Today, we feature Aisha Kalson, a magnificent writer, podcaster, and Social Policy graduate. Aisha is the host of her podcast, Aunthetically Blue, which she describes as where vulnerability meets voice. A collection of thoughts, experiences, and soft truths, it explores what it means to feel deeply, grow gently, and move through life with intention—written for anyone finding their way back to themselves.

I met Aisha Kalson during the shooting of SCREAM, a film about survival from sexual violence by her namesake, Bint Aisha. I remember noticing her gorgeous brown eyes first, then her beautiful smile, and later, the warm way she would welcome everyone who came into the space. Then we started working together, and her talent in editing, in interviewing, in writing, and in podcasting blew me away.

Coincidentally, I am featuring her here as we are winding up with the film and are planning its screening, which will happen on 12th April 2026 at Cheche Bookcafe, from 2 PM - 5 PM. If you’d like to attend, kindly RSVP here.

And please get ready to read Aisha Kalson!!!

bY Aisha Kalson

Hello, hello, beautiful readers.

I call my podcast listeners beautiful aliens, and I bet you are one, especially for clicking this.

I am listening to “I am woman” as I type this in the Gambia on the last day of my week-long holiday, and the lyric “I am anything” I want popped up, and I had to do a shimmy dance, because that is what self-love is. It is loving yourself in all your states, the happy, the messy, the goofy, the blue, and even the authentic, mundane moments.

Self-love has evolved for me throughout my life. From a young age, I have been blessed with the opportunity to live in many places and be surrounded by many cultures, religions, traditions, and races. I have been exposed to people of various ages. Something I understood from a young age is YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT, because no one does. There is a lot of pressure and expectations from family, loved ones, and society to conform and follow a certain path. But once you truly accept that life is short and can be cut at any point, everything becomes less deep. Oh gosh, I have gone into my mortal talk.

Circling back to self-love. On my podcast, Authentically Blue, I advocate for how we are always a work in progress. My favorite quote, which I heard from Sophia Bush, is ‘You are allowed to be a work of progress and a masterpiece simultaneously.’ You, beautiful, dear reader, are figuring life out, so are our parents, grandparents, and everyone we know. We all have different life experiences that affect us in more ways than we understand: friends who shape us, triggers that come from the smallest to the randomest things, and our understanding of ourselves. My brother and I grew up in the same house and have very varying views on various things, but it’s beautiful to challenge ourselves and love each other through life.

• Editing note - I read this to my aunt before sending it off, and she reminded me that love is in the simple, mundane moments of life. It is in nature, hearing the birds tweet ( not online tweet), listening to the ocean, touching soil, watching animals, or a butterfly passing - yes, that is a nickname she gave me- as I apparently fly away from people, but I am very beautiful, hehe, so it fits. Self-love is in meditating on the mind, and this can be done anywhere on this planet, from the smallest of villages with no electricity to the bustling cities!

Self-love is one of those things that sounds beautiful in theory. Soft mornings. Journals. Skincare. Affirmations whispered in the mirror. But no one really tells you what it looks like when it’s not aesthetic. For me, self-love has looked like distance. Like choosing not to reply. Like outgrowing versions of myself that once felt like home. It’s looked like sitting with uncomfortable truths instead of romanticising situations that were never right for me.

Self-love is not always kind in the moment. Sometimes it’s firm. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it feels like a loss. I used to think loving myself meant feeling confident all the time. But I’m learning it’s actually about how I hold myself when I don’t. It’s in the way I speak to myself after I’ve made a mistake. It’s in the boundaries I keep, even when I feel guilty. It’s in choosing peace over being understood.

And if I’m honest, there are still days when I don’t feel like I’ve mastered it. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe self-love isn’t a destination. Maybe it’s a practice. A choice you make in small, almost invisible ways: Getting up when your mind feels heavy, letting go of what drains you, staying when things get hard… but leaving when they hurt.

I’m no longer chasing a perfect version of self-love. I’m choosing a real one.

One that allows me to be soft and strong. Certain and unsure. Healing and still human.

And maybe that’s enough.

The lovely Amanda invited me to write this Substack yesterday after I nudged her, hehe, thank you, ma’am. I met Amanda while working on a project ( many more to come). She is a woman who embodies self-love. I was drawn to her beautiful energy. She is confident, adventurous, creative, and so soulful, is that a word? hehe thanks for having me on here:)

— Kalson, from Authentically Blue, for anyone learning to love themselves in real time.

Read more of Aisha Kalson’s work on her Substack here.

Listen to her podcast here:

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share Therapy Sessions

It has been two weeks. I have two more to go on this 30 day challenge. In terms of writing, I have been approaching this challenge with letters I am writing to myself. So far, I have written a letter to myself, and a letter to my hair. Both deeply personal, both containing words I needed to hear. Today, I want to write a letter to my body. This vessel that has been with me all along, carrying me, allowing me to breathe in and out, giving me life. How many times do I really stand in front of it and appreciate it for the wonder that it is?

Unlike my two previous addressees of the letters, I would not say that I am a person who has struggled with loving their body. I have struggled with loving myself, that very essence that makes me me, the soul and the thoughts in my mind. And I have struggled with loving my hair. But my body? At the risk of sounding bragg-ish, my body has always been banging. Except that period in high school when I was a little plump and felt undesirable (but really, who felt secure in high school?), I have always known that I have a sexy-ass body. Ample breasts, small waist, cute butt, smooth skin. It’s a great vessel to wake up in everyday.

But, there is a difference between knowing you have a beautiful body, and intentionally doing things to appreciate the beautiful body that you have. When you have something great, it is easy to take it for granted, to not treat it well, to always assume that it will always be there to serve you when you need to let it out to play and get that person you want. But how many times really, do I stand in front of this body, do I look at it, and not only appreciate it but swear to it that I will take care of it until the end of time? How many times do I allow it to experience the pleasure it deserves? The love? The affection?

Well, that changes today. This marks my third letter of the Self-Love series. A Letter To My Body.

My Dearest Body,

In my meditation practice today, the instructor said to feel you. And not only to feel you but to experience you. I looked at the crescent moon above me, lighting up the sky with its body, then I closed my eyes and imagined you as the moon. I felt the air coming in, and the air coming out of my nostrils. I felt the cold touch my neck, my bare feet, my hands on my thighs. I felt the clothes on my skin —- my brown tights and multicoloured sweater. I felt my hair rising to meet the sky. I felt my face relaxing with the gentle sound of the wind. And then I felt you. You, my body. You holding me, holding me, holding me. How can I ever thank you?

How can you ever forgive me? I have not been a good host. There are times I have felt you are too good for me, and to punish myself for not deserving you, I have mistreated you. I have put things in you that you do not deserve. Unhealthy foods, unhealthy smoke, unhealthy drinks. Unhealthy people. Like a cruel pimp, I have loaned you to other bodies that did not how to build an altar and worship you. I have not worshipped you. I have not leaned and bowed and said : this is my body, you have to learn how to eat it from it. I have not yet learned how to give you pleasure, and I am to blame for it. I am sorry.

I want you to know, it is not your fault. You are beautiful. You are sexy. You are divine. Everytime I catch a reflection of you in the mirror, my steps falter. Sometimes, I discard all my clothes and walk naked just so I could see you in your full glory. And my goodness, are you not glorious? Are you not the most gorgeous body to ever exist! There is not one blemish I can find in you, and I want to say again: I am grateful for you. I am thankful for you.

I am learning to love all aspects of myself , and by far, you are my greatest trophy. There is no one that can compare to you, to what you do to me. You allow me to walk in rooms and belong. You allow me to strut sexily and turn heads. You allow me to be the center of attention. You allow me to build a home in you. You allow me to exist. You allow me to breathe. You allow me to be.

So here is my vow to you, my dearest body. I am with you for a lifetime, just as you are with me for an eternity. I promise to love you fearlessly. I promise to hold you when you are thriving and when you are breaking. I promise to take care of you. I promise to eat more healthily. I promise to establish boundaries when it comes to the people I let near you. I promise to move you. I promise to feel you. And above all, I promise to experience you, as the divinity that you are.

With love and warmth.

P.S. I held the first edition of Therapy Sessions: The Salon two weeks ago, themed on financial literacy.

