Overview

The Phoenix summaries this tale perfectly, we meet a young woman who reinvents herself in the phase of change and an emotional roller-coaster which we often tend to find ourselves in as we transition through different phases of life. The Phoenix was historically a symbol of strength and resilience and that is the message I’m trying to depict in The Black Phoenix.

It was about 12.26 am, just a few minutes after midnight, I still remember feeling the sudden excruciating pain in my left breast. It had been a really long day and all I could think about at that particular moment was that I wasn’t dead. I had just gone through surgery to remove a “fibroadenoma” that I had had for almost 4 years. you’re probably wondering what that is, it’s a breast tumor that often occurs in young women between 15-35. It’s generally caused by reproductive hormones. I found out that I had this growth almost a year earlier in one of the most unconventional ways (tale to tell another day). Anyway like any paranoid other person I thought a lump in my boobs just meant I had cancer and I was shit scared, literally my heart was in my ass.

For a few months before I talked about it with my folks I actually did a deep dive on the internet searching for answers, looking at symptoms, reasons one might get a growth like that one among other things. Eventually I went for a formal checkup to understand what I had and the doctor told me it was a non-cancerous growth and its common to young women. This made me feel a lot better but the downside was that it had started growing faster and it had to be removed so I had to schedule for the surgery.

This was back in November 2018, this was one of the most difficult months because my relationship was in a very rocky place and I was in complete denial that it had been over for a while but we were just holding on to what it could have been rather than what it actually was. In all honesty I had invested so much into that particular relationship because I wanted it to work no matter how toxic and ugly it got sometimes, let me be more specific, we were really good together or at least that’s the image we portrayed or wanted to portray, we were ‘relationship goals’ if you will. We seemed to be so in love and we actually might have been in love for what we understood love to be at that particular time. I guess I could say we were young and dumb but I am a firm believer of the school of thought that everything happens for a reason so I don’t like to spend my time having regrets.

Anyway let me drive my point home, around the time I was going for the tests my mental health was not at its best, it was actually revealed on my checkup tests that I had a lot of acids in my stomach which were a result of stress. My mum couldn’t understand why I was stressed I mean I was only 22 years old I didn’t have a lot of things I needed to be worrying about at least according to her. But love is a very complex emotion, studies have actually shown that when you are heartbroken you could sometimes feel physical pains in areas such as your chest. Now you know how powerful love can be. Anyway I was trying to get by with everything I had, by the end of November I made a conscious decision to breakup with this person I had come to believe was the love of my life. It was one of the most difficult decisions that I had ever made, walking away when I still loved him. But it was something I had to do because the relationship had become extremely toxic and I couldn’t take it anymore, more often than not as women we have been conditioned to nurture and try to make it work and I thought that he was gonna change and that I could fix him. But that’s always a scam and you shouldn’t have to change someone or teach them how to love you. If at all someone wants to love you they will change their undesirable traits personally and will make steps towards understanding your love language.

December 13th came around faster than I had anticipated, at this point I had started coming to terms with my new relationship status, mind you this was my first time being a single woman after around 2 years of ups and downs in that relationship. I had decided I was gonna thug it out and face it like the boss bitch that I am. My surgery was scheduled to be in the afternoon in Coptic Mission Hospital and I was accompanied by my mum and dad, this was terrifying because I mean I am old enough to go to hospital alone but my parents were going with me so it felt pretty serious and realer than I had pictured it. Long story short, it went well and a few hours later I was in the ICU recovering. By this time my folks had already left but a few of my friends came by the hospital to see me and that was honestly the nicest thing anyone could have done coz my thoughts were so wild and I was still so scared.

I like looking back to that day because I feel like I had really been living in my comfort zone and not really pushing myself to the extent of my potential. After the surgery I felt like I had changed a lot both emotionally and mentally because of the whole experience. I understood that there is a lot more to embrace in life and that being happy is something I have to decide to be more actively and consciously.

The whole experience had taught me that I could actually be strong if I decided to be and I had more potential than I thought. The reason I felt that this story would be important to share is because I had been so afraid of being alone and being lonely but lying there on that operating table alone thinking I might not wake up really put a few things into perspective for me, I remember thinking that I was going to start living a little more for myself rather than to please people and to quit living my life according to other peoples terms, I always felt a lot of pressure to be perfect and to fit into people’s opinion of being and living a particular way that they deem acceptable and when I couldn’t meet their expectations I felt like I wasn’t good enough, I can say with confidence that I was my biggest critic, I judged myself so harshly, I didn’t even give myself credit for getting by day by day, I had lost so much weight my parents had even started getting concerned, all this was just psychological torture that I had been putting on myself and the pressure from all the drama surrounding the relationship I was in.

I remember my ex coming to visit me in hospital and I felt so emotional because I was still coming to terms with the whole breakup and he of course wanted us to get back together because he apparently had realized his mistakes and he was now ready to change and he was gonna put in more effort into making us work rather than taking the backseat in the relationship like he had done previously.

After he left I remember bursting into tears because it was a very intense moment for me being in that position and seeing him that emotional and seeing that he had actually put an effort to come see me at my weakest moment and I wanted so badly to believe everything he was telling me, I actually hadn’t told most of my friends that we had ended things and I knew it was going to be pretty awkward because we had so many mutual friends and I was scared I would lose them and I was scared of what people would say being the so called “power couple” we had been labelled.

I felt like getting back together with him was the easiest and best outcome to end all the heartache I was feeling ever since the decision to walk away but lying in bed a few minutes after midnight when the anesthesia in my system had subsided and the pain of the procedure all came back, at that particular moment I knew that if I could go through a procedure like that and be strong about it then I was strong enough to keep walking away from that relationship and not look back no matter how tempting and convenient it could have been. It’s exactly a year today since my recovery and I’m sitting on my balcony drinking this Cellar Cask Johannisberger red listening to Beyoncé’s ‘best thing I never had’ and I can’t help but think how I dodged a bullet.

My whole mindset changed and I can safely say I have grown to understand love even better. If you have read my previous blog posts you probably understand the circumstances that orchestrated the whole relationship at the beginning and why I decided to take a little more time before jumping back into the market this time. It’s been a whole year of rediscovering myself, I have grown as a person and as a woman. I am in a better position to choose a better partner because I understand who I am, what I am looking for and what counts as a deal breaker to me.

I think it is very important for people to understand themselves before making the decision to share their lives with another person, this is done through self-love. A person will learn to love you by leading your example during the first few days by how you love yourself, people tend to pick up on that by seeing how you take care of yourself, simple aspects like how you dress or how your nails look like speak volumes of how much importance you have attached to yourself and your image and this becomes the cornerstone to how they will love you. My parting shot today is seek to get great understanding of who you are so that you can show them how to love the complex being that you are, because you are a beautiful mess. Remember “what they don’t understand, they fear and what they fear they seek to destroy.

WRITER: Marie