In the wake of the recent debate that has flared up and now extended far beyond the US, I found myself for the first time ever, struggling to come to grips with my own whiteness. If I’m perfectly honest, the narratives reverberating from the US triggered such strong feelings of discomfort, that I felt compelled to explore them. Watching George Floyd desperately appeal for breath, broke me. I cried for days. What followed though, was an increasing sense of affront on the grounds of a feature that never really coloured my sense of identity; white skin. I felt as though my integrity was being questioned owing to an insufficient sense of guilt. Was I not doing enough already? Worse yet, was I contributing to the maintenance of a system rigged in my favour? Wait, am I racist!?

The answer, to some extent, is yes. I am guilty — at least of ignorance. My racism may not be fuelled by hatred or malice — but rather it is the byproduct of having been socialised within a system built on generations of colonial exploitation, ethnic annihilation, segregation, discrimination, mass incarceration, the list goes on. I will never know what it’s like to be a black or brown person trying to beat the system. I will never understand what it takes to succeed despite your skin color. I will never fully be able to appreciate the strength required to take the high road day in and day out — in the face of constant indignation. I will simply never know.

What I have come to understand though, is my personal responsibility. Responsibility to stand up, to stir up conversations; be it among white friends or others who don’t feel directly impacted by these injustices. Us white folk cannot afford to rest on the illusion that overall, things are getting better, right? Wrong. Let’s take Germany — arguably the moral and economic foundation of the EU — as a case in point:

In 2017, the far-right AFD party was sworn into parliament for the first time in over half a century. They’ve been gaining traction ever since. Last year, a mainstream politician was shot dead on his front porch for his support of Angela Merkel’s move to allow refugees into the country back in 2015. This year, nine people were brutally murdered during a shooting that targeted “immigrants” at a Shisha bar in the town of Hanau. Just recently, stories of hundreds of right-wing-extremist within the German Bundeswehr were revealed. Right-wing-rings within the German police force have been an issue for years (think NSU trials). This is just a humble selection of tragic examples to choose from in Germany alone.

This brutality impacts us all. It directly affects the black and brown colleagues you share coffee with at the office every day— it affects their families, frightens their children. It puts your teachers, your friends, perhaps even your lovers in danger. When you are anxious and traumatised — and in the case of many POC communities, we’re talking of intergenerational trauma — you are highly sensitive to things that may seem trivial to others. Ignorant comments, careless behaviour, and even jokes can be powerful triggers. As someone who has experienced a very different kind of trauma — I can empathise with the heightened sensitivity exhibited by those carrying generation loads of stories marred by genocide, slavery, and prejudice in their rucksack of family narratives.

We are all products of this shared history and it’s up to all of us to take steps within our spheres of influence to help reform this system. Never before have I felt it a requirement to distinctively position myself as anti-racist, because it just seemed a given. Sadly, this isn’t the case. White privilege is not a call for guilt. Nor is it be a call to arms. It’s a call to our shared responsibility.

A toxic relationship had ended,
but the pain had only just begun.
Emotionally traumatized, a neurological wreck,
my body decided to react
 — without my conscious consent.

On a clear autumn night,
I climbed out a 4th story window
and dropped 4 floors.
Was it sleepwalking?
Had I subconsciously wanted to go?
I may never know.

8 hours of emergency surgery later,
I awoke, broken,
without any recollection of what had gone down.
Amnesia or trauma-related dissociation, they said.

With my body now more broken than my heart,
at least, I thought to myself,
now we are more aligned.

When I finally got up out of my wheelchair
2 months and many surgeries later,
I found myself questioning why I’d been the one to survive
while other patients around me
with far less fatal stories
had simply vanished.
Disappearing from their beds.

I was determined
never to give any man the power to break me again
and perhaps more importantly,
to learn to love myself
and know one but myself
so help me God.

With this conviction, I set out on a personal quest
to find out why I was still here,
when really,
I shouldn’t have been.

Today, I think I know.
I fell in love with her the moment she walked in the door,
though I couldn’t immediately grasp it.

After 30-odd years of life,
marked by multiple relatively wholesome,
happy heterosexual relationships (save the last),
I was blindsided by your soul.
Dumbstruck by the intensity
of what two souls could share with one another.

She could have been any gender, this soul mate.
Greater forces were at play here.

I am so grateful,
that the void chose me
to be among those lucky enough
to feel such the kind of love
- that others seek for lifetimes.

