namwano

Happy New Year—or maybe a better greeting is, You made it! It’s been an eternity since I last did this, weaving thoughts into sentences. Back then, it was pen and paper; today, it’s keys and screens. The act of writing itself feels like a resurrection. My writing process for the hiatus period has been a messy one of delay, distraction, overthinking, and an impressive dedication to avoidance. Not encouraging terms for the beginning of the year ey? True, but the awareness of it is the start in the right direction if you ask me. 2024 had been a year of relentless demands, stretching me thin in every direction. I constantly felt like I was chasing an elusive "enough," a feeling that left me perpetually unsettled and plagued by the insidious whispers of inadequacy. "I don't know," became my frequent refrain, a mantra of self-doubt that clung to me like a shadow. Yet, as I sat down to evaluate the year, a profound realisation dawned: I had pushed myself beyond my per...

A moment of peace and quiet seems hard to come by these days. Sleep has failed to honour many of us with its presence. Life can be messy for what seems like an unending period of time. But the other thing about it, is that it cannot and never will be linear. It is complex; complicated-and the strangest thing is there is beauty in that complicated state. You cannot really separate it in black and white, but you can recreate it into various shades of grey. But what about that pause? The pause you create because you are afraid; the pause you create because you are too worn out and tired; the pause you create when you’re trying not to cry and the tears are blurring your vision; the pause you create when you’re tormented by the lie that you are invisible- a movie playing in an empty theatre. It can be a daunting pause that endures horribly.  However, a solitary pause isn’t so bad. It teaches you the art of loving yourself so that you don’t have to use other people as coping mechanisms. ...

For a while I haven’t allowed my fingers to dance around the keyboard. I was breathing just a little. A little was just fine, for now (then), because during the pandemic, many had stopped breathing; and no one knew when their turn to stop breathing would come. I really don’t remember seeing beyond the moment; we at our workplace were among the few that rarely worked from home, and that served somewhat as a destruction from the reality that the world had been brought to its knees. For the past few years, breathing was considered a luxury. To conquer the anxiety of life required a dedication to a lifestyle we called social-distancing; it worked for a season, until I found myself wondering, “I want me back, this isn’t me”.  The volume knob of life had been turned down low. We could now hear people’s fear, doubts and anxieties equally as loud as we heard their dreams-at least for the number whose ambitions were not snuffed out by doubt. The pandemic made way for a lot of doubt. Even th...