All I could see was darkness.. Every story of my life that I created in my head lead to a horrible ending. I couldn’t make sense of how my life had gotten that way. It was like I had no control, like the decisions I made would not harvest results. I was in complete denial, so mad at the world! So mad at God! Knowing deep down that God had nothing to do with my bad choices. As I continued reflecting on my childhood – I noticed that my desire to be good enough for my absent father persisted as a foundation of what I built most of my relationships on.

I did all i could in order to be loved.. THAT was literally who I was for a long time. I would battle with the idea of who I was, secretly, in my adolescence. I kept thinking that everyone had it all together besides me. So it became my mission to be the same, to act the same! “I had it all together too”! My African culture or should I say my African pride taught me from a young age that I had to maintain a poker face in front of others regardless of what I was going through. They couldn’t know of my pain..

So Who am I!? A question I never really spent time asking myself. It was more common to ask myself who I would become…A doctor? A nurse – maybe even a lawyer? I never appreciated who I was. I was so fixated on being who I thought my culture and society wanted me to be that I was suffocating and the more I tried to fit in the more I felt trapped with no air to breathe. I started to realise that fitting in does not reap any tangible results only temporary highs and lows. I couldn’t do it anymore, I deserved more…

I deserve more! That’s what I began to tell myself every morning when i woke up. I had enough of society’s expectations, in fact I had enough of everybody’s expectations. I had to take my life back, I had to free myself from the negative thoughts and pressures I put on myself. It was ok that I wasn’t following in social media’s footsteps of what I should be doing with my life.

The more I told myself I deserve more, the more I started to believe it! I realised that I had to change my mindset by investing in things that would make me better not bitter. So apart from waking up and praying, I would say positive things to myself and I had to see them too. So I wrote positive words on my wall so that if I forgot to say them I would see them. And they went a little like this…

And the list went on… I started to realise that by surrounding myself with positive things and positive people, those words began to manifest themselves in my life. The dark cloud, all of a sudden started to disappear and I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. As light was surfacing, I started to realise that my past was necessary! I had to go through everything I went through in order to even be in a place where I was so desperate for change. It was my ultimate mission to give the little girl inside of me peace and lay her to rest so that the new and improved me could be born…