In a society still organised within a masculine paradigm, strength and resilience are often ascribed to those less overtly susceptible to emotional triggers and Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), like myself, often perceived as frailer and perhaps weaker. In my view, quite the opposite is true (no bias here!).

Take Amal, Billy, and Hilda for example: By nature, Amal tends to be minimally phased by his emotional world; he’s pretty laid-back and Billy cognitively bright-sides most situations; he’s a natural optimist. Hilda on the other hand, is a HSP. She is a soul that loves so deeply that when betrayed, it can take years to repair the wreckage. So, when calamity beckons, guess who’s is gonna be kicking the hardest and longest to stay afloat; you got it — Hilda!

Strength can and should not be measured by the level of suffering a person endures under a given set of circumstances but rather in the way they manage their suffering — regardless of whether the shit that hit the fan was a pellet or a bomb turd. Nobody can control how strongly they react neurologically to certain stimuli — be it a nasty comment, heartbreak, or a fall from a 4th storey window. Our emotional perceptions are preprogrammed and/or nurtured at a young age, which is especially unfortunate for HSPs like Hilda and myself. What we can train though, are coping mechanisms, willpower, and perseverance; and this can pay off!

From September 2018 until June 2019, I worked so hard to stop judging myself for feeling the way I did (pretty godawful) for “so many months”. I was so frustrated with my inability to experience genuine heartfelt joy and fed up with the darkness constantly clouding my vision. Today, when I read my journal entries from 2018, even those in the months leading up to the fall, I am overcome with self-compassion. In fact, I’d like nothing more than to travel back in time and tell that hurting person, who’d strayed so far from herself, that everything will be A-ok — spiffing in fact.

Looking back on it all, one thing I realised I never did do, was stop. However slow, small, or painful the steps, I kept walking, kept meditating, kept swimming, kept getting out, kept hare krishna-ing (just kidding!), or doing whatever to try to move forward— despite the debilitating thunderstorm in my head that struck at the break of dawn, almost every day without fail. Even if you don’t feel like your functioning at the high bar you set for yourself or performing the way you’d envision a winning act — Keep going. Keep feeling. Keep practicing acceptance and gratitude for all the poop that is right now. Life.

I like Hilda, she’s my spirit animal. Hilda (not me!) recently paid a gentleman with a man bun 90€ to look deeply into her eyes for 2 hours and explain to her in a plethora of ways, what a uniquely pure soul she carries (ah, the gift of desperation!). A soul that loves with such abandon, that when it ends, there is so much beauty in the pain it is capable of feeling for months on end (yay!). When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change; including yourself! In the end, we are all just children at the wheel so I say, just keep your butt in the chair!

DISCLAIMER: This post was written on very little sleep at 2:15am Dubai time in an airport lounge.

A site on the interweb, known as Wikipedia, reads that free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Pedantic as I am, I couldn’t quite make peace with the authors’ chosen adjective — unimpeded. During meditation practice, you learn to recognise and allow to pass, the colourful array of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that naturally arise in consciousness from one moment to the next. In doing so, I began to understand that the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world are constructed by a multitude of prior neurophysiological processes steered in part by genetic disposition and personal experiences, in a way science has yet to decipher. In short, we are not the original authors of our our thoughts, intentions, and desires or even their resulting actions to some extent.

Thoughts are the basis of everything — our reality — and their nature and flow determines what we say, do, and don’t — as well as how we feel. They can be neither controlled nor tamed — only recognised and accepted — a powerful exercise in itself. The practice of simply riding the ultimate ungovernableness of consciousness is liberating because it curbs our tendency to personally identify with all its haphazard contents. We become better equipped to manage sometimes difficult yet always fleeting states and moods.

According to this rationale, our supposed freedom to choose from potential courses of action available to our mind in a given situation is in fact impeded. I’d even go as far as to say determined by this ocean of prior causes and influences. Thus, our choices are in fact mere products of automatic processes. Once I was able to appreciate this automaticity, the judgement and frustration I felt towards the junk of my mind abated somewhat.

It’s one thing to intellectually grasp how our subjective sense of having freedom of will and of there being an unchanging self inside our heads may be illusions — yet quite another to fully internalise the concept. It took me many hours of self-observation and even language became an important tool of practice. For example, I tried making a habit of replacing phrases like “I think…” and “I am…” with “I feel…” and “I have a thought…” (at least in situations where this doesn’t make me sound like a complete reject).

