After months of disappearing, I am back (again) and super excited to start sharing posts in this tiny little corner of the internet that I own. The past four months have been pretty crazy–2023 started off on a bad note for me, what with my father having a stroke on the very first day of the year.
And while several wonderful things have also happened this year–I traveled to Thailand, and participated as a volunteer at WordCamp Asia—I will admit that it has been exhausting to deal with one terrible crisis after another.
Maybe that’s why I am finding myself gravitating back toward this blog. This place has always felt like a place of healing for me, strange as it may seem. Even though most of the time it’s my own voice echoing back at me here, it feels like the one place where I can be who I really am, the one place where it’s okay to be vulnerable.
God knows I have been feeling vulnerable and fragile as glass lately.
It started sometime in September of last year, but that is nothing new for me. For as long as I could remember, I have always slipped into this cold, grey place right before October arrives. Strangely, I have been able to fight it during the pandemic–when the world lost its shit from being cooped up indoors, I somehow managed to thrive. I still don’t know what to make of it.
But last year it hit me hard, even though I know what to expect. The symptoms were different–perhaps because I had so much going on. If you only knew me in person, you wouldn’t believe me if I had told you that I was going through another episode of depression. In September, I got a huge promotion (and increment) and helped to successfully organize our company’s annual Gala Night.
By the time November rolled in, I was in Nepal, participating in WordCamp Nepal as a Speaker and also exploring Kathmandu and Pokhara with my baby sister and just having the time of our lives together.
In December, I received a wonderful news that I was not at all expecting, but one I’d been waiting a whole year for.
So, why is it that when my life was going so great, my mental health fell into a downward spiral?
I am not sure I am ready to find the answer to that question. I am not sure I have the energy right now to psychoanalyze myself and peel back my own layers to see what’s rotting underneath my skin and bone and my heart.
I just know that during what should have been some of the happiest months of my life, I felt battered and bruised. And maybe that’s why 2023 has been so difficult for me.
Again, we are only about 4 months in and already a lot of wonderful things have happened to me. I went to Thailand at a time when the entire world is trying to adjust to global inflation and price hikes. That’s a blessing I know.
But my mind keeps spiraling back to the phone call I got on the first day of the year when my sister called to tell me that my dad had collapsed in the middle of the street, and some stranger was bringing him home.
I wasn’t even afraid when I got off the phone. My mind had already taken several leaps forward and started strategizing about what our next move needed to be, should the worst happen to us.
What kind of a daughter does that make me?
And as I write down these words, there is a voice in my head that’s trying to justify all of it. That voices says that I am the eldest daughter, this was simply me trying to think ahead for the family. That voice says that people cope with shock and grief in different voices.
But I also feel like that voice is spewing bullshit.
On some nights, I truly feel like my family has been cursed. Because right after my dad got sick, my grandparents got sick too–one right after the other. Then my mom and I got sick. And then my sister got sick. And it’s been going on in cycles ever since.
Or maybe this is Allah’s way of testing our faith every day. I don’t really know.
Regardless, all of this has made me want to come back to blogging, and reading and writing. The things that I love most. For some reason, writing and publishing these blog posts bring some kind of normalcy in my life. Losing myself in fictional worlds help me cope with the reality that I can never truly escape.
And writing has always been a cathartic experience for me.
So, I am back again. Hello, friends!