When I was a child, I wanted to be a Nun or live on an island alone. I felt that life would have been so much better this way, and that is something I never unpacked. Instead, I have tried to go about the daily task of living like everyone seems to be striving to live. I did well enough in school to get a place at University and worried my way to an upper second-class degree. Right after leaving university, I got a temporary job that seemed promising. This opportunity led to a career I never planned for but was determined to work hard at, and I did. I worked hard to get better, to a point where I gained the ambition to move up in rank at some level within this career path. Eventually, I acquired a senior position after working hard to improve my skills. On paper, it seemed as if I was doing well, but I did not feel like I was doing well. I felt like a jellyfish just drifting, doing everything and nothing. Just going through the motions. I had worked hard and seemed to accomplish little except showing that I was a hard worker, dedicated to the job. I tried to please everyone, and I was immensely dissatisfied. I looked at my life and realised I still wanted to live on that damn island. I wish I could find somewhere away from everyone and everything I knew. Everything I had done was nothing I wanted to do, and I felt the weight of the wasted years, the missed opportunities to do what I wanted to do and be what I naturally was. It felt like it was too late. Then I started to panic. I had finally earned a position I thought would make all the work and sacrifice and stress worth it, and I felt defeated. I spent my twenties and thirties trying to do the right things and be the better person, and I did not enjoy those years at all. I spent them being resentful, nervous, suicidal, and battling severe panic attacks that saw me rushed to the hospital on several occasions, tied down to restrain me on one of those occasions. I have not recovered. I tried once to take my life, but at that time I was, for the first time, failing at everything, so that was a bust. I had an eating disorder that lasted over ten years. I was a mess! Yet, through all the mess, I had to go to work, be there for others and pretend to be okay, act strong. So, by the time I had gotten that position, I was sick and desperate…
Tag: Finding your happy place
It Will Be Okay.
Imagine if you lost. Everything you thought you could never live without.
That is a terrifying thought for many of us, but what if we did? What would we do?
It’s easy to look at someone who is not okay and give them advice on what they need to do. Then we think or talk out of their hearing: “Man, that is hard, but thank God it’s not me!”
Now, my issue with such a sentiment is this: does God allow good things to happen to some and bad things to others? Sometimes when we say the above, it seems as if we are somehow exempt from going through certain trials, but we are not.
I spoke recently to a colleague who is undergoing cancer treatment. I had not seen her at work for some time, and then I saw her back out at work. Though she had lost some weight, she seemed so calm and was laughing and smiling, which made me pause and think about how I overreact to some simple things at times. After all she has been through lately, where did she find the courage to get up and live each day as it comes?
As she pointed out to me, it is not easy, but she does it because the alternative is death.
I am realising that the problems I see as insurmountable or really not impossible to overcome. I am in the process of reconstructing my mindset regarding the outlook I have on every situation I face. If I can be devastated at the thought of someone else’s diagnosis and surprised by her ability to get up every day and smile and be pleasant, then maybe I need to change how I view my own problems. Are they really that serious or require the reaction I sometimes have?
Would I be okay if I lost all the things I fear losing, that have nothing to do with the life I have been given by God?
I remember a point, as I got older, that I feared losing my grandmother, and so I used to pray every year that she would live one more year and that God would make it ten or twenty years-or forever if he could. It has been 15 years since my grandmother died, and I still have not forgotten how important she was in my life. Since then, I have made some terrible decisions and some good ones, but the most important thing is that I have been able to continue to live.
An article I recently read, entitled, In Haiti, the Art of Resilience, comes to mind. The article was written in 2010 by Bill Brubaker, after the earthquake which devastated the country and killed 230,000 and displaced approximately 1.5 million others. The writer highlighted a series of stories concerning the impact of the earthquake on the Art community. One that stood out to me was about 87-year-old Haitian artist Préfète Duffaut, who lost family members, friends, his home, and most of his artwork. What was so inspiring about his interview was the hope that Brubaker noted was “shining from his eyes”. The hope is to build from the rubble something new and vital. There were other stories of gallery owners, whose galleries had not escaped the devastation, who provided money and art supplies to artists who had lost everything. Duffaut, at 87, having experienced crisis after crisis in Haiti, along with his countrymen and women, was able to affirm this particular event: “My future paintings will be inspired by this tragedy”. How many of us would be able to create something meaningful and inspiring from the rubble of our own tragedies?
We all have the potential to take ourselves out of the dark abyss that life places us in. All we need to cultivate is a vision of possibilities in the face of adversities.
Though it may be hard for us to keep the faith when things go wrong fast, it will be okay. Just keep telling yourself this until you believe it.
Like many Haitians, let us adopt their attitude when faced with difficulties: ‘Let’s get on with it! Tomorrow is another day.’
Smile Through Them Tears
Smile Through Them Tears Yes, I know it hurts, I know you are raw from being beaten too long and too much. I know you are stiff already set in the grave your lips refuse to move when you are at the edge of the cliff. I know the rain has left you to gallivant somewhere else to bless and bring success to somebody else. I know you can't stop them anymore. So cry if you want to let it flow down and cover your view of possibilities. Get it all out, who knows, it may stop the drought and the doubts. Then maybe you can go about the business you came here to do.
Shame of Pride
Shame of Pride
I hang my head in shame
a shame milady.
