This has been a year of frustrations for me. A year where I have been too close to the edge and back. A year that started out with promise but slowly I began to feel like the life was being sucked out of me. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
This year I got my heart broken…..
Broken to pieces by the man who had stolen it away from me while in the Queen’s land. Circumstances ,that is, me coming back home and him going back to his country, put a gut wrenching end to the whole affair. I cried bucketloads that last week I was with him but it didn’t change the fact that in the long run things couldn’t work out between us. So I swallowed the bitter pill and begrudgingly closed that chapter.
This year I didn’t achieve my set out goals…..
I had a whole list of goals and objectives written out that I was sure I would achieve by the year’s end. Most of these centered around my career, financial independence and a feasible long term investment plan. So imagine my dismay when I couldn’t secure a job thus rendering most of my list null and void. I kept at it though, application after application, kept wearing my suits and smiling in interviews while wringing my hands under the table until my knuckles turned white. I eventually got picked up by a company I had interviewed at some month’s earlier and so begun my four month employment stint of the year.
This year I got fired…..
Four months into the job, I walked out the door, only looking back to entertain fleeting thoughts of slashing the car tires of my newly former boss. I’d heard horror stories of women being catty and downright vicious in the workplace but like many stories we hear, you never think it will happen to you. Well, until it does. I remember walking into the office of one of the board members after I was informed my services were no longer needed to try and get the back story. Because I honestly didn’t understand why it had come to that. So the story I get is that apparently my boss had been unhappy with me for an entire month and she had been sending nasty emails to the other board members about me. For an entire frigging month! In that month, she was nothing but full of praise about my work, smiling and acting like all was right with the world while I was in the same room as her. Little did I know that behind her sunny disposition and fluffy weave lay a ruthless bitch. So yeah, I got canned. Read about that on Revealed.
This year, I coveted (Forgive me Father)…..
After the heartbreak, getting canned and no luck on the job front thereafter, I began to wallow. I looked at people around me and began to covet their lives, their success, their happiness…. Every week I heard about people I knew making strides in their lives and I felt inadequate compared to their achievements. Tom who had just bought his first house. Dick who had just purchased acres of land and started a promising farming venture. Harry who was now a multi-millionare after his entrepreneurial endeavour hit pay dirt. Wanjiru who was newly married. Akinyi who just had her her second baby, Nkirote who was now regional manager in a multi-national organization……and so on. I began to let negativity be the driving force in my life. I was a dark cloud just sailing through life. Frustration, angst and depressive shadows haunted my days and temporary highs became my escape.
This year, I made a lot of bad decisions…..
I clung onto temporary highs making one bad decision after another. And as much as I knew it was not the right thing to do, I used it as an escape….willing the howling of emptiness to be still within me. In that state, I wrongly placed that burden on someone I considered an awesome friend. Someone who I knew I was pushing away with all my shenanigans yet I couldn’t seem to yank myself from it. I could not seem to smack myself upside the head and deal with the real issues instead and in effect placed a world of pressure on a man who had nothing to do with the turmoil I was trying so desperately to run away from. And for that, I have my regrets.
This year I lost myself…..
Eventually all the negativity I had been holding back began to bubble up. It swallowed me whole and I lay there,in the pit of its darkest recesses not knowing what to do or where to turn. So I clammed up. Shut down every nerve ending that threatened to feel any inkling of emotion. I just wanted to be numb to it all. I built up the mother of all walls to keep it at bay, to protect myself from the licks of the waves of depression that tried to nip at my heels. I fought it. By Jove, I fought it. But eventually all of it came bubbling to the surface wiping out the happy facade I had been putting on for the world to see. One night while I was having a shower, I was literally bombarded with all that I had stashed away behind the wall. Standing there with the hot water running over me, I stopped fighting. The tears came in rivers. The cries, deep and anguished, from the very depths of my soul. And for some weird reason, while I stood there, weeping, with the water flowing over me, trying to muzzle my sobs with the sound of the running water, a thought came to mind. The thought that I was weeping like I had lost someone….or something. And it didn’t take long to figure out what that was. I had lost myself. Lost my sense of self. Lost my self confidence. Lost my moral compass. Lost any feeling of achievement or self worth. And that stark realization overwhelmed me in its truth, in its unashamed nakedness. I sank down to the tub and wept until I could weep no more. Until I felt that my heart was completely devoid of any emotion. I stepped out of the bath and stood staring at my face in the mirror. Into the red rimmed teary eyes that seemed so sad and so lost. At the shoulders that seemed to slouch, almost in a resigned acknowledgement that I was defeated. I tore my eyes away; I couldn’t bear to see myself in this way. I curled myself up into bed, switched off the lights and slept. A dark,dreamless sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt like a blank canvas. Like I had unburdened all that I had been trying so hard to hold back because I thought it would make me seem weak when in reality, acknowledging it made me stronger. Acknowledging it meant I finally knew how far I had let myself sink into that black hole and knowing that I had to do something to get myself out before I was too far gone. And thus began my journey to fix things.
