The 5 Stages

Today I'm going to go abit dark on all y'all. Mainly because the last thing I watched last night was Grey's Anatomy. Something I should probably avoid in future. And that series has a way of magnifying my emotions. Yesterday's episode was all about dealing with grief. Grief is not only experienced when you lose a loved one. Although it is when we deal with the most grief. But it is generally experienced when someone feels they've lost something that meant alot to them. Whether its a great job, a friend flying out indefinitely, divorce, a lost pen. The sense of loss is always felt. The stages are always the same.

According to the all knowing Grey's and the ever truthful google the stages are as follows:
Denial-Anger-Desperation-Depression-Acceptance.

I have never lost anyone close to me and I am grateful everyday when I wake up and everyone I love is intact. But I have lost something close to me. A few years ago, I lost total faith in myself. I lost my sense of purpose. I know it doesn't sound like much but before then I had successfully predicted the direction my life would take with uncanny ability but up until now, I still feel abit dazed by how life is unfolding.

Depression:This is the stage I am in right now as I write this. I feel like something important died inside. I couldn't care less about my education, my job, my future. The only reason, I wake up and go to work is because I hate being broke. The only reason I still go to class is because I hate failing. I lie to people that I'm going home to read and then I promptly fall asleep the minute I enter the house. It feels like I'm in a noiseless vacuum walking in slow motion while everyone else is just wheezing past me at lightning speed. I think for me this is the scariest stage yet because moving on to the next stage will mean admitting defeat. Admitting that I have lost my purpose in life.

Eventually I will have to take that leap into the unknown. Probably take a trip to a wartorn part of Somali 50km west of Kakuma and go discover myself while gunfire keeps me up at night. Hopefully by the time I'm done, I'll be ready to take over the world.

Everyone grieves different at their own pace and prepares themselves for the next stage in their own style. Some do it in the bar, some go to discover themselves in the wilderness, some in the crowds, some through their work. I personally prefer doing it in my room, amongst my clutter and other unimportant things.

It's hard but life has to move on so with the last words of yesterday's episode: "The grief washes over you over and over again and every single time, it'll make you lose your breath" until it doesn't!

You will never walk alone.

I am not a soccer fan by any definition of the word. I do not watch it if I can avoid it and when I can't avoid I prefer to sleep through it. Of course if I am watching it live, there's alot more interest because there's alot more to see. But I love the Liverpool slogan. "You will never walk alone". This is especially true for liverpool who hasn't seen a championship title since the earlier parts of this century. It would be rough to be alone when all you keep doing is not winning.

Unfortunately for most of us, we do walk alone. Especially when we are "not winning". It hit home especially for me yesternight. The day had gone pretty much in its usual luckluster way. So eventually after another day in the "mines" I got home ready to read. Clearly KPLC had other plans and as soon as I walked in, the electricity promptly walked out. Figuring that wasn't the worst thing that could happen, I decided to catch a nap and wake up later better rested and ready to read.

Well, later that night, I did wake up and electricity thank God had come back. Off I go, boil water for tea, wear sweater against the cold,find books and then........it went dark. It was 3 in the bloody morning and KPLC still had the indecency to cut the power. All I wanted to do at that point was scream at something. But it was 3 in the bloody morning. There was no one to text, no one to tell, no one to feel my pain. I was totally alone. In the dark. I was walking alone.

I know it doesn't sound like much but small things tend to crush one's spirit after intense pressure. For me, it was that lack of co-operation by Kenya Power. That was the point I needed someone, anyone really to tell me that it was going to be ok! That one night of darkness won't be my downfall. Electricity did come back an hour later. But I was too annoyed to wake up and use it.

We do unnecessarily walk alone... alot. With no one but ourselves to lean on. Which is quite sad with all the numbers we have in our phone books. But rarely do we at a point of need call and say we are in problems. Most of us tend to think that we are being a bother.I know for the most part of my life, I could have texted someone last night just to get the pressure off.

So today I refuse to walk alone and I will tell everyone that the flipping jav dropped me off 3 bus stops down and I had to walk 1 km to the office. But on the bright side, I am much fitter today than I was yesterday.

Here,there, eveywhere!!

I got home yesterday and I couldn't sleep. It's not because of the forced insomnia that I've been going through lately or that I had too much else to do but it was purely because, there was no space on my bed to sleep on. The whole bed was cluttered with books, newspapers from the past week that I've been trying to catch up on, my laptop, a variation of cables whose uses I can't quite place my finger on just yet.