If you missed it and would still like to experience that process — or simply have the Financial Reflection Guidebook for your own quiet reflection — it’s available for Ksh 500.

Pay via MPESA Till: 3603094
Free delivery within CBD.

Self-Love Resources

Essay I read

• Uses Of The Erotic - Audre Lorde

Podcasts/Videos I watched

1. Treat Yourself Like Someone You Love (How To Learn To Love Yourself) | Adam Roa

2. How to start loving yourself

3. rejection: how to handle it, detach from it & redirect from it

4. Beyond Vision Boards: 100 days of exposure (SOS EP 1)

5. This is how mirror work will completely change how you view yourself🥹🪞✨ (SOS EP 3)

Spotify Playlist containing songs and poems that speak of loving yourself softly

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

And to everyone who was present — Sheila, Sonnie, Trevor, Frank, Oscar, Ken, Tracy, Eileen, Gathoni, DJ Shock —you made the salon the kind of intimate and beautiful and insightful space I envisioned it to be when I was first picturing what Therapy Sessions: The Salons will look like. Thank you so so much for bringing my vision to life.

I would also like to send my gratitude to three special people. Mutinda for your support, Rahmi for your encouragement and for your continued support and Sonnie, for this piece she wrote that captured the event perfectly. Thank you so much.

Everyday, I am reminded that when you send out your intentions to the universe, the universe responds abundantly. This is the kind of message that was loudest in the first edition of the salon, and it is a message that is becoming more and more evident in my life. I am grateful and happy and surrounded by goodness. What else could a girl need?

Turns out, a girl could do with a bit of self-loving, too. Nine days ago, I started my self-love and self-worth journey. In the first piece I wrote on this Self-Love series, I expressed my interest in approaching this journey as letters I am writing to myself. After I wrote the first letter, A Letter To Myself, I started thinking: what would be my next letter addressed to? The answer was very obvious: It was to be a letter addressed to my hair.

Two weeks ago, I cut my three-year-old dreadlocks. They were long; the length almost reaching my mid-back. This length had become a source of admiration for many people who were just starting their loc journeys. “Ghai, I can’t wait for mine to also reach there. Aki si nitafurahiii.” These were the compliments I received, not once, not twice, not even thrice, but many, many, many times. I would receive these compliments with a smile, loving the fact that I had something that people admired, but even as I smiled, I knew, deep down, that I did not feel this great admiration towards my hair as they did.

I locked my hair in June of 2022. The decision was not out of my love for the Rastafari lifestyle, but rather, for the sake of convenience. For as long as I could remember, I have always viewed my hair as something like an inconvenience I had to deal with. Going to the salon was an inconvenience. Trying to figure out what to plait was an inconvenience. Staying with my hair out was not only an inconvenience but also a source of frustration. So, when the idea of having dreadlocks, which rarely required care, was presented to me, of course, I took it. What I did not know is that even locks require care. Even hair deserves love.

This, therefore, marks the subject of my second letter. A letter to my hair, which, finally, I am learning to love.

My Dearest Hair,

I have been with you since that first cry. I imagine you, just a few strands by then, smooth and wet with amniotic fluid. I wailed, and I imagine you rose. You had seen the world for the first time. Perhaps even before I opened my eyes and light flooded into me. You were there, thin and fickle, and against all odds, daring to grow.

I remember you growing. I remember you being long and luscious and beautiful. I remember running around the village, a small girl of six or seven, pleading for her mother to allow her to plait “pussy cat iko na beads” for Christmas. I remember you making me feel pretty. You were a source of so much beauty, so much joy, so much girlhood.

And then, I remember the first time I lost you. We had just moved to Shikoti, and you were a cost we could not afford. Next thing I knew, tears were falling down my cheeks as the barber took the scissors and cut through you. I wept as you fell on the ground. Wept some more at the sight of you, mingled with other strands that did not belong to me, and I knew, then, that I had lost you forever. My hair. My beautiful, long, luscious hair.

The next morning, I shivered as the cold hit my scalp. I was not yet accustomed to the loss of warmth you had provided. I was not ready for what losing you would mean to me. I did not feel pretty anymore. I would look in the mirror, and I would hate the fact that I looked like a boy. I would dream of when you would grow again, but as soon as you did, it was another trip to the barber. I hated the barber, and I dreamed of when I would stop seeing his face.

Finally, that day came. We had become better off. We could afford you. We could afford to take you to the salon and plait you in horizontal lines for school. But this, too, came with pain. The blow dryer, with its hot air and its loud vroom sound, scared me. I cowered at the thought of it touching you. It hurt you. It made you thin and straight and possible for me to run my fingers through you easily, but it hurt you. Beyonce sings: " Pretty hurts”, and I guess she must have been in that chair with me. I guess she knows, too, the pain they put you through.

Slowly, I started losing touch with you. I knew you were supposed to be neat, and I abhorred that process of making you neat. It meant hours seated in the salon, my head being cruelly pushed left to right by hands that did not learn tenderness. It meant the scary blow dryer coming close to you with its heat and making my goosebumps jump to attention. It meant I would come out of there in more pain than I had when I went in, only for the style to last two or three weeks, and I was back in it again. The idea of taking care of you became hell, and I neglected you as a result.

I am sorry.

I am sorry for my neglect. I am sorry for losing touch with you. I am sorry for not caring for you. I am sorry for the hands that did not learn tenderness, teaching me that you were not a tender thing that deserved love. I am sorry for the times I hated the idea of you. I am sorry for always rushing to make you neat, instead of appreciating the glory that you were. I am sorry for thinking you were not beautiful. I am sorry for not knowing that you needed nourishment. I am sorry for not nourishing you. I am sorry for not watering you. I am sorry for not loving you.

I am sorry.

I am here now. I am learning to love myself, and I am learning to love you, too. I am learning to look into the mirror and admire your blackness. Your curls. Your baby strands falling so perfectly and prettily down my face. I am learning to admire you. I am learning to take care of you. I am learning to pour so much joy into you. I am learning to thank you for making me beautiful.

Thank you, my dearest hair.

With Love and Warmth.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Resources

Podcasts

These are the self-love podcasts I listened to these past seven days. I hope listening to them too, will allow you to embrace the journey of starting or continuing to love yourself with tenderness

1. How To Build Self-Esteem and Self-Love - Shimon Davis

2. how to build REAL SELF-LOVE | practical methods to grow it daily, self-love prompts & misconceptions

3. In the case of radical self-love? I’d like to be guilty, your honor - Temina Semo

4. How to build self-worth and stop seeking external validation (with 4 practices) - Dia Jin

5. How to start loving yourself FOR REAL! (step-by-step) - Tiffany Monday

6. The Truth About Self-Esteem No One Ever Taught You - pearlieee

7. THE POWER OF THE BLACK WOMAN’S SELF LOVE JOURNEY | Denise Francis | TEDxQueensVillage

Spotify Playlist

This is a Spotify playlist containing songs and poems that speak about loving yourself softly.

When I started these new changes, the idea of hosting an event, let alone a ticketed one, had not crossed my mind! And now, here we are, a month later, and I have organized the first ever event of my life, and I keep meeting people who want to pour into it as much as I do, and you guys have paid for the event because you believe in this vision and Oh, I am so immensely filled with gratitude I could burst. From the deepest deepest parts of my heart, thank you, thank you.

This first edition of the salon is themed Financial Literacy, and it is a culmination of my 30-day money journey. I learnt a lot, and continue to learn a lot, and the idea of the salon was a way for me to share this knowledge and allow others to also share, have conversations and reflect on their financial life. The event is happening in three days, on the 14th March 2026. If you haven’t yet secured your space, please do so. I promise, this one will be one for the books. (see below a poster with all the details)

Now, that said (or is it written?), it is important for me, and for you, dear reader, to remember that Therapy Sessions has two other pillars other than Financial Literacy. And today is the day I introduce the second pillar: Self Love & Self-Worth. Prior to writing this, I was debating whether to write it at all, because the truth of the matter is that I have an event in three days, and I should be hyping it in everything I write or post if I am to meet the targets I have set for myself. But, the other truth of the matter is that there are other things happening in my life other than the event, and one of these things is that I have already started my 30-day Self-Love & Self-Worth journey, and I am on day 2.

