It was such a loving and warm environment full of people who love poetry. I will be going back!
Maybe I’m just tired
My head’s been hot for so long
and I’ve been waiting for the cold to seep in
But now that it’s here I’m reminded
of what I ran away from.
I’ve spent so long running from what I could feel
that running is what I feel to run from too…
But maybe I’m just tired.
Oh what if the sun is down when I wake up
And the blinds are too low
And I don’t want to move
And I think of all my affections…
Maybe I’m just scared.
but I don’t know how to fight this fear
even with God on my side
I should be honest with myself.
I fear the emptiness I’ve been running from
has been inside me all along
The base feelings I’ve been taking about
and the Malibu at the bottom of my cup
I’ve just been distracting myself
from who I really am
and that’s quite hard to deal with…
But maybe I’m just tired.
When life gets exhausting
What retrospective thoughts lead to
“Good. As much as life is unpredictable, it can be predicable too. And I predict that you will be okay, LIKE YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.”
***
To say I never want to look back and regret is ambitious. I know I will. However, that is expected. Regret is no longer a surprise to me, neither is disappointment, (perceived) failure, or any anti-climax I experience.
I can’t figure out if that is making me more intuitive, or simply numb to the storms of life. But whatever.
Looking back is special to me because it has brought me calm, clarity and acceptance.
I’ve written about it countless times before; at this point it’s a regurgitation of a well-known fact to me. But I keep on saying it because it means everything.
Hindsight is important because it presents this truth to you:
Everything will be okay, it always has been, it is, and it always will be. Your past present and future are covered, because you have survived everything you have ever been through, and you will continue to do so. You have to believe this.
In light of this truth, you should allow yourself to feel peace.
But, I am not naïve. I accept the fact that life sometimes disappoints. Yet that is the least of my worries nowadays, and I thank God for that.
It goes beyond the scope of learning from my mistakes. It’s the simple acceptance that life will do what it wants. Sometimes that’s what we want, and other times it isn’t. I just believe we should accept whatever happens.
Afterall, for something to “happen” is what is expected. “Happening” is neutral, it’s just a fact. How we interact with this fact is what’s most important.
Life happens and happens and happens – it’s been happening, yet it’s been fine.
Dare I say that in retrospect, I didn’t need to worry as much as I ever did? Nerves and anxiety are normal of course, but the fact that things turn out fine in the long run (no matter how long the run is) is a bit more of a reason to relax now, when current “happenings” are worrying and plaguing my mind.
“Wasn’t everything okay last time Adefela?” I ask myself. To which I answer yes, it was.
“Good. As much as life is unpredictable, it can be predicable too. And I predict that you will be okay, like you always have been.”
Put your name there.
That’s the conversation I should have with myself now. The blessing of hindsight is in my possession. I will use whatever it takes to remind myself of that, and to calm myself when I feel like this “happening” may just kill me. It probably won’t.
I nod my head thinking, good, I’ll keep on trying. And I thank God for the reassurance of everything being fine.
Postponing my pleasures
GIVE IN TO A GOOD THING WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE IT, BECAUSE NOW IS HERE.
***
I have a list of things I want to write about. It’s been piling up for a while. This is at the top, it should be something close to this:
I don’t want to get into my issues too much. Although I like to explore a lot on my blog, I have a diary for a reason – for the deeper issues that must be dealt with behind closed doors.
But this one can slide. I’m trying to move past cycles of self-deprivation. I wonder if other people postpone their pleasure until they have achieved or received something; until they feel like they’re there, wherever there is.
Put simply, I keep on waiting for things to become complete before I give myself any gratification. Extreme? I don’t do it for everything all the time, but I do it enough to notice. Perhaps this is difficult to write because I haven’t thought of a way around it, other than to stop doing it. Or at least, do it less.
It’s funny how often the solution to something is to simply stop, or start.
Note to self: Give in to rewards and self-commendation while the situation is ongoing, rather than waiting for it to be complete. It’s probably an indication that I don’t see myself as worthy of some pleasures I have access to, not believing that I deserve them. Neither do I know how to handle them.
Or maybe it’s because I have no self-control and I know I’ll lose my mind if my rewards are not controlled in some way.
But I won’t get lost in thinking about that, because it may turn into a trap of overthinking that stops me from doing anything at all. Sometimes I don’t want to process so much.
I understand that this is a surface-level exploration but as I said, it isn’t my diary.
Yet, perhaps this is identifiable to you.
Stopping and starting are easier than you think. There’s no need to rewrite mental patterns. No call for affirmations and no self-convincing. Just simply giving in to a good thing when you feel like it, because now is here.
I don’t need to reiterate how important balance is despite it all.
But yes, just give in. Sometimes that’s fine.
