Feel And Heal

     I feel light, so light I could just float up and be carried away by the wind if it wasn’t for my body tethering me down.      I am feeling this massive relief because I felt an important truth last night. It came to me SUDDENLY and from the passing of one second to the next I became almost a different person. It’s a truth that has been revealed itself to me before… I just keep forgetting. But conveniently my Highest Self and Power loves me enough to keep telling it to me to my FACE. I’m saying this here and now because I’m human and I might need this again later on.     That truth is the simplicity, authority and just plain audacity of the statement, “So what?” The last couple of weeks I had been feeling such a heavy. Fucking. Misery. I was finding it hard to do more than breathe some moments. I wrote about it. Trust me, I wrote different pieces of different lengths about what was affecting me but then I was still left with the...

       For as long as I can remember, there has existed a “Before” and “After” timeline in my mind. The “before” was me being fat, uneducated, unloved, unfunny, poor and just generally physically uncomfortable. The “after” would be the complete opposite of that! I LOVED letting my mind wander into the “after”. I would be 25 always. I would get older, of course, but pretty much just stay looking and feeling 25. I would be thin but not too thin. I would have a cute apartment in a cute red brick city like Pittsburgh. I would have a cute little animal friend, maybe two. I would have a real life, serious boyfriend who I may or may not have known in my “before” days but that wouldn’t matter because this is “after” and I would be perfect. In the after I would be famous and my job would be to inspire people with my bright cheerfulness.            I do not remember the exact thing that caused me to start thinking of my life in terms of befo...

Breakup letter to 2018.      2018, thank you. I truly do thank you, from the deepest darkest bottom corner of my heart.      You taught me to be selfish. I think even now you’re still attempting to teach me this, even though your time is done and you should relax and let 2019 take over.      I’m glad you’re done. Your lessons were painful and I wish I would have known just how bad they would be because I might have wanted a different teacher. One with an easier, softer teaching method.      I had to learn to be selfish because otherwise I would have burnt myself out. I would have used all the energy in me to fight events that were doomed to happen anyway, and I would have done that until it killed me.      It was during your time, 2018, that I began learning that it is not my duty to save my sister. It is not my duty to save anyone, that I could grasp, but I was not able to let go of the res...

     I have been in one single fist fight. It was the end of 5 th grade, and shit got real bloody. Little skirmishes with my siblings and cousins don’t count...no this fight was brutal, I was filled with rage and I broke the other girl’s nose and she had to go to the ER.      The rage was stemming from the fact that I became a bullied social outcast within a couple weeks or so of being in America and at Sandy Springs Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. I arrived in the US of A in April, 2002 a hopeful and happy girl, grateful to be reunited with my family. We had all been on a refuge journey for months before this and for about 6-8 months my mother, father and two baby siblings had been living in Atlanta while working on finding a way for me to fly here and join them. In that time I was passed around between family members and trusted friends in Europe, moving every couple of weeks.      But I arrived, I made it. I was excited t...

     One time my family attended an event. I don’t remember exactly what it was but there was music, people were dressed up and plastic tables strained to hold up enormous amounts of food. So it could have been a wedding reception, a baby shower, or a dinner after a prayer meeting. We had taken both cars there at separate times, and my mother arrived later than the rest of us. When she got there she had changed into bright and silky Rwandese robes, she’d put on makeup, and her hair was up in a tight bun. You could almost see each strand of hair stretching back across her scalp towards a shiny mass at the base of her skull, her whole head wanting to show off her face. She was beautiful, and I told her so. I even threw in a little joke about how she was more dressed up than I was. Because somehow everything was a competition with us, to the point that I didn’t even know it when I was thinking in those terms. In this moment she appeared to have won and she made sure everyo...

     I love talking. It’s so great.   I love having a captive audience, whether it’s a toddler or a best friend who’s already got tears of laughter in her eyes. And if there’s no one there to listen but me the story is still amazing, the laughs still so real.      It’s really strange to remember that there was a time when I stuttered horribly. One of the possible factors could be the fact that by time I was six years old I had lived in three different countries and spoke all their respective languages. Remembering who in my life spoke which language was fucking exhausting.      What I do know is that when someone asked me a question, or made a comment and expected one in return, sometimes it took longer for me to make the words come out. I realized there was something wrong with that when I connected people’s mocking laughter, smirks, and awkward glances with the pause that preceded my responses.        ...