Lost

It is one thing to lose people you love. It is another to lose yourself. That is a greater loss.
Donna Goddard, Waldmeer

Lost is the last post in the trilogy chronicling my unintentional absence from Lwile the Leo for 729 days. After introducing the trilogy with AWOL, I put up the first of the three posts titled Cracks which details how the cracks in the happiness I finally found in 2019 (after chasing it my whole damn life) started to show in 2020 before it all came crashing down in 2021. The second post, Crashing Down, showcases me in all my damaged glory when my mental health was in the absolute gutter in 2021.

I had initially planned to have four posts in this series, with Cracks, Crashing Down and Lost chronicling 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively because those three years all played such distinct roles in me going AWOL and deserved standalone posts. The fourth one, Rediscovery, was supposed to close out the series but while I was writing Crashing Down I realised that there is no way I can put up a post on my rediscovery yet I am just getting started with it. It would be quite unwise for me to let people into a space I am yet to finish figuring out, so I will hold onto the post until I make headway into my rediscovery.

In Cracks I revealed that telling the story of my mum’s battle with stage IV breast cancer and my fear that my brother would die by suicide in 2020 were responsible for the cracks in my hard-won happiness that year. In 2021 I was still worried about my brother in addition to potential unemployment and my sister’s depressive episode while also dealing with the Power Struggle stage in my relationship. All this was over and above the three anxiety disorders I live with, so it will not come as a surprise that everything I struggled with over those two years added up to a total loss of self in 2022.

I was not aware of how lost I was until I had a session with my therapist in February this year. Before our February session I last saw her in March 2022, which was my first and last session that year, and in between then I did not have any correspondence with her. When we had our session this year she quickly noticed a stark difference in me from when she last saw me in-person before Covid (BC) and said as much. She opened my eyes to how much I had lost myself and I spent a couple of days after our session ruminating on her words and it broke my heart to realise how accurate they were.

Lost is the one word I would use to describe myself in 2022 but I am not ready to share the many ways I lost myself because I am still making sense of it all, so instead I will share the two biggest struggles from losing me and first up is procrastination.

I am most likely the biggest procrastinator alive. The fact that I procrastinate and still get shit done is probably why I cannot seem to break the habit.

Those were the first words I ever wrote for Lwile the Leo in my inaugural blog post on August 22, 2018. I have always been a procrastinator and leave things to the last minute as I am a deadline monster, but my procrastination has only gotten worse since I wrote those words. And when shit hit the fan in 2020 my procrastination got sooo crippling, before becoming even more detrimental in 2021, that it became my undoing and I am yet to recover from it. I had a dozen or so posts planned from June 2021 onwards when I was came back from the Mental Health Awareness Month break that year, but then I moved my comeback date to August for my blogiversary, and if you are reading the last post in the trilogy then chances are you know what happened next. I did not have any motivation to get back to writing so I only put up three posts that year and two in 2022. I have ± 30 blog post ideas from as far back as 2020 that I am yet to move from the outline phase to full-fledged post, and that is just one example of how my procrastination has become my undoing. I knew what I was meant to be doing, but I simply was not doing it. I had all these goals for 2021 but by May I had not accomplished anything and that realllllllyyyyyy freaked me out, but I just could not bring myself to get started.

Procrastination can sometimes be a symptom of an underlying issue, such as ADHD or depression. And since my mental health was in the absolute gutter in 2021 to the extent that I had suicidal ideations for the first time in ages, it makes sense that my procrastination got worse as there was an underlying issue. I have since learnt that procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem. It is a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks— boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt etc etc. When you procrastinate, you are avoiding an unpleasant task by doing something else that gives you a temporary mood boost. Our brains are always looking for relative rewards and when you are rewarded for something, you tend to do it again. The momentary relief you feel when procrastinating is actually what makes the cycle especially vicious and why procrastination tends not to be a one-off behavior, but a cycle that easily becomes a chronic habit. But the shame and guilt of not doing what you should be doing can make you procrastinate even further, creating a vicious, self-defeating cycle. And what makes procrastination so harmful is that the tasks do not go away and eventually you are left with the tasks to complete, the negative emotions again, plus the added stress of a time constraint.

If you have a habit loop around procrastination but you have not found a better reward, your brain is just going to keep doing it over and over until you give it something better to do. I am now working to find a better reward than avoidance— one that can relieve my challenging feelings in the present moment without causing harm to my future self. So if you have any tips and tricks regarding this please share and I will add them to my mental health “toolbox”.

My second struggle was that I was grasping, but not latching, on to happiness. I wrote about this in April 2021, just before I went AWOL the next month, and things only got worse in 2022. In my 2019 post titled Find Your Happy I wrote:

I have spent most of my life pursuing happiness. My second tattoo, which I got in 2011, is Kanji symbols for strength and happiness. Strength because I am the second strongest person I know (second to my mum) and happiness because one of my life goals has always been to be happy. Of course I have known happiness, my life has not been all gloom and doom. I have just never had happy as part of the repertoire of emotions that make me who I am. That might sound hyperbolic given I have one of the loudest laughs ever, but there is a difference between experiencing fleeting moments of happiness versus being holistically happy.