Through my practice, I have come to believe that the proximate cause of most suffering is not actually the nature of our thoughts but rather the focus of our attention. Without free will and the help of psychopharmacology, the same old thought patterns will infiltrate the mind time and again, this much is certain — at least in my experience. There were days after the fall, when the contents of my mind were so persistently dark and the level of suffering so strong, that the prospect of eternal darkness started to seem frighteningly attractive. I felt myself losing hold of the feelings of deep gratitude and joy I typically cultivated for being alive. It was truly humbling to experience how clearly PTSD floodlit the paper-thin line demarcating sanity from insanity.

Through my ordeal, I learned that there is an art to experiencing fully and clearly, be it hardship or joy, without becoming completely submerged by the feelings produced by said experience. Love, exuberance, despair, and anger are all sides of the same coin. You can only feel one extreme as strongly as you are able to feel the other — lucky me! At the same time, by learning to recognise these feelings for what they are — the products of automatic neurophysiological processes — and allowing myself to feel them without resistance or judgement, I no longer felt defined by them. By identifying these states before they got a hold of me, I was able to avoid consequently spiralling into well rehearsed synaptic thought patterns and instead, focus my attention on what is real in the present moment. (And when that didn’t work, this song by ma favorite homegirl Sia usually did the trick)

I apologise to all the lucky readers for whom this ramble may seem painfully obvious. To the rest, please know that it took me many hours of meditation, grit, and tolerating frustration before I could internalise these ideas… and I still practice each day. With some patience and perseverance though, the clouds will eventually lift —as they always do. FLEETING!

The evening of the act, I felt serene, ready, and oh so avant-garde. Upon entering the love den, I had an introductory talk with my soon to be lady lover — let’s call her Blossom - during which she repeatedly referred to me as a flower and expressed her honour and gratitude for my having selected her to shepherd me through my very first tantra experience (most clients tend to be a few decades older than I, she somberly disclosed). After a sauna and shower, things proceeded rather more quickly than I was ready for and before I knew it, I found myself nude and breast-to-breast with a now also naked Blossom, who had me gaze deep into her eyes as she announced repeatedly in a moaning intonation, that I was in for a grandiose portion of love. What I felt in that moment can only be described as sheer panic. I was only able to suppress my flight response by employing the deep breathing exercises I had learned as a tool for managing physical pain in the hospital.

What happened next can only be described as a confluence of horror, nausea, pleasure, relaxation, and relief…in that order. The feelings that surfaced as I found myself hidden from the world behind rouge curtains in an inconspicuous Berlin apartment building were almost, almost, too much to bear without pulling the emergency brakes on the whole scene. During the two hour session, I found myself scissoring a stranger while imagining my mother’s face — if only she could see what her daughter was up and down to. Don’t get me wrong, having every inch and crevice of your body stimulated and essentially worshipped was not unpleasant and Blossom is no doubt a highly competent professional. I was even okay when it was my “yoni’s” turn for her undivided attention. Ultimately though, the moosh-on-moosh and full body contact with an oily stranger whom I wasn’t sexually attracted to, was a little much for my pious soul.

To top off our evening, Blossom and I took a little trip to the supermarket to purchase groceries for her monthly club night event involving electronic music, a diverse array of fruit, and lots of sexually enlightened guests. As we patiently waited in line in the jam packed supermarket, Blossom began sharing her enthusiasm for the shape and texture of various lychee and pomelos, going on to loudly marvel at mother nature’s erotic disposition and naughty intent in creating these. Sensitive as I am, I felt a pang of guilt for not being able to give Blossom’s mindfulness the credit it deserved. Instead, I was distracted by one head after the other curiously turning to inspect the lady in pyjamas fervently stroking the banana while I died a little inside.

To conclude, I am genuinely grateful for the unique experience and ESPECIALLY the laugh attacks I had with friends while attempting to recount my initiation experience with my dear Blossom. In all seriousness though, Tantra is definitely a philosophy and practice worth exploring. In my case, the journey shall continue with intimate partners, rather than with other flowers like myself.

All the way up until my latest release from the hospital, I had been in surprisingly good spirits, all things considered. Between operations, I was hatching up new life goals and fantasising about all the things I would do and change in my life as soon as I was somewhat able-bodied again. Certainly, dark clouds came and went — but I let them pass without resistance and I honestly felt like a stellar trauma processor. I felt a sense of boundless possibility and philosophical acumen, like a survivor whose suffering was serving a purpose. Thus, when I read Dostoevski’s words; “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings” — I believed I had no reason to share his concern.

