Hello,
I hope you've been well! It's been a while but I'm here. The past month has been really difficult, and when I track the past two years of my life it's been a sinking ship, a bit like drowning on dry land and always pretending to be okay, telling people after the fact and lying again that I'm fine and it's all good when I'm still carrying it around. But this past month in particular, I was both afraid that I wouldn't survive it and simultaneously welcoming and wanting the fact that I might be dead soon. I still worry that I'm not supposed to be alive but I'm here so that's something.
It's been a period of looking in the mirror and realising that what it boils down to is that I hate myself. And hate is a strong word but in the spirit of honesty and self-reflection, all my actions mirror someone who hate themselves and doesn't believe they deserve to be here. And as someone who talks a lot about love, I don't know, I feel like a fraud. Even with the poetry book, I felt like a fraud. And it's difficult because here's me acknowledging or wanting to acknowledge that I'm not okay, but then what comes next when all around me it's darkness? You could call it a testament to strength but I find it hard to have compassion for myself because this is all feels pointless, like I'm barking at a tree of self-entitlement and it's all silly. And I am grateful that I have a bed to sleep in but it's also a lot of emotional pain and I don't know what's it worth.
And really, I ended up losing, giving away half my stuff, things I loved, and it's made me conscious of the fact that all you really have is your body, and that things are just things, but I also think there should be space for sentimentality which is to say that I could never be a minimalist. And it hurt saying goodbye to my adult furniture, big pieces I owned, loved, and imbued my personality, my love with. But reaching that conclusion, that your body is your home, having to hold on to that truth, to move through the change, it was annoying because like I said, the self-hatred, and I guess it's important to confront the beliefs I hold about myself, why I struggle so much with feeling safe, feeling in control. And I feel like I'm floating and like I need to figure out where I belong or what it means to be belong. That being said, a positive is that I don't have the weight of university hanging over me anymore, though that means I have to think about what it means to fail, if I did fail, if I want to go back, who I am outside of school. It’s just a lot of sitting in the mud and wading through the shadows and I have faith I'll find the light because what else is there? I'd like to believe there's a God and that meaning is important to that entity because I think I'd crack if it was all indiscriminate and coincidental. Anyways I'm back and I feel like shit and I hope it gets better and that there's a newsletter next week, but what matters is I'm here today and that this is more than a hobby, it's at the core of me.
Here's three songs I’ve been listening to this week :)
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Thank you for reading. I want to share a really beautiful article on healing by Madinah Farhannah Thompson with Tasnim Morrison featuring a couple of my poems. It's an illuminating conversation!
With Love,
Oyinda