Today, in the morning, I was thinking: will it be off center if I write on this so close to the event? But then I had a thought: my financial life is tied to my self-worth. These are not two separate things I am writing about. They are actually quite tied together. When you love yourself, when you value yourself, heck, when you believe you are worthy of good things, the money will follow.

Alright, enough yap-writing. Let’s get into my Self-Love journey. The thing is, I want to approach this a bit differently from my money journey. During my money journey, I listened to a lot of podcasts, and I would sit down with the knowledge and dispense it in the form of essays here. In my self-love journey, I am still listening to a lot of podcasts, still doing Yoga and Meditation, still eating healthy. But, the change comes in terms of the writing. I would like to approach the writing of this journey in the form of letters addressed to myself because, what is more romantic than love letters? And what is even more romantic than writing a love letter to yourself?

So here it goes.

Letter #1.

A Letter To Myself

My Dearest Amanda,

I have lived a thousand lifetimes with you, which is to say, I have held you in this country and its cacophonies and I have watched you walk through grief and emerge into bloom. You thought you would never be able to sing again. But look at you. Standing center stage. A spotlight shining bright as you open your throat and release the song stuck in it.

You remind me of a bird. You remind me of the sky too; all whites and blues and yellows and oranges but sometimes, grays too. Sometimes storms and thunders so loud you can barely breathe. But remember, rain is a source of growth too. If you listen closely, to the pattering of it, the sound of it as it seeps into your skin, you will see the flowers growing and expanding into someone bigger than you thought you could be.

You are the rain, and you are still the sunshine. You are beautiful and magnificent and powerful beyond measure. And yet, you have spent years hiding this fact from yourself. Like a wounded child, you have spent years in the corners, afraid to take that one brave step into the light. You have been broken as a result. You have smiled when your heart was shattering. You have cried yourself to sleep; body shaking so vigorously it almost broke your spirit. You have contemplated not existing; even going as far as romanticising the idea of it. The peace that it will bring! Surely, something else would be better than this pain.

And yet, in those darkest moments, and even more so in the flickerness of the light in these moments, you never stopped looking for it in everyone you met. That love. That deep unconditional, “I would die for you” love. That “I will hold you through everything” love. That softness, that gentleness, that warmth you yearn for.

You have been unlucky on all counts and you have blamed yourself for it. If only I was more understanding. More forgiving. More confident. More loving. More sexy. More prettier. More accomodating. More into them. More sacrificial. More into the things they were into. More culinary skills. More romantic. More faithful. More generous. More kinder. MORE. MORE. MORE.

You have tried to be MORE, but at what cost?

My dearest Amanda, I say this with all the love I have for you now: you never needed to be MORE anything. That thing you have been searching for in other people, you already had it inside you all along. You had the warmth, you had the beauty, you had the sexiness, you had the forgiveness, you had the ability to hold yourself in this country and its cacophonies and emerge into bloom. You are all these wonderful things. And most importantly, you had love because you are the love.

You are the love. You are the love. You are the love.

Please never forget that.

With Love and Warmth.

Resources

Podcasts

1. WAYS TO *ACTUALLY* PRACTICE SELF LOVE | healing guide + inner work & being your own best friend - A Better You Podcast

2. how to BUILD a relationship with yourself, especially if you’re anxiously attached. - Glow Up Secrets Podcast

Spotify Playlist:

I’d highly recommend listening to this playlist. It has wonderful poems and songs that speak to loving yourself softly.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Today, while I was in the salon getting a pedicure, I opened my WhatsApp and Olive “The Bee” Bii had sent me this piece to publish. “Wrote a piece for your guest column today,” she had typed, and I was overjoyed just looking at that message, and even more excited when I read it, and felt extremely honoured that she chose to share this piece here. Bii, thank you for your words. Your writing reminded me that there are writers and people out here who are resonating with what I put out, and I am grateful beyond comprehension.

Please get ready to read Olive “The Bee” Bii!!

By Olive “The Bee” Bii

‘Sasa ukidedi leo, hiyo pesa umesave, nani atakulaaaa??’(paraphrased)

I grew up thinking poverty was the default. Like, everyone was born and destined to be poor, and only the lucky, evil few became rich. I can’t count the number of times I pointed at something on the supermarket shelf that I wanted, and my mother told me, ‘Hakuna pesa’ or ‘Si saa hii’. What did that do to an impressionable six-year-old? Teach her that money was scarce.

Still, seeing my father come home tired after work in a bad mood and not wanting to talk taught me that money was something that required strenuous amounts of effort to acquire. The last straw was when my father beheaded my extremely beloved robot girl toy to use as a lamp stand for his moonlighting egg business. From that simple act, I learnt that, to get money, I had to make painful sacrifices.

I only started to see money as something that could happen for someone like me when I first stepped into my sister’s apartment on the outskirts of Nairobi. Her house was so well-arranged. So simple yet so tastefully designed. That rewired my whole money mindset. I started to think that maybe, just maybe, my dream of being a rich woman would maybe somehow not be as delulu as I thought.

Over the years, I have learnt so much about money and how to manage it. Today, I will teach you two important lessons. So, you can all get told, ‘Na unakaa pesa!’ like me. Even when you have just 1 bob to your name.

1. Attaching Our Worth to Money/ Money beliefs.

This was my biggest money weakness. When I had money, I felt like I could fly. Like I was Muhammad Ali. Like no one could touch me. Having money in abundance gave me delusions of grandeur in a way nothing else in my life ever had. And what did this teach me? To constantly chase it. Because in my mind, it was something that was always running away from me, always ending.

Money was arriving in my account, and before it even sat and rested and acclimated itself with the environment, it was out and into another account. You see, I have ADHD. Essentially, it’s a dopamine deficiency that makes you seek dopamine in every way you can get it. And money is the ultimate dopamine boost. I’m not P-Square, but ADHD was chopping my money left, right and centre. Up till I found out that impulsive spending was one of the symptoms of ADHD, I just thought something was wrong with me, and I was just very irresponsible and careless. But it wasn’t that way at all.

Now, I am actively learning that my worth is rooted in my very existence and being. Not in any material things or amounts of money I could ever have. I have discovered other ways to boost my dopamine in order to not lean on money as a way to boost my dopamine and my self-worth. I’m currently in a financial valley, and I have successfully rewired my brain to know that I am worthy and enough, whether I have 30000 bob or 24.02 bob.

It’s been a hell of a ride trying to unlearn beliefs reinforced for years upon years. But now I’m finding out that money is abundant. And that the universe will always, always provide for me. I am rewiring my beliefs to, ‘Money flows to me easily, money flows to me often. I am someone who has money. Money is safe here.’ I am relearning to budget in a way that works for me, not in the way that everyone is taught they must do. I am realising that my dynamic with money is just like a human relationship. When I open my heart and create space for it to come and stay (structures, e.g., separate accounts and systems), it comes, and it stays. But if I think of it as the root of all evil, it stays far away from me.

2. Uses of money/ True source of money.

Money is for bigger use than for our self-image and individual needs. Obviously, we want to look good, slay, and have the coolest, latest gadgets and designer stuff. That’s what we’ve seen as the measure of success everywhere we look. But let me tell you something I found out. True money is quiet and calm. It has no point to prove. I always thought I wanted the big, flashy life. But I’m not sure anymore.

Anyway, I think money should be used to meet our needs, help us to acquire more skills and to help others. In an individualistic society, helping others is seen as weakness and stupidity. But I have seen how generosity circulates resources and opens doors for more money to come through. Ever noticed how when you send your friend some money, you get some more almost immediately, if not within days? When you open your hands to give, you receive. Closed hands don’t receive money, in the same way closed mouths don’t get fed.

Let me let you in on a secret. Money is not a result of effort. It is a result of internal energy. Money is a direct result of providing value and aligning with our purpose. So, you can do a million tiny odd jobs and go back home at midnight, but you may sometimes find yourself perpetually broke. Partially because the energy you’re operating from is that you need to work really hard for money, that money only comes if you work very hard. But many businesspeople and people in non-conventional careers often make more money long term, even when their work is not as strenuous and has less security than a traditional office job. Why? Because they often are aligned with their strengths, talents and purpose and provide value exactly where they feel they are aligned. Most of our money blocks are caused by misalignment, negative beliefs and mindsets, and getting stuck in jobs we hate because they keep the lights on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t work to pay your bills. I’m saying you should reflect on what life you want to lead long-term, so you don’t get stuck in a loop of unhappiness if you refuse to heed the calling that is your purpose.

