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.