The reason my books are on the bed was probably because my study desk was full of spare parts from computers past, hats, belts, stockings, a variation of papers from who knows where. The hats were not in their proper place on the chair because the chair had been taken up by dirty clothes and well you wonder why they were not in the clothes basket??Because the clothes basket was happily holding on to CD wallets and a variation of other implements that have long outlived their use. My bookshelves were overflowing, my floor was crawling with shoes. Strangely though, the only place that was clutter free was the dustbin. I wonder where the rubbish is!

If I say I'm not naturally a clutterer, I would be lying but lately, my clutter has gotten a life of its own. There are things in every nook and cranny in my room. Letters from a pen pal in the early 90's, exam papers together with their notes from high school, my 1st campus project. Things seem to get in and never leave. I'm like the black hole of useless things.

So, purely because I had no where to place my laptop so that I can atleast nap, I decided it was perharps time to throw out all those shoes from when I was a shoe size 3 and skirts from when I was 4 inches shorter. So yesterday, I started with the easiest thing to de-clutter. I took out my phone and started to de-clutter my inbox. (Don't judge. I was tired.) 600 messages and counting. I can't say it was easy letting go of all those "where are you?" texts and it was much harder deleting the "hope your holding up good!", "thank you" and "i'm sorry" but it was most especially hard on my thumbs. But I can proudly now declare I am down to 120 texts on inbox and exactly 0 texts on my sent messages.

So I am giving myself a week to throw the trash out of my room. It's time to decide what matters and what doesn't. The past papers from the past century have to go, the top that was so "in" in 1997 has to be packed up and given out. Well I might keep the jeans jacket that has seen better days. It might come back in fashion. But by this time next week, I will be clutter free and ready to sleep!

Why I go to church.

I don't like to classify myself as a religious person. I always find that as a very broad term. I mean I can belong to any religion if I call myself religious. I like to think of myself as a believer. Not just a believer in something or someone greater than myself but a believer in one true God. I believe that He is the only reason I wake up in the morning, the reason I sleep at night, I eat, breath, read, see. You know...generally the reason I am.

I am not to big on the idea of God helping only those who help themselves. It is in my opinion a contradiction in terms. If we are already helping ourselves, why then do we need God? Ofcourse,He is more inclined to help a hardworking member of society more than the guy seated lazing in the sun but the point is we wouldn't be here to be hardworking if it wasn't for Him.

So every so often I humble myself and try to atone for all the days I didnt pray, everyday, I intentionally lay by the way side not caring what He thinks. It's wrong for me to do that to the one Being that has stood by me when I was at my lowest, laughed with me my loudest, held my hand at my most scared, gave me my greatest rush. Sometimes I wonder if He was an actual person in an office, if I'd send Him a thank you note with some flowers every month. I know it wouldn't even compare to what He has done for me.Especially what He has done when I wasn't looking. It's just that it would be nice for me to know I did something in return.

That's why I go to church. Not because of hype or friends or habit. It's because I know it is the least I can do for the amount He has done for me. The song goes "Jesus loves me, this I know. For the bible tells me so!" I rephrase it to "Jesus loves me this I know, for my whole being tells me so!" Sometimes I may fall by the sidelines. Infact most times I will fall by the sidelines but I want Him to know that everytime I sit on that pew for those 2 hours on Sunday morning, I am doing it for Him!

Drop, Roll and Run

Usually my morning regiment is like a fire drill. I wake up, drop clothes and roll in the shower and run out of the house. It takes about 25 minutes for me to get up and out the door. I call it my own personal slimming program. I don't eat breakfast, I run to the office and hit the keyboard. Lately, however it has been close to impossible to drop, roll and run.

My brain has literally stood still for the better part of the month. I am running on fatigue and nothing else. I take 5 minutes to roll out of bed, 15 minutes arranging my various soaps and beauty things along the shower, 5 minutes checking the temperature and then still scrub twice coz I'm not too sure my tired hands did the job the first time. Then it'll take me 10minutes for my foggy mind to register that not all the clothes in my wardrobe are a dull grey colour and 5 minutes staring at them just to make sure I don't wear them inside out. Then since I am forgetting to do everything, I have to drag myself up and down the stairs 12-20 times to get my watch, my phone, my handbag, my belt......and as of today, my shoes and socks!

