“It is all about finding the calm before the chaos”- unknown

Has someone ever asked you ‘how are you today?’ and you have no answer for them? You cannot tell them whether you are fantastic, coping or sad because you have no clue as well. And so you just say ‘I am okay, thank you’ and move on…

You see over the past year I have come to find myself searching for the real meaning of ‘I am okay’. Dictionary wise, okay means satisfactory but not especially good. Not elaborative enough for one to fully comprehend, I asked two of my closest friends to define their understanding of what one means when they say that they are ‘okay’. The first friend said it to be ‘I am not hundred, nor am I zero. I am not happy, nor am I sad. I am just thankful to be alive and that is all’, that is an intense yet comprehendable definition, is it not? I then asked my second friend, who herself suffers from her own chronic illness known as Fibromyalgia, she said “To some people they would just not understand it… If I asked you how you were feeling and you said ‘okay’, to me in means ‘well I could possibly have a better day. It doesn’t hurt so much but I still want to pull out my uterus, yet I am coping better than other days”, she described to me how her roommate who suffers from endometriosis would paint out her okay as being alive, able to pee properly with bearable pain, fatigued yet able to do some house chores -and to her that is the okay she can relate to despite the fact of having a different condition.

So what has my ‘okay’ come to be? I mean from the responses I have gathered; the most common thing is that you are just scrapping by. You have accepted where life is, you have accepted what you cannot change. You are wishing for some light at the end of the tunnel yet you are ‘okay’ with it never shining through… actually being okay sounds like one has given up. It sounds like one has accepted the fact that they are still breathing without so much a desire to be doing so. Being okay is the same as being numb. You feel nothing. You have accepted defeat.

Therefore, here I am asking myself this question again, why is it that I keep saying I am okay whenever I am asked how I feel? I am numb. I am angry. I am fatigued. I am stressed. I smile while being seconds from crying. I feel myself crumbling under the pressure. The pressure of school, the pressure of succeeding, the pressure of being happy when I am not, the pressure of keeping it together when it is falling apart, the constant pressure I put on myself to be perfect. I feel the lump in my throat when I think about my future. I feel the ache in my heart when I think about my health and the infertility. I feel the disappointment within me whenever I have failed. I feel the weight on my chest when no one around me is happy and I know I played a role in it. The constant pressure of life… I FEEL IT- I feel it all. I notice how I am triggered by the smallest of things. I cry to Disney movies more often than before, I am angered easily, I get emotional over things that make me happy, I am isolating myself even within a crowd. I feel everything and all those things that I feel keep pointing out to the fact that I am not okay… I am not okay because I do not feel okay. Hence the next time you ask me how I am, just be prepared for the answer…

I am not okay.

published by Faith Ngwenya