I am weary...but alive.

I'm sure at least a couple of folk have been wondering where I've been. Well?

Let's start with what I've dubbed 'The Infernal Cycle'. I work four days a week. Most might call it a blessing. I'm...perhaps going to sound a bit spoiled when I say it is most definitely not.

Each morning I wake up on a work day...I'm having troubles describing the thousand pound block of emotional sludge I have to push against in order to just get myself to a vertical position, much less walk to the bathroom and begin my morning ritual.

I'm also having a lot of problems getting myself to write anything, paint anything. I've just been sucked in a void.

I know I've been extremely depressed for the past 6 months. The only thing I've been able to manage is to take care of myself and my child. And you have no idea how hard it is to do just that, to negotiate with myself every morning: "Just a little further, you have no choice, just get up, just.Do.It."

For a while there it took a little THC-induced euphoria to just get me to just be able to eat anything. I had no appetite. I cried every night. I wouldn't bathe for days. I had to lock myself in the bathroom once at work in order to not have a panic attack in front of the never-ending procession of entitled, fat ingrates with their rude comments.

Pushing myself to work, because I have no choice.

Living in an overpriced apartment in which I pour most of my paycheck, only to start again the next month.

Most of my plants are dead.

But the worst, I think, has been those who have tried to 'encourage' me to return to school, get an office job, 'move up the job chain' so to speak...as a way to improve my income, facilitate my climb up the social ladder...motherfucker!

Why the fuck do you think I'm working this job? Lemme tell ya.

Every day of my fucking life, since I was nine, I've had to find a reason to hang on to life. Every day of my fucking life.

How many people do you know would admit to you that their first suicide attempts was when they were nine years old? For fuck's sake! It seems like I've been at odds with this world since I landed in it! Years of repressed memories of my abuse eventually gave way to an avalanche of anxiety, anger and depression that I've been fighting off for the past decade. High school was spend fighting to hold on to my identity, as my parents tried, unsuccessfully, to mold me into what they wished me to be. I'm not able to switch my mentality to the droning drudgery of the pavement pounding, suit-donning work force that keeps our wonderful world and successful economy marching! I don't want a mortgage or a million dollar house! I don't even want my daughter to enter the school system!

My mother to this day prides her efforts to pull me out of the muck that was Africa, still ignoring that while she was out there ensuring my financial future, I was in Africa being subjected to what I can only describe as an experience that splintered my soul in a thousand pieces and left me forever weak and susceptible to days and months of rage and despair and a deep-rooted anxiety I fear I might carry for the rest of my days. I guess perhaps it the privilege that entitles me to give in to these bouts of soppy sentimentality...clearly thousands of African women are subjected to much worse and they survive, right? So what the fuck am I 'complaining' for? Clearly this is just an excuse to be lazy!

Baby boomer mentality never ceases to amaze me. That being said, I love her to death, and spent most of my childhood wishing she was around, and spent time with me, instead of being seen to by nannies, but that was just a norm I was supposed to accept and even appreciate, because not every family was lucky enough to have their own nannies, much less have a nanny for every child in the household, as we did.

My parents and I don't understand each other. And I don't expect them to, though I see where they are coming from. They accuses me of being too complex and expect me to get over myself. I have no right to be fucked up because I am too privileged to 'hyper-focus' on those pesky childhood issues. Anything that bothers me oughta be solved by mindless devotion to the Christian faith and I've had everything set up for me to 'succeed' in life! My issues are nothing more than a result of my exposure to American pathology and over-diagnosis, never mind I was already exhibiting signs of kookiness while we still resided in the dark continent.

It makes me laugh. I have gotten over myself. The simple fact that I'm still on this festering rock is an indicative of that fact, mama. The fact that I'm able to function, despite this 'handicap' is the result of years of figuring my emotional and mental composition, testing, pushing and defining my own boundaries. I know what I can handle and what I cannot handle. I know what gives me the will to go on, and when I'm reaching my limits. And I know that a high-stress job is something that I cannot mentally/emotionally handle. The bakery job is a slower paced kind-of-thing, that makes me enough money to survive and that's just about all I can handle right now.

And Lilo, Lilo is the only thing keeping me above grounds at this point. That and the desperate need to ensure that what happened to me as a child never happens to her. But had I known then what I know now, I don't think I would have had her. Had I known that her father and his relatives would treat us the way they had, I wouldn't have sullied my genetic line by mating with one of them, that's for sure!

Had I known that there seems to be no way to be free from the ravages of capitalism, greed, financial slavery and the innumerable consequences of unchecked commercialism...no. I never would have brought her into this world. I never would have hurt her in that fashion. I don't know how anyone, anyone could just blind themselves to what's happening out there and still think that if they just sit in an office for x amounts of hours a day, get x amounts of degrees, and make x amounts of money, everything's going to be fine. It's not.

Everything aggravates me. I can't even watch the news anymore. All that does is introduce a sense of creeping horror and helplessness. I want to retreat. I want to stop living in the city, move to a smaller town. I can't take the rampant materialism, the ridiculousness that is rent in Calgary, the rising cost of living... I just can't. I can't take the entitlement of Mitch's family.

Watch me retreat to go live in the woods because I think I would be happier growing my own fucking greens and raising chickens than continuing to live like this.

The fact that I've manage to even continue going to work (albeit being late every morning)is...beyond me! Ha ha! I'm hanging on, desperately, to life, but I'm so bitter I can't stomach the smallest bullshit from anyone at this point. My dreams, however...I haven't expressed myself artistically in months.

I'm growing weary of my isolation, which is a good sign, however, I'm alone in a foreign country, and there is not many people I would trust to watch over Lilo, while I go out and dance, dance, dance...then start to actually plan to leave this place because I am done!

I can't force myself to do something I don't want to do, if anything, what happened to me as a child has conditioned me to be an assertive machine AND I CAN'T SPEND THE REST OF MY FUCKING LIFE TRYING TO CONFORM TO MY FAMILY OR SOCIETY IDEA OF WHO I SHOULD BE AND HOW I SHOULD RAISE MY CHILD. I am sick of lending my time on this earth making money I never see, or get to spend on my self. I am tired of being part of a machine that takes away my identity, steals my time with my child and turns me into a faceless number on a tax report sheet.

I can't be anything else than who I want to be. I can't allow this world to defeat me. I cannot continue wasting my life here in Calgary. I want to be a mother. I want to live outside of concentrated, 'business' centrals, I want to grow my own food. I want to be a mother first, an artist second, a 'productive' member of 'society' sixteenth or ninetieth on my list of priorities, whichever comes last. I'm afraid that if I continue compromising my desires, it won't be long before I completely lose the will to get out of bed.

That being said, life ain't too bad if you switch perspectives. I'm a twenty two year old soon-to-be divorced African immigrant with a two year old child. I have a cute apartment. I drive a station-wagon. I live in a seemingly stable country with enough of a semblance of democracy and my daughter and I have free basic health-care. Truly, I've got it made and perhaps mindless financial slavery is not too high a price to pay.

Maybe I complain too much.

Maybe my expectations have always been too high.

I don't know.