Konklushen.

The more I know about money, the more I realise I know nothing. Sometimes the pressure gets to me, and I remind myself that nothing happens instantly. It’s a process. Just like Avatar Aang had to master how to control all the elements, you need to learn *how* to be a money bender.

And you learn day by day. There’s no ‘get rich quick’ scheme. I want to live a fine life, but I also want to have true bonds with the people I love. True wealth comes from a rich spirit, a rich mind and a rich soul. You are not how much you have, regardless of what the world tells you. Love and light. *virtual hugs*

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Did you enjoy reading Olive “The Bee” Bii? Oh, I bet you did, and boy oh boy, do I have some news for you! Bii has a Substack, where she publishes her great, witty pieces. Read, follow, and subscribe to her Substack: Kween Bee Mashine, and I guarantee you, you will leave there laughing.

And if you loved this particular writing, I bet you will enjoy the conversations in the first edition of Therapy Sessions: The Salon, themed Financial Literacy. Currently, there is an International Women’s Day offer running until tomorrow, 10th March. Hurry and get your ticket! I would really love to have you in the room.

Yesterday, after scheduling Marie’s piece for publication, I quickly checked my WhatsApp and found a surprise waiting for me there. Gladys, an amazing writer, poet, and, do I dare say, curator of art conversations, had sent me a piece she had written for Therapy Sessions. It was such a wonderful surprise, seeing that I was not expecting it, and even more so, because the content of her piece felt like words of affirmation I needed to hear as I continue in this money journey. Reading it, you will find that it shares some lifeline with Marie’s words, and again, I am reminded of why sharing our thoughts is important. Thank you, Gladys, for these words.

Please get ready to read: Gladys!!

bY Gladys Njamiu

If creativity were a room and life a house, and the corridors procrastination, then I am moving from one room to another. Too anxious to stay still in any, and too guilt-ridden for not sitting still. Perhaps the word “sitting” appears a lot in this paragraph as a reminder of how far I have come (guys, I often forgot the difference between seat and sit, shout out to Keith for the correction).

Anyways, grab a seat, let’s talk.

I’m thinking of a quick introduction. As mentioned earlier, creativity and I... At the moment, I am not living creatively. Not only am I not creating, but even my house, my hair, my sensuality, and my food are not creative. Creativity has become a room in which I check, I romanticise about it, and before the juices start to flow, I run away.

We all love Amanda’s work, don’t we? I have been keenly following the Finance Conversations, and as the month comes to an end (If you haven’t read her work, Amanda shared three goals with us, and each month she picks a goal, talks about it, journals, thinks about it extensively, then proceeds to the next goal).

As we put a pause on the financial conversation, I have something to say.

You must believe people like you deserve the money you want. Self-concept: how we see ourselves. A culmination of our self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-acceptance plays a vital role in your money story.

What I liked about this series is that we did not start with “This is the amount of money I hope to make in 30days”. It is a gentle walk through the problem. We talked about our money wounds. We explored our money beliefs and money stories, but the icing on the cake, I would say cherry, but I love icing, is believing that you, exactly the way you are, deserve the money and the experiences this money brings you.

In 2022 & 2023, I was pretty industrious. I had a business and a remote job ( academic writing, but let’s glorify it). I was also a lucky student; my mum paid all my bills. So, my money was long. In 2025 and 2026, I have had a single job at a time, paying my own rent, feeding myself, educating myself... In short, my money is short! Too short. But the experiences I am getting, the things I get to try, cannot compare to when my money was long.

Of course, we cannot compare the taste of a twenty-two-year-old me and a seasoned twenty-five-year-old me. But we can compare the mindset. In 2022, I believed only super creative poets deserved to attend poetry events. I am a much shittier poet in 2026, but I am hosting poetry nights and attending poetry events. I thought only good writers should submit their work, but here I am, with slight growth in my work, and here I am, pitching myself ( I hope Amanda says yes, hihi).

This popular phrase, “money cannot buy happiness”, I believe it’s true! Let me cook! Let me cook, guys... Assuming you have all the money that you think you need, if you do not believe you deserve the opportunities that come with money, then you will fuck it up. You know that stereotype? Wealthy people have no taste? Or those of us who went spree shopping and ended up with things we cannot imagine liking? Or you got paid and bought so much food that it ended up rotting?

Well, what happened between 2025 & 2026? In 2024, I was in therapy (period!). And for twelve sessions, we discussed self-concept. We discussed how I viewed myself. We dismantled old beliefs, and I was left to create a new identity. In my new identity, I believed I was worthy of good things, of good feelings, of money, of gifts, and of good mornings. And guess what, even with my limited resources, I am having amazing experiences. My money is limited, but the gifts keep finding me. The money is limited, but Mount Kenya looks amazing every day on my way to work.

Please don’t get me wrong, yes, the money is coming. But you must look at yourself, exactly as you are, and affirm that people like you deserve money. People like you deserve the opportunities that money and wealth bring.

That’s all from me. I am grateful this series offered the opportunity to dust off this writer’s block.

This knowledge is a result of:

- You’re a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero

- Erik Erikson's Stages of Development ( explain how our upbringing affects our self-concept)

- Exploring the Root, Sacral, and Solar Plexus Chakras. The Root Chakra reminds us we are children of the earth and therefore deserve to be taken care of. The solar plexus reminds us that we have it in us to go after the things we want. And the Sacral Chakra reminds us to enjoy the pleasures of this world. Might I add the throat chakra, i.e., negotiating better pay and self-advocating.

- Exploring what Self Concept is, (a quick Google search will suffice.)

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

If you enjoyed reading this, you will enjoy the first edition of Therapy Sessions: The Salon, theme, Financial Literacy. It will be a guided journaling session where you will write through your relationship with money and join thoughtful money conversations to discover your personal financial journey.

See further details on the poster below:

Today, I am very excited to welcome back a writer and a friend — Marie Wamakima. Marie’s piece, Creative Burnout, was the first guest piece I published on Therapy Sessions. She was the first writer who trusted me with her work, and coincidentally, she is also the first person whom I am featuring since the new changes here at Therapy Sessions. Marie, thank you for your trust, for the laughter, for your wisdom, and most importantly, for writing this piece.

Please get ready to read: Marie!!

bY Marie Wamakima

‘Tumia pesa ikuzoee’, those were the words neatly calligraphed on the bus’s mud flap in front of me. And as I reread the text, a soft buzzing slowly erupted on the edges of my body, slowly lifting the hairs on my skin. It was as if I was suddenly liberated from an invisible bondage. Needless to say, that became my mantra every single time I splurged. Or needed more pocket money. Or used my savings. It’s as if I had been waiting my whole life for someone to give me permission to use money.

I wasn’t always like this. Up until I was 15, I always accounted for every single cent I spent, and saved my pocket money till the end of term so that I wouldn’t strain my parents’ pockets asking for transport.

But as we all know, it’s not always easy to shake off some habits. Over the years I would still find myself doing the math every time I went out, and it always left a bad taste in my mouth. I would brood over my ‘reckless’ spending and worry about where I would get my next cent. You see, having money was a convenience for me; it promised to fill the hole my lackluster life created. It would raise my social status and magically increase my self-esteem. It was the answer to all my problems. And that’s how I got into hustling.

I looked for a job as a supermarket attendant immediately after high school. I bumped into a church homie of mine, and while I was still trying to place where I knew her from, she rambled on about how she had moved to our then town because she was married. The shock of learning that just buffered my recognition mode more, because what do you mean you’re already married at 18? Si utafute pesa kwanza? Anyway, I shrugged it off and she hooked me up with the job. I didn’t get an opportunity to start because my mum thought I should enjoy the break; I would have a lot of time to work in the future; jobs weren’t going anywhere. (Hehehe, future me here, if only she knew).

Fast forward to my second year on campus, and my grandma helped me find a job at a chemist which I did for two months before I quit. The money sustained me for a bit and then I got the brilliant idea to sell clothes. I was fed up with having to recycle the same old outfits I had since I was 14, and I decided to sell them and get new ones. I approached my dad with the idea and with the way he quietly looked at me, I assumed he thought his baby girl had gone mad. I retreated to my room and decided I would do it with or without his approval and devised a new way to get to the market. Surprisingly, though, in the morning he asked me to get ready so he could take me there. I don’t know what made him change his mind. Maybe he figured that if I was anything like him, I was stubborn.

