Thought Picnic: That warmth has caught a chill

A sealed witness to see

My closest friends have identified a character flaw that reflects my disposition to reclusiveness and clamming up when things are not the way they should be.

I cannot recall the number of times I have heard in the last couple of weeks, “It is me, Akin/love, you do not have to shy with me.” I do not know if I can call myself a veteran of adversity, but I have my own share of stories that I hope I would find the words in reflection looking back to talk about life and its experiences, the way my hopes and fears play in the daily toil to get to a better place.

It is probably a conditioning that regardless of how difficult and dire the situation is, you put a good face on it, and make the best appearance of things as you prevent the stress, the turmoil, and the uncertainties from eating you up from the inside out.

I feel the changes

Yet, I could sense in my voice as I was speaking to my best friend that it had lost a timbre of confidence and self-assurance, my usually trusty guard was down and he made inroads into the recesses of my psyche that is rarely available and out of that came respite and support, I sorely needed but never deigned to ask for.

On an intimate level with my partner, I am even more an obscurity, that he deploys his sixth sense to read my visage and my usage of words to elicit information out of me. At other times, he follows his gut feeling and acts with such prescience almost like a seer. I do not give him enough credit for how much he understands me.

Another thing I felt yesterday was when I went into our local office for some documents to be endorsed and notarised, in explaining how I was effectively on a ‘zero-hours contract’ situation to the senior manager who asked, I distinctly realised there was no colour in my face, I had a blank and pall expression that I did not need a mirror to observe, my humour was deserting me.

Blog - Hypothetically, a zero-hours contract, it is

If only I could talk better

You do not become an expert in suffering, rather, you find ways to cope and work through it. For all that you have to accommodate, you cannot afford for circumstances to steal your sleep whilst you seek the words or music of comfort that tells you that though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death at this time, you are on your way to new green pasture and still waters as the Psalmist says in Psalm 23.

One thing I still am not that good at is asking for help when I do need that help.