When will I cry
This song is pulling the pain out of my heart
a mass of incompletion yearning for expression
from a source that could not provide
But since bodies float to the surface when there’s no life left
I guess my ocean wasn’t so deep after all
I’ll be like Ophelia in the water
petals and leaves floating around me
As rhythm expresses what I had inside all along
It was the weight of my mind
fooling me into thinking I could never rise
Now it’s the beat of my heart,
fighting to be realised
It pushes me up a final time after I pass away, singing
To be victorious I must find glory in the little things, father take all the fears and sorrow from my life
And it plays through the waves
Lifting what’s left of me back to the shore, where I should have been all along
Music is helping my heart to sing
And it’s telling me that I’m not dead yet
I still have inside of me the ability to live
Because my heart never stopped beating
or searching for a vessel to express all it was carrying
Once again I am indebted to it
Thank you for keeping me alive
when I thought I was dead and gone
Get out your feelings
I sat down and considered that maybe there wasn’t too much going on. Maybe I was lost in the ripples and waves miles away from where the rock hit the water. Thoughts relating to what I had to do mixed with immediate responsibilities and couldn’t see things as clearly as I wanted to. Either that, or I just coudn’t handle the heat like other people. It would be a sad realisation to come to… finding that you’re weaker than others. At the same time, I had told myself and that being strong was overrated. I was weak. In God I found my strength. But I couldn’t extricate that from my definition of a cop-out.
This alone shows how lost I get in these waves.
How do you stay grounded? Does anyone ever remain focused? How do you put your head down for two hours without worrying that you may not make it to the end, distraction-free? How do you shut off that overwhelm of emotion? It distracts me. I could link it to my cycles, the things I’ve learnt to accept as part of who I am as Adefela. But I found that in delving into myself through a pen for years and years, I’m unable to swim up from the depths of wondering. I used to feel two centimetres above the ground but now I just want to breathe fresh air again.
The deep blue sea can be so beautiful yet so dark. And after a while the sun stops cutting though those waves. I can sink further into the unknown, past liminal spaces and straight into that unexplored 90%. There, I’m faced with creatures I didn’t even know existed. I couldn’t describe to you what they looked like, I would struggle just as much to explain the colour red to someone who has never seen before.
How do you come up for air? What creatures of thought do you face? I will never be able to picture them fully because I know they are exclusive to you. But I’m with you in understanding that they can be so scary and unrecognisable in comparison to the problems you escaped at the foot of the shore.
Cycles
words I wrote a year ago
turned up again
focusing on my shortcomings
it seems I never let them go
So I’ll stop searching for progress
Since I never find I’m better
As it resonates year by year,
same old story, record and player
They’re gathering dust
that I mistook for glitter
Still
and I’m frustrated by phrases inside that I can’t force into verse
some things enter the mind in silent beauty
and fail to come out the same
I’m frustrated by living solo
that’s happening more lately
as windows provide a live feed of the world passing me by
on trains I never board
Frustration: my dreams.
I’ve maintained my ambition and changed my perspective
that’s a pivot
and it’s all I have to say
frustrated by strange new addictions picked up on the road,
brand-new habits I desire and fail to implement,
never pushing them past the deep down
They should take up the space I prefer.
I thought I got my space back a year ago
but somehow nothing else has moved in
now that space reminds me of the same old tenants.
Here I am
In truth there is no clearer way for me to express how lost I feel sometimes, than describing my current situation with a metaphor that doesn’t pin down a single understanding of what I am going through.
***
I write this under stress and pressure.
My last blog post, On half-developed thoughts, was a struggle to write. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to focus on non-academic things in the middle of academics. Growing up, education was everything to me, and anything that I perceived as a threat to my grades was hastily avoided.
Over time, I’ve learnt how to balance it all. But this course has made me regress in a way I did not expect. However I am aware that what I label as regression in this moment may eventually turn out to be adjacent to growth, somehow.
In On half-developed thoughts, I was recording the beginning of a mental unravel. Since then I have been building new systems for productivity, and developing avenues of thought to help me adjust to what life currently requires (things that I have never experienced before).
I was concerned with not fully developing thoughts because developing them is what anchors me. I am obsessed with figuring out and understanding myself, so when I was robbed of the time I needed to do that, I felt like I was falling apart.
Now I am telling myself that that was not me falling apart, but in fact old parts of myself falling away.
New clay is being added in their place and a new self is being moulded in the process.
It has become easier to describe my life with metaphors and that’s because I don’t know what is going on. I like metaphors because they are vagueness and uncertainty disguised as the beautiful and abstract. In truth there is no clearer way for me to express how lost I feel sometimes, than describing my current situation with a metaphor that doesn’t pin down a single understanding of what I am going through.
I’m filming content for a YouTube video that I’d like to upload when my course is over. Hopefully, it well-documents the past six months. In the video, I hope to insert readings of the blog posts I will be writing in the upcoming weeks.
Some will say that I am back and some would not have noticed at all. But here I am.
Stay tuned for Postponing my pleasures.
Some Variables 