Tag Thoughts

Go Touch Some Grass

Kahumuzah Leave a comment

Looking at social media at the end or beginning of the year can feel like you are drowning! Every other post about someone’s wins will have you asking yourself; okay, what did I accomplish or what am I trying to accomplish? Then you look at what you’ve achieved compared to what others have accomplished and think to yourself Papa God what am I not doing right??

There’s the other side of the coin where you do not feel like you have a single thing to show for having lived a whole year. Every day you were just surviving and hanging onto the fact that you have yet to lose your mind. If you can relate you are probably shaking your head slowly hehe.

Remember December 2024? With all those “Thank you for the happiest days of my life” edits? The imaginary pressure was felt in every corner and it is easy to say comparison is the thief of joy but you have to admit seeing all those snapshots of people highlighting what they went through and did throughout the year, over and over again will leave you feeling a certain way. I know it did on my side.

It’s hard to feel optimistic about life when you feel like you are just wasting away. No plans, no next steps and you do not even feel like setting goals because they feel useless. Having hope makes you feel like throwing up because it just feels overwhelming. It feels like the past five years have cooked you, like the kids say. You’re so cooked that at this point you’ve just burnt and your will to live is slowly sizziling out. You are constantly worried about the future while simultaneously doing nothing about it due to how helpless and hopeless you feel.

People keeping saying there’s a light at the end of the tunnel but you start to wonder if that light isn’t an oncoming train racing towards you. Life is generally hard, directionless and meaningless in your opinion, it isn’t but that is how it feels which is valid if your’ve been taking hit after hit without any sort of reprive. You have spiralled so fast, your mental health is about to call an ambulance on you and the only thing holding you together is the couple of hours you spend doomscrolling and disassociating at 3 am because that is when everything is quiet enough for you to do so.

If you feel attacked by everything I have just described, I’m sorry don’t beat me please. I was just describing my life up until this point. This is not a wake up call, it’s just my way of saying I understand. I honestly don’t know if it gets better, all I know is I woke up one day and decided to focus on the smallest things like the way the sunlight hits a spiderweb or shines through a leaf. These little miracles are what have helped me as I work on fixing my perspective on life.

All I am trying to say is when your brain starts to get too loud and life starts to get drained of all its color, go touch some grass. It helps.

Happy New Year! May you find your joy again.

No Flowers for This Grave

Kahumuzah Leave a comment

What is love?

Love is covering up bruises every morning

Learning to get hit without crying

Watching my body get thrown across the room

Love is waking up in the ER

“Two broken ribs” the nurse says

Pity leaking from her every pore

Love is

Being held hostage and no one knows

They can’t see and won’t believe it.

Love is wondering if I’m insane

I’m wrong, right? Not them

It’s second guessing every word, every action

Rehearsing my reactions

Love is maintaining the status quo

Because what will they think if I just go?

If they found out my reality is different from what I show?

You’re just weak, she can’t do that!

What did you do? He is such a calm man

Man up!

Guma mwana wange, kuma amaka go.

They go on & on & on

As I fall slowly through the mundane

And settle in my hell

When I die they will tell tales of how they loved me

Cry and scream for the loss of one so young & lovely

My Lucifer will be there too and maybe they’ll cry too

A little remorse for their loss of toy

A thing not a person, that’s what I am to them

But I will not die that day

I die every day

But you’ll never see

There’s no flowers for this grave.

Watching someone you know experience domestic violence is a bit of an out-of-body experience. However, one thing you learn is you have to be careful not to overstep any personal boundaries of the person being abused or you risk being overbearing. There is a thin line you walk as an outsider looking in of wanting to help your person and deciding to step back because you’ve done all you can without controlling them.

In the absence of this, you beg, because they are an adult at the end of the day. You don’t want to control them because then what would be the difference between you and their abuser?

When someone is a victim of domestic abuse, it is not a sudden shift. The process of abuse starts slowly and snowballs into something all-encompassing over time.

When faced with a victim of domestic abuse, it is important to extend grace to them and keep in mind that the signs of abuse will not always be visible and most of the damage done is to their mind. We need to be patient and never stop offering help in whatever form we can.

