“Keep Holdin On…”

“I have a headache the size of Jupiter. I hate everything. And I don’t want to write this blog entry. Amen.

Let’s begin.

The Italians say something about the pleasure of not doing anything. I want them to riddle me the agony of not wanting to do anything. Sometimes I can’t get my legs to move. I sink into this endless pit of boredom where I try to think about stupid ways to be brave. Then I throw crunched up paper at my colleagues to entertain myself.

It doesn’t really work.

I’m often very tired.

This could be the “what now?” that comes after having been content for a while, after having done many things that you’ve wanted to do and having given up on others. This could be the ultimate whatever.

I still like things. I still listen to music in the morning. I still go to work. I can hold civil conversations though I’m rarely following.

I tried to scare myself watching this Vice video about a Liberian warlord who fought naked in the civil war because he thought it made him invincible. They called him Lieutenant Butt-naked. It sounds like juvenile comedy but there is nothing funny about it. He tore the beating heart out of innocent children and ate it and then fed pieces of it to his child fighters. He’s a pardoned evangelical pastor now.

I don’t have a profound opinion about this. On my better days, I would but now I don’t want to think hard enough to have an opinion about an African cannibal warlord turned man of faith.

Books were once a great escape. Movies too. I saw Red Sparrow this morning.

I think the appeal of these great escapes once upon a time was that there was something to relate to. There were people you could love in there and people you could aspire to be like.

When the real world got too dark, we would escape to these surreal realms and disappear for a while. I think I’ve experienced that a few times.

I have a shelf full of these realms now. I just can’t get to them. I’d open one and start thinking about something someone said to me seven months ago then end up closing the book to basically just kick back and think about that. I fall asleep watching what on normal days are good movies. I’d think about all the great books and movies people who are better than me have read and seen and how I don’t even know which books or movies they are and how even if I did know, how much work I’m willing to put in to catching up.

It’s a little dangerous and not the exciting, adrenalin inducing kind. More like the recipe to self-pity and self-inflicted isolation. ”

The above in quotes is an entry I’d written sometime within the past three weeks and decided to not finish and definitely to not publish.

But this particular entry is a happy one, one of overcoming. So the above is here as reference. One might say I’ve been dealing with a certain creative block. One might even call it depression. I won’t give it a name. I definitely won’t call it depression because then you might think I’m sexy-melancholic and interesting or even pitiful. You’d be wrong on all counts.

My good friend Kalkidan Getnet, a poet you might know as Everted, writes very openly about Mental Illness. She’s very strongly stubborn about her message and when I become doubtful of the things I am doing, she tells me to be the same way. One time she wrote, ” What does a generation of depressed creatives tell you? I asked. Art, they said. And they rushed past me as one of them called out, Now look at this one, exquisite! Original! Pointing at a lone man by a corner.”

It’s been said that what she writes can sometimes be too real, too raw and not a lot of people can stand to face something like that without a tinge of discomfort, myself included. She and I once shared this idea that good art came from sadness and pain and I am not sure how she feels now but I think good art comes from having overcome and survived.

Her late art/poetry exhibition was titled, Despite ;

I got the chance to hear Kenny Alan share his musical journey with a few people about a week ago, at The Schmoo Career Fair and he pointed out that he doesn’t believe in writers’ block. I caught on to that phrase in his speech like a fish on a hook and when he was done speaking and he started taking questions, my hand was up in the air Hermione Granger style. How dare he say Writers’ Block doesn’t exist when clearly, I was out here dying from it.

He took my question and he gave me a good answer. Not new information but a much-needed reminder. He said, “When I feel like I have exhausted my creative energy, I prefer to think of it as my mind telling me that it’s now time go outside and live a little.”

In retrospect, I took it as him saying to me, “I don’t sit around and mop. I get me some life.”

A week later, I found myself in the same room as well-to-do Kenyan photographer Mutua Matheka, at somewhat 98.6K followers on Instagram, better known by his screen name TruthSlinger.

One of the panelists of the Young African Think’rs Convention, a man by the name of Richard Njau was giving a lecture on what he called the Mental Digital Shift. (More on YATC and Mental Digital Shift on my next entry) Richard was for sharing what he knew about digital marketing and the whole strategy of social media that he was talking about happened to be one of my biggest concerns; selling out.

The fact that there were too many people on social media with too much content, much of which I feel is similar to mine has had me in a certain twist, and like I don’t have anything to offer the world because there are so many people who could do it better, that it might be better if I just, I don’t know, stopped. I raised my hand and put forward the idea of selling out to Richard. (His answer will be in the next entry. The entry that’s valid for this one came from TruthSlinger. After I’d heard an argumentative answer from Richard, Mutua addresses me and says, “I get what you mean.”

He’s an established creator. He’s made it. But he gets what I mean? I gave him my seat and my ear and he told me, “Consistency is key. You feel like there’s too much content because some of the people around you seem to be doing the same things as you, some of your blogger friends have the same niche so you feel the competition. But keep doing what you do, give value. Bad content is better than no content. In time, you will learn and you will get better. In spite of everything, you have to make the effort to still be there.”

I think I’ve crawled out of the pit knowing that I’ll probably fall back in, a lot! But we need to keep trying to crawl out. We need to make the effort to still be here.

Even when we don’t feel like doing anything, it’s better when we keep holding on. Things always change. In fact, that’s one thing that can’t be helped. Change.

P.S Look out for my next entry.