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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Torturous love
And so it is…love and torture have always been stablemates. Sometimes, without warning, someone enters your life and challenges every assumption that you ever made about what’s possible. What you thought you deserved was limited to what you were capable of achieving up to that point, and maybe just a quiet desire to acquire some…
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‘Sorry’ isn’t the hardest part
The only thing worse than an insincere apology is the apology that is offered with a demand that it be accepted. The most important part of an apology is not that it is made, but that it is authentic. Not just sincere. Authentic. If an apology is limited to a text message, or a few…
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That war within
Sometimes that village is a family, sometimes it’s a group, and sometimes it’s just one person who represents everything that the village stands for. That child grows into the raging adult who destroys every wholesome thing, because they feel like no one deserves peace if they were denied love and acceptance. When you treat the…
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Silent screams
Crying, or a show of emotion, is still a sign of hope that things can be different. It’s a means to communicate our dissatisfaction because we believe that our dissatisfaction matters. Our emotional expression is exactly that. An expression. No one expresses unless there is an expectation of a response. That response may be from…
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Whose pedestal is it?
When we see people for what we need them to be, rather than who they are, we elevate their position in our lives through no fault of their own. When they fail to meet the expectations that we created because of that unrealistic perspective that we had of them, we feel betrayed and then blame…
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That self-loathing demon
Ingratitude for the self is reflected in how much time we spend self-loathing. But self-loathing is disguised in many creative ways. The above list of 10 common points is only the tip of the iceberg. Self-loathing is rarely, if ever, a result of our current circumstances, and almost always a result of how we felt…
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Raging for love
Nothing destroys more than ingratitude, and ingratitude for the self is expressed through self-loathing. But self-loathing is disguised in many ways, the most common of which is anger. Anger is a defence mechanism that distracts attention away from what we feel inadequate about. It demands that we be taken seriously when we have no reason…
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Maybe tomorrow…
Just like tomorrow is not guaranteed, neither is our next breath. Each moment taken for granted is a moment lost. Each loved one taken for granted is a heartache earned. Each abandoned resolution made after tasting loss or visiting death’s door is food for the seeds of hypocrisy and self-loathing within. The victim mindset turns…