Month: July 2025

How I Lost My Rhythm

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There was a time when I wrote like breathing.

Not every day, but often enough to feel like I had a rhythm. A cadence. A pulse.

And then one day — I didn’t.

No dramatic event. It felt like a series of tragedies and a car in a slow-motion skidding off a winding road and into the abyss of a canyon… or maybe since I am in Kenya… picture driving the Mai Mahiu Road just after the View Point and winding off the banking and into the Rift.  

The way my ability to write left me… No grand announcement. Just a quiet grinding to a stop. Like faulty gears whose teeth are stuck.

Suddenly, writing felt like trying to catch a moving train while half-asleep. My ideas came foggy and late. The characters in my head stopped speaking. Sentences no longer danced — they stumbled. Or sometimes sat mute between full stops and elipses.

For a while, I told myself that I was just tired. I’d get back into it “soon.” You know, after I finished that thing, solved that crisis, bought that lamp, reorganized that drawer. Maybe if I got an Apple Pencil so that I could scribble like in a notepad but the words could be transcribed to text. Or maybe I could dictate my thoughts and then transcribe the records. OR I could actually commit to NaNoWriMo.

But “soon” left me by myself in the deep Rift of nothingness.

And then the guilt started stacking.

I’d open my laptop, scroll through old drafts, wince. Start a sentence. Delete it. Close the tab. Repeat. 

I even got an expensive Writing Coach… who I ghosted! At least we got to Chapter 3. I still haven’t opened the emails with the notes on Chapter 1 and 2.

People kept asking about my next book. Friends I hadn’t seen in a while asked, “Are you still writing?”

The answer was always a tentative “Yes!” 

To which my conscience would scream “LIAR!!!”

Other times, I would narrate my plot story line.

Other still would be met with a near honest, “Sort of.”

What I meant was, “I don’t know how to explain that I’ve lost the rhythm of myself.”

That the comfort of writing was no longer soothing. And the sadness inside me was all wastelands. No words.

So. Here’s what I’ve come to understand:

I didn’t stop writing because I became lazy. I stopped because I was surviving. Because I was tired in the kind of way sleep couldn’t fix. And the feelings I had were like mud or black, tarry, gooey melted asphalt. 

I have come to understand that somewhere in all the striving, I stopped listening to myself.

And rhythm — real rhythm — requires listening.

It requires stillness. It requires a lot of honesty. 

Presence. And reckoning. The ability to say “Whoosh! I am in a difficult space.” And then to quiet and just allow the soul the attention. I mean the kind of soft attention that’s hard to access when you’re just trying to make it to next week without collapsing. Or wake up without the heaviness of being alive.

Fast forward to this year, something’s shifted. I feel lighter. I feel buoyed (you know like that bobbing orange ball that they keep near boats and things). I’ve started humming again while brushing my teeth. I’ve caught myself narrating random scenes in my head. Started seeing the imaginary spaces where stories form come alive with color again. I’ve started writing things in the margins of my journal and even randomly between meetings on open Word documents… hehehe…

The rhythm is not back in full. But I can hear it again. Faint. Familiar. Like music playing softly in another room.

I feel compelled to follow the sound. Slowly. Steadily. No rush.

Because the thing about rhythm is: it always leaves room for return.

Notes to my Younger Self

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Dear girl,

Oh dear, little girl. I wish we had had this conversation earlier.

You don’t have to prove your worth by how much you can endure.

You don’t have to fix everything before you allow yourself to rest.

You don’t need to explain why your joy matters. Or why your tears are valid.

Someone, some time, convinced you that love is earned through effort. That you have to be useful to be kept. That you have to keep working harder and faster than anyone to stay ahead of crises unknown. That you have to anticipate needs before anyone speaks them. And honestly? You’ve gotten really good at that.

But I want you to know — you were never supposed to disappear in order to belong.

You think you’re being “easy” when you wait just a little too long to ask for help.

You think you’re being mature when you withdraw tactfully when you’re pain to yourself.

You think you’re being strong when you say “it’s fine” even when it’s not.

But baby girl — I see you.

And I know you’re tired.

Let me tell you a few things I wish you had heard sooner:

You are not dramatic. You are expressive.

You are not weak. You are emotionally attuned.

You are not too much. You are in full color. You just have a not-so-quiet stubbornness to be just you. You are not unstable. You are just full of life and committed to living truthfully (at least by not lying to yourself, no matter what).

Oh, sweet girl. Life has taught us that there always will be people who won’t understand you. Some even in the circle of those who love you the most. That’s okay. Don’t twist yourself trying to understand why this is the way it is. Don’t even try to analyze why they don’t get it. You’ll learn, eventually, and be okay with not always being the Belle of the Ball. And the world will not end.

And here’s something else: one day, you’ll learn the joy of finding your tribe. And people who make you feel compelled to keep your softness. Keep your curiosity. People who amplify your voice, even when it trembles, and who hold your hand through everything. It is a wonderful joy to be loved by other people than those who first loved you and have been so steadfast (that huge family and those crazy siblings of yours, of course).

Most of all, you will discover that you can say with as much honesty as the sun rising in the east that you truly love yourself. I really and truly love you.

We’re still becoming.

Love,

Me.

The Worst Advice I ever Took

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There’s something especially frustrating about realizing you followed bad advice—not because it was malicious, but because it was normal. The kind of advice everyone nods at and that you are almost always required to take. Simply because it is such good advice that you can’t possibly have anything against it.  I mean this is the kind of advice that fits in polite conversation and LinkedIn posts.