Beaten by the truth.
Pride.
The deadlest of all sins.
Hubris leads me to my nemesis.
No it's not a good thing
I now fear looking within
my very soul is in the balance
waiting at the gallows.
I must pull it back
and cage this monster that sits atop my head.
Who is greater than God?
No man!
Today I will learn
that i am not.
To think otherwise
will set you down low.
Instead I must cling to my shipwrecked raft
drifting
praying to be saved.
I must be saved from drowining.
I have not choice
with Pride I carry the shame of Icarus.
me against Me. Always
Does it always seem you have to be guarding against yourself. Is your greatest enemy you? In a lot of ways, we can be our harshest critic and our greatest liability. I am not here to sprout any words of wisdom, not today at least but to ask some really important questions for self-reflection.
Question 1: Who taught us that we need to be perfect? At what stage in life did we accept that our value lies in successfully jumping the hurdles life places before us? I have come to recognise in myself a need for perfection that has time and again led to some very imperfect results. it seems the more we strive for perfection the worse we perform. However, recognising this very poor tendency to aim for perfection does not mean it is easy to overcome. When I think I have mastered the art of accepting my flaws I am reminded that indeed I have not!
Question 2: Why are we obsessed with the past time of comparing ourselves with others? We know that comparison is the thief of joy, but we persist in doing so. There is no way that I can be anyone other than myself and yet we may find ourselves being drawn into this unwanted sport of comparisons.
Question 3: Why do we try to please others? I have been guilty of trying to fit into the mould someone created form. Do you know what happens when you squeeze into a mould not designed for you? If you are successful in your squeezing it disfigured you. You morph into a contradictory shape of the original that will never match it, to even come close to it.
Question 4: Why do we hold on to things that are destroying us? This is one of the saddest and scariest things we do. We know we should let go, we tell ourselves we will and yet actually doing so is so painfully hard. Why? I think fear has a lot to do with it.
Question 5: Why do we allow fear to control us? I think life would be so much better if we became fearless. Not a little more fearless, because too many persons have no concept of what it is to be fearless. There are too many of us who allow fear to control every decision, every action and every word we utter. We have to find and way to do things, say things and be in spite of those naggingly annoying fear waiting to trip us up.
There is no easy answer to overcoming self-sabotage. It’s a daily struggle we have to fight with and win. Keep fighting.
Crazy Bud
Crazy Bud Look at you! Wow! Is that you? Really you? Well well well you really made it didn't you? You did the impossible - but you're crazy after all. An embryo too tightly wound to show the beauty you carried axil fragile likely to break but you held on stubbornly. You had no power to conquer the mind but you wait to conquer the heart. Though you came in slow your growth was sure and so we waited and look! Here you are. No resting bud are you to be deceived by the coming cold you fought through storm and sleet to whorl most boldly. You did your best passed all your tests and trials to bloom and strike and die to make way for another, someday.
Bored… Uninspired?
Maybe you feel the your life is in the dumpster, because everything is in the dumpster. Maybe it is that being in quarantine, restrictions in your movement has stifled your enthusiasm for life. Maybe you feel that life is just one never ending corner that you having trying to get around, to no avail. You look around, and in many ways you feel bored with your life. Maybe, you have even questioned why you should even care about anything.
We look at our phones and see yet another person celebrating another achievement, then look in the mirror and question the image looking back, “what are you doing with your life? Pathetic”. Then onto Instagram or even Facebook we go and see many perfect (or so it seems to many) images that further flings us in great distress at our ordinariness. But we do not stop looking. Too many persons continue to torment themselves by looking at these highlight reels that never reflect small fragments of that person’s life – those highlight reels.
We too lie comatose as we try to recapture moments in our lives that mattered, while we ignore the life we must live. We want to experience those times before covid when we were innocent and free. But if we look close enough we would realise that even then we complained some more bitterly than others of how bored we are with our lot and how little we had achieved. we may see highlight reels of events that seems so exciting and so real but which often times would evaporate in thin air when we try to reach for them to touch them.
But what if we stopped focusing on what our lives is not and appreciate what it is. If we flipped the switch and begin to see every our lives as just that our lives. Instead of waiting to live your real lives and until things get back to normal, let us make choices that will allow us to enjoy all those ordinary moments. Moments when we say and do the wrong things but also when we get things right. When our choices brings positive results even if no one knows we did that – we know and we just have to be content with that. We have to make our ordinary extraordinary by stop looking behind at those moments that have been captured on the reel of our lives and we have to stop looking down at those highlight reels that not even those in the frame can maintain.
So though many of us feel bored with life right now, a little vexed – or a lot vexed – by all we have to deal with, take a walk, have a laugh, work on something that you love doing or that will help you to move forward. But whether bored by the restrictions imposed because of covid or whether you have been stung by your judgmental inside eyes that look out and compare, there is nothing gained in allowing your view of yourself to stymie the potential that you have and the richness of your life now and that which is yet to be realised. Maybe we need to get off or reduce our consumption of social media, stop straining our necks to see in someone else’s lane and just appreciate the good things that this year has given – life lessons and good people who stuck by no matter what.
Maybe when we choose to open ourselves a little more to possibilities we will see that there a many little things that can make our lives exciting and rewarding in its own special way.
