Coming out of a hole

It's been... A difficult year. Last year, I was publishing blog posts at a rate, once a day even for a while. On May 20th last year, I stopped.

It's been... A difficult year. Somewhere around May 20th, I felt the emotional strain of everything catching up with me. Covid in particular created an environment that was challenging to deal with everyday. A child at home doing home schooling while clearly showing the toll of not having social contact with other small children is not easy. Being at home, locked in, while essential at the time also took its toll eventually.

Couple all of that with the looming sense of an economic collapse, which are now right in the middle of, and it just became too much for me.

I needed a break from something. I took a break from blogging regularly. I didn't want to go through the motions of finalizing my blog in the night anymore. What I didn't realise at the time was that really, I didn't want to do anything. Before I knew it, my break meant that I stepped away from anything outside work. Art? Gone. Writing? Gone. Skating? Well, that had to go anyway due to the lockdowns. Every day just turned into work -> time with family -> dinner -> watch tv.

What I thought could just be a break, turned into me falling into a hole.

It's been... A difficult year.

Somehow, during the worst of this economic crisis where we don't know if we'll have fuel for our vehicles next week, or powercuts that return to 13 hours a day, or even food due to the agricultural disaster in our country, I'm managing to come out of this hole. It's difficult. It's incredibly difficult to even show up at work each day when I think of the political hell hole we are in and that we should actually all be on the streets protesting and asking for the corrupt leadership to step down. But I also need to keep parts of me moving forward through life's daily needs.

So here I am. Crawling out of my hole. Trying to build a healthier relationship with myself while much of the world around me comes crumbling down. Somehow, during the worst of times, I'm slowly returning to exercise. Slowly returning to art. Slowly returning to reading books. And now, slowly returning to my first love of the digital world, writing on my personal website.

It's been a slog to get here. Just logging into my server to update the ghost version itself was a chore that I wasn't sure I'd get through. But I did. And I'm going to try to keep getting through each individual hurdle like this, one at a time.

With drawing, I'm slowly returning to my art courses. One at a time.

With exercise, I'm returning to it, one day at a time.

With my personal life and my organization around it, I'm building into it, one area at a time.

And then there's all the hopes and dreams I had like starting my own company or working on impactful projects. I've realised it's too soon to do anything collaborative because I'm only going to let others down. But I'm going to somehow get to the solo bit. One day at a time.

It's been... A difficult year. It's taken a lot of reflection to come to terms with the fact that it's actually been years of emotional strain at this point. It's taken even more reflection to accept that there's only more of this ahead of us. My heart hurts, and that's ok. I'm not looking for a cure anymore. I'm not searching for the fix anymore. I've accepted that I'm in a tunnel, not a hole, and there's no light I can see yet, and that's ok. All any of us can do at this point is to find something to guide us and to let us keep moving forward, come what may.

For me, that's my family, my writing, my art, and even a little bit of my work. Somedays I'll feel strong enough to hold on to these and pull myself along. Somedays I won't have the strength. I'll close my eyes and rest. That's all ok. I'm not going to blame myself for being here. It wasn't the break I took that got me here. It was everything around me that made me need to stop everything I was doing. I'm not going to blame myself anymore for the fact that this tunnel seems endless. I accept this moment in life, and I move forward when I can.

Upon reading this post to check for errors, I realise that it's an oddity of a post and exposes many emotions in prose that I haven't used for a long time. Apologies if any of this unsettled you. Remember though, if you are going through hard times emotionally, and you feel like you can't go at it alone anymore, please reach out to someone in your life. Love yourself. We'll make it through this.

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Posted on June 07 2022 by Adnan Issadeen