Diary of a Healing Girl: Stage 2 – Healing not Healed, A Brutal Awakening

I was healing. I was doing better every day. My mistake was that I started to think I was healed. This is the healing chapter of the Heartbroken & Healing Girl Series. Read the previous post here: Diary of a Healing Girl: Stage 1 – The First Step

Disclaimer: This is written from my point of view. Every relationship has two people and every story has two sides. I am writing this hoping that one day a person going through what I went through will read and be encouraged and know that it gets better. It did for me (Sorry I gave away the ending😂).

That one church service changed my life. It turned the direction of my journey. The moment I let go and let God, the emptiness was washed away.

In the coming weeks, I was much better and I was enjoying life. I was finally getting a glimpse of what it would have been like to live on the nearly tropical island without a lot of emotional baggage on your shoulders.

I was finally looking at the positive side of everything.

Malindi was finally starting to feel like the paradise I had envisioned in my mind when I first decided to go live there.

I had healthier thoughts about everything. And I was looking forward to the future. I allowed myself to feel the way I felt whether good or bad. I still had a few bad days but they were mainly great.

Those good days were awesome. Unfortunately, they had one bad side effect, with more days that passed, I started to think that I had healed.

While I was healing, I had not healed yet but I would only come to find this out too late.

As I said, I was doing very well. I was hosting friends and it was wonderful.

The two girls from my Mombasa trip came to visit me during the first weekend of May and we had an amazing time. We went to the beach, took awesome pictures, swam in the pool, went out dancing and it was overall a lovely weekend.

The next weekend Steph came to visit and as usual, we had a lovely time together. Since she is a mutual friend to my ex as well and she saw him constantly whenever she was in Nairobi, I was worried that if she talked about him it would trigger me, but the few times she did, it did not affect me.

On the next Tuesday, another friend, let me call her Callie, it’s her first official appearance on the blog but I am sure not the last.

Steph, Callie, and I had loads of fun. From going to the corals, working from the beach, obviously taking awesome pictures and swimming both on the beach and in my swimming pool, we did a lot.

Emma was the last to join the girls trip. She arrived on Friday morning and we went directly to the Watamu full-day boat trip that we had pre-arranged.

The boat trip was great. After we resolved a case of Ksh 10,000 sent to the wrong number without casualties, we set sail.

The first part of the trip was fun. We danced in the rain on the top of the boat, we went snorkelling for the first time ever and swam at the awesome Garoda beach.

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The next bit was the sail to the Waka Waka island where we would enjoy a variety of seafood and traditional dance.

I am not sure what came over me during that stretch, as my friends left me on top of the boat sunburning, my heart started to sink. By the time we got to the Island, I was barely holding off tears from my face and keeping myself from breaking down.

As we sat waiting for the food, that is when I realised that the boat trip reminded me of the fateful boat trip of valentines day when my world had just crashed. Somehow my emotions came crashing down on me.

Without my permission, my happiness diminished. I struggled to stay happy. Trying my best not to spoil my friends’ trip with my fading mood. I remained strong. In the end, I did all I could to keep a happy charade. I chugged some leftover whiskey-cola that we had carried, ordered some mnazi (some beer brewed from coconut) for me and Callie to share (my first time trying it, ever), joined the traditional dance, e.t.c. Anything to keep from breaking down.

That night we went out dancing. And I drank, a lot. Mostly because I was afraid if I stopped drinking I would feel sad. And to my friends, I seemed happy. Goal accomplished.

After the wild night, when we were back at my place. A huge drunken misunderstanding between how my friends and I saw things, led to one of those cringe moments you wanna forget.

I was angry at them, at the universe, at life, at everything. Enraged that I had to be alone in my worst moments. I was furious because I felt like no one understood me, especially not the three awesome friends standing before me. I angrily scolded them and ended up pouring my heart and soul out to them and made sure they felt how I was feeling. It sucked. That is the only way to describe it.

The worst part is that I remember it all. I wish it was a blackout moment that needed narration the following day, but it wasn’t, because what I told them was the truth, with a dose of too much truth, thanks to the no doubt excess alcohol that was running in my veins.

What happened was definitely a misunderstanding, a difference in the way we view things, and if I had been sober, I would have found a better way of telling them and explaining my side to them, not crying hysterically on my bedroom floor.

In the morning, I couldn’t sleep. What had happened was still too fresh and too puzzling. My friends and I talked and we were fine. We all knew why it happened. The combination of the heartache and the alcohol was a bad mix.

