Meet the President

They will rebuild the old ruins, raise a new city out of the wreckage. They will start over on the ruined cities, take the rubble left behind and make it new.

He did what?

My dad was just like any other dad on the face of it. It’s just that at times he wasn't too good. The problem with mental illness is that it lacks a marker, some sort of barometer that flashes to the world saying ‘go easy on me I am not feeling too great’.

I remember one episode when dad donned himself in a suit and headed out to state house.  For those of you that don't understand what that is, it’s the big house in which the president of my birth country lives in.

My dad walked up to the guards patrolling the formidable gates and demanded to speak to the president. According to him, he had a few issues of national interest that he wanted to iron out with the president. You don’t walk up to state house with a list of presidential hostile demands and expect to still hold to on your freedom! Needless to say my father was arrested at gun point!

We had a difficult time trying to convince the authorities that he wasn't well.  For all intents and purposes he looked the part of a successful business man. Looking back I find it comical that I had spent a large proportion of my life up until then, refusing to acknowledge publicly my father’s illness but in that moment facing the barrel of a gun, I had never been more desperate for the world to acknowledge he was a sick man.

What do you do with a guy that looks distinguished and speaks so eloquently but yet claims to be fighting mental illness? I have observed when people can’t explain a dilemma they will look for someone to blame.

They threatened to arrest my mother!!

What does it take?

A lot of people have asked me since I started to write my blog, how it is possible for someone stigmatised by her father’s illness for most of her life, can begin to publicly document her life journey. How can I speak about my dad's mental illness with ease and comfort?  To this I say it has been a process, the process has neither been easy nor comfortable.

The key I have found is to obtain emotional closure from pain resulting from encounters on lifes journeys.

Sometimes you have to give yourself what you wish you would have gotten from someone else, I gave myself acceptance, and acceptance brings peace.

I made peace with my past.

Make peace with your past because no matter what you do it's too late to change it. Forgive those that have hurt you, let go of old resentments and hurt.

It took a while, it took a process and sometimes I stumble but I remind myself to get up, look up and keep going ~the pain of what sometimes happens to you is inevitable but continuing to suffer is optional.