Fear

Kahumuzah Leave a comment 
 The Oxford Dictionary describes fear as:

An unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain, or harm;

A feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety of someone;

The likelihood of something unwelcome happening

but also

A mixed feeling of dread and reverence. 

The Urban Dictionary says it is:

an emotion which tends to take over your mind causing negative thinking, anger, and even more fear;

Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

and

Fear is the only thing in your way from achieving your goals.

These days I like to call the Black Death or Saving Grace, for two reasons. One being fear is False Evidence Appearing Real, meaning whatever you are afraid of you can overcome but your own mind has tricked and trapped you into thinking you cannot. Two; sometimes we fear things with good reasons to for example walking alone at night, it is dangerous and this has been proven time and time again. So being weary of walking alone at night causes you to take the appropriate measures to secure yourself if you need to move around at night. Fear is an issue like any that has two faces to it.

This emotion can elicit a “rush” from you or terrorize you sometimes even paralyze you. The reason for this comes down to one thing the context; how we perceive a situation has an immense bearing on whether we react with immense excitement or numbing fear.

You live a life where you know where what goes, what happens when, who comes when, who goes when etc. You’ve you reached a plateau in your life where you can sit comfortably and once one is in a situation like this they do not like to be shaken or even poked, no sort of discomfort is appreciated. Now nothing shakes someones foundation more than uncertainty however small and with it comes fear, it’s like having the lights right in front of you being shut off when ever you take or try to take a step forward. However that’s all life really is lots of uncertainty and a series of fortunate and unfortunate events orchestrated by decisions you’ve made or external factors and your the explorer trying to trek your way through it. We always think of uncertainty as an obstacle that we must go over, go through or get around of but we can also see it as a curtain. A curtain that when pulled back holds either an amazing result or nothing much because what your doing behind the scenes is what eventually appears on the scene, never forget that. 

 That which you dread may be that, that frees you
It may make you cringe
You may make you cry 
You may make you lose 
But hopefully you won't die

"Oh the worlds a stage" upon which we perform
A scene upon which our stories are told
There are those that all see and those that they don't
You never know your next scene or next story to tell 
Next adventure or tragedy to befall you 
Next next or next next next
And all in all as Dory say "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming"

As a wrote this article I decided to do some research on fear, its triggers and what it entails as I did this I stumbled upon this simple but interesting answer on Quora: http://We all have our comfort zones. This plateau may occur when we’ve become good at our jobs and can show off a skill or complete a task without thinking too much about the process. We also learn society’s rules and regulations early in our formative years, and become confident that this knowledge is valid each day. This allows us to get to work, buy groceries, and cross the road without getting shot in the face. Mostly. Learning new tasks requires time and effort that we’d prefer to spend impressing people with what we already know, or going about our business, following rules that we’ve already learned to obey. We aren’t really interested in the government suddenly deciding to change which side of the road we drive on. That’s going to take massive amount of re-education, and a lot of people are going to get shot in the face. Some people don’t like change because they are too lazy, too fearful, under educated, or have physical or mental problems that make learning new tasks and rules difficult. People generally want to follow the path of least resistance. Luckily there are enough innovators and free-thinkers among the sheep who spice things up for the rest of us, and hopefully one of them will make the rest of us a bulletproof face-shield.

You can interpret that however you like but what I see is learning new things, change, anything we want to do but are not sure about requires us to rewire ourselves and go back to the drawing board sometimes needing us to unlearn some of the skills we’ve mastered in order for us to tackle this new wave that’s about to hit us. We just don’t want to do that and just thinking about it causes us to get afraid then the uncertainty of the whole situation looms over us, we consider all the ways it could go wrong and the two ways it could go right if we tried. In short we turn into a hot mess and want others to take the risks for us because . However, when faced with this looming fear of the unknown we need to embrace how uncertain we feel about it and only then can find a way to push through that curtain and onto the other side of our fears.

This is what’s up when faced with uncertainty.

Though finding “what is to be done next” is hard, breathe, step back and survey the situation as you do this a window will open and you will see it and jump through. Don’t panic or lose your head just breath and enter the murky waters riddled with fear however you feel comfortable doing so, because and it grounds you in a skewed kind of way.

Kahumuzah