That is generally how my day is when i get really busy and don't have time to sleep, eat, breath or speak. For someone who is full of witty comebacks, it is quite frustrating to have to think for 30 minutes before shouting your comeback to a person who's already moved on to better things. So now instead of dropping, rolling and running, I am rolling out of bed, clumsily dropping all my things and quietly crawling out of the house. I guess it is still a little like a fire drill. Only now it's like am running away form a fire that's building up really, really slowly. Roll, drop and crawl.

Have a Nice Day???

Have you ever woken up to one of those days when everything goes wrong. Where Murphy's law can't even begin to explain the madness. You wake up late.It's raining outside, there's no electricity, you have to shower with cold water. You go outside and in your rush yesterday,you parked your car the wrong way and ended up getting water in the engine. Just as you get it started finally, you realise after drinking in the middle of the week, you forgot to fuel last night and now both tank and wallet are low and with the traffic this morning, there is no way you are going to make it to the petrol station. The usual excuse is sh*t happens but sometimes that excuse doesn't suffice.

Then there's the clients who are shouting so loudly through the phone while you are cursing at traffic that it almost seems that they are out to deafen you through your blue tooth. Of course on such days, everyone else has worn their worst personalities ever and they are all out to make sure that they show you what they are made of. The printers never work, the computers always crush and the people you have successfully avoided for months come knocking on your door.

We all have such days where you calculate your days back just to see if God is punishing you for something. The neighbour's cat you hit last month, the junior at the office you screamt at 2 days ago, the watchie you punched in your drunken state last friday. The list is endless but in my opinion no one deserves such days. Unfortunaltely life is unfair. But if you wake up tomorrow, and your day just seems to be carrying the same nonsense, it is only reasonable that you punch the next person in the gut who pisses you off unnecessarily.

At least that way, whatever happens next will be all your fault. Have a nice day!

When you hit me,hit me hard.....

Rock music and I got into a relationship when my age was still in single digits. It was at a time when people thought that Oasis was a patch of green grass in the desert and Jewel was an expensive stone you gave to your girlfriend. It began because I was going through a tough time then and the only music that seemed to understand what I was going through and put it into words was Rock. Alot of that still rings true to date and sometimes I think if I was left to my own devices I'd have red and blue hair, own a 600 cc sports bike and my wardrobe would be scattered with alot of leather and chains.

Anyway,I went through a pretty disturbing break-up a couple of months back and as usual I turned to my rock music. I will not tell you what this song meant to me then or how grateful I am it came into my life. I have since moved to less dark songs but I live you with the powerful words of:

Biffy Clyro-Many of Horrors

You say "I love you, boy"

I know you lie

I trust you all the same

I don't know why



'Cos when my back is turned

My bruises shine

Our broken fairytale

So hard to hide



I still believe

It's you and me to the end of time



When we collide we come together

If we don't we'll always be apart

I'll take a bruise, I know you're worth it

When you hit me, hit me hard



Sitting in a wishing hall

Hoping it stays right

Feet cast in solid stone

I got Gilligan's eyes



I still believe

It's you and me to the end of time



When we collide we come together

If we don't we'll always be apart

I'll take a bruise, I know you're worth it

When you hit me, hit me hard



'Cos you said our love

Is letting us go, guess what

Our future is for

Many of horror

Our future's for

Many of horror



I still believe

It's you and me to the end of time



When we collide we come together

If we don't we'll always be apart

I'll take a bruise, I know you're worth it

When you hit me, hit me hard

(ps:Many of Horrors is the name of the song!)

Day 1

LikeToday is the first day of the rest of my life.the first time blogging,the first day to bare my soul to the world. I read somewhere that there are over 300 million blogs in the world.I figured if 300 million people can do it then why can't I? I have never been great at baring my soul even to my closest so this is going to be quite the task for me.

I have been writing in books my whole life. Expressing feelings i can't speak into words on paper. I can even say my pen has been my best friend through the roughest of times. I dont know when my love for the written word started but if I'm not reading something, I'm writing something else or listening to someone else's writing.(And for all of you who don't know, movies and series are actually written by someone!)

Creativity starts with the mind then to the eyes then to the pen then finally to the audience. Why have i moved to the keyboard form the tattered book? Mainly because i spend most of my waking hours staring at a screen that has made my eyes worse off but my job easier. But also because, sometimes the pain can't wait for dinner time writing and the darkness is too impatient for a table for 1 at Java.

So as I embark on this new journey where i expose the me within to the world and try to fight through my struggles with the world, I hope you'll bear with me my dear keyboard and you will not be wary. Welcome to the blog of my life.
Enjoy!