not-your-cautionary-tale

[not-your-cautionary-tale]

K tells me that he'll see me in a short while. He has a meeting at the restaurant in the yoga community that I stay in.

What does that even mean? Is he finally going to talk to me again?

I get home and my friend is sitting at the table next to his table. Just my luck. So I sit with her, almost next to him. I am trying to act as normal as possible. Normal means that we are laughing at every minute and at everything. I don't want to sound award, like I am waiting for him. At the same time, I don't want to appear as though I am searching for attention. I don't want to feel as if I am disturbing his meeting.

After a few minutes of silently acting silly, I leave. He has my number, if he wants to speak to me when he is done, he will text me. He doesn't.

I am finally comfortable in my feelings for him, though I am feeling frustrated because it's clear that I am being led on. Letting go has been an intense process but l am getting there.

When he has left, I check in on my friend, who laments at the type of conversation she overheard. It was about sex.

Because we live in a religious community, the topic of sex is only ever seen in negative light except for procreation. That's not how the rest of the world works though. When you are in that space, it's hard to differentiate when the context of conversations on sex is sinister or when it is normal.

K's research has to deals with a specific sti. When I bumped into him months prior, he tells me that he just joined the programme because it was the only option. It's not for me to judge.

My relationship with him feels shameful. I like him and I tried to ignore him at the beginning. Then one day I tell my friend about him, who stops him while shopping at a local shop and we invite him to our yoga center. I knew that this was a big mistake but as long as I got to see him, I was happy.

Out of the shame of my desire to be his girlfriend, I constantly felt the need to have a spiritual element to our interactions instead of me just hanging out him. Though, a majority of the time we hang out outside of the community and we never spoke about the community or spirituality. I still felt like I was "preaching" to him and would talk about him to my spiritual leader.

I would also experience panic attacks because of past trauma distorting my perception of own self. Being around him would make my legs putty but I also felt a pit in my stomach. An emptiness. Emotions so intense that it felt as if they were spilling into a black hole at the core of me.

I never felt enough. He was tall, dark, handsome and intelligent. I didn't feel smart or attractive enough for him.

A few months prior to meeting him. I had just moved to this big city and I achieved my dream of living in a spiritual community. Though I felt as if I had been dropped in unfamiliar waters with little to no guidance. I struggled with sleep, so I would sit in the restaurant at night and chat to another boy who struggled with sleep. I eventually got into trouble for having male friends but I was friends and I hung out with everyone, even the girls. My story almost got spun out of proportion when the boy I used to sit with was involved in a scandal. I never recovered from that drama.

It has been over 5 years and a lot has happened. K and I stopped talking a few years ago. I've has many more experiences that has shaken my sexuality to the core.

Since leaving my religious community, i am unpacking so much religious trauma. Sex is no longer a dirty word for me, I feel like talking about it in relation to feminism, gender based violence and female bodily autonomy. It's hard though. After every Facebook post where I share a little bit of my thoughts, I can the potential disappoint and the jeers.

It may be all in my head but the fear is based on conversations that I have participated in in the past.

I see myself empowering girls in ways that I was not empowered growing up. Learning to love their bodies. Learning to not control the access of their bodies based on anyone else's desire but their own. Learning to prioritize pleasure. Learning to be okay with celibacy. Learning to have conversations about intimacy. All the things that we are not taught.

I also prepare myself to treated like a leper in spaces that I used to love. I prepare to hear "I told you so." and I prepare to have to ward off unwarranted attention.

I comfort myself from my anxieties by remembering that the future is not certain and what people say behind my back is none of my business eitherway.

I will do what's best to keep myself and other women safe in the world, especially from the weight of other people's opinions and our struggles to choose self.

Choosing yourself will always be important.

[not-your-cautionary-tale]

Spoilt Milk

If there is one thing that I have learnt throughout my 20s, it's that there is no use to cry over spilt milk. But I do it all time. Longing for a clean slate where I don't have to make avoidable mistakes associated with the pain of growing up.

At almost 30, I am experience many ambivalent feelings about the past decade.

My best friend is getting married and I sit with this uncomfortable feeling. It's not envy. I am happy for her. Yet I still feel sad. Being so involved in a planning a wedding is a reminder that life goes on for everyone else but me.

After years of suffering through life, trying to "persevere", I finally got to a point where I could not go on anymore. I then realised that I was autistic, an answer to a question that I had been searching for years: "What is wrong with my head and why cannot I not fix it despite my best efforts through therapy, self-help and religion?"

