Zaid Ismail
@zaidie@zaidismail.com
Author, life coach, and mental health activist. We need to change the narrative from disorders, illnesses, and survival to accountability, understanding, and thriving.
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If you think you can’t, then you won’t…
Archive Post… I can’t count how often I’ve been told, “Not everyone is like you!” That comment was usually in response to me encouraging them to do better or to rise above what was troubling them. You see, the assumption that a weak person makes is that some people are gifted to be more successful…
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Burn yourself, why don’t you.
Anger always claims a higher price from ourselves than it ever will from the people on whom we project it. And before you assume that to be false because of the lasting impact that it has on its victims, understand that that lasting impact is because of their anger at the one who was taking…
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Trading the future for the past
Sometimes, we lose ourselves in the struggle to build the future that we want, while forgetting that it’s a struggle because we’re still living in the past. Our expectations about what opportunities lie ahead, or what we believe we’re capable of achieving, are defined by what we believe to be true about the events that…
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Confidently you…and only you
The question is, do you know yourself well enough to have an informed opinion of yourself? When we rely on others for more than just feedback, and instead, we allow them to validate who we are, we essentially give them the power to define how we feel about ourselves. Listening to what others think of…
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Assumed to be inadequate
Assumptions are those things that eventually appear as facts because we’ve been making those assumptions for so long that we don’t see reason to question it any longer. It’s a theme that sets in over a long period of time, and becomes the lens through which we see the world. More importantly, it becomes the…
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Defending myself into misery
Defensiveness is driven by a belief that you’re under attack. Hence the need to defend ourselves when someone tries to correct us. The defensive response on our part confirms that we assume their intention to be other than genuine concern for what we’re experiencing. We also assume that we must be right to feel a…
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A brain dump
The obstinacy with which I once wrote, escapes me lately. It was an obstinacy borne from the absence of expectation. Self-awareness is easily distracted by familiarity that we may share with others. In a moment of inclusion after a lifetime of isolation, the self is quickly lost. Re-finding that which was lost becomes an arduous…