A few days after getting out, I was suddenly overcome by sudden and frequent bouts of the weepies. It happened in the street, in cafes, in the shower — you name it. The tears came, relentless and unprovoked. In addition, I started having nightmares, my appetite disappeared (this never happens!), and city traffic freaked the bejesus out of me. My daily meditation started feeling like I’d entered an airport terminal for mental objects arriving on multicoloured magic carpets and departing with fragments of focus. I felt like a mess.

My first instinct was to try to identify possible triggers and regain some degree of control. At first I attributed the overwhelming sense of sadness and skittishness to various emotionally taxing events that had preceded the fall — and I judged myself hard for it. A true survivor doesn't cry for boys or work stress! Thankfully, and somewhat to my relief, I was soon advised by the doctors that I had been run over by a classic case of PTSD — not fun. At the same time, I sought the opinion of alternative practitioners, who told me that my body was now in the process of releasing the stored trauma in the form of emotion, since up until now, its focus had been on survival and physiological healing.

I mulled over these diagnoses in a somewhat desperate attempt to make sense of what was happening to me and stop the madness. I truly felt like I was regressing and this infuriated me. It took me a couple of very long days to realise that since the day I awoke from the accident, I had given myself timelines and deadlines for feeling certain unpleasant emotions. In the hospital for example, I felt it was acceptable to feel broken and hopeless — and so ironically, I didn’t. My release on the other hand, was tied to certain self-expectations: As soon as my disabilities became less immediately obvious to outside observers (I lost the wheelchair, the casts were coming off, and my missing choppers had been replaced) I was to return to work and kickstart the next chapter of my life.

Clearly, this didn’t work out (duh!). I slowly began to understand that the impatience and strictness I felt towards myself had been a feature of my mental scaffold for as long as I can remember. I think this is trap many of us fall into. As the world around us accelerates and becomes more automised and optimised towards efficiency and performance, it’s easy to link these techno-social developments to our own persons and develop self-expectations that are inhumane and often unrealistic. When we don’t meet these, we suffer and scold ourselves behind the scenes, which furthers the impression that everyone is living up to their incredibly productive fantasy selves.

I had no choice but to radically accept what was happening to me. Personal growth and healing involves heaps of effort and continuous hard work — but it doesn't always follow the trajectory or slope you’d expect or wish for. Sometimes though, these very setbacks — or what is perceived as such — contain teachings that should not be overlooked. Pain and sadness in particular have a lot to teach us. In my case, it was a lesson in giving myself the permission to be human. One of my new year’s resolutions is to be kinder and more generous with myself — and honestly, I believe this should be on the top of most peoples’ lists. Whether its dealing with physical trauma, illnesses, grief, depression, anger, or fear (of which procrastination is a symptom), we are all doing our best and that’s all we can expect from ourselves.

It’s not over until it’s over — but until it finally is, we all thankfully have the freedom to choose how we frame opportunities for growth in the face of suffering. Who knows, maybe part of being worthy of suffering simply means allowing our emotions to take their course without judgement or self-flagellation.

On the last day of this past September, I managed to fall out of a 4th story window in Barcelona, while sleepwalking, and not die. The damage? Multiple fractures in my arms and legs, a cracked mandible, a couple of broken (and lost) teeth, and ultimately a whole lot of time. The 7-hour emergency surgery that saved my life left my mind in somewhat of a confused state of shock, to which my natural reaction was a resolute and pervasive dismissal, not only of the severity of my physical trauma and pain, but also of the emotional haemorrhaging that was taking place inside (…denial ain’t just a river in Egypt!).

In the days and weeks that followed the fall, I was overwhelmed by the loving presence of family and friends who came from all corners of the globe to feed, wash, and roll me around in Breezy (my snazzy wheelchair) that I didn’t get the chance to truly process what had happened to me. Overnight, this impatient, somewhat proud, and usually stubborn lover of silent reading time had become a full-on nursing case — only ever really alone in her sleep. I was completely and utterly dependant on my family and homies for even the most basic (and intimate!) of undertakings, including bringing a cup to my lips and even page-turning!

Finally, a doctor with some sense in her ordered me to be re-hospitalized for the treatment of a gaping wound on my unbroken, yet useless, left arm. The time in the hospital brought with it another set of very different challenges. Suddenly, I not only had heaps of time on my hands to think and feel things, but I also lacked any possible means of fleeing from myself. There was no going running (pun intended); no working; no alcohol; no sex; no dinner parties; no dancing: NADA, I was stuck. To make matters worst, before being locked up inside a broken body and my hospital ward microcosm, I had been somewhere in the midst of the 5 stages of grieving the loss of a romantic relationship. Needless to say, this added letdown was the absolute cherry on my crap cake.