My diagnosis got confirmed by a professional last year.

I had been failing at life. It took me 7 years to finish a diploma that was supposed to take two years and failed half of my classes at an expensive college I decided to attend. I couldn't last as a resident of a monastery. I cannot seem to find a job. I am a total failure.

I also got a pcos diagnosis confirmed. Though I was on the fence about children, I still felt grief. I know pcos does not mean that I will never have children but I don't deal with loss well and I don't think that I would survive a miscarriage. I do not think that I need the extra trauma plus it doesn't feel worth risking my life.

Getting married young was something that I wanted badly. After multiple failed relationships, I felt broken. I know that happiness is not found in another but when you spend your life alone and feeling misunderstood, you desire someone who will understand you, care and share with. Yes, companionship can be found in female friendships but what happens when your female friends get into relationships themselves? Also, you cannot cannot get physical intimacy (not necessarily sex) from your female friends. I know none of this is a need but it is a want.

I guess the feeling that I feel at the pit of my stomach is grief and mourning of the life that I thought I wanted, that is increasingly feeling like it will never happen.

As a black, fat and autistic woman who is also infertile and has nothing material to offer either, the world constantly reminds me that I am not welcomed.

From childhood, every choice I made would lead me to be questioned by my ability to please a hypothetical man.

When I turned vegetarian I was asked what I would cook for my future husband.

When I changed religions, I would be questioned about whether I converted because of my non-existant husband.

When my PCOS was confirmed my doctor's first thought was how am I going to give a hypothetical man children. Despite, at that moment, I had a bad headache, palpating heart from anemia because I had been bleeding for three months.

As a child, another told me that my body weight meant that I was only good enough for sex and to be left.

When men speak about "women", I know that they are not talking about me. I am perfectly content with that. I would never want to be with someone who considers me lowered standards. I know that adds a layer of complication in a world that heavily relies on the externals.

With the tides changing in dating and mysogyny being on the rise, I know feel even more cautious. It's hard enough that as a black woman, we are already trained for a hard life or to protect ourselves from men. I never wanted that. I am not so desperate enough to submit to someone who thinks of me as their enemy or posession.

I am also tired of constantly looking over my back. I also too autistic for mindgames.

Society doesn't expect men to be carers, especially African men. I need someone who will be gentle with me as I navigate life on the spectrum. It is even feels more frustrating that mental health is not recognized in African communities. I already fall short of what is required for "wife material".

Fertility issues feels like as set up for disaster as an African woman.

My best friend is not black, she is thinner, shorter and her neurodivergency is one that allows her to be magnetic. She knows everyone and everyone loves her. She has barely experienced long periods of time single, there is always a backup. She is independent, has a child, has a good job, owns her own car and house.

While feel like I keep leaving silent tornados in places thaf I've lived. I don't get along with everyone, unless I fawn. I often play the mother role, stay silent, stay agreeable. The moment I step out of that role is when I get discarded. Still it's not enough.

Nobody understands, who has never experienced this, understands. So I'll get "comforting" statements such as:

"You'll find someone."

"You need to choose better."

"You need to choose yourself"

"You need love your own company."

All I have is my company. I have full life on my own. I visit galleries, museums, restaurants, film screenings and more, alone.

I have female friends who I adore but even they have boyfriends and husbands.

With my life falling apart, I know that I definitely cannot bring anyone in my life. Who would want a jobless 29 year old?

I know it doesn't mean that I will definitely never have someone in my life, I just wish that it was life not this hard. I wish it was gauranteed.

I often wonder if I was married earlier, if this period of my life would have been easier. Like I've noticed some women around me experience.

One day, I was being rejected by a guy I thought liked me. I felt so bad that the word husband was triggering.

I know that sounds stupid and in hindsight, I am cringing. However, with my new understanding of the feelings of grief and mourning, I can feel them then let them pass, instead of trying to hold them in like sour milk that I refuse to throw away.

Evantually, when you open the milk, it explodes. That layer of shame that came with the feelings was like bacteria in milk. That bacteria produces gas, which causes pressure in the container. The toxic emotions that I was trying to push down, the years of trauma and rejection, built up to a specific moment when something insignificant brings out seemingly unnecessary emotions in a apparently inappropriate

I let these feelings of grief, of some envy, of pain to be felt and then gently released.

I forgive myself for time wasting, lamenting over what was or should have been. Over spilt milk.

Above all, I am content.

