Category: mental health
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The Making of a Double Standard
Five years later, we are still reducing women to numbers while men are applauded for the same choices. A woman’s worth is not a body count, a rumour, or a label. Until we confront the double standards we have normalised, we will keep confusing control with morality and shame with virtue.
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The Strong Black Woman Is Tired: Why Survival Is Not a Superpower
“Help me.” From the outside, it looked like strength. Inside, it was survival. In this piece, I reflect on the hidden fatigue behind the Strong Black Woman label and what it means to stop performing resilience for the comfort of others. If you’ve ever been the one expected to hold everything together, this reflection is…
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When Discipline Becomes the Only Language of Love
We often grow up calling pain “discipline” and fear “respect.” But what happens when humiliation becomes the language of love — and we carry that into adulthood? I wrote about a story that stayed with me for years, and what it revealed about how abuse shapes what we tolerate. Change begins when we name what…
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The Discomfort of Becoming: Why Outgrowing Yourself is Necessary.
I used to mistake the discomfort of growth for losing myself. But I realized: I wasn’t losing who I was—I was shedding what I had outgrown. If your cocoon no longer fits, this reflection is for you.
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Aim at Nothing, You Hit Nothing: Why Alignment Matters More Than Goals
A single line from a film stopped me in my tracks: “Aim at nothing, and you hit nothing.” Not because it was profound — but because I finally understood what it wasn’t talking about. This reflection explores why aiming inward matters more than New Year goals.
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From Ranting on Paper to Journaling With Purpose
Do you have a way to process your thoughts and feelings at the end of each day? I do! For years, journaling has been my outlet. My notebooks were full of rants, dreams, raw emotions, and half-finished thoughts. It was cathartic — but it often left me stuck. I could pour everything onto the page,…
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Embracing the Present: Lessons from My Year Off
It has been a while—indeed, it has. When I hit “publish” on December 31st, 2022, I didn’t think it would take me over a year to return to this space. But life, as it often does, had other ideas. The struggle to come back, to write as consistently as I once did, felt like…
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When you are tired, rest!
It was on the third anniversary of this blog, while I struggled to write a post to celebrate, that I finally accepted that I was fatigued. Writing had never been a problem for me – all I needed was a topic I was passionate about and the anniversary post was a chance to talk about…
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Is hitting children discipline?
In many cultures and some religions, physical punishment of children is encouraged – the society I come from encourages this and many people have used a famous Christian bible verse to justify this practice. Years ago, I was sat in a meeting and the speaker who claimed to be passionate about fatherhood, especially for black…
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Time to prioritise your mental health.
Last month, there were a couple of high profile suicides in the news – the talented 26 year old son of one of my favourite actors and a gorgeous 30 year old beauty queen both ended their lives. In that same month, I had been struggling with sleep and my doctor had suggested that I…
Koya Nkrumah 