So, by 10:00 am I was outside Rongai Supermarket, my clothes neatly arranged in columns on a gunia, and me sat on the ledge of a water trench. The morning traffic was slow, and I found myself dozing off now and then. By 12:00 p.m. I was about to give up, when another trader, a shoe seller, settled next to my spot and started yelling at the top of his lungs. I stared at him for a good 5 minutes; this brave and unashamed man and a scream quickly welled up in my lungs. Within seconds, I was also shouting, ‘BEI MIA! BEI MIA! ZOTE NI SOO! BEI MIA!’. It felt exhilarating, and when I turned into my right, he was looking at me, an amused twinkle in his eyes. Before long the rest of the traders had joined in the hubbub and the air was filled with a cacophony of different sounds from deep basses to high-pitched shrills.

By the time my dad came for me, I had made 800 shillings, and one of my customers was my high school friend. I remember that she bought a sheer blouse that my mum had given me. I was over the moon. And I couldn’t wait for the following Sunday to go back. Only for the day to arrive and my dad to adamantly refuse to take me. Apparently, he had stayed behind and watched me the whole time, and he decided that no child of his would become a hawker. It didn’t matter that I was completely thriving at it. Afterwards, I thought about packaging the burnt charcoal in our store and selling it, but my dad wasn’t having any of it.

I tried to find a different source of income and in my fourth year, I started a coffee and mandazi business. And I made a decent amount of money that, at times, I didn’t need pocket money. I guess I could say that this was the focal point of my relationship with money. I started making plans to expand into a fruit and juice business. I had it all planned. Within no time, I would be well settled before graduation. And then God laughed. And all my zeal and ambition disappeared in a puff of smoke. Then COVID-19 spread to Kenya, and before we knew it, we were under lockdown. That didn’t bother me as much because we were all, in a way, in the same boat. Then a year later the lockdown was lifted and that’s when it started biting me hard. It was all I could do to not sink into a depressive episode.

I started an errand business, but it didn’t take off. I applied to work as a club waitress. I knew nothing about cocktails or alcohol. (I know some of my friends will be surprised to learn this, hehe, I wasn’t always a boozehound), I applied for internships, and I got next to no responses. And, the thought itself of being broke broke something in me, so much so that I decided to look for a god of riches, because the one I was taught wasn’t helping me out. Yes, I read all about Hades and his wife, Persephone, and even researched ways to worship him. Did I mention that I had even considered using men as a source of income at one point? It was that bad. I had to get this money one way or another.

And what desperate need did I want to fulfill, you may wonder? Did I need to move out or perhaps further my education, you might ask? Nope, I just needed money for clothes, shoes, hair, nails, and outings. And that is exactly what I bought when I finally got my first sales job. And although it wasn’t much, I felt comfortable knowing that I could get these things for myself. And for a long time, even with my unstable career progression, I believed that I had to work for money. When I was working, my mind was at peace, and when I was not, I anxiously bit my fingernails trying to find my next source of income.

Until a few years ago when I bumped into another belief: Money is energy and it exists in abundance; just as there is never a lack of air, there is no lack of money. When I first heard this, I snorted because that was the most new-age balderdash I’d ever heard. But the more I looked into it, the more it made sense. There was no quantifiable amount of money that could ever be enough. For someone like Wanguku Al Madeni 001, emptying the national coffers will never be enough for him. He even needs it in offshore accounts because apparently the entry to the netherworld is in foreign currencies. And, for Sifuna he’s just glad that he’s able to live in a house with an upstairs, feed his family and has no ambitions past having the senate seat. There’s no exact science or measurement to having enough.

Then it clicked for me. It all boiled down to feeling that you have enough. The mindset that Amanda talks about in her recent financial literacy blogs. And about four to six months ago, I started deciding that I have enough and started feeling that I have enough. Even when I was operating on the negative side in my M-Pesa, I decided that I would always get the money I need when I need it. I guess, subconsciously, I did hold this belief because it always proved true. I never realized it, though, because I was always focused on the perceived lack of it. And, since my spiritual beliefs rely on believing before seeing, it became easier and easier to believe that I am monied.

So, what’s my relationship status with money? I no longer desperately chase after it. I know I can always have whatever I want when I want it, just by believing that I do. I know that I am taken care of regardless of whatever financial situation I am in. I saw a TikTok that said nobody knows how a heart starts beating, or how a tree grows, or what causes the sun to rise. But they do. They are. And in the same way, I am.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Thank you for reading Marie’s piece, “Talk Money To Me.” It was beautiful, wasn’t it?

For me, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There is something powerful about witnessing someone articulate their money journey so honestly — the hustles, the shifts, the slow rewiring from scarcity to seeing money as energy. As abundance. As something that can move toward you, not just away from you.

Reading her piece reminded me of why I started Therapy Sessions in the first place. Because when one person speaks honestly about her financial story, it echoes something in the rest of us. Our details may differ, but the emotional undercurrent — the fear, the resilience, the desire for more — is often shared.

That interconnectedness is the foundation of Therapy Sessions: The Salon. A physical room where we don’t just read about our struggles; we also write about them. We examine them. We speak about them. And together, we begin the process of healing communally.

The first edition is on Financial Literacy. It will be a guided journaling experience built around a Financial Reflection Guidebook I prepared — filled with structured prompts designed to help you examine your money wounds, the financial realities you carry, and what it truly means to respect money.

If you are currently on a financial journey, or if you know you need to start one, this session is for you.

Because reading someone else’s clarity is powerful, but writing your own can change everything.

Date: 14th March 2026
Venue: Santuri Salon
Entry: Ksh 1000

Let’s continue the conversation. This time, in a room.

Initially, I had set out to write essays each week to bring you along with me on what I was learning. I have already written two essays — Excavating My Money Wound, and Money Wants To Be Respected — and yesterday, I was supposed to write another one, but had another thought instead. Why don’t I put into practice all I have been learning? Show, not tell. That is the golden rule of life, right?

So, it is in this spirit that I am expanding Therapy Sessions into more than just a Substack space and into a business. Yesterday, I spent hours on end creating the concept of this business, and I would like to share it here as a way of taking that first step in my entrepreneurship journey. I will appreciate any comments, feedback, or a new way of thinking regarding this concept.

That said, please allow me to reintroduce myself.

What Is Therapy Sessions?

Therapy Sessions is a literary platform that explores topics of personal development with a focus on Financial Literacy, Self-love & Self-Worth, and Confidence (read: sexiness). Published weekly on Substack, the space is expanding to monthly physical salons where the guests will explore their growth journey using a guidebook with prompts that encourage them to discover their path to a more fulfilling life through writing. In this way, Therapy Sessions become a space to heal communally through words.

The Background

Therapy Sessions was started by Amanda Nechesa, a writer and poet based in Nairobi, Kenya. In January 2025, Amanda felt the need to create her own space where she could write and freely publish her thoughts and feelings. Substack was an easy choice in that it provided her with that urgency and agency. As she continued writing, Amanda discovered something powerful — her writing, which she had committed to publishing every Wednesday, was slowly starting to heal her. By the time 2025 ended, she had become more confident, she had begun to value and love herself more and as a result, more opportunities had started flowing her way. It seemed to her that by writing on her Substack, she had quite accidentally created her own Therapy Session sanctuary.

Another thing also happened in the middle of 2025. At this time, Amanda was getting more opportunities to be in creative spaces. She was interacting with a lot of artists, but more specifically, it was the female creatives and writers who held her attention. The more she interacted with them, the more she realized that the stories they often talked about related to hers or gave her a different perspective on her life. This prompted her to introduce a segment in Therapy Sessions, where each month, she would publish a piece by a female writer. This was a way for her (and her readers) to get different perspectives of multiple women and recognize that our wounds, joys, frustrations, happiness, and sadness are often the same. This, too, was a way of healing communally.

So far, Therapy Sessions has published nine intelligent and ferociously-talented female writers. They include: Marie Wamakima, Kirigo Murage, Benter Marion, Ruth Mwanza, Salama Wainaina, Bint Aisha, Natasha Muhanji, Sheila Ngei, and Rehema Zuberi.

