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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Moving on
There’s a difference between giving up and wanting to move on. Too many are shamed into staying because someone convinces them that moving on is giving up. Holding on to a bad experience, or a bad relationship is more reflective of a poor sense of self than it is of commitment. The zombies among us…
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From Disappointment, to Despondence, to Depression
I saw a meme this week that suggested that the reason a baby cries at the time of birth is because that experience is the worst experience of its life. It seemed like just an interesting observation at first, but later I realised that it spoke volumes about perception and reality. Several incidents since then,…
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The Need to Fear
We know our fears too well, and our needs to little. We’re so focused on protecting ourselves from our fears that we’ve convinced ourselves that this need for protection is in fact our needs. It’s not. We’re out of touch with ourselves and what we need, and this is why it is so hard to…
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Reverse Engineering Life (Take II)
The previous post feels like I over complicated a really simple concept, so here’s my second attempt at clarifying it. It’s really as simple as this. If you wish to understand someone, look behind their eyes, or their actions, and embrace the vulnerability that is required to see in them what you know to be…
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Reverse Engineering Life
It seems that I’ve wasted most of my life experiences during the years when I quietly contended with the upheavals in my life and moved silently forward without making a fuss of what I wanted, nor questioning why it always seemed to happen to me. Through no deliberate effort on my part it strengthened me,…
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Who puts a smile on the face of the village idiot?
I’ve been asking this question a lot lately. Most people laugh it off, probably turning me into the proverbial village idiot since I put the smile on their face, but no answer seems to be forthcoming. It was never intended to be a rhetorical question. At many points in my life I found myself abandoning…
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Holystic Healing
It’s so interesting (read ‘entertaining’) to note how people convince themselves that everything is solved through faith and struggle. It’s probably one of the cleverest disguises of feigning strength that I’ve come across. You see, the moment we profess to be answering to a higher calling in our efforts to rid ourselves of our demons,…
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Ties That Blind
There are times when we’re so fixated on wanting to remove ourselves from a situation because we fear contaminating it, that we lose sight of the fact that our absence is in fact the greatest contamination of all. I find this most relevant in families, where our insecurity to fulfil our roles as role models…