Later in the day, as my hangover kicked in, I knew I was never going to get drunk again. The last two times I had used alcohol to escape my feelings went horribly. The first I had thoughts I never thought I would, as you have read here, and the second I had a huge fight with my friends over a misunderstanding.

That was the day I decided I was done with alcohol. And I know people always say they won’t drink again when they are hangover but this one was different. It wasn’t the hangover talking. It was that girl that had finally realised that alcohol only caused her more problems. Alcohol isn’t the escape it seems to be, it was the nuclear bomb that flattened everything in my path.

Steph bought me my last cocktail. And from that day till today, I haven’t drunk again. And I don’t plan to get drunk ever again in my lifetime. I have actually decided to stay away from alcohol altogether for the next foreseeable future. I am now a tea tottaler. It was the best decision I have ever made. While I generally have no regrets in my life I wish I had made that decision years ago.

The brutal awakening

As I was sitting there in the aftermath of that ugliness, it was when I recognised two very important things about my healing.

The first is that I was alone. That I had to go through the healing process alone. My friends and family could not help me at all no matter how much they loved me. Healing is a very personal journey and while having people around may lessen the weight of it, it doesn’t help with the actual healing.

It made me realise that the decision to live with my sister for a while after my lease was up, was not a foolproof healing mechanism but just a change of environment as I healed on my own.

I had always wondered if I would have gone through what I did if my friends had been around. If it would still have been as painful as it was. The sad answer is yes. I realised that having my friends around would have only slowed down the process. Where I nose-dived into rock bottom, I would have canoed to it but I would have gotten there eventually. It was inevitable.

Whenever I am around people there is a strength switch that goes on automatically, I feel the need to be strong for everybody and cater for everyone else’s needs before mine. To take charge. So if I had been around people, I probably would never have broken down, as I did. While someone would think that it is a good thing, it really isn’t.

If I had kept all that inside, I am certain I would have burst open at some point. Eventually, the outcome would have been way worse than it was. So while it sucked to be alone when I was at my lowest. In retrospect, maybe I needed to be alone in order to feel what I needed to feel honestly and fully.

Another thing is that if I had been around someone, most likely I would have grieved my relationship in that person’s way. Maybe the person would have made me go out more, meet more people, etc. But these would have been distractions from the real truth which is that I was completely broken and I needed to accept it to get through it.

I am not saying that being alone helps you at all. Not really. All I am saying is that for me, being alone forced me to break faster, feel deeper and when I couldn’t break anymore or feel anymore, it also helped me heal faster. So judge for yourself what that means.

The second realisation was what my friend really meant when she told me that healing is messy. To quote her text:

You will see you be healing even when you think you ain’t, you’ll be healing, hurting and happy at the same time, something people will not understand. Y

Will hate when the night falls cause its the only time you can cry out your anger, pains and hurts, those night falls seems endless and all you do is cry yourself to sleep and when dawn comes you wipe your tears and face the world like all is fine.

Healing is messy mama, but no matter what keep going and rush nothing, at the end you will be grateful for the incredible and super warrior you are 💪

My very wise pal

She was 150% right. Healing is not a straight journey. Sometimes you take 2 steps forward and 5 steps back. Healing is a bumpy road, and if you go too fast, you might crash and burn. It is having very good days followed by a bad day that makes everything seem dark all over again. Healing is messy.

And that early morning I had taken a few huge steps back.

Healing not Healed

Later that week, after my friends had left Malindi, I found myself texting and trying to tell them that I really was doing better those days, despite what it seemed like to them but it sounded like a scapegoat. But I really was better. I just needed a reminder that I was healing and not healed.

In the end, I came out of that weekend both hopeless and informed. I was hopeless because I thought my friends and family were a one-way ticket to healed town, but I had just recognised that they weren’t. Moreso, I was informed because now I knew that I needed to look for an actual ticket to healed town, not distractions.

From that moment, my mindset around family and friends changed. I stopped pretending I was stronger than I felt. I embraced living in the moment and enjoying the comfort their love and support offered me. All while recognising that it was really just me, myself and I, with God.

The next stage was where I found the solution. The one thing I always had but never depended on it as I should have. Diary of a healing girl: stage 3 – salvation and developing a personal faith in God.

Series Navigation

<< Diary of a Healing Girl: Stage 1 – The First StepDiary of a Healing Girl: Stage 3 – Salvation and Developing a Personal Faith in God >>