After 3 weeks, multiple surgeries, and a skin transplant (I now have a piece of thigh on my arm — sexy), the doctors finally released me, at least until my next surgery. I have chosen to share my experiences of the most testing period of my life via a series of upcoming posts, not to arouse sympathy (I’ve had plenty of that to go around!). My noble impetus for documenting the lessons I have been learning the hard way is the hope that readers facing relatable struggles might find my thought-vomit insightful or even conducive to their own physical or psychological healing. On a more selfish note, I know that organising my thoughts in writing has in the past helped me digest some of this world’s madness.

For resistance only feeds the hail, and strengthens wildfires in their rage. So let the flames scorch this supple ground, searing crisp your guarded gates.

Because within their lies a garden, still struggling as it rains. Ever growing and resilient, amidst the the dancing flames.

They wrangle with the thicket, til only the strong remain. With all the courage to reach up again, still naked and untamed.

This livid, raw commotion, a testament to life. Untamed, we let the hurt in, blistering in its strife.

So I lean back and let it burn, until the winds change course. Embracing the seasons as they come, their colors I’ll endorse.

We welcome sadness, like the rain. For tears are cleansing too, and bathe and soak within this mess, until we grow again.

An act, so abruptly obliterated, it seems. By your frigid gusts, dear Autumn.

Blown away by roughshod realism. My heart. Now dances only in my memories.

Your colours I abhor. See they set fire to our scene. Oh and how it burns, dear Autumn.

Collections of kisses under cool summer forests. Now lay in ashes, rotting, fading, beneath my rubber soul.

Scarcely evidence remains, but for residual shrapnel. That still makes me wince. When it blows, on occasion, dear Autumn

All illusions raked away, diligently, tirelessly, by loved ones so devoted.

Still I wrench and weep and resist, under these cold layers. So obsolete before you crawled in. And took him from this bed, dear Autumn.

But the void is slowly closing, disappointments overcome. Now that the warmth of loyal dancers, so present has become.

So thank you, dear Autumn. For moving me and making space, so gradually. Not all at once. For my own light, to return.

The Namibian people should be loudly lauded for their early and continuous commitment to the preservation of the country’s precious environmental resources. In my view, Namibia (being african as it is) gets know-where near the recognition and praise it deserves from the international community for its foresight when it comes to protecting what is probably its most valuable asset.

Having said that, there have been some rather worrying developments happening over the past few months. In October, the environment ministry approved an application by an Arab-majority owned company to extract marine phosphate from the sea, despite concerns about a lack of consultations with other ministries (such as Fisheries) and the public, as well as the unknown and potentially harmful effects such a project might have on the ocean ecosystem given that this type of marine extraction has never been done anywhere else in the world (and probably for good reason!). Most recently, New Zealand and Mexico recently rejected similar applications.

At the same time, the fisheries ministry has been mulling over an application by a Chinese company hoping to gain permission to capture live Namibian marine mammals for export to China for “breeding” and “scientific purposes”. What this translates to is hundreds of orcas, Cape fur seals, African penguins, bottlenose dolphins and various sharks being captured and put on display at marine amusement parks, a booming industry in China. Many of these species, such as orcas, are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), making it illegal to capture and export them. What is perhaps even more exasperating is the fact that the number of animals requested by the company actually exceeds than the number of animals which currently exist (so much for scientific accuracy!).

Both applications have attracted heavy criticism both locally and globally. As a result, the government has placed a moratorium on the mining project until an environmental impact study has been conducted — a promising win for democracy. As for the $95,000 application to harvest endangered species, where is the slam dunk nay!? I mean honestly, what is there to think about and why is it taking a government that has pledged to protect its wildlife so long to reject this absurd proposal? This delay does not fit with the nation’s supposed commitment to preserving its marine resources “for the benefit of the Namibians, both present and future” as set out in its constitution. In my view, these developments are disappointing, shameful, and outright appalling. We must stop them.

If you’d like to join the global call to:

1. Stop the capturing of endangered marine species for the purposes of entertainment and profit, please sign this petition: http://bit.ly/2dclNEk

2. Stop the marine phosphate mining project from going ahead, please sign this petition: http://bit.ly/2fBVAyj