Tag: psychology

I wrote you a love letter

She makes me cross-eyed

My dearest,

Do you want to know what hiding anxiety and depression look like?

Try an erattic pulse, forgetting to breathe, anticipating the worst and soothing that only comes through the reassurance of intimate connection.

Try looking at the relentless gym goer, the man obsessed with providing the best life he can to  his family, or even extend an eye of empathy to the war mongers who see no healing except through expressing how much they want to kill themselves, by curating outwardly creative, yet deceitful ways to justify killing others.

And on the topic of suicide, how do they hide, those suicidals?

We hide in prayer, in worship, in devotion to something larger than ourselves. 

You may think strangely of the above, but if you allowed yourself deeper reflection, you’d realise, that we have to stop pathologising these things, and rather see them as symptoms of not extending every last fibre of our being to a cause.

Not expressing the immense tapestry of our abilities onto the world and releasing it in creative and artistic splendour.

It’s the soul taking you to account, the inner knowing, that voice that speaks to you and again is not a stigmatic label like schizophrenia nor a disorder of any fashion, it’s that buzzing, that noise that won’t go away, urging you into action.

Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts and a whole host of concocted psychological disorders are just by-products of unfulfilled potential incessantly knocking on your door. It’s the gnawing consciousness ear bashing you, soul crushing you, so that like cardamon, you release a fragrance.

Don’t be sold on these ideas that are hell bent on categorising you and lulling you into inaction and the comfort of a diagnoses (read: excuse). Rather, understand them as cues to spring into action because your soul knows you are capable of more.

So see all my efforts and exasperation as just answering the call, as a reluctance to procrastination, as a fulfilling of a Godly command, to realise our fullest potential in total and utter gratitude.

Wesam El dahabi

Washing sins away

I had a shower this morning.
These days showers are more metaphorical than anything else,  
water beads that pelt me,  
and wash sins away,
or so I assume.
 
Unseen things, unknown things – I thought were my own –
are now on full display like a merchandised window,
 
and the people always do a double take as they go past.
 
That’s just it,
knowing people will take a second look,
isn’t too different than them second guessing you,
and sometimes you just don’t want anyone’s prying eyes,
their curious nose,
nor their wondering minds.
 
What is this mess of a man,
scars, and bruises and well-worn hands,
words thrown up with the same well wishes as rice on a wedding day,
carefully curated,
that no one understands.
 
And at that point,
when no one gets the point,
when you scream down into your marrow,
‘what’s the point?’
words may as well just disappear.
 
If it takes the pit to be spat out for people to see that you have something in your mouth,
if it takes muting your voice to tell the world you’re not without a whirlwind of words,
then so be it, 
let them taste the shrill of your silence,
and only read you when you’re dead.
 
Sometimes our sins keep us mute and other times they make us shake violently like an epileptic who has to sweat
involuntary spasms into thoughts,
or thoughtlessness,
inconsideration and worthlessness.

The punishment for the sin, is the sin itself,
and that’s why showers don’t work anymore.

Even throwing myself into the ocean leaves me in a tesseract of inability,
of timeless timelessness looking into time with longing and distance like I can reach it at the end of my fingertips and change it,
the elusive fuck!

If you haven’t let life beat the shit out of you for all that you are,
you haven’t told the truth to yourself,
and your sins still hold you hostage,
and that shower will always be a bandaid.

Wesam El dahabi

When they call you heavy

When they call you ‘heavy’, 
I feel like asking, “Heavy how? Like an anchor that holds a ship amongst turbulence? 
Or like a backpack laden with books and loaded onto a child on the way to school? 
Perhaps I’m a mule, camel or beast of burden that is stubbornly refusing to do another day of work without some rest? 

How exactly am I heavy, so heavy, that you feel so light telling me so?
That it rolls so effortlessly off your tongue, that you assume my heart isn’t also just as heavy?  

Heavy with hurt, heavy with guilt, heavy with rage and remorse, so heavy that it makes me consider all things heavily, and the reason for my heaviness is that I haven’t yet released it onto you or the world.”

You retract, and change,
reorient your words like shuffling cards, but it’s the same deck and now you say, “No, not heavy that way, but like, you’re too much”. 

