Over the past couple of years, I have been trying to get to a point where I was “fully healed”. What that meant to me was a place where I was completely happy and everything in my life would keep going perfectly until I died. I am starting to realise that is impossible. Seems quite obvious, doesn’t it? Why would anyone think that life could be perfect every single day without anything bad happening ? The good exists in the bad and all that bull shit, right ? 

I guess when you’ve seen the intricacies of a certain sort of pain, you never want to experience it or anything that looks like it ever again. 

I was involved in a terrible car accident when I was 12 and since then, I’ve struggled with anxiety, even before I knew what the word meant. I knew that I wasn't okay and something had truly shifted in the way I connected with people and viewed the world.I was terrified of everything and constantly had panic attacks with no one around me knowing what it was or how to handle it which meant i had to hide. My parents comforted me the best ways they knew how to but not how I needed to be comforted. I needed the world to stop spinning, for time to slow down and for everyone to see that I wasn't okay and I didn't think I would ever be but they never did. I heard the words “you’re a really strong girl” and “ndo (meaning sorry, in igbo, my native language)”  a thousand times.

 At some point, I started to take pride in how strong i was and started hiding how much pain I was in. I started saying i was fine with everything and had to lie because that seemed better than telling the truth since it felt like no one was listening. Life had gone on, my siblings were much older and had to take care of their respective lives. I felt utterly alone and i still couldn’t make sense of this thing i felt. Why it felt like i was always on the outside looking in, why i found it really easy to make friends and had a lot of them but I always felt really alone even when i was surrounded by people and why i was always sad & angry, why i had really big reactions to little things or felt numb like i was watching myself do stuff &  why everything scared me. 

Looking back now, i know i handled the situation as best as my 12 year old self could and I am really grateful for that. As i grew older, my mom would say sometimes when i got really sad about things that seemed really trivial “you know how to make yourself sad, try to make yourself happy” and i would be so infuriated wondering why she couldn’t see that it wasn’t so trivial and i was actually trying my best to be. It wasn’t that i was making myself sad, i just didn’t know what to be. This made me look for who to be in everyone else but myself and become a people pleaser because then if people were pleased with me especially my family and friends, they’d be happy and by extension, i’d be happy. 

I avoided confrontation and even when i did, i would be overly angry and upset, always set on getting my way because i thought the world owed me that. If i can’t be happy, then i have to get my way by all means. I was such an angry teenager but i didn’t understand then that it was feat masquerading as anger. I was scared of my parents dying when they left the house, my siblings never loving me or being my friends and my friends would end up hating me for no reason. I wanted nothing bad to ever happen again but that’s not how life works. 

I became so melancholic and turned to giving myself and showing up for people even when they’d never do the same for me. Putting people on pedestals and thinking that everyone had a better life than I did. Then i decided to study psychology, one of the reasons being  to fully understand myself thinking i could fix myself if only i could figure out what I broke. In recent times, reading self help books, googling symptoms and constantly on the edge with nothing to make feel as good as writing does i have come to realise that there is nothing inherently wrong with me as much as there is nothing wrong with those around me who couldn’t give me what i wanted. After having a similar experience recently, having to relive the trauma my 12 year old self desperately wanted to escape, i came to realise that we are all doing our best collectively and people cannot give what they do not have. 

Things are going to go wrong and things are going to go right. The only difference between now and then is that i have more awareness and a capacity to choose what i decide to focus on because sadness would always exist as an emotion but it doesn’t have to exist as my reality. 

These days, I try to live more in the present than in my head because a whole world exists and I need to experience it and take fear out of the equation no matter how hard it feels. Getting closer to God, building a strong community and being intentional & vulnerable about my life with trusted people has helped and I’m grateful & excited to see where life takes me even if it’s scary that there are things outside of my control