Are you in that space where it feels like nothing is moving towards where you want to go? No matter how much you push, it’s like carrying water in a bucket with a hole at the bottom. It sucks to be here, where you know for sure there is an end to this but for today and now, you can hardly keep going and you can’t let go either.

I have been here a couple of times myself and you would think next time around I would be better prepared or with better coping mechanism. Far from the truth. Each time it is different and takes a toll just as if it was the first time I had the heavy feeling. So I have no solutions you ask? Yes and no.

In 2022, I decided to pursue the path I had always said I would and never did for many reasons, the biggest being, most good ideas need money. I started writing my book without a full picture of how this would pan out. This book though had to get out of me and this felt like the best time. I had been through trauma therapy for like three months and some work projects were coming in that made me feel secure. Nothing could go wrong.

Being in the NGO world in the HIV and sexual reproductive health and rights space for a decade gave me the feeling that I would keep growing in this area. I was getting more opportunities for consultancy gigs and optimistic that more would come. I quite the job I was in to focus on the book and create room for the opportunities coming my way. Let’s laugh together my people.

It was a joy for the first few months, I had good savings and the launch of the book came with quick successions of other good things like a trip to New York, people eager to buy my book and getting my first deal of getting the books to my target audience, young women and girls in the slums of Nairobi, where I grew up.

I was on such a success high, I could taste joy in my mouth.

For the first time, everything in my life aligned so well. My time was mine, I could share it with my family especially my daughter and just have slower mornings. You take for granted how slow mornings are such a gift. I went to road trips with my love, signed my daughter up for dance school and read books in cafes sipping lattes. This is the life I always wanted.

Then the ball dropped. My mother was diagnosed with cancer and this thing does not just affect the person with it, it changes everyone around them that care. I realized the things I had set for myself were going further and further away each day. My energy levels just dropped as well as finances. I was lucky my friends near and far gave into the fundraiser and it become easier-ish.

That dream of mine of selling so many books in a short span of time, reaching out to supporters and all the goals I set would keep taking a back seat. We were all just doing our best and were somewhere near some form of finish line with the chemo. Then my mother-in-love got into an accident and that was just madness. What on earth was this? Then our car got into an accident and was so badly dented. Who had we wronged? What were we supposed to learn from this? With them both in our home and concentrating on hospital visits, bills and sending endless job applications, hope was the only thing flowing in my veins and keeping me from insanity.

Hope however is a thing with feathers that keeps flying away and me chasing it every morning. I know the power it holds in changing my story each time I was at my lowest and this time would be no different. I mean I wrote a whole book on hope. Those days that feel like I am covered in mud in a sink hole and it’s such a task to breath or see light; there is always some warmth to it. This warmth eventually melts the burden away, a day at a time.

That is how I know you will be okay, I will be okay, we will be okay.

Because we have hope. We have to cultivate hope daily.

We can work towards things getting better, no matter how hard it feels now. Push through just one more day, one more application, one more good thing that a future you will be proud of. Then we do it tomorrow again, just one more push and pull until we are in that space we enjoy so much. Where the sun shines yellow and the rain is another adventure.