It begun with a phone call…..
I talked to the one person I knew would understand my situation. She listened. She didn’t blanket it all in a ‘things will be alright’ comment. She understood where I was coming from because she had been where I was standing a couple of years before and I knew how dangerously close to the egde she had come. But she managed to pull back. For the first time, I bared all details of the turmoil that had been chruning inside me, leaving no gory details out. She listened and intuitively knew that I wasn’t looking for solutions or advice, I just needed to let it out. That done I set about getting things back on track.
I let go of negativity…..
First on my list was the decision to let go of everything and everyone that brought negativity into my life. Some were harder to get rid of than others but I achieved it somehow.
This year I discovered my true passions…..
Next was to put pen to paper and actually decide what I wanted out of my life. If my unhapinness was written all over my face, something urgently needed to be done. Did I want to spend the rest of my life feeling chained to a job which was only good for my wallet but didn’t feed my passion or desire for some sense of achievement and career progression? That was a no. I decided to risk putting myself out there and pursue my passion and you know what…..it panned out and I even got some pocket change out of it. As a bonus, the universe conspired for me to meet a couple of people in the industry whom I respected and whose work I admired. They became mentors of sorts, giving me advice, solicited or otherwise, and didn’t expect a thing in return. I was humbled.
This year I discovered what the really important things in my life are……
Family…..
Where would I be without them? My backbone, my shield, my haven. They never stopped believing in me and supported me in all my decisions, even when they disagreed with some of them. The folks fronted me capital for my business venture and my siblings always kept me laughing. Laughter really does heal the soul.
Friends…..
My circle of friends came through for me in ways I cannot even begin to thank them for. There are no words for the gratitude I feel for they who would drop anything and everything in a Nairobi beat to be there for me. They embraced me with love and fed my sense of self worth. For that, I will be forever grateful.
Two people really stood out this year: the first is W. This girl would believe in me if I said I wanted to deliver world peace! Lol. Its rare to find someone who believes in you so unwaveringly. She drummed it into my head week after week that I could do anything that I set my mind to and bit by bit, I started to believe it myself. The fear began to ebb and was replaced with a tentative sense of daring. She threw ideas and challenges my way and I absorbed it all and those ideas gave birth to new ones and just like that, my creativity and innovative spirit was revived. She also fed my faith; not in the shove-it-down-your-throat kinda way that some people adopt…but in a way that made it easy for me to believe that God has a purpose for me and bestowed my talents upon me with good reason.
The second individual to light up my 2011 in a special way is L. He sat me down after I got canned, as rational and real as he always is, and asked me some tough questions I had been dodging. What did I want out of life? What career path did I want to pursue, why and how I planned to get there? What was I doing with my talent? How did I account for my time on a daily basis: was it spent idling around or actively working towards achieving my goals? And he listened, like REALLY listened as I babbled on trying to make sense of all the thoughts going through my head. And after that, he gave me an amazing gift. He taught me how to think outside the box and explore the avenues and talents I possessed to go after my dreams. He is all kinds of amazing and a thank you would never do enough justice for what he did for me and for his selfless friendship.
And for all the new friends I made this year who left their footprints on my heart and in my life, I feel blessed to have met so many amazing people. even those for whom I don’t have a face to associate with their names 
God, Great Health and all that other good stuff…..
I learnt never to take anything for granted and that God always had my back even when I thought otherwise.
This year I learnt that each of us has a different path to follow…..
It’s easy enough to get sucked into the habit of comparing yourself with others and lining up your achievements against theirs. Fact is, there will always be someone with a higher stack than yours. Accept it and move on. Concentrate on building up your own stack to your level of satisfaction.
This year I learnt that I was in control of my happiness…..
I embraced life, laughter, love and made a conscious effort to avoid anything that would bring me down. I learnt that all the shit I had been through earlier in the year only made me a stronger person; even when I stooped under its weight for a season, that season passed and with it came lessons and life experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything. Because all these things make up tiny little intricate pieces of who I am. And who I am is awesome
Looking forward to 2012 and excited about the plans I have for it. As I dance my way into the new year under the stars with my feet on the sandy beach, I will give thanks for the year past and for lessons learnt.
Happy New Year!
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