I Took Two Days Off And This Is What I Learned

 The art of doing nothing helps you lean more into who you are meant to be.  Who we are is directly tied to what we spend our time doing so it's very easy to forget you’re a human being these days not just your job title.  I go from CEO to assistant to the CEO, to being a booked creative, to life as an auditioning creative, to canceled recording studio sessions because I had no energy, to missed writing deadlines for scripts I’ve already written in my head, and always returning to my safe space, Twitter, by Monday morning.  All of these directions I am pulled in, were all masterfully strung together by me, the creator of my life.  No regrets.  Just rest.  And I don’t mean just sleep.  I recognize that the energy we exude from brainstorming alone can equate to the physical exhaustion of heavy lifting.  When I stop to write a new verse, I pause to take my breathing into account, to make sure I am not holding my breath.  I write outside or when I’m on the move as a matter of meditation.  In a writing session however, I am trying to convey a message with the spoken word set to a melodic background, my thought process is just as laser-focused as the scientists who made the covid-19 vaccine.  The pressure is always on all of us no matter how meaningless or powerful our contributions may seem at the time.  How do you handle this pressure? 

I imagine this is why we quit when it gets tiresome or when it gets “hard”.  I trained myself not to become a quitter but a rester.  As much as I want to hit my goals, remain competitive, and show up for myself daily, I recognize being Tahyira isn’t special, it’s human.  My little heartbeat is drowned out by our collective heartbeats.  I never take myself too seriously while remaining an individual light.  There is a moment when each little heartbeat receives shine and I purposely live inside of those moments.  My IG handle, I let the good times roll, is a sentence artfully structured to let folks know who I am and what I represent humanly.  The good times shall roll on as much as the tired times.  And unfortunately, as much as the bad times.  As a high-functioning human, dealing with mental health and traumatic experiences, I normally share tons of what happened to me in anticipation of finding help.  I find help in seeking human acceptance of trauma.  It took me a long time to accept that.  We try to run from our past but we forget it's inside of us, it happened to us, it was meant to do something to us, and our job is to constantly seek out that purpose.  

Once we’ve secured what our purpose is meant to be we elevate it.   It becomes a gift.  A way for us to help each other.  For me, words have made for a better pathway forward.  I used to fight a lot growing up I wanted to be like a soldier or a professional fighter.  I always excelled at schoolwork so I thought I’d be a scientist working in a top-secret lab doing calculations.  I made people smile when I would sing and dance as a kid so I always kept entertainment pretty close to the front.  There was something about money, or working that intrigued me too, so being a boss or a grocery store owner would be something I could do as well.  As I got older my mind swayed toward logical reasoning.  I would watch legal shows like Law and Order and figured I could keep the legal stuff in my brain long enough to survive a trial.  I also admired the command lawyers had in the courtroom, it looked like a stage.  I guess when I break it down, I saw my life through the lenses of different characters.  The trauma I experienced made me feel sad all of the time.  I felt like I was being punished for something I did not even do.  For a long time, I made myself sadder than I had to be as a form of survival.  

When I went to adult therapy I realized that I had to go back and befriend that child that had only seen herself through the lens of characters.  What do you see when you look in the mirror? I see my adult face and feel my childhood heartbeat.  There is no such thing as growing up more so we become responsible at the same level as the people who created us and birthed us into the World.  Our parents are children who had children.  The age of 18 in the US is deemed the legal adult age but not until 25 are we able to fully achieve all the benefits of adulthood.  That also depends on if you’ve got the monetary value to stand on your own adult feet.  Young girls can become pregnant before reaching the age of 18 therefore children having children is one of the most under-discussed aspects of childrearing.  This is what I’d call the grey area.  50-somethings are living with their parents who are no better off than when they were 5 years old.  Age ain’t nuttin' but a number.   Our society has done a fine job is skewing our realities to fix into a timeline or sequence when we see humans redefine what their realities can be especially with the use of technology.  I mean, surrogacy is very much a thing nowadays, who would have known? 

Life is going to be what we make it.  I want to make mines exciting, adventurous, and filled with big moments, and small reflections.  I want to take risks, find success, and mitigate disbelief by challenging the past to create a wider presence for me and for people who are like me.