[not-your-cautionary-tale]

I recently came to the realization that I struggle with intrusive thoughts.

According to Dr. Kerry-Ann Williams, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in a 2021 article by Kelly Bilodeau for the Harvard Health Publishing site.

"An intrusive thought is usually very different from your typical thoughts. "For example, it might be uncharacteristically violent. If a thought is disturbing and it’s something you want to push out of your mind, it might be an intrusive thought. Intrusive thoughts are often repetitive and won’t go away. The more you think about it, the more anxious you get and the worse the thoughts get,"

I wish that this was not something that I had to learn from the internet. Maybe that would have saved me hours of feeling stuck in therapy, wasting time contemplating suicide and feeling like an overall shitty person.

Not even studying psychology could give me the knowledge to fix myself. It is something that I don't remember being spoken about. Even when I tried to enquire about my own experiences.

I remember while we are discussing personality disorders in Abnormal Psychology class, I ask my lecturer the following risky question:

"How do I know if the voice I hear in my head is my own or not?"

I know. It is a strange question. I had always heard wellness spaces in the media tell us (the audience) that the voices we hear in our heads that we are not enough, that we're stupid, and/or that we will fail, were not our own. However, I grew up with a great-uncle who had catatonic schizophrenia. All I knew about myself was that I had a delibating anxiety that turned to loud thoughts.

With barely any context provided by me, my lecturer replied "Well, if the voice sounds as if it is outside of you, that is a concern. If the voice sounds as if it is within you, that is your voice. However, I am concerned that you cannot tell the difference."

The last night sent tingles throughout my body. Not good tingles, not shivers either.

A few months to a year later, a friend of mine was committed to a mental health facility after experiencing a crisis that led to an unalive attempt. He spoke about an inner voice and I defended him by saying that he doesn't have the vocabulary to appropriately express himself. He was a french-speaker, Defending him was not a good choice either. His voice led him to harm himself.

I need to give myself grace for this situation. Through trial and error, I learn to judge situations more appropriately. At the time, that entire situation made me feel like such a failure that I had convinced myself that I wasn't cut out for psychology. That I was not cut out to help others.

One argument that I can give for my difficulties in navigating mental health conversations, despite my interest in them, is that I am an African woman. Knowing a little bit about African spirituality adds extra layers to my understanding of the psyche, that my white acquaintances and lecturers may not understand. On the other hand, it also meant that I needed to be sure about my mental health knowledge. Mental health was not widely spoken about in African communities and it is sometimes unnecessarily linked to spiritual causes. That may be the case but finding a middle ground is hard when both ends of the philosophical standing do not want to meet at the centre.

As an undiagnosed autistic, that is something that I could never express appropriately. Some people spend their entire life learning how to express their emotions properly. As a black person, you're told to persevere, hide your emotions or sweep them under the rug. You can talk about it but if you let your emotions take control of you then you are weak.

Now taking all of this into account, I was back to being forced to figure out what was happening to my head. After a traumatic 2018, a depressing 2019 and a stressful 2020, I believe that I was overdue for a breakdown. In 2021, I spent countless hours trying to control the thoughts urging me to harm myself because I could not control the thoughts that begged me to feel shame.

I had spent years, consistently telling people that I am scared. These thoughts are loud. However, I know that they are my thoughts yet still a regurgitation of words that were thrown at me throughout my life now morphed into something more harmful. I told professionals and religious authorities that my thoughts were dark. Only to receive not enough urgency from my therapists about my dark thoughts, though I understood that it was not their role to panic for me, Therapists are there to observe and guide. Dealing with religious leaders on mental health is a mixed bag of reactions.

At the end of the day, only you alone can face the darkness with the guidance of professionals. However, the work is 100% yours to do to dig yourself out of a hole.

I spend hours consuming mental health content on Tiktok, learning more in a year than I did in my two years studying psychology and my 5 years dedicating my life to my religion.

I learned that I might be autistic (I formally got a diagnosis last year). I learnt that living as an undiagnosed autistic was stressful and traumatic. I learnt that the thoughts that I was experiencing were intrusive thoughts and that they were not a reflection of who I am.

Intrusive thoughts can be caused by PTSD and stressful events in general. It can also be caused by OCD.

Thank you to Dr Kali for affirming me through her videos and the other mental health professionals

The knowledge that the thoughts did not make me a bad person made me feel so much more at peace. My thoughts eventually quiet down, after a year of purging and doing healing work such as writing, therapy, research and watching films that helped me make sense of my inner world a little bit more.