Postcards and Reflections from Home

It’s almost 2025, and I’m back home and fully recovered from a brief but intense battle with Miss Falciparum, aka malaria. I came out of it donning rose-tinted glasses, feeling happier and immensely grateful for my life and my body. I’m writing this because the tint is fading, and the greyness once again is encroaching on my view of the world. I know now not to let it. I monitor it intensely now instead of blindly stepping into months and years of despair, unaware of why I feel the way I do and hating myself for daring to be sad when I am so privileged. As I write this, I feel better equipped to handle this incoming wave of gloom despite what the tears currently running down my face suggest (it's mostly catharsis not sadness). I will tell you a few reasons why that is. I am in therapy; when I return home to England in January, I will be beginning an intensive round of talk therapy to explore my depression, habits, relationships, and, most importantly, how to shed the ways of thinking & being that no longer serve me. Secondly, I am approaching my 30's; I feel the urging of time ticking, some internal pressure within me to confront, question and change how I have been approaching life. An approach which was entirely comprised of fear, blame, shame, guilt, judgment, reclusion and self-hatred.

In the spirit of balance and truth, I will be interspersing photos of joy, fun, and triviality whilst I discuss some not-so-fun things. It’s an honest reflection of my mind, moments of vibrance amidst a backdrop of endless grey, stillness and monotony. For a long while, I viewed my life as a calendar, good days are vivid, and bad days are grey. From the age of 17 till now, it’s been dominated by grey. Nowadays, I think of my journey as a tune, a melody that weaves and shifts (🤮 I know). Trauma and depression have made this tune discordant. This melody has not been to my taste, but it is my music. In acknowledging that simple, terrifying and powerful truth, I think I have learned something essential to living. Something every child should grow up knowing, but for some reason, I and many others struggled to learn, even deep into adulthood. The truth is I am the one playing this music, I am at once the composer and its most devoted audience. I have learned that you can’t deny, denounce, or despair over the music of your life. You cannot be shamed for it unless you yourself are ashamed of your sound. The worst sin, which we all know yet seemingly can’t avoid in our current era, is comparing your music to someone else’s. Whoever came up with the saying “dance to the beat of your own drum” ateee down mama, but most likely they just went through a bunch of shit.

Another absolute queen is the person who said, “Comparison is the thief of joy”. When I was younger, I compared myself to others, I would covet elements and aspects of people I thought I lacked, and the most effective solution for this was stepping away from social media. I knew that the algorithm was amplifying this covetousness and habit of comparison, it was making me less grateful for my life. Again, in the service of balance and truth, I must admit that this decision to self-preserve also largely contributed to my isolation and disconnection from my peers and the world. The more I stepped back, the more things felt alien to me and made me want to retreat further inwards.

In more recent years, comparison has reared its bitch ass head again, in a more insidious way. I mourn and crave the person I would and should have been had I not had mental health issues and let those issues define who I was. Have you seen the Apple show, Dark Matter? I am that crazy motherfucker stalking the idealised version of myself, wanting her life and hating mine. I find myself holding myself up to her image and life, her potential and adventures. It has shown me a different type of grief and discontent hitherto unknown to me. The highlight reel, screening all day, every day, pits my failures and shortcomings against her perfection.

I believe this is my mind's attempt to distort that beautiful realisation I spoke of earlier. Instead of seizing on the opportunity and relief of finding out that I can control my thoughts and actions, my brain is attempting to retcon my life and highlight all the ways that I, not depression, anxiety or trauma, have fucked up my life and opportunities. I berate myself for not knowing this sooner and living a fuller life than I have done, which in turn makes me even more depressed and hopeless that I’ve wasted my good years and there is no going back. Do you see the distortions? It is all or nothing (either it was all depression's fault or all my fault, and since I know now it’s my fault, I’m a failure). It is tormenting myself with should statements (if I have been in control of my life all this time, then surely it means I should have made better choices, right? Right!?). It is jumping to conclusions (well, it’s all nice & cute that I’ve realised this now, but it's far too late and I’ll never get to where I should’ve been, so it’s all fucked anyways).

*Spoiler alert* If you’ve finished the show Dark Matter, it ends with that crazy motherfucker ruining his own life and that of his idealised self. It’s an extreme metaphor, but it has a nugget of truth. Comparison, seeking perfection and holding on to perceived failures & shortcomings are always destructive forces. Our feeds, our personalised realities, most things we consume nowadays are dominated by people portraying these forces as self-improvement, growth, glowing up, levelling up, looksmaxxing, etc, each one tailored to whatever displeases us about ourselves and our lives. In actual reality, this quest for the idealised versions of us breeds deep dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and an inability to see oneself as one truly is. For example, the pressure of my encroaching 30s is probably a mix of genuine changes in my outlook as I get older, but also largely a consequence of capitalistic endeavours pushed by algorithms to make us all panicked enough to consume goods and services that promise youth & perfection. It tells me I am past my prime, and tells you you're currently wasting yours, but if you just do xyz you're back in the game mama! If you’re a well-adjusted adult, you probably have enough mechanisms in place to counter those feelings. However, if you’re like me, you might drown in this negative chorus constantly being blasted around us in every direction and domain of our lives. If you’re also like me, you’ve learned the hard way that going full hermit may not protect you from it all and can leave you lonelier and more isolated than before.

So, what the fuck to do? I think if you’ve read this far you know that I am distinctly unqualified to tell you what to do, and it's quite alarming that you thought I would know, maybe you're the crazy one. What I will try to do is be honest in my journey of trying to figure it out, and hopefully, along the way, share something that might help or ease the burden of living in a harsh world, be it internally or externally. I tend to think of my mental struggles as a tarnish on who I am, something that diminishes me, ruins me, and makes me less than. I often think of myself as damaged goods; it’s an awful mindset which reflects poorly on me, but it’s also an indictment on our society & communities, the things we value, and the things we think should be hidden from view.  I don’t see other people with mental issues the way I see myself, but we also judge others the way we judge ourselves, so perhaps that isn’t entirely true (I did just call you all crazy). So, in writing and sharing this, I hope this makes me kinder to the world and the things and people living in it, which begrudgingly, I must admit, includes me.

I want to be clear that in talking about all of this I’m not equating struggle to enlightenment, neither am I trying to glamourise & trivialise trauma and mental illness. I just hope that through all the pain and fear, there exists a path to a better mind & life, and I’d like to share that. If there isn’t, I’ll share that too. So far it hasn’t felt like that path exists, with each blow I have felt weaker and less able to carry on than before. It is also true, that each time that feeling has faded, and in fact, I have carried on. So, with that in mind,

my only resolution for this coming year is to examine my way of being without shame, judgement or blame, and let go of the things that have helped me cope for so long that no longer serve me. I'm inviting you to join me :)

P.S. No, I don’t mean cut off your friends, that’s literally the exact opposite of what I just said.