Dear Reader,
I took this picture on a walk after 7pm a few days ago. I thought these flowers were so beautiful.
Happy Easter! I hope it is a joyful one.
It’s a beautiful day outside, bright, sunny, and warm. I have to remind myself that the colder days are behind me, and I can soak in this goodness. I am also enjoying seeing flowers bloom in different shades and colours. They are everywhere and I love it. So yaay!
How are you, like really, how are you doing? Tell me in the comments.
It’s a few days into April and the end of the first quarter of 2023, hmmm, does this make you feel a certain way? For me, I feel the rush of time and days but also the slowness in the same breath. This might come off as contradictory but I am learning to lean into the dualities of my experiences. And talking about experiences, I will share a little about March. Ooophhh, March was uniquely challenging because, for most of it, I was battling the flu, and guess what, I am not healed yet, it has me by the nose..lol. Someone told me it is the winter flu or something of the sort, but I couldn’t fathom why it got me when winter was winding down. I have not suffered from the flu of this intensity before. It’s been extremes of nose blockage or a running nose and incessant sneezing. My nose is bruised from all this. The crazy thing is that it has not been responsive medication, and neither did concoctions of, lemon, ginger, garlic, and honey help. I have had to wait it out and somehow manage to go on with it. Towards the end of March, it ceased and then I got reinfected somehow and I am going through it again and hoping it heals sooner. I am also considering taking a flu shot, so we will see about that.
Now with this flue in the works thrown together with the downhills of life, it has been chaos and amplified emotions. I remember one cold morning, getting off the bus from home, adjusting my tote bag on my shoulders, and thrusting my hand in the pockets of my jacket to keep them warm. As I wound around the corner of Victoria Centre (this is the main mall in town) I wondered if this pursuit of a different life was worth it. “I could have stayed home, I was doing meaningful work, had great friends(still do), had warm weather, and was living a decent life. Then thought, why not throw a spanner in the works? Put a pause on all the aforementioned and go see what’s out there..hehe and I did. Boy oh boy, it’s been quiet the undertaking. Is it worth it,? I wondered while lost in the thought of catastrophising things in my head.” I was headed to the library.
At this moment I was feeling a lot like the Anti-hero that Tylor Swift sings about. I got to the library and finally in a warm space and took a minute to remember the great things that my anti-hero moment had overridden. Such as the fact that I dared to follow my heart and conviction, I am in a different place than I was last year (physically and figurately), I have had beautiful experiences in this place, met amazing people, and done some cool stuff. It is what I set out to do well knowing there would be challenges, but here I was forgetting all this, and I owe myself to give all this a chance to play out. These anti-hero feelings are not new, it’s just that they are playing out differently because of a different setting. I told myself to breathe in and out and float above the dungeon of the negative self talk and doubt. The other day as I thought about my day before I dosed off in the night, a phrase came to mind, “you are not there, you are here”. Another reminder that I am not in the past, and neither I am in the future, I am in the present and often I forget that.
To speak to one of the beautiful experiences I have had, it is finding a community in a group of Kenyans (first pause reading at this and give our neighbours some flowers). They have been my family away from family. Asante!
As I conclude this, I hope you have enjoyed easter. I hope that you feel like the hero in your story and that the moments of anti-heroism do not last long whenever they creep up. As for me, I am going to soak in this warm weather, take more walks and to always remember I am a hero and main character in this life that has been given to me.
Cheers!
Hermusings 