Mental Health Monday: this is me trying

They told me all of my cages were mental
So I got wasted like all my potential

That lyric is from this is me trying, a track off Taylor Swift’s eighth studio album folklore, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year. I adore everything about the song, but right now that particular lyric is my favourite as it resonates deeply with where I am in my life.

When discussing this is me trying during folklore: the long pond studio sessions, Taylor explained the deeper meaning behind the song.

I was thinking about how sometimes it’s just really hard to be a person. And we can’t forget that, and you can’t write that off. Everybody struggles at different times, and sometimes your struggle is more invisible. You can’t really see it, but it can be just as hard as what other people go through. It’s just as valid.
I think this is me trying is kind of writing from a perspective of somebody who is really struggling and not even fully understanding the extent of their own struggle. I relate to that.
I’ve been very open about the fact that I’ve struggled with mental health and all kinds of things that were very hard just to exist. And this song is really about addiction and about recovering. It’s about how hard it is to just exist sometimes — and the fact that you’re even trying is something to celebrate.

I am one of millions, perhaps even billions, of people who lived a traumatic childhood. I have said many times before that I grew up in a very violent household, an environment that informed my childhood which in turn informed my adulthood.

I have never shared the full extent of the trauma I endured as a child. Maybe one day I will. Or maybe I never will. But for today that does not matter because my level of disclosure is not what this post is about. What today’s post is about are all the mental cages I live with, the ones built from my childhood trauma and reinforced in early adulthood. In 2017 a therapist helped me realise that moral development happens in adolescence and continues into adulthood. Which is why my late teens and early twenties were so hard for me; that was when my brain was finally able to understand the magnitude of just how traumatic my childhood was.

And then my mum was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in my mid-twenties and the next 5 ½ years of her battle with cancer were some of the hardest years of my life, marked by pain, resilience and love in equal measure. She died 131 days after my 30th birthday, and her passing created a tectonic shift within me, a seismic event that rearranged every atom of my being. The person I was before ceased to exist, replaced by a fractured, grieving self who had to find a way to exist in a world without the person whose womb was the very first place I called home. The first year after her death was a brutal landscape of survival and the cruel calendar of milestones without her — Christmas and New Year’s Day hollowed out by her absence; her birthday with her on the other side of death; my first motherless Mother’s Day; and my birthday without the person who made birthdays matter to me — repeatedly broke me.

My life has not been all gloom and doom but for a good portion of it I have been dealt a very shitty hand. That shitty hand built the bars of my cages, and I was trapped inside them for the first 37 years of my life, getting wasted (literally, especially in the past two years) along with all my potential. Because one thing about me is that I have sooo much potential, especially when it comes to my talent for writing. Lately I have been thinking about how if I grew up in a loving, supportive, stable home, I could have been on top of the world right now. With my talent for writing, I might already be a bestselling author. Instead, I grew up in an environment of fear, and my life and the choices I have made have been governed by that.

One of my first true career aspirations was to be an English teacher because I am such a logophile, it is like I have ink coursing through my veins. The reason I say “first true career aspirations” is because so many of us grew up wanting to be a doctor/lawyer/pilot, or some other lucrative profession, not because it was what we really wanted, but because it was what our parents wanted for us. I initially thought I wanted to be a doctor, but when I got to high school I quickly realised that was not going to happen because I fucking hated Biology. I hated it so much that after the required two years I dropped it, keeping only Chemistry and Physics to meet the science requirement. It was in my third or fourth year of high school that I finally understood how much I loved English, and when I told my mum I wanted to be an English teacher, she shot it down with, ‘and earn KES 15,000 for the rest of your life?!!’ At the time, it made sense to me because I like money very much and wanted to earn as much of it as possible. But years later, I came to see that my mum’s advice was not driven as much by what was best for me, but by her own fear shaped by her marriage.

My mum used to say that she stayed in her marriage for her children. She did not have an education beyond high school and so she was entirely financially dependent on her husband for everything. I say it as a joke that my mum’s favourite word was empowered, but I am also not joking. Which is why she was big on education. Her lack of education was directly related to her lack of empowerment.

But if I had grown up in a loving, supportive, stable home, one where my mum’s daily choices were not governed by fear, who knows where I would be now. I first dreamt of pursuing a B.Ed. in English and Literature because it combined three of my greatest loves: English, books and teaching. But a BA in English and Creative Writing would have been an even better fit, because writing is not what I do, it is who I am. From my primary school days when I wrote best-in-class (literally) compositions, to now, where I have kept my creative nonfiction blog alive for seven years, it would have been such a joy to earn that degree. I bet I would have gone on to do a Masters and maybe even a PhD, unprovoked. Instead, I ended up in BCom because my mum insisted that I work in Finance, since that is where the money supposedly was. She would not even let me major in Marketing, which at least would have allowed me to tap into my creative side, convinced that Finance had more money and job security.

I want to make it abundantly clear that I am not blaming my mum. She did the best she could with the very shitty hand life dealt her. And while her choices were understandably rooted in fear, they were also grounded in love, because she never wanted me to end up trapped in the kind of physically, verbally, emotionally and financially abusive marriage she was in.

The point I am making is that I have been saying one thing and living another. I say all the time that I understand I cannot change my past, and that continually wishing it were different only keeps me from moving forward. But I recently had an epiphany that I have been moving like someone still very much imprisoned in her mental cages. That became painfully clear when I looked at how my life fell apart at 36 and 37. 36 was heaven and hell combined, and 37 was a custom order from hell with my name on it. Which is why 38 arrives as more than an age that mirrors mine and my mum’s birthdates August 3^rd and March 8^th). It is the rebirth forged in the very fire hell tried to consume me with.

So this is me trying. And I mean really trying this time, because at the end of the day you, and only you, are the author of your own life. Sure, you have can have a support system in the form of family, friends and even professionals like a therapist, but the first 37 years of my life are a testament to the fact that the system will not work unless you do.

This new era of 38 onwards, hereby crowned the second phase of my life, ushers me into a season of trying as I journey toward becoming the person my mama brought me into this world to be. Some days I will win. Others I will lose. But through it all, I am determined to never stop trying. And who knows, I just might make a Creative Writing course my next great adventure.