Again, I ask, “What exactly do you mean? Am I a price tag that you don’t want to pay for, am I a book too thick to consider reading? Perhaps you mean, I’m a plate that you’re too full to even look at let alone eat from. Please, tell me, am I rain that doesn’t cease, heat that is unbearable, or are all my offerings, all that I am, everything I have learned and developed into, is any of that what you mean?”

Maybe you failed to consider a man who has weight will be the workhorse to provide for you if you just offer me enough room to find a semblance of myself, and be the pillow I lay my head on. 

I could be mediocre and get by, I could be just a fly in a room, just there, that eventually annoys you.

Or is being too much, only too much because you want to cut me down, is being too heavy a veiled cry from you for me to slow down, be less, think less, heart less, because you don’t want to do any more, or you just can’t tolerate the pain of seeing someone engage with their entirety, whilst you offer…… nothing?

Because, if you prefer, I could be too little, and I could be a weightless thing.

Wesam El dahabi

I used to have a love affair

I used to have a love affair,
some people were jealous,
some, still are.

I saw words as an escape so far from what I had allowed myself to become, that I could be seen glowing when engrossed in their partioning, like I was a lantern lit and was arranging flowers.

Nowadays, even though the only sound I made in composing those words was the indenting of a pen onto a page, the scathing of a pencil, or the tapping on devices, and with my background in music, I not only instinctually layered my words down in prosaic meter, but also in aural acoustic rhythm that lulled the listener into calm, still I prefer silence over words, even if they are only read and not spoken.

I prefer burying them so deep inside my that they sprout by force into action instead, because they can’t go anywhere else.

And if I can’t action them, boy have I learned to sit in stillness.

And that’s what happens when you follow the prophetic saying of ‘Whoever believes in God and the last hour (meaning they understand in the pits of them we are both collectively going to experience a time where things will end, be it our own personal journey on this earth or our collective human experience where God will sanction the world and all that is in it to end) should speak goodness or remain silent ‘.

It subdues you with and organic resonance, it pumels you and humiliates you kindly without embarrassing you outwardly.

It ironically elevates you to a noble throne of beholding as the world hears nothing but absolute necessity that is good from you.

Thomas Hardy the poet once said, ‘That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to’ and this had caused me great grief and joy. I understand the litmus of it, but I know the sorrow that must insue for the beauty of it to manifest.

And that’s just it. Silence and sprouting actions, have become a state of wonder to observe for me, even though words have always nurutred me into a world of my own, traversed me across lands without moving a muscle, soothed my heart from wretched heart break over heart break, accounted me from guilt so dark and brought me to the surface of being able to deal with myself and amongst other things, being able to curate words has helped me see, feel, express, be a voice, a sound board, a receiving vessel, an ear, a heart and soul for others to pour secrets into me that if I were to divulge would ruin their lives.

And the irony is, it is they who have become silent towards me, 1not for noble development and spiritual enhancement, but rather openly disregardingly, neglectful, ran their tongues with rumor, heresay and false narratives until amongst their circles, they have lulled and comforted themselves into a caricatured meme of me with words and labels they cannot arrange in any particular order to save their souls, to make a coherent, logical nor gramatically correct arrangement, something metrically sound, something prosaically soothing or at the least something from the depths of their hearts, even if expressed dyslexically, but contains beauty in expression, sounds out a sorrow, joy or stoicicm that enhances the reader rather than entrapping them into a sinful state of sharing absolute falsity because it makes for good time fill between unconsciously hating their lives and not amounting to anything of worth and the dopamine hit of being the giver or receiver of backbiting.

Perhaps you will understand why I choose less words, even with a volcanic heart, and what you receive from me, even if you draw your fingers over my writing with caress, assume they were written for you and you alone, you should perhaps know this, I am not even divulging a crumb of who I am, because I am riddled with a fear and insecurity of there ever being a soul out there capable and worthy of catching it all.

Irrespective of their actually being a soul out there with a baseball mitt of a heart, I choose not to let you in, my family and wife absorb and give enough love to me to exist in my silence.

Where this fear and insecurity comes from, I understand and I have married silence enough and we have become intimate beyond acceptability for me to have seen my wounds and hurts sources.

