Ask a ten year old what you should do if you catch a cold and the child would immediately recommend getting into bed and drinking plenty of warm fluids. Ask what you should do if you get a cut on your knee and the child would advocate cleaning it and bandaging it. Children also know that if you break a bone in your leg you need to get medical attention immediately. If you then asked why these steps were necessary they would tell you that treating such injuries helps them heal and prevents them from getting worse. We teach our children how to take care of their bodies from a very young age and they usually learn such lessons well. But ask an adult what you should do to ease the sharp pain of rejection, the devastating ache of loneliness, or the bitter disappointment of failure and the person would know little about how to treat these common psychological injuries. Ask what you should do to recover from low self-esteem or loss and trauma and adults would be equally challenged. Ask how you might deal with intrusive thoughts or nagging guilt and you are likely to be met with sheepish looks, religious innuendo, or a pointed effort to change the subject. Some might confidently suggest the best remedy is to talk about our feelings with friends or family members. But while discussing our feelings might offer relief in some situations, it can actually be damaging in others.
The reason we take little to no purposeful action to treat the psychological wounds we sustain in daily life is because we lack the tools with which to manage such experiences. And I experienced this personally, during a season in my life when I became overwhelmed with a couple of pesky psychological condition I had been struggling with. I was ill-equipped, to say the least. And that is why I want to share what worked for me in today's post. So you know what to do in case this happens to you, or to someone you know.
One Saturday, a few years ago, I stared at the ceiling of a hospital ward in Nairobi, exhausted. I said to myself, “If anyone else wants to live this life I have created for myself, they are more than welcome to try. But I’m done. I need a new way to live.”
I was twenty-seven years old,in many ways, I loved my life—loved my husband, adored my family and friends, grateful to have a good job and I was so thankful to be pursuing my dream of being a writer on the weekends. But it’s like I was pulling a little red wagon, and as I pulled it along, I filled it so full that I could hardly keep pulling. That red wagon was my life, and the weight of pulling it was destroying me. I was aware that I was missing the very things I so badly longed for: connection, meaning, peace. But there was something that kept me from unburdening the little red wagon —an old set of beliefs that I had come to see as truth. They kept me pushing, pushing, and pushing even as I was longing to rest. My health was suffering. I was frequently sick, anxious and depressed. I slept poorly and not enough. I got migraines, panic attacks and then vertigo. The muscles in my neck and shoulders felt more like rock than tissue, and the circles under my eyes looked like bruises. My heart—the heart I used to offer so freely, the heart I used to wear proudly on my sleeve—had retreated deep inside my chest, wounded and seeking protection.
Eventually, my physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social health had been deeply and badly compromised, and it brought about the events of that Saturday afternoon when I was hospitalized. It's safe to say that was the worst day of my life. And I had no idea what to do, or how to get better. Like many fine, high-functioning, capable people, I loved my life but I secretly felt burdened, unfulfilled or disconnected. You have found some form of success yet you grapple with sadness or anxiety or the feeling of emptiness, for which there are no words and for which you could find little explanation.
“Shouldn’t I be happier?”
“Why haven’t I accomplished more?”
“Why doesn’t my life feel more meaningful?”
You know what is expected from you in most of life’s social environments. Yet you are unable to label and describe what is wrong in your internal experience of life and how it harms you. Eventually this state of being leads to days when all you want to do is lay in bed, but life won’t let you. Days when you get in a big fight over something small, you loss your job unexpectedly, find your partner cheating or discover your friends are more like frenemies. Days that make you wish it were socially acceptable to walk around wearing your pajamas. Days when you want the ground to open up and swallow you whole. But thank God, it never does.
It's an insurmountable struggle to climb out of that wallowing hole of self-pity when life knocks you on your ass, but it can be done. And here is how;
Step #1 - Seek help from a mental health professional
Immediately!
Step #2 - Set aside beautifully empty long hours for rest
I enjoy both good work and good rest. I love intellectual challenges, the sense of purpose and accomplishment that comes from getting both big and little things done. For me, the feeling that accompanies a creative breakthrough—and even just the feeling of chasing an idea, immersing myself in a problem, and matching my talents against a big challenge—is as addicting and exciting as any game, as physically satisfying and stimulating as food (and I really like food), as emotionally fulfilling and essential as being in love.
