A Peace Of My Mind

Peace still remains my number *emotion-compass. A lot of things can happen in a short space of time and that often leads to dissatisfaction within one’s soul. Maybe it’s because of my battle with anxiety, but I need peace like I need air to breathe.

Peace also goes well with growth. The wind can easily blow you into the direction of the shortest route to your destiny, but it is ‘peace’ that will pull you right into the long seeming  route, but it is the route that will give your soul satisfaction.

It’s a bit hard to change and stay the same at the same time, because there’s demand for both. Our lives are multi-faceted and there’s enormous pressure to soar in every one of them. That’s why I need my peace. My peace allows me to sometimes let things be, if trying to control them will lead to the ruin of the other.

Looking at my former younger self, I notice the loudness. The unnecessary quest to be in control of all the situations I found myself tangled in, when I couldn’t even control my own emotions. This often led to spending hours feeling frustrated and sometimes even worthless.

The older, wiser and calmer me has found solace in deep breathes, meditation, naps and surrendering it all to God. This I realised after my husband died. The things I used to fuss about suddenly became not so important. A heart at peace in every circumstance is the desired goal of every waking day. This is especially tested when conflicts rise. Therefore I have had to learn to deal with conflict with firmness without losing the peace within me. It has taken a few tries, but I think I have nailed it. I know because I no longer throw shade. Yup, that thing I used to do; very petty.

*(I just made up this phrase in my mind, I hope it exists and it’s relevant to this context)

A Widow's Prayer.

I remember saying to God, “I am so glad you’re God because I don’t know how else I am going to survive Mbu’s death…” 

This was minutes or hours after Mbu’s passing, at this point everything was unstable or maybe it was my mind and whole being that was unstable. I was so desperate to hold on to something greater and stronger than myself, thank God God was that very thing.

It was a scary time for me. A time I never thought I’d face. Yes, when you say your vows you hope that death would be the only thing that would separate you. Even with this as the ending we hoped for for our marriage, I wasn’t near ready. It came too soon.

Instantly I lost a part of me. I don’t cook anymore and if I am forced to, it feels as though my heart is oozing pain. My son has been begging me to make lasagna. It’s been almost 3 years and I still haven't made it. it’s not that I don’t want to cook for my kids, it’s just that there’s an emotional connection to the things I used to do in my marriage with Mbu, that feel like torture when I do them now. This is probably why therapy is so important.

I try to be as open as possible with my kids about my grief. I want them to know how I am feeling each day and to allow them the opportunty to support me; and also so they could know that life happens and there’s nothing wrong with being vulnerable and accepting help. I want my kids to know that some life events can be so harsh, that they blow you right off your well organised plans.

It was like watching dominoes fall. That one hit led to a series of equally hard hits that knocked my life right off balance and off plans.

Hence I told God, “I am so glad you’re God because I don’t know how else I am going to survive Mbu’s death…”

Safe Space.

Although forgiving is a great part of the healing process for those who have suffered the trauma of abuse, it is important that we understand that the outcome of the attempt to forgive lies greatly on how the forgiveness process is done.

As a survivor of both physical and sexual abuse, I can tell you from my own experience that when you’re in pain due to abuse, more than anything you want to stop suffering from the pain. Therefore when I was being told that I must forgive those who’ve abused me in order to heal, I felt betrayed. I felt as though my reasons for feeling the pain were uncared for. I felt as though the one who had abused me was allowed to walk away unquestioned, while I was left with enormous emotional tasks on not just forgiving them, but also to live life as though nothing had happened and that is how I justified my resistance to forgive. I was angry.

Although forgiveness released my hold over the pain and attack, it was not a one-step process. There were a lot of emotions tied to that one event. There was guilt, there was shame and there was fear. Therefore I couldn’t process all that in just one step. I needed time. I needed a safe environment that would allow me to let down my guard so I could start unpacking each one of these great and daunting emotions.

Firstly, before I could even attempt dealing with these emotions, I needed to calm my mind and convince it to allow the process of confrontation, because in order to forgive I had to confront the ordeal.

My mind had built up great walls of protection from anything that looked like the trauma and the attack I have suffered. I was at war with myself, yet the attack was never my fault. My mind told me not to trust anyone with my wound, not even the trained professionals.

Until someone created a safe space for me to let down my guard and allowed the forgiving process to be just that – a process (procedure, course, development, progress etc.)

It could several deliberate attempts before the desired goal was achieved. The goal was clear – I wanted to forgive and be released from carrying the trauma in my daily life.  

May we be kind and gentle towards those who are still healing from their trauma so that they can also get to a healthy point of release and forgiveness, so that they can find and restore the peace that was once taken away from them.

At Peace With My Pace

I was scared. This was a deep kind of scared. I was scared to even to talk about it – even to God. There’s was a crackling in my spirit each time I thought about it. Those closest to me didn’t know about this. I pretended to be excited about it, all in a bid to get them to stop digging deep with their questions.

Looking back, I feel I have been so hard on myself. I forced my fragile soul to just step back into life. I treated myself as if nothing happened, yet a lot happened – I lost my true love in the harshest of ways.

I treated his death like a break-up. I guess it’s because I had never been widowed before. I was so determined to finish strong, forgetting that finishing strong meant finishing with my all my sanity still intact.

I took on advice from people who’ve never travelled a day in widowhood. It wasn’t wrong of me to do so, but it was definitely unkind of me to do that to myself, because each response put unfair expectations on myself. This caused me to be depressed because I was feeling like I was being weak, a pushover and pathetic for not healing from my loss in a certain time frame.

Sitting in a session with my psychologist one midday, I accepted that this was a different kind of war than any other I’ve ever been in before and that meant I had to scrape off everything I’ve been trying and start working on a different strategy.

This scraping came with a lot of crying. Letting go of comforts such as unsolicited advice from the uninformed wasn’t easy nor pleasant. In fact it hurt. You know, the known is always easy to accept. The unknown on the other hand is just pure torment, especially if you’re already in a torturous season like widowhood. I have never been close to any young widow before Mbu’s passing. I never even knew of one in my community; so I felt so alone.

Since I was going to build from the ground up again, I decided to draw up new dreams, bigger dreams. This is where the glimmer of hope came in. I scraped off the old dreams for new reinvented ones. This was fun and exciting. It gave purpose to my pain. I am in no way saying I’ve got things figured out – I’m just saying I am having fun while at it. And one day, when I am brave enough I’ll face one of my biggest fear – loving again.