Catharsis: water on my arid land

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t / political, I must listen to the birds / and in order to hear the birds / the warplanes must be silent.

Marwan Makhoul

There’s a saying that when we wait to be happy, we wait forever. I have been chewing my words since March started and that tells me one thing: like life cools down in winter and takes its long-needed nap to reawaken in spring, so has my mind taken its much-needed break. It is awake again and I can’t shut it up for longer than a minute. This makes me feel both giddy and excitable; not because of anything else, other than my sheer love for writing and being able to do it repeatedly even after I’ve stopped doing it for a while. I have realised that sometimes I cannot bring myself to string together anything intelligible enough for a perceptible audience. This realization used to prick me like it was a hot needle pressed into my temple. I would feel like a fraud and tell myself that I wasn’t good at writing anyway so maybe that was why the ink ran dry. Now, that realization doesn’t seem so harsh anymore. I understand this is just how life works and that too, is growth.

I thought carefully about what would be my opening statement, my prelude, to this new phase or shall I call it a rebirth and the recurring theme that came into my head was Catharsis. This is a process of releasing emotions to provide relief for oneself. I tried my best to think of something more ‘refreshing’, but in the end, the word wouldn’t leave me alone. So here I am yielding, albeit, against the strong forces of dilatoriness. Being an unapologetic dawdler, I have contemplated that perhaps there are mental health-type explanations for it but if I had to explain it to myself on a more cellular level, I would confess that it’s one of the major things in life that I don’t fail terribly at. If I hadn’t become this ominously positive person, I would have said a win was a win but I am learning to reserve kindness for myself too.

If you ask me how I have been, I would tell you that I’ve been burnt out since 2020. I would say that when something shifted in the world, it did in me too and that would be the lazy answer. It’s a get-out-of-jail quick, monopoly card type of answer. However, because it’s lazy does not make it entirely untrue. As concise as it may seem, it best explains it. The more plausible explanation though, would be that I have been struggling mentally. In January, anxiety came into my space with her other accomplices and made herself a home. Before then, I had only heard of her when people spoke of her name in hushed tones during conversations. She had never occurred to me as anything so significant that even when we first met this year, I referred to her as “the nerves” and maybe that was what tipped her over and why she decided to give me a lasting encounter. It’s the main reason I have been absent and maybe you will have some idea of what it was like if I put it this way: You’re hardly any good to yourself when you’re too busy catastrophizing.

While it’s been a rollercoaster type of situation in my head, I can acknowledge that it also didn’t help that it’s the same everywhere else on the outside (I mean, when has the world not been on fire this year?!) and that made it difficult to turn to anyone or anywhere for whatever relief they may hold, as they probably also needed it for themselves. I went through a challenging period where I struggled on many days to keep my wits about me and pined for the days I had momentary comfort. It was particularly harder because I couldn’t talk to anyone at an in-depth level about the things that worried me. First, I believed that no one would understand what even I couldn’t articulate so much of it properly either. Secondly, it felt like something I had to go to war against and conquer on my own, which was also why I decided not to succumb to the ease that medication promised. Please understand I am writing solely on my account and I would never undermine the importance of seeking help. If you have the means, you SHOULD get help.

I would go on about the days I spent spiralling into oblivion or the nights I resorted to unhealthy coping mechanisms to reel myself back from the edge but that’s not the point I’m trying to fixate on at this time. While I have been itching to come back here and do my thing without any ‘dramatics’, I think that because of how I have also been waiting to be ready to talk about this, I got carried away. The truth is one is never truly ready for what one has to do. My birthday is in a few weeks and if you’ve been with me for a while, you would know this is usually around the time I start to write a letter to my outgoing year. I realized that if I wanted to maintain the same level of authenticity that I bring to my posts, I needed to let this out first. Again, I believe this is a primary step towards another chapter of my life and I want to do it right. I can’t promise to publish new thoughts and stories every other day because it’s practically impossible if we consider my current lifestyle lol. What I can promise, however, is that I will do better than I have in the last year. So maybe hang in there for me? 😉

And oh, yeah, it’s much better in my head than it was before now, thank you very much for asking 🙂 You can sign up here for my newsletter.