Hey there,
Miss me? Even I missed me, I can’t even begin to tell you how tough these past few weeks have been for me, mostly because of school work, you know how something wears you down so hard that hidden deficiencies start to show? It’s not a new thing to successfully repress your emotions, it takes stress of a certain degree to get you unravelling at the seams, surprise surprise, school was my undoing, one would think it would be something interesting like I fell in love with Christian Grey or something, mtschewww….
So, let’s see what I learnt during my hiatus;
friends are the best right, I wonder what the world would look like if we were created to live on our own without someone to lean on, family is beautiful but family can’t be there with you every time, when they go about their own lives, it’s friends that are there with you, sharing in your humour, gossiping, laughing and even encouraging you when the waterfall of tears won’t dry but sometimes, we do need solitude .a.k.a. alone time, I for one used my friends as a shield from my thoughts, a cover or a blind I placed on my conscience, I hated being alone, I didn’t like my thoughts, I didn’t like what they said, I’ve always wondered at people who could think positive soul lifting thoughts, how do they do it, how come your mind is in love with you, mine doesn’t like me that much, and as a result I rarely stay in my feels, I end up bawling my eyes out, along comes school work and by default I have to make a major slash on my waka-about, if I’m to make something of that posting, therefore less gossiping, less gisting and more time to either be with myself or be by myself.
It wasn’t easy to be honest, dealing with my thoughts, I’m good at telling everyone but myself what to do, majorly because it helps me concentrate on anything but my own problems. I had to deal with personal issues, feelings that I pretended I had forgotten, things I found hard to share with others, not being enough, not being adequate, those things that have plagued me for as long as I know, floating above my head like cobwebs surrounding an entangled ant, this time I had to find a major defence against them, I can’t categorically say I did but here are some things I figured out:
• The statement ‘no one can hurt you if you don’t give them permission to’ may not apply to every scenario; I wasn’t even up to 10 when I was told I was “too this” or “too that”, couldn’t I be less this and more that? I didn’t even know I was doing something wrong, not to talk of knowing what I did that was so wrong. It would have been something else if I was being corrected, if I was being told what was wrong with me, but without getting any proactive solution to any of it, no matter how hard I tried, nothing I did was good enough, and so over time I suppressed those hurtful words but their effect never really went away. Whenever the silence started to get loud, they appeared no matter how much I denied them and tried to work on myself they wouldn’t go away.
And then I came to the realization that it wasn’t my fault, I hadn’t given them my permission to hurt me emotionally yet they did hurt me and that wasn’t my fault, maybe I had a mistake by keeping them at a dusty corner at the back of my mind until they festered instead of actively dealing with them but then, words and actions, those things hurt and leave a lasting mark and it may not be your fault, it’s ok to hurt over something someone did to you, you’re not being petty, you’re not being weak, it isn’t your fault because the permission wasn’t even yours to give in the first place, and that’s ok…
• You will let yourself down and that’s ok too; most, if not all of us place ourselves on some sort of pedestal, how high it is doesn’t matter cause we’re going to fall, we’re built to fall, lol, even the one handcrafted by God himself fell.
I’m not saying it’s an excuse, just that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up so much, I am in a situation I placed myself in because I chose my feelings over my own needs and to say the least, it didn’t go so well, I blamed myself for it until I came to the realisation that I’m not perfect, I will hurt myself, I’m going to fall with two eyes open, as much as I acknowledge my fault and don’t try to lay the blame at someone else’s door, I should stop beating myself up over it, because frankly, I’m human, at least I’m making mistakes, someone out there is making nothing and that, that is ok too…
• Everything you’ve done or been was what you needed to do to survive at that point in time; this is not an excuse for wrongdoing, it is a ploy to get you to move on from your mistakes. Maybe you needed to make that mistake to learn, because we learn better from our own experiences than stories told by others, I’m not also saying it was inevitable rather I’m telling you that sucking on them lemons isn’t going to get them to disappear, it’s just going to leave them sour in your mouth, why not add some sugar and make some sweet lemonade, drink it and get on your way.
• You’re a work in progress, you know what that means right? You’re an unfinished project, one on its journey to perfection, you still have to undergo some addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, the whole BODMAS in fact, before you get there, and wouldn’t it be cool if you enjoyed your journey there rather than fretting about what the finished product would look like?