Five Bad Days

If you read my inaugural Mental Health Monday post of the year (Mental Health Monday: I Am Fine), then you know I spent two nights at Chiromo Lane Medical Centre in January.

During those two days and two nights I had nothing but time to take stock of the choices I had made that led to my admission and it was evident that, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, I had been the architect of my own chaos. Having to take a long, hard look at the mess my life had become quickly revealed that one of my biggest problems was that a lot of the choices I made in 2024 were not rooted in self-love, hence my decision to make it my Word of The Year for 2025. It was also around that time I realised I had stopped seeing myself in the woman in the mirror and no longer liked the person looking back at me.

Those were hard-hitting realisations to come to in such a short amount of time and given the extremity of my circumstances (being in a mental hospital), the only solution was to get my shit together with immediate effect. After my discharge I began my journey towards mental fitness with renewed intensity by, among other things, taking my antidepressants in earnest and going 100 days without alcohol, the latter being a major milestone for both my physical and mental well-being. The ‘among other things’ I have referred to are detailed in my Self-love post that you can read here so I do not have to repeat myself.

100 days later and my efforts paid off. My mental health was better than it had been in months, if not years, and I was the personification of I Love My Life by Watendawili & Coster Ojwang.

Until it all went to shit less than a week later.

I had five bad days between May 9^th and 13^th that shitted on the progress I had made between January 25^th (when I was discharged from Chiromo) and May 8^th. I will come back to those five bad days in a bit, but for now let us flashforward to May 16^th when I had the privilege of attending the 2025 EQ4Africa Conference with a few of my colleagues. EQ4Africa is a Pan-African conference powered by PTS Africa that champions Emotional Intelligence (EQ) as a catalyst for personal and organizational transformation. I may not be a religious person, but I cannot deny that being invited to attend the conference was divine intervention. I was given a heads up about it on the 14^th, aka my first good day after five bad ones, received the official invitation on the 15^th and attended the conference on the 16^th, aka my ninth workiversary.

The conference was enlightening in several ways, some of which I will share in June’s Mental Health Monday post. For today I am breaking away from the Mental Health Awareness Month guest posts to share one key takeaway given how timely it was for me: the power of resilience.

The dictionary definition of resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. I first came across the word when I was 18/19 and just like that, resilient was the first word I ever used to describe myself. With time I would use other words besides resilient to describe myself, but what I could not have anticipated was that with each new word I used, resilience quietly slipped further down the hierarchy of my identity. And that was never more apparent than when I hit my first rock bottom in December 2024.

I hit rock bottom for the second time on January 22^nd, the day before I was admitted to Chiromo against my will. I am still trying to determine whether I hit rock bottom for the third time in May or those were just five bad days. I will figure it out the way I do almost everything else, slowly and then all at once. Either way, that piece of the puzzle is not the emphasis of today’s post. The importance of resilience is.

To be human is to have bad days. They may look different for each of us, but they exist nonetheless. Rather than owning that, I let the initial bad day I had on May 9^th snowball into five bad days. Things got so bad that my husband had to enlist the help of my sister and three of my friends to pull me out from the avalanche my snowball effect had buried me alive under. He reached out to them on Mother’s Day as he had sworn that, given how events transpired around the time of my admission in January, the next time he sees similar signs and symptoms he is calling in the cavalry immediately.

Over the weekend I came to the painful realisation that I am not as resilient as I have always believed myself to be. If anything, I have got a shitload of work to do to build my resilience muscle because when I fell—in December, then January, and again this month—I did not bounce back. Instead, I wallowed. Coming to that painful realisation about my resilience, or lack thereof, sparked a deeper epiphany that my entire definition of ‘thriving’ has been skewed. I thought thriving meant always having your shit together. So when things fell apart, I took it as proof that I was failing not just in my journey toward mental fitness, but in life. And since I was already riding the “I’m a failure” train, I figured I might as well stay on board and see it through to the final destination.

But I have since learnt that thriving does not mean that you always have your shit together. It means knowing how to get back up when life knocks you down. Sure, you can wallow for a moment because sometimes life hits hard and expecting yourself to bounce back instantly is not just unrealistic, it can mean you are avoiding your reality rather than working through it. But eventually, you need to do whatever it takes – a la The Avengers – to get up, dust yourself off and keep moving forward.

I had a most epic fall between May 9^th – 13^th but I eventually got back up with the help of my husband, sister and the three friends my hubby reached out to. I am learning to see that not as the epic failure I initially perceived it to be during my five bad days, but as the win it truly is.

Fall seven times, stand up eight.
Japanese Proverb

To anyone reading this who has fallen in one way or another, I encourage you to take this as your sign that you do not have to stay down. If getting back up feels too hard to do alone, reach out to the people who love you for a helping hand. And if it feels like there is no one in your corner, reach out to me and I will do my best to help.

As I conclude, I would like to share thirteen (IYKYK) quotes about resilience that are currently resonating with me. Take a moment to sit with the ones that speak to you most.

Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.
Elizabeth Edwards

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Margaret Thatcher

It’s your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Nelson Mandela

Rock bottom became the solid foundation in which I rebuilt my life.
J.K. Rowling

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Confucius

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller

Resilience is very different than being numb. Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt. You fall. But, you keep going.
Yasmin Mogahed

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying ‘I will try again tomorrow’.
Mary Anne Radmacher

No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffering can come strength – if we have the virtue of resilience.
Eric Greitens, Resilience

Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and the responsibility to pick yourself up.
Mary Holloway

If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill

PS: Today is the fourth anniversary of SOUR, Olivia Rodrigo’s flawless, intimate, raw, emotionally charged debut album that distills the most volatile elements of adolescence — heartbreak, envy, rage, and longing — into high art. It was my favourite album of 2021 and to date it remains one of a handful of records I would dare to call perfect. If you have never listened to it, this is my gift to you today and trust me, you will thank me later 💜🦋