Now I no longer identify as a happy person. I am back to experiencing fleeting moments of happiness rather than being holistically happy as I am grasping, but not latching, on to happiness. The downturn of my happiness started in 2020 which is a bit ironic as on the one hand I was falling in love with my future husband, but on the other hand I was falling out of love with things that previously sparked joy in me. The only things that brought me joy in 2021 and 2022 were reading and watching TV but they did not bring me any lasting happiness because books and TV shows are not real life. They are more of an escape as they allow me to leave this world and fully immerse myself in that of the author/screenwriter. And while that is completely fine every now and then, I will not find lasting happiness in something that allows me to escape from the world.

I attended the twelfth edition of Biko Zulu’s Creative Writing Masterclass where I learnt that the first year or two in a writer’s journey is all about affirmation. In 2019 I had a lot of people reaching out to me, whether in-person or via DMs on Instagram, telling me that they resonated with the blog and it was enchanting to hear that as the early mornings and/or late nights are hard to endure when no one is reading what you are putting out because writing is HARD!!! It is challenging to explain just how hard writing is because you only get to see the finished product. It is not like, for example, a football player you see train a couple of days a week and then play matches over the weekend. You are not privy to the early mornings and/or late nights, or the rewrites upon rewrites upon rewrites that are so time and energy consuming. The best example I can give to explain how exhausted I feel after a few hours of writing is to liken it to how exhausted you feel after spending an entire day reading for an exam.

When I started the blog on the last day of Leo season in 2018 it was, in many ways, my grief journal. My mum died on December 13, 2017 at 1:10 a.m. following a 5 ½ year battle with stage IV breast cancer and blogging about my never-ending grief journey in 2018 was extremely cathartic and therapeutic. 2019 was the best year of my life and I had sooo much fun writing then that the early mornings and/or late nights were worth it. Then around the middle of 2020 the viewership numbers on my blog posts started dwindling and come 2021 almost none of my posts were hitting triple digits in terms of readership. I even started to wonder whether WordPress was dicking around with my numbers because I could not understand how I went from such high numbers to next to nothing in less than a year. On May 4^th I put up my Mental Health Awareness Month post and took my usual break to use the blog as a platform to share guest posts from people who struggle with their mental health like I do and promised to be back in June. June 1^st came, but I did not. Then on August 4^th I put up a post about the significance of the number four in my relationship and in the intro I said I would explain my reasons for going MIA on August 22^nd in my blogiversary post, but for the first time since I started the blog I did not put up a blogiversary post.

When I took the break in May I told my man that I did not see myself going back to writing for a while even though I had said otherwise on the blog. The dwindling numbers had demotivated me even further and I no longer had the heart to write. But instead of putting up a blog post on June 1^st to explain my prolonged absence, I ghosted my readers. Or, to quote Taylor Swift, I ripped the band-aid off and skipped town like an asshole outlaw. I burrowed myself even further in my books and challenged myself to complete my 2021 reading challenge by my birthday on August 3^rd. I had just finished book 11/30 by the time my post went up on May 4^th, meaning I had challenged myself to read 19 books in 3 months. I finished book 30/30 on my last evening as a 33 year old 💁‍♀️🤓 but something went terribly wrong because that fun challenge that was supposed to fill in the newly minted gap in my free time ended up becoming my biggest source of joy. Reading was the only thing I wanted to do in my spare time in 2021, and in 2022 I upped the ante when I started buying books on my Goodreads Want to Read Shelf. I opened my Bookstagram on April 20, 2021 (😎) and through Booksta I have been exposed to sooo much book content. Books that I had been eyeing on Goodreads and in bookstores I suddenly had to have, and consequently 2022 will go down as the year I learnt that reading books and buying books are two very separate hobbies. Now my personal Instagram is more or less a Bookstagram and you can say I never post blog posts that are not book reviews anymore.

Some people get lost for so long that they forget what it was like to be themselves. Find yourself again.
Anon

When COVID-19 entered the scene and the first case in Kenya was discovered on March 6^th, the outside closed shortly after. I did not know it then, but something inside me also closed that day and when the outside cautiously opened in the following months, I remained firmly shut. Which is why I have been lost for sooo long but I am now on the path to rediscovery and I love. that. for. me 💅 I turn 36 on August 3^rd and I usually set my intentions and resolutions for my new year on my birthday instead of the conventional new year. This time around my intention is rediscovery which is why it is my word of the year for 36 and 37 as I am on a journey to find myself again by my 38^th birthday. Why 38 and not something more conventional like 40 which is a milestone birthday to begin with? Well, it is because the number 38 is significantly special to me and I will reveal why in a post on my 38^th birthday.