Why do you choose to suffer?

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

Life is meaningless. I don’t say this to drive the hopelessness agenda. I live in the hope corner. It is just that though, meaningless. We are the ones that assign meaning to our experiences. In what ways are you causing your own suffering?

I will use two simple events to explain this. You are lucky, this time, I am choosing to not be expansive with this. It will be short and sweet.

Wine glasses at Kamûkûnji

I had already bought a lot of kitchen utensils from her. The dessini pots, hizo pekee ni kama 7/10k, and so much more kashakashas for my new home. I had just moved back into the country, so I was almost starting from scratch. I had already bought most of the things. I would get what she did not have in another shop. Back then, 2022, Kamûkûnji was still affordable. The influencers had already been coming, I was in fact seduced here myself, but bei hazikuwa exaggerated. “What about wine glasses?”

Now, I am a very blunt person. The majority of the population is not a fan of it. I need to perform meekness, for some reason, to pacify strangers I have just met.

She showed me the glasses. I did not like them. I vocalized that, instead of conjuring up a lie to express the same. People tend to like that, the lies. What a waste of time for both of us? We have a lying problem.

“Ghai!” she exclaimed out loud. I was puzzled by this. How is it something personal that I do not want to buy those glasses? Especially after buying all these other items already. I had bought the bulk of it from her. Kama ilivyokuwa desturi wakati huo, I thought to pacify her. Apologize for my ‘bluntness’. I am glad I didn’t. I had moved on to other things instead. I had better things to do.

The handkerchiefs

Hapa nikisema ni juzi tu, itamaanisha hivo hivo. Ilikuwa ni juzi tu.

My grandmother needed to buy some clothes in town. I offered to take her. By this point, we had shopped to her fill. Which reminds me of the woman with the heavy breathing. But we are not on her today, I will solve that case another day.

We then do a final stroll, just because. She spotted them and as is her habit wanted to buy them. She went through the handkerchiefs to pick out one she liked. By her third/fourth, she switched her attention to something else. “These are not cotton, though.”

Then me and her started discussing how nowadays everything is poly cotton, everything was plastic. I was coming from a political lens, and she was coming from a poor quality lens, we met in the middle. She decided not to buy them because they were not cotton.

The woman did not like that. “Ni vile tu wewe ni mzee,” she said loudly enough for her to hear. We walked on. My grandmother was bothered by this though. What was there to be so offended about? It is not a direct attack on her. We were simply discussing the quality of the handkerchief. Yet the seller, because of her own pain, took it personally. She was not the manufacturer. She was not the distributor. She was not the oppressive governments that choose to push toxins to us at every corner. We did not even call her out for selling them. Why was she so pressed about our conversation? After all, that is how conversations start sometimes, an event happens to drive it.

“She is just projecting her own pain on you,” I told my grandmother. The stroll was brief, we now walked back to tea room. The woman looked at her badly, she had told me after. It had not even occurred to me to care about her anymore, I had resolved that and moved on with my day. This was another scenario of adding meaning where it isn’t.

These two women are not unique. Many of us do this on a daily. An event will happen and we will suffer even more, because of the stories we have attached to it. We suffer more than we have to. When we never even had to.

Hebu nijianike. I am currently in my luteal phase. I would be lying if I told you that this has not brought me any suffering. Are there visible changes because of the stage? Yes. Are they symptoms I now know how to manage? Also, yes. Yet I have still suffered. There was the dread of the suicidal thoughts that visit sometimes because of the hormonal shifts. There is the PMS symptoms all together that are a new thing to me. Maybe they were always there and I was numbing my way through life. I sleep walked a lot for sure. And the biggest dread of all, the actual menstruation.

I have not liked menstruation. It all started when they first visited. I had been looking forward to it. I hated being among the last people to get them. My sister and her friends had warned that it is not the happy occasion I imagined them to be. I wanted them anyway. This big marker that is advertised, over and over again. I had been tired of the build up.

They had come in august. I had decided it was a birthday present. That first day, is when the heartbreak hit. What was this pain? Since then, I attached meaning to this. I suffered even more because of this.