Some of the most destructive advice for creative people often takes this VERY SENSIBLE form. I mean one of my favorite terrible pieces of advice is: “Be realistic.”

It sounds harmless, right? Grounded. Wise. A call to humility. But what it really did—at least for me—was shrink possibility. It taught me to dream within frameworks other people had already tested. It taught me to ask smaller questions. To choose paths that felt “proven.”

I remember being told not to focus so much on writing.

To “keep it as a hobby.”

To find something more practical to pursue. A 

And for a while, I listened. I let the voice of “realism” override the voice of wonder. I made safe choices. Applied for the sensible jobs. Stopped calling myself a writer unless I had something published to prove it.

I don’t blame anyone. They meant well. They just didn’t see the version of me that lights up when I build a world from scratch, or spend five pages on one conversation between imagined people who feel so, so real.

But still—that advice cost me something. Time. Courage. Maybe a few stories that never made it to the page.

The thing about “realistic” is that it often centers other people’s fears, not your vision. It wants you to be legible. Predictable. A good fit for the systems that already exist.

But I’ve since learned: some of the best things in my life happened because I ignored that advice. Because I bet on something that didn’t make sense to anyone but me.

So now, I keep a little internal filter. When advice comes my way, I ask: Is this protecting me, or limiting me? Is this helping me build something, or just keeping me from falling?

I still don’t have it all figured out. I’m still learning how to trust my own rhythm. But I’m done trying to be realistic.

I’d rather be faithful to the wild, slightly irrational parts of me that still believe the impossible is worth chasing.

Love in the Margins

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Some of the most formative love stories of my life didn’t end in relationships. They didn’t even begin in the way stories are supposed to. No grand gestures. No well-lit first dates. Just quiet connections that existed… on the edges.

The guy who always studied with me for our classes and did joint assignments, even though we never once called it a date. The friend who made me playlists but never said the words I needed. In fact, this guy made me laugh because he could never remember when we met and yet for me, it was one of the most significant events – I felt so much for him when we were talking… joke was, for him, it was just another great conversation (!).

So many tender moments and so many left on the way. There was one guy who very quickly, after an equally brief liaison, stopped talking to me. By then, I hadn’t wisened up to college guys and their ways. He just moved on and never looked back—but knowing him sure taught me how to spot guys like him from a mile away. 

There was one with whom we had an instant connection on a flight from North Carolina to New York. We sat there looking at each other. Our shoulders moving ever so much closer. He had these beautiful eyes and it felt like it could be something. He invited me to walk Central Park with him. But before I could answer, we remembered he was engaged.

There is another stereotype I have encountered one too many a time: the almost-lover who said, “Let me get you home,” after a night out but could never quite make a move when we got to my house.

Love in the margins is tricky. It doesn’t ask for much. It thrives on eye contact that lingers half a second too long. On inside jokes. On the careful way someone says your name. It rarely announces – or pronounces – itself. But it leaves shadowy feelings. Most of the time, these comment balloons type of love, just has enough room for longing and not much else.

It took me a while to understand this kind of love. I think it took me far too long to see that some loves are not meant to unfold. They are, instead, meant to reveal. To show you what matters to you. What doesn’t. Where your boundaries are. Where your softness begins. And sometimes just to remind you that you are alive. Breathing.

These “love in the margins” people are never for a chapter in my story. They are present in memories and only ever remembered in nostalgia, or in the demands of every love scene that comes long after they are gone.

I don’t write about them often. Mostly because I don’t want to overinflate what wasn’t. But also because I know that love can be true without being permanent. That not all loves have a destination… sometimes they’re like matching in place. Love in the margins. I think this is possibly where the most human parts of love reside – not so much in declarations, but so clear in the “it could have been.” 

That One Bad Review

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There’s a particular kind of hurt that comes from being misunderstood in public. Not criticized. Misunderstood.

I once got a review for one of my books—buried deep in a blog I hadn’t even known existed until someone sent me the link. And let me just say: I don’t go looking for reviews. But when you hear the words “I found someone talking about your work,” you click. Of course you do.

At first, I was okay. Curious. Even nodding at some of their points. Yes, there were typos. Yes, the structure was a little jagged. I could own that.

But then came the sentence that made my throat tighten:

“1.5 out of 5.”

And suddenly, it didn’t matter that they said I had a strong sense of place. It didn’t matter that they mentioned potential. I could feel my lungs get smaller in my chest. My stomach flipped. It was like someone had looked at the whole of me and said, “pass.”

What hurt wasn’t the rating. It was the finality of it. Like I’d been scored as a person, not just as a writer. Like the sum of years spent collecting ideas, sitting through doubt, pushing past paralysis—could be wrapped up in a number and dismissed.

That review made me question everything.

Why I write.

If I’m any good.

Whether I’m wasting everyone’s time—including my own.

I cried a little. Not dramatically. Just quietly. Like something tender had been poked one too many times.

And then—I don’t know—I remembered that, much like friendships, the relationships a writer has with her readership is deeply personal. I think I needed to embrace the fact that as a writer I may not be for everyone. In fact, it felt like you know creating any form of art is a journey of sorts. Sometimes, even good art shows up before it’s ready. Or before the reader is ready. Or maybe before the writer is ready.

I think I was successful in consoling myself. So, I keep going. With typos. With imperfect plots. With the kind of writing that might earn me another 1.5 somewhere down the road. Because I also know the kind of writing that earns a message like, “I didn’t know anyone else felt this way.” 

And true… now that I am sitting here, remembering someone who asked me how I am able to write this and capture something so relatable to them. And for that kind of connection, I’ll risk another review.