Handwork can be both honorable and rewarding. I look back fondly on some of my hardest jobs because of the fulfillment I found working long hours with good people, pushing the boundaries of our company, and trying new things. At the same time, I love serious rest. Not idle hours watching reality TV shows and taking Facebook quizzes to see what the newspapers would say about me, but the beautifully empty hours that stretch out, untouchable by clients, colleagues or family or friends. I love sleeping, and even better is the physical sensation of my body settling into bed. I’m often motivated to finish my work by the prospect of laying in bed, scrolling through Tiktok after.
So my interest in rest doesn’t arise from a distaste for work. It starts with a sense that that work isn’t a bad thing but an absolute necessity for a meaningful, fulfilling life. But I have also come to see that our respect for overwork is, perhaps a bit toxic.
Step #3 - Start Journaling
For nearly 5 years I have had the same therapist. This therapist is available to me 24 hours a day and hasn’t gone on vacation in all that time. I have called upon my therapist at three in the morning, on my wedding day, on my lunch break, on a cold and lonely Christmas, on a the beach in Mombasa, and in the doctor’s waiting room.
I can tell this therapist absolutely anything. My therapist listens silently to my most sinister darkness, my most bizarre fantasy, my most cherished dream. And I can say all this in any way that I want: I can scream, whimper, thrash, wail, rage, exult, foam, celebrate. I can be funny, snide, introspective, accusatory, sarcastic, helpless, brilliant, sentimental, cruel, profound, caustic, inspirational, opinionated, or vulgar. My therapist accepts all of this and more without comment, judgment, or reprisal. Best of all, this therapist keeps a detailed record of all of our work together, so that I have on my bookshelf a chronology of my life—my loves, my pains, my wins, my wounds, my growth, my transformation. Has this cost a fortune? you ask. Not at all. My therapist doesn’t want payment.
My therapist is my journal. And through the guided journals I created, journal therapy is available to you too.
Step #4 - Give your inner child a voice
Experience has taught me why the truth about our childhood is something we cannot, and should not, forgo, either as individuals or as a society. One of the reasons is that; behind the wall we erect to protect ourselves from the story of our childhood, still stands the neglected child we once were, the child that was once abandoned and betrayed. She waits for us to summon the courage to hear her voice. She wants to be protected and understood, and she wants us to free her from her isolation, loneliness, and speechlessness.But this child who has waited so long for our attention, not only has needs to be fulfilled. She also has a gift for us, a gift that we desperately need if we truly want to live. A gift that cannot be purchased and that the child in us alone, can bestow. It is the gift of the truth, which can free us from the prison of destructive opinions and conventional lies. Ultimately, it is the gift of security, which our rediscovered integrity will give us.The child only waits for us to be ready to approach her, and then, together, we will tear down the walls.
My belief is that the time has come for us to take the trauma from childhood and their consequences seriously. We must free ourselves of it. This does not mean that we have to repay our parents’ mistakes or ignorance in kind because they too were traumatized by those that came before them. It means that we must see them as they were, and recognize the way they treated us when we were small. Then we can spare ourselves and our children the repetition of such patterns of behavior. We need to free ourselves of the “generational trauma” carrying on its deadly effects within us. This is the only way we can heal and learn to create healthy habits and relationships.
Step #5 - Redefine your meaning of success
I am still trying to figure out what success means to me. Some days success means having more autonomy on how I spend my time, because who dreams of labour? Not me! On other days, success would be if I was a billionaire and able to serve my community in a grand way. Wouldn't that be a amazing. Most days I feel I am successful because I am blessed with a circle of people that love and support me. Parents that pray for me and always gift me my favorite things. A spouse that loves and laughs with me. A group of women that nurture and worship God with me. What more could I ask for?
According to Earl Nightingale, the author of 'The Strangest Secret', success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. When one is working toward their predetermined goal and knows where he or she is going, the person is a success. If they are not doing that, they are a failure. He goes on to list some successful people. The school teacher who is teaching because that is what he/she wanted to do. The entrepreneur that is running a local business because that what he/she set out to do. The woman who is a wife and mother because that is what she wanted to do and she is doing a good job at it.
The successful person is the one that says I am going to become this and begins to work towards it.
Today's post is an invitation—a hand reaching out across from my corner of the internet to yours- inviting to the winding, messy journey of surviving a bad day, month or year. Together we can move from exhaustion to peace, from isolation to connection, from hustling and multitasking to sacred presence, because it has been the greatest, most challenging, most rewarding seachange of my adult life.
To begin this journey with me, contact me on +254 708 649 088 to join my 12week coaching program.
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