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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Do you hate apologising?
Ever reject an apology from someone only to be told, “Well, I apologised. So if you don’t accept my apology, then that’s your problem, not mine.” Or something similar? When you apologise and expect your apology to be accepted, you’re not apologising, you’re demanding that the other person just move on without any redress to…
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Good vs bad manipulation
Sometimes we choose to maintain the peace by giving of ourselves despite not wanting to. Sometimes, we don’t want to deal with the upheaval that follows not doing what someone wants, so we do it anyway. Sometimes, we’re afraid of the repercussions of not complying, so we comply despite not believing in what we’re doing.…
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Enjoying the deferral of death
“When we go through life waiting for our struggles to be recognised, to be seen as the walking wounded, or the ones that survived, we become defined by that survival. We become survivors. Survivors don’t enjoy the sweetness of life. They simply enjoy the deferral of death.” From The Egosystem in the chapter titled Recognise…
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The harm of wishful thinking
Whenever I hear things like the universe is waiting to give you everything that you want, or manifest what you desire in your life through positive thinking, or put it out there and the universe will answer, I wonder if the proponents of such philosophies would like to tell that to the toddler that was…
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More ways to destroy trust…
Our consideration of trust is often limited to promises or follow through on something that was clearly agreed with another. However, trust is broken in many ways, most of which are subtle and often unintended. It’s these subtle breaches that leave us seething with anger or raging with tears while not knowing how to connect…
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Do you appreciate you?
When we surrender to what we believe was preordained for us, we give up our ability to influence its outcomes. That giving up creates a self-fulfilling prophecy by allowing things to progress in its current path without any effort to disrupt it, convincing us that we were right about it being preordained. For this reason,…
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The fallacy of what was meant to be…
On the surface, this seems like a really positive perspective on life, right? But let’s unpack it very quickly. Being thankful for the experiences that we’ve had has merit because there is nothing so bad that there is no good in it. What we take from our experiences is what gives us the opportunity to…
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Ingratitude starts with you
We most often only realise that we’re ungrateful for a blessing that we have when it’s too late. That’s when regret sets in and either spurs us on to improve our awareness of what we should be grateful for, or it makes us bitter for the loss that we experienced. Gratitude is something that no…