Healing
I tried to run from this idea. But it keeps finding me. I wish if I could disbelieve it, but it keeps proving to me that it is a truth. it finds me in the silence between distractions. it finds me when I am almost okay, and it sits beside me, it whispers, and it says: you are still here. still alone in this.
Doing it alone is hard. No one to see my progress. No one notices the night I chose to fight, the morning I got up when everything in me said stay down. No one is there to say I see it. I see what it is costing you. I just carry the evidence of my own becoming and have nowhere to put it. nowhere to share it. because of what? because I have never learn to.
Today, I spent five hours talking to Awab.
It wasn’t planned. no intention, no emotional preparation. he texted me casually saying: “VC in 2–3 hours?” the kind of message you expect to lead to small updates and shallow catching up as we usually do. Instead,it became one of the most profound conversations I’ve ever had.
When I turned thirteen, something shifted in me. it was not dramatic on the outside, but internally everything felt rearranged. I was lost in a way I could not articulate. I could not understand my emotions, nor my behavior, nor the sudden cynicism that began to color the way I saw the world. I became negative, sharp, and difficult, and I started affecting the people around me without even noticing.
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you will understand how foolish it is to think you can change someone else.
— Matthew Hussey
This is a part I have always wanted to document and share but I never found the right words for it. it is the scariest feeling I have ever experienced, and it is mainly composed of fear. but it is also confusing in a way that, unless untangled slowly and honestly, it will remain confusing forever.
The story goes back to 2023 when I was a student at the University of Khartoum. I wrote about that period before in a draft called days that I still do not understand . during that time, I was packed with fear. I was shaking for no obvious reason, living inside something I could not explain. I kept saying it was my sympathetic nervous system reacting because I was grinding too hard, as if my body had decided to pull the emergency brake for me. but that explanation slowly started to feel shallow. what triggered my nervous system in the first place? why was I already tense before the collapse? why was I restless long before everything fell apart?
There is a famous Viktor Frankl quote:
“When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.”