I am not saying that the pain was not there, it was. I would vomit, have diarrhoea, stay up all night, be in pain; the whole shebang. I would soon discover meds that worked for me. They promised me a pain-free experience, as long as I took them at the right time. I loved this. I still hated menstruation, but the pain was mostly gone.

So in my wisdom, this year I decided to heal it myself. I had stopped using meds for the most part, I haven’t even gone to a hospital, or needed one in a long time. It was time to now rule out this one last open thread, the nsaids I was taking during my periods. Not because of the misogyny thread of invalidating women’s pain as less, but to heal it naturally. Food, herbs, oils, heat…

I decided to start with halving my dose. I would ease myself into it instead of going cold turkey. Haha, I just remembered promising you a short article. My mind got us here somehow. Samahani. I am almost done.

I survived that one. The next one was even more scary — no drugs at all. What was I thinking? I considered abandoning this entirely. But I was determined to learn how to heal myself. Get past this pain body, at the very least, understand it. You can’t heal what you have not felt. I wanted to unpack the pain and heal the different parts of it. Before this, my suffering did not help me look at this objectively.

I survived that too. I also did not struggle with self-harm thoughts as I had the previous time. They had left me scared. They had stayed long after the periods. Oh hell no! Having lived depression for so long, these are not a welcome visitor whatsoever.

So now I am close to it again. A lot races through, even after I have built some trust that I can handle it. Am I kidding myself? Brufen ni ya 5 bob, you know. Kwanza those herbs are expensive.

But I am understanding my body better. The last one taught me some things, the biggest: to only eat when hungry. Eating, just because, is what fucked me up that first night. It led me to stay up all night because of indigestion. It is not like I had not eaten earlier. I was also not even hungry. The body is already overworking so I have no business adding stupid unnecessary side quests. When it is hungry, it will communicate so clearly.

The next thing I need to focus on is managing nausea. I have my drinks for this. As long as I stay on top of it, I should be okay. The last one, all these are for day one, is to just let the body be. If it is not sleepy, why am I stressing about that fact? It is not like I have anywhere to be in the morning. So if the sleeplessness comes, lean into it. There is no problem here. I was just choosing to create one where there wasn’t.

Day two is easier, especially if I have already survived day one. But the gist is the same. After that no one cares. The only inconvenience is that I have to wear a panty, and the extra admin work. These are the tools I am carrying to this coming cycle. I feel prepared. Yet, my body still knows the tension. It has not fully trusted yet, to release and just be. That will take time and practice. I got all the time for you baby.

Now let’s go back to the two women. There are different scenarios playing out inside them:

• feeling an injustice
• feeling disrespected
• feeling insulted
• feeling unworthiness
• knowing the comments had absolutely nothing to do with them, but the script is yet to update to reflect this…

All those are possibilities. What’s clear though is this, they are adding more meaning than there is to it. We tend to do that. Suffer before, during and after the event. It is our ego that magnifies all these. Even when the event is horrible, we suffer more than the event itself caused us to. If someone calls you ugly, what causes your suffering? So many ways you could perceive this:

• believe this to be true because it is your first time hearing that
• believe this to be true because you have been told the same before
• decide it is simply their perception, therefore it is unnecessary
• remember whole people don’t pull others down and leave them to their own pain
• decide it is a lie because you already know you are beautiful

Based on your perception, you will react differently to it. This has little to do with beauty, for the most part. All because of the meaning you attached and the scripts still playing out in you. You may dismiss it, or suffer because of it. You could also perform indifference during the event, and then suffer later. How dare they do that to me? Again, more suffering.

Why are we here? I am challenging you to interrupt the pattern, maybe for the first time ever. Crusading to you about a whole new life of freedom. Do you like how you live? Would you want to change something? It starts there — awareness. You don’t even need to change anything yet, just observe. You are the observer. Observe yourself, observe others, observe the world around you. This is where freedom starts, interrupting the pattern. Over time, you will know what to do with that awareness. It starts with awareness, embodiment comes later. Be patient with yourself in this.

Refuse to suffer.