Journaling as a mainstay

(A letter style entry about Covid 19- heads up so you can choose whethere you’re in the headspace to read this now or wish to return later)

Hello lovely,

How are you? Thanks for coming back and reading another one of these. I’m happy to have you here with me. I want today’s blogpost to read like a letter. I hope you enjoy the change in format.

The not so new news is Coronavirus. Global pandemic, lockdown, and quarantine are some of the keywords of the current times. A huge element of being instructed to stay indoors is challenging for me. Obviously as someone who has been sectioned (almost a decade ago now) it is not surprising that this feels very close to the skin. Autonomy is something of a theme that keeps on cropping up this year.

I don’t this is limited to me and my experiences though. I believe that it’s an entirely human feeling, to instinctively recoil at a command that seeks to keep you confined. Isn’t prison seens as a crime and punishment system? It’s punishing because your freedom of movement is voided. (We’ll talk another day about how prison also seems to void human rights, and the whole rehabilitation issue. I have huge feelings around institutionising humans.)

I find myself deeply concerned about the long term implications of our current conditions.

Today the Govt spokepeoples were talking about secondary deaths due to Cv19 they talked about comorbidity. They talked about “BAME” ( slowly coming to really dislike that term) covid rates. I waited with baited breath for them to talk about class, race, poverty how these things intersect with people’s likelihood to contract the illness, how they correlate with how likely they are offered treatment/testing or not believed and sent off …. of course this was not mentioned. Of course not.

Though “the pandemic” has all but painted bold the social inequalities that are built into the very fabric of many of our societies, by many it still goes unseen, unspoken about, and out of awareness.

There’s been such loss and grief.

Numerous people, souls who laughed, thought, felt, loved, were lights, complicated, joyous, passionate, have departed this life.

My Lord grant solace to all those grieving, and soothe them in their experience of loss, of breaking, and hurting.

It’s now more than ever that we realise the value of community perhaps. It feels like another thing that’s been painted bold. This spiritual human interconnectedness. This is a light, and I have hopes that this reconnection to our sense of collective purpose strengthens throughout and beyond this time.

There’s been a whole host of different experiences I guess, and it’s just, I think societies are bound to change in many unimaginable ways on the other side of this. Im hoping to be a part of the effort to make sure this is a “for the better” outcome than a “for the worse” type of thing. Tie your camel, and leave the rest to Him.

So having put things into context of course there’s a lot of feelings and emotions coming up, some mine, some the feelings of others that i feel so easily atuned to (hello, extraverted feeling). My current experience is that it’s taking even more energy than usual to maintain boundaries in that respect.

Hence I’m grateful to have journalling, as a great resource to sift through feelings, identify mine, sort them out from other people’s emotions, and then even looking into projections.

One of my new journaling experiences recently has been getting really relaxed in my body before hand, sort of floating along my mind’s currents and then feeling deeply into any emotion/memory that comes up. After that i breathe deeply, then stretch, and then turn to my journal.

There’s so much stuff coming up. Isn’t that always the case, that the more work you do, the more work there seems to be that needs doing. Such is the joy and sorrow of life.

Anyway that’s it, I just wanted to check in. And express things on here. This is history in the living, and I want to remember it exactly as it was lived for me, not however it might be reworked to fit objectives and poli-socio-economic narratives in the time after.

All the best,

take care,

Fine words Weave

Thoughts unrefined

Tonight is something different. Sometimes there’s tension between what to say, and what I think, what to share, and what to hold back on. As someone who has recognised, over time, the impact words have, I wrestle between caution and courage.

Hope brings relief

There’s a lot of fear out here in the world. From racism, discrimination, and fear on all “sides” of the issues- stems deep defensiveness, misconceptions, and poor communication; to the latest with the coronavirus, (why aren’t the news reporting on the rates of recovery??? ) Does this speak to the disease vs symptom treatment of many current healthcare models?; to knife crime and violence- so many people ending their time on this planet through this means.

There’s a lot of fear. Do you feel like that fear serves a purpose though? Sometimes it can, sometimes it’s a rallying point, sometimes you see the best of human nature unfolding. I know there’s a possibility that fear could lead you to dig deep and ask what’s going on here? Try to get a grip of what’s happened, where things have gone left, and what the lessons are within the experiences.

It feels like this idea of relying on certainty (for me the most certain place to rest my faith is Allah, the Eternal, the Ansolute), to weather through periods of uncertainty, in a flexible and strong manner, isn’t mainstream.

Sometimes I look at that and think there’s a reason it isn’t the mainstream messaging. It doesn’t necessarily serve capitalism. It serves a higher power and strengthens individual’s internal reasoning and deductive skills, along side emphasising shared humanity, and the interconnected nature of our lives.

It feels at times that societies (at least the one i currently live in) are moving away from that interconnectedness. What do they say? Divided they fall? As you know I’m a counselling student. There’s this movement in psychology to move towards a Power Threat Meaning Framework. It basically advocates looking at and recognising our difficult experiences, and how messaging from wider society can invrease feelings of guilt, shame, and isolation (source: bps).

There’s this strange (to me) sanitisation from life experiences and the human, (natural inclination towards adaptation and doing the best that we can with the resources at hand) response, that’s almost a means of blaming individuals for not coping without considering what the experiences they’ve gone through are, recognising that they are coping, if in a maladjusted way, and beginning to reconcile that and encourage better coping strategies that work within their given experiences. In short understanding a dis-ease means slso understanding the context.

Honestly there’s a lot going on right now. I want people to remember to look after themselves and others in the human family. I want people to have courage, which flows from a knowledge that what happens to you in life is ultimately for your good, (and always a means of drawing you ever closer to your Maker. I want us to really go back to our fitrah, (purest form of our natures) and remember that we are brothers and sisters in humanity. That what affects me affects you as fellow sojourners on this planet. Mostly I want us to rekindle the light of hope in ourselves, in eachother.

Take care my family,

Azeezat Adeola A B A

Fine words weave