I’ve chosen to sit with them rather than to heal them. I don’t want pity, I loathe hearing voices attempt to understand me.

The prose has to live on, if only as the seed to silence, so I can sprout enough beautiful action and be remembered not for a collection of burnable books or words I write, but an unforgettable pheromone as I walk in a door, a garden that blooms and makes souls happy every spring, a legacy of wisdom that carries on in the veins of my children, something that benefits humanity in the slightest and reminds them, ‘verily actions are by their deeds’, an anecdote of proof for people that God chose to inspire his Prophet to the word ‘action’, not ‘words’, nor even ‘silence’.

Silence is only the catalyst, it is the action that God waits for….. that is prophetically reminded to us, because quite simply, quite plainly, without complication, right there is the fruit that comes from the seed of silence that grows into action.

Wesam El dahabi

Artistic purpose

There is but one singular purpose for the artist, and that’s to purify their art to one ode, one rhythm, one harmony, one line of prose, one sentence. To the magic elixir of our art, the final opus, as clean and pure as it can be.

I don’t think you’re an artist if through all your work, all your searching, all the things you produce, you aren’t driven by the chase of finding that one thing that exemplifies everything you’re trying to achieve.

This extends into the scientific world as well, perhaps even more-so, for what is science if it is driven only by a robotic, lifeless and mostly monetised objective, by a narrative enslaved to restricted paradigms and formulae, how impure a pursuit is science if the scientist isn’t driven by a romantic ideal of discovery and rewriting otherwise dogmatic beliefs? The purity under their microscope, the precision of the one cut of the scalpel, all of it, driven madly by purity of pursuit.

The silver lining is the purpose, as minimal as possible, untainted.

This chase, this desire is but a longing for our origin. We were born pure, and we spend our lives chasing it. Chasing down the reminder of what we once were.

In our innermost core, we’re utterly and magnetically attracted to it. We linger, we pang, we ache, we feign for it.

The addiction can be so overwhelming that we lose our way, much like a madman searching through the forest looking down for their treasure for so long that when they look up, the world seems so disoriented and your location in it all is unknown.

Some people pop, they have enough and cannot contain themselves, either their outer appearance changes to resemble that of a derelict, for what is a homeless person except someone without a place to return to for safeguarding from the elements? Nay, perhaps those people become the elements.

They’ve lost their home or way back to it that they become the elements they’re surrounded by, is it with this subconscious thought that we so numbingly ignore them as we walk past, they, vanish into the environment, into their surroundings?

That’s not how we understand the outer appearance to resemble, and so we label them mad, homeless, worthless because we attach worth to orientation, to a direction, to a purpose. What if their purpose all along was finding that purity and in the method, have become the purity, outward semblance like thorns on a rose, unkempt to keep people away, so they can guard their secret.

The secret in the Sufi path was never to look down on a vagabond, a darwish, a person humbled before God.

It was to treat the faqir, the spiritually impoverished, sometimes appearing as the materially impoverished with the same dignity owed to a sultan.

And so we return to the artist engrossed in their search for purity, perhaps by God’s bounty and generosity He allows beauty or remnants of it to extend to all humanity through their fingers, through their states as a sign for us to be reminded of our purity, without losing our minds.

Perhaps by His largesse He grants the artist temporary sanity to pursue their goal or at least enjoy the process whilst they are alive.

Wesam El dahabi

charade

 

It’s only through utter savagery,
through the comprehension,
of knowing how far I can stretch the extremes of my soul,
torch the very idea of my being,
that I came to terms with all the sensitivity of mankind,
and found intimacy with every pain conceivable.

I bathe in that idea,
I drown in it,
that this world was meant for pain,
and those who avoid it,
who shun waging war inside themselves,
against their own selves,
are only pretending,
to experience pain.

What business do you have calling to it?
Pointing the world to a faux trauma,
idolatry of your false god,
worship of yourself,
and making people bend in guilt?

You’re of the worst kind of decrepit beings,
slithery and poisonous,
you are the illness and the plague,
hash tag your mattering to the world,
hash tag yourself into existence,
hash tag your plight to the devil.

-Wesam El dahabi

 

The serenade of solitude.

The psycho-social pathologies of people approaching relationships in any other way than completely giving of themselves perplex me.

You are given a chance,
to divulge your whole being towards someone and have them do the same in reciprocation and we still approach one another with amputated souls.

Bits of you and bits of me,
is a little too Frankenstein of a relationship for me to spawn life into.

Grotesque, is thus quite a fitting word,
here’s the most vulgar part of me, I care nothing of,
and here’s the remnants of what they want to share back, regurgitated traumas,
damaged and parts beaten to a pulp in the mind fuck,
in the mine fuckery of pseudo vulnerabilities,
everyone armed to the teeth with ego’s and no hearts,
awash with misery and toxic breath,
lip service to love and all that sparkles.

I’ve got a serious distrust of people,
it is tattooed in my brow,
it is heavily abated in my breath,
like a dragon I wait,
for anyone to try their hand.

Some say it is offensive and arrogant to assume so much,
for those people,
cut open your chest and they still won’t see,
let alone feel what you feel.

Alone, remains the most poetic living I have known,
solitude is the serenade of choice,
let the mundane and mediocre,
in their frivolity, rejoice.

W.E.

Introversion – seventy nine

Introversion – seventy nine

A floor,
a wall,
and light that leaks in.

At times, I don’t even want to share myself with furniture.

Solitude with all the groans of a house is enough,
an intimacy of unspeakable proportions.

Ghosts of longing that open and close doors as they wish,
secrets that don’t pass their lips.

This house has an echo of women who have clawed at my skin for a piece of my soul,

ironically making me turn further inwards to flee from myself,
stay somewhere that I can control.

This light that leaks in,
a reminder that I have fissures that open without warning,
bursting with unspeakable sin.

Let this be a warning to my heart,
don’t let them near you,
remain in that room alone!

Insist on your intuition over their appetite,
insist on your vision over their illusions,
insist on your solitude over their lust,
sit in so much stillness,
alone in that empty room,
and be one with the dust.

The souls that endear you will inevitably be near you,
without formality and necessity for introduction,

we were created from an ether in the pre-world,
our souls will always find each other in this world and the next.

W.E.

Am I selfish for not wanting to share myself?

The gist of tye above poem is an apology of sorts,

try as I may, I often disappear into myself,
ironically away from my Self.

That oft gnawing awareness of the faults you harbour,
that slip between your fingers of guilty frivolity,
drowns you in a tug of war,
of second guessing yourself,

and that’s why I recluse,
it becomes a bit too much to swathe in a world of ‘sureness’, people vying to be the first one to be right.

What does it matter who gets to the end first,
if the journey was filled with dishonourable disregard.

There is a way,
I believe it to be quietude and seclusion,
introversion and accountability,
a slowing down rather than speeding up.

I’ve found myself just as many times as I have veered off the path,
only in the cocoon of solitude,
only ever alone.

I have never read of a man of worth or a woman of magnitude that has needed the masses to prop them up and I think it is deep in that wisdom we can find what society so desperately needs.

I will put this post up on my stories as a poll,
I’d like to hear your comments below on the above, even if in private.

introversion – seventy eight

No one gets to go there,
these walls are not scalable, not saleable.

You can’t claw your way in,
you cannot pierce past this skin,

this pilgrimage is reserved for the hermit,
for the inwardly inward, for the withdrawn & within.

I’ve seen your eyes pan,
I’ve seen your desperation for man,
and this whole time you missed the essence of his span.

Wretched carnality, devoid of spirituality,
you’d eat my flesh and spit it out without so much a thought.

I’ve squandered women like you and all their triviality,
I’ve toyed with their insincerity like a sport.

The stench of the ulterior motived precedes them,
their actions are seen in advance by men, real men.

Foresight and experienced in the sinisterism of  hucksters,
gypsy travellers settling on whatever soul lines their sack,
they’ll sell you a love story and break your back.

Burning at the stake is too swift and merciful a punishment,
it’s far easier to immortalise them with rhyme and meter,
and leave them to their ways in banishment.

They ask, “Where does it hurt?”
The reply comes gushing, “the place you couldn’t reach”.

W.E.