The Three Pillar Method

When 2026 rolled around, Amanda was quite proud of the work she had done so far with Therapy Sessions, and even moreso, the work Therapy Sessions had done for her. But something was still missing. She was still publishing every Wednesday, and while she previously prided herself on the fact that she came to the page unstructured and let her thoughts guide the way, she now recognized that to make this space into something more fulfilling, not only for her but also for her readers and her community, she needed a bit more structure. That is when the Three-Pillar method came in.

The Three-Pillar method is simply three major things that you consciously decide to work on, one at a time, for a specific period of time, to grow as an all-rounded person. For Amanda, once she did self-auditing, she came to a conclusion that the three pillars that are important to her and that she wanted to work on were: Financial Literacy, Self-Love & Self-Worth, and Confidence (read: sexiness).

The plan is to work on these three pillars for 30 days each. For those thirty days, she would abstain from personal distractions and instead put her focus on moving her body each day and learning more about the topic of the month. If, for example, it is 30 days of Financial Literacy, then her typical day would look like this: waking up, doing her preferred exercise, eating a healthy breakfast, listening to a podcast about financial literacy while taking notes. Then, every Wednesday, she would get on her substack and reflect on what she had learnt during the week as a way to reflect on what she had learnt. This, she found, was a way to engage not only her mind but the minds of Therapy Sessions readers.

The Three-Pillar method is available and accessible to anyone who is willing to try it out. The rules are simple, and there are also three!

1. Do a self-audit to discover what three areas of your life you want to work on. For some, it could be their relationships (whether romantic, friendships or family), for others, it could be their careers (advancing or getting into new ones) or it could be their creativity (drawing or writing, or creating more), etc., etc.

2. Once you identify these three areas, choose a period of time that you will comfortably and honestly see yourself committing to consistently. It could be a thirty-day period, or a 20-day period, or even a 10-day period. The point is, during this time, you do away with all your distractions and put all your focus on your chosen pillar by educating yourself more on it. If you want to get a promotion at work, for example, listen to podcasts or read books that will equip you with these tools. If you want to build a business, the same logic applies. We live, fortunately, in an era of information, and you can access all the information you need with a click of a few buttons.

3. Set a reward for yourself. This reward can be something like going to that concert you have always wanted to go to, or going on a solo date, or maybe even going outside to a party if you had to take a break from drinking as a distraction. The point is, the reward should be something that will make you happy, and something that you are looking forward to when you complete each day of your “focus” period.

P:S Do not forget to include an exercise a day in your routine too. Even a daily ten-minute walk or a thirty-minute home workout with a guide from YouTube can do wonders to your mind.

The Salon

So far, Therapy Sessions has become three things: A space for personal healing, a platform to publish female writers, and an advocate for the three-pillar method. But, there is a fourth step that Therapy Sessions has not explored yet, and this step lies in creating a physical space where readers and like-minded people can meet, converse, and grow together. This is what The Salon will be.

A Brief History of Salons

What is a salon? One might be wondering. A salon is a curated space where, often, intellectuals and artists gather to discuss a topic. Think of it as a room full of people who are all curious or want to learn more about one specific topic and have gathered for the sole purpose of conversing and discussing ideas around this theme.

Salons were first introduced and hosted by women in 17th-century England. Since at that time women were not allowed to be formally educated, they found ways to learn about the world and art, and one of these ways was hosting salons. They would invite male poets, writers, painters, and the educated to a specific venue, mostly their households, and this would become a space to foster deep and intellectual conversations.

Anyone who was considered smart or artistic would get an invite. As a result, many original thoughts that we have now come to learn and enjoy in today’s 21st century about art, science, and politics were discussed or discovered in these salons. The women were not just hosts, they were trend setters even before the word ‘trends” was added to the dictionary.

Therapy Sessions: The Salon

The idea behind Therapy Sessions: The Salon borrows a lot from what the 17th-century English women introduced, but with a bit of a twist. Apart from just creating a space for deep conversations on certain topics, Therapy Sessions: The Salon will also feature a physical guidebook that will prompt the guests to reflect on their growth journey. Occasionally, Therapy Sessions will also invite a guest who is an expert on the topic to offer their insights in order to help the guests build a more fulfilling life. The main topics that The Salon will cover will closely borrow from Amanda’s own growth journey, and as such, the topics will be on: Financial Literacy, Self-Love & Self-Worth and Confidence (read:sexyness).

Some Rules

The main aim for Therapy Sessions is not to become a community, although that will be an inevitable development considering the kind of topics it tackles, but rather for it to be a business. As such, some things need to be made clear.

1. Therapy Sessions is not an alternative to medical and certified therapy. Amanda Nechesa is not a licensed therapist, and the name Therapy Sessions is merely a suggestion of how she personally uses writing and journaling as a form of therapy. If you are dealing with mental health challenges, please seek professional therapy services.

2. Therapy Sessions: The Salon will not be free events. They will be ticketed for the guests who want to attend to cover the cost of the venue, the printing and creation of the guidebooks, the cost of the expert opinion (if any is coming in), and to help in giving back by starting to pay the female writers who will be published in the space.

3. Under no circumstances will any form of bigotry, harmful language, or emotional and physical abuse be tolerated in this space. If you are interacting with Therapy Sessions, either as a reader or a guest of the salon, you are required to respect the opinions of everyone present and not cause harm to other parties. Failure to do so will have you blacklisted from The Salon and blocked from reading the Substacks.

In Conclusion

Thank you for taking the time to move through this brief guide to Therapy Sessions. I hope that Therapy Sessions grows into more than a successful business. I hope it becomes a steady, thoughtful space — one that supports reflection, encourages honesty, and gently walks alongside others on their personal journeys.

See you on the other side of therapy.

With love and warmth,

Amanda Nechesa.

Founder, Therapy Sessions

If you are interested in attending the first edition of Therapy Sessions: The Salon, please fill out this form.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

As I have become more immersed in my meditation practice, I have found that taking a moment to breathe can change your brain chemistry in small but significant ways, allowing you to focus on the task or piece at hand rather than letting past and future distractions divert your attention. I am hoping all of you breathed with me, so let us begin.

Last week, I excavated my money wound. I wrote at length about how little I valued money, and how much I had no control over how it came into my life, and little to no desire for how to make it. For years, I have been my biggest obstacle when it came to improving my financial life, and for years, this information was hidden from me, by me. So, when I started to consciously start seeking money, I didn’t understand why it did not come, or even when it did, why it did not stay. The simple reason, I have come to realize, is this: I did not respect money.

Think of it like this: let’s say you have a crush on someone, and you want to make them go home with you (hihi). Obviously, before even thinking of them naked in your bed, whispering sweet things to you, there has to be, first, a reason why you have a crush on them. It is either their physical appearance attracted you to them, or their intellect drew you in, or their confidence, or their talent. There has to be something you first respected about them, and after that, gradually, your feelings start to develop. You want to be near them, if only to breathe the same air they breathe and experience what it is to be them or with them.

If your feelings align, you find that they are also attracted to you. In the beginning, it might simply be because of your interest in them, but when they see and notice how much you actually respect and value their insights, appearance, talent, or intellect, they begin to develop a curiosity towards you, too, until, eventually, they are falling for you.

Now, money is the same way. For you to build a healthy relationship with your money, you first have to respect money. In this podcast episode, Lewis Howes says: Money wants to be respected. You cannot hate money and expect it to come to you. The same way you cannot hate someone and expect them to like you, is the same way you cannot devalue money and expect it to flow towards you. This is why it is so important to first know what our money wounds are, because more often than not, they are the cause of our disrespect towards money.

If, let’s say, for example, you grow up believing that all rich people have scammed their way into their wealth. This means that you will always view money and people with money as less than in terms of their moral standards, and by default, you will see your lack of money as, yes, a struggle, but also as a stamp of your higher moral authority because at least you didn’t scam your way into a rich life like them. You will, consciously or subconsciously, always be judging those who are financially well-off, and turn yourself into some sort of suffering vigilante for the poor.

This kind of mindset is dangerous. Any attempts you make towards being financially stable will always lead back to zero because, every time you really begin to make or understand how to make money, you will feel like you are betraying yourself, and by default, you sabotage your efforts and remain poor. It’s a bad state to live in, but at the time you are living in it, there is no denying that it has some romantic connotations to it, such that by holding on to these beliefs, you always feel like you are living out a montage of your life, and not your real life. For a creative person, especially, it is very alluring to be in this dreamlike state, but if you want to make money, real money, you unfortunately have to live in the real world, where money is respected.

Heal your money wound, is all I am saying.

Money Respects Systems

Okay, so now, you have healed your money wound by slowly learning how to respect money. Cool. But how does this money actually come to you and, more importantly, stay with you?

The first thing to do is to build systems that money will respect.

Let’s go back to our crush scenario. So, let’s say this crush of yours has noticed you noticing them, and they are curious about you, too. Now, they come into your life, but you have no actual ways to sustain them or their interests. Their being there is by no means adding value to them, or to you, for that matter, because you simply continue to exist as you did before, not considering that after you get what you want, you need to make them stay and grow with you. Eventually, what will this crush of yours do? They will lose interest and leave, and you will be left wondering why they did when you never had any systems in place to actually make them stay.

Money respects systems. Money is a babygirl that wants to know that she is well thought of, that she is valued, that you are putting in effort to make her grow into the most beautiful version of herself that she could be. Money wants you to want her every day. It wants you to think about her when you are showering, cooking, walking, singing, jumping, praying, laughing. Money wants you to talk about her to your friends and family. She wants to be flexed. Money wants to make you happy. She wants to make you independent, but only if you let her, and only if you put systems in place that she respects.

But what are these systems? In basic terms, the systems themselves are not complicated. You only have to know how to do three things: how to increase your income, how to save, and how to invest. That’s it. That’s all you need to know for money to start flowing your way. It sounds simple, on paper, I admit, but for someone who has no idea how to begin, and that person has been me multiple times, you might be discouraged even before you take your first step.

And that first step is to increase your income. As a writer and a creative, I have struggled simply getting past this step. In university, I studied something totally unrelated to my creativity, and for a long time, it has always been my wish that my passion for art would lead to my success rather than what I studied. However, my lack of desire to know how to really make money, tangled with the fact that being financially stable in the creative world is not easy, has made my life extra strenuous. For these reasons, I have had to get into roles I didn’t care for, and which always ended with me quitting before I finished a year.

Making money is not simple. For some who have not had a cushion as much as I have, there is simply no option but to stay in those roles. I am blessed in that I could afford to quit as many times as I did, but sometimes I wonder if I had stayed and really learnt the business of making money, would I have been in a much better position? Of course, there is the factor of loving what you do, and your work will not feel like a job. But much has been said about following your passion, but why does no one talk about when your passion is not putting food on the table? What happens when it feels like your passion is not following you back?

Anyway, I digress. Increasing your income is the first system, but before that, you have to increase your income potential. For most of us, this is why we go to school. We pass through primary, then secondary, then college or university, graduate, and apply for jobs. Some do a Master’s to increase more of their potential, some go as far as PHD and become doctors. This is the system within the system of increasing your income.

But what about that creative or artist who, for them, these systems simply do not work? How do they increase their income if they cannot stand the hurdle and hustle of a 9-5 that is killing their soul, but they still want to succeed financially? I will say that you need to know what money systems are working for your practice. The world, fortunately or unfortunately, is built on rules. No matter what you are doing, some rules surround that practice, and once you learn these rules, especially in how to make money, you will be able to increase your income.

Recently, when I was in Kisumu for my book reading and book signing, I was talking to a writer, and if you are a writer, you know the only conversation writers have is about other writers. Anyway, we were talking about a particularly accomplished writer I admire, and I was wondering out loud how he was able to afford his lifestyle simply from writing and I remember asking: Kwani writing iko na doh hivyo? Which prompted the writer I was having a conversation with to burst out laughing. After he finished laughing, he gently explained that yes, the writing business does have a lot of money, and there are writers who solely live comfortably on it. It is, he meant to imply, up to me to figure out how to make this money. I will not lie to you and say that I have figured them out, but I am determined and curious to learn more, and sometimes, that is all that matters.

I wish to stop here today, but I will encourage you to also be curious about what you can do to increase your income streams, and not only that, but go further into researching the other two systems: how to save and how to invest. I have provided some links to the podcasts I have listened to this past week, which have tackled all three of these topics in one way or another. If you are a creative, I will urge you to listen to the Kelsey Rodriguez episodes because her content is tailored to creatives and how to build your creative business.

Other than that, I am also thinking of having a physical intimate event where we can have these money conversations one-on-one, and share the knowledge we know between us. If you are interested in attending, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/kVqFjsJ2DwArDCZB8

With Love and Warmth,

Amanda.

Resources

Podcasts I listened to this past week:

1. Exactly how to go from $0-10k/month as a creative - Kelsey Rodriguez

2. How to Get What You Want Every Time: 3 Steps to Negotiate Anything With Anyone - Mel Robbins

3. This is the year you’ll finally start that business. - Kelsey Rodriguez

4. You’re going to 10X your creative business in 2026 and here’s how - Kelsey Rodriguez

5. 25+ Income Streams for Creatives (and HOW to start them!) - Kelsey Rodriguez

6. How Monica Etemesi Built Her Luxury Event Planning Brand | Business Edition - Financially Incorrect

7. Murugi Munyi: I’ve made millions as a content creator

Spotify Playlist for entertainment vibes!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Wherever you are, whether it’s in your house, or in a matatu, or lying in your bed, I’d like for you to close your eyes for a second and take a deep inhale in, and a deep exhale out. As I have been getting more and more into my meditation practice, I have found that taking this moment to breathe can change your brain chemistry in small but significant ways, allowing you to focus on the task or piece at hand rather than letting your past and future plans distract you. I am hoping all of you breathed with me, so let us begin.

Money.

What emotion did you feel when you read the word “money” just now? Did you suddenly feel excited, all your neurons lighting up because money is your absolutely favourite topic to discuss? Or did you suddenly feel scared, your skin crawling back into your own body because money is a topic that makes you deeply afraid and you are worried you have never mastered or will never master how to approach it? Or, did you feel neutral because discussing money is a normal thing for you, a necessity like breathing or eating?

I would like to start this exploration towards financial awareness here; with the emotions we associate with money. Everyday for the past two weeks, I have listened to a podcast episode about money. This means that I have listened to fourteen podcasts, some which were as long as two hours and some as short as 30 minutes. I have sat down with my notes apps, taking down what the experts were saying, from how to budget your money, how to save, how not to save but earn more to how to invest, what the best investments are, how to build your rich life and wealth etc etc

I have heard it all, and I have the notes to prove it. But, as much as the experts had different approaches on how to earn more, save and invest your money, there was one message that was so clear across all the fourteen episodes that it honestly started to become chilling to hear. The message was this: Before you even start thinking about how to earn more, or save more or invest more, the first thing you need to understand is your relationship with money. What emotions do you associate with money, and why?

It was so weird hearing this at first, because for me personally, I have never thought of money as something that I had a relationship with. Relationships were things I had with friends and lovers and family, not something I have with an intangible thing like my finances. But, in one podcast episode (which I unfortunately cannot remember) the guest said something that resonated deeply the more I thought about it. He said: whether we realize it or not, we have a relationship with everything in our lives. You have a relationship with the house you live in, you have a relationship with the shoes you wear, you have a relationship with the clothes you buy, you have a relationship with the phone or laptop you are using to read this piece, and finally, you have a relationship with your money.

The first goal, if you want to build your wealth and rich life, is to figure out what this relationship you have with your money is. It could be good, or it could be bad. If it’s good, excellent. This means you not only have multiple investments and savings and financial freedom, it also means you have emotional freedom, and have healed all your past traumas associated with finances. It means that you, my dear, have cracked the code. Congratulations.

This is the dream we should all aspire to reach, but the reality is, we will never reach it if our relationship with money is bad. So how do you figure out what your relationship with money is? The first step, according to Lewis Howes, is to figure out what our money wounds are, and once we figure them out, start the process of healing them.

My Money Wound

Simply, money wounds are all the beliefs that you have around money which have been ingrained in you since childhood. In the podcast episode, Lewis invites the listeners to an exercise where, you sit with yourself and start jotting down all the memories you have, especially in your childhood, that revolve around money, including what you heard the adults saying about it. It could be simple things like “money is evil,” or “money does not grow on trees”.

I would like to invite you to do this exercise for yourself, and I will lead by example by sharing a childhood memory I have around money.

So, the year was 2004 and I was six years old. My mum and dad had gotten into a huge fight at four in the morning, which resulted in our dad throwing all of us, sisi na virago zetu, out. So there we were, around five in the morning, the sun had not even risen yet, and we were walking with our mother, five small children carrying heavy Naija bags, walking to the main tarmac road to at least get a face-me matatu that would take us to the school our mum taught at, and to live in the Teacher’s Quarters with her.

Prior to this, I had never known how comfortable we had been living, but when we got to my mother’s TQs, and started living there, I started noticing some changes. The first is that we were not eating meat as often, so as the lastborn, the kababy of the family, I would often cry and complain why we were always eating Ugali and Kunde (to this day i abhor kunde wallahi), and my mother would either berate or beat me, while telling me over and over again that money did not grow on trees. As a child, I had no clue what she was facing. She was suddenly living in a house meant for one person with five small children who needed to be fed, clothed, taken to school, and then, there was this ka-lastborn who kept crying to her for meat. To make matters worse, my father offered no financial or emotional support whatsoever.

In retrospect, I understand her position, but at the time, I did not. Slowly, I started looking for means of how I could get what I wanted. There was, in the school compound, a canteen that sold kangumus , and when I was a child, I adored kangumus. So, because I knew that my mother would not give me any money to buy them, I would go there every evening, and lie to the shopkeeper that my mother had sent me for kangumus and that he could put it in her “deni” book. The first day I tried it, I did not think that the shopkeeper would buy it, but he did, then, while I was eating the kangumus, I became so happy, I decided to do it over and over again, until, one day, as my mother was passing by the shop on her way from school, the shopkeeper asked her for the money I had been eating. That is when my scam came tumbling down. I was beaten and berated, but part of me thinks I never did learn the lesson that I needed to learn.

When we eventually returned home, and my father was the one to leave this time round, my mother became the primary source of our financial life. We were struggling, but we were doing better day by day, but, as the last born, I was often left out of any discussions around money. Everyone either assumed I already knew what was happening, or if I did not, I could learn simply by observing what was happening around us. The thing that they did not take into consideration is that I am an artist, and as artists, either writers, poets, musicians, painters, we tend to live in our heads more than we live in the real world.

Yes, I knew we were struggling, yes I could see that our situation had started getting better, but I did not understand or care to understand how, because, for me, the simple reason that I had food on the table, clothes on my back and roof over my head was enough. As long as I was fully fed, and could climb the mpera tree in our compound to day dream about the lives of the village people I was seeing from up the tree, I saw no need to learn the hard things like finances. Besides, I had already tried a stint in how to scam people and had failed miserably, so why try again, even if it meant doing the correct thing this time round?

Fast forward, when I became an adult, and our family financial situation had considerably gotten a lot better, and I started feeling like money was not as important, because, at the same time, I was slowly consuming a lot of art. Now, I love art with all my heart, but, there is this absolutely false narrative that most art, especially movies and music and books and plays, sell. The narrative is that money is not as important as love. We saw it in all the afro cinemas. How Ramsey Noah would the poor guy chasing after Ini Edo, and then there would be the rich guy chasing after her too, but all the while, the story would manipulate us to root for the poor guy because the eventual lesson was, love is more vital than money.

Or, the movie where a character would be chasing money and would eventually go to the witchdoctors, and eventually need to sacrifice their family in order to get wealthy which instilled in us the lesson that money is evil. Or the music video where the singer would be singing to their lover about how he loves her, and how heartbroken he is that she chose someone with money over him, because, of course, wanezakula mapenzi.

I consumed a lot of this art, and while, of course, they were really good pieces of art and the artists were immensely talented, for me, I started developing some beliefs around money that I am only now realizing have shaped my entire thinking around money, and, even more so, my thinking towards my romantic relationships. When a guy who was not doing so well in life approached me, I would immediately consider his proposition to date me, because, in my head, I was the beautiful heroine and he was the charming but poor hero and together we would conquer the world with our love. Fuck money. Who needs it when we have love? That is all we needed, right? Wrong!

This belief, combined with the fact that often, I was too deep into my head, meant that the person I was in a relationship with had to pick up the slack when it came to our financial life. I would talk about everything with them, but when it came to wanting to talk about money, I would freeze, because, first, I was entirely clueless on how to approach the topic, and second, why were we talking about money when we had love? Isn’t that all that we needed? I did not realize it, but slowly, my relationship with them started mirroring the relationship I had with my mother, in that, she and they would be the ones dealing with the realities of money-finding and sending it to me, while I was the one spending but still believing that money was not important, never once considering the sweat they had put in place to get that money in the first place.

In fact, almost all my relationships had this dynamic, except one, in which the boy was more clueless than me and I had to pick up his slack sometimes. After around three months into that relationship, I got frustrated because I was not used to being the one in control of the financial situation, and left him for a guy who was more the type I was used to: the one who knew how to make money, but more importantly, who knew how to spend it on me so I could continue focusing on my thinking that money was not important. When that relationship ended, I called it toxic and blamed it on all manner of things except the one thing that truly mattered and was probably the biggest influence in our eventual toxicity: money.

This is what I am talking about when I say, you need to understand what your relationship with money is, what money wounds you carry and how they affect you and the people you interact with. My personal money wound is that I have always had a belief that money was not as important as other things in life. Because of this belief, for a long time, I have not had any desire to know how to make money, how to save it, and how to invest it, because, why would I take my time learning these essential skills when in the first place I do not believe they are vital to my existence?

That is my money wound, what is yours?

Resources

Here is a list of podcasts I listened to this week. You might not be able to listen to all seven of them, but I would recommend you listen to at least one as I believe they can start shaping your thoughts towards your relationship with money and how to build your rich life.

1. The #1 Financial Freedom SECRET Rich People WON’T Tell You! | Codie Sanchez

2. The 5 Money Habits That Set You Up For Financial Freedom

3. The BIGGEST MONEY LIES Keeping You POOR! | Vivian Tu

4. “I AM WEALTHY” - 3 Steps To Manifest MONEY, SUCCESS & HAPPINESS! | Ken Honda & Lewis Howes

5. MONEY WILL FLOW LIKE CRAZY! (How To Manifest Success & Riches) | Dr Joe Dispenza

6. Lewis Howes: You’re 69 Minutes Away From NEVER Being Broke Again

7. You’re 54 Minutes Away From Never Being Broke & Lost Again | Vishen Lakhiani

Because I am a music junkie, I also created a Spotify playlist purely for entertainment purposes, but it does contain some affirmations and songs that could start shaping how you think about money.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

When I started this Substack, I was in a very dark place. I had just lost my Podcast Production Assistant job, I had resolutions that I was basically ignoring, my finances were in the pits and my mental health was in an even darker pit. I told myself: I am going to write every Wednesday, and if that is the only thing I do for the week, so be it. So I would stay in bed, rotting for the whole week, but when Wednesday came around, I would suddenly get some strength, wake myself up, get on my laptop, and write random shit. And that is how, slowly by slowly, I began pulling myself out of the darkness until light flooded my whole being.

This space, true to its title, has been my therapy session, my saving grace that I keep coming back to again and again and again.

As I mark one year, I look back at that girl I was when I started this with such awe and gentleness, but I also look at her, knowing that she is who I have to leave behind if I am to grow, and if this space is to become something more. To put it another way, I have been thinking about making some changes here, particularly in terms of what I write about. By making changes, I mean I would like to have some structure, and I would like to invite you as I form this structure, and as I navigate through it.

Here is what the ideal idea (and the background of it) seems to my mind:

In my personal life, I have realized there are three major things I need to work on this year if I am to become a better and greater version of myself, and those three things are: my financial awareness, my self-love, and my confidence (read: sexiness). I have devised a system where for 30 days, I work on one pillar, then move on to the next for 30 days, then the next for 30 days, and once I am done with the three, I repeat the first one.

For example, right now, I am working on being more Financially Aware for 30 days (I am currently on day 10), then when I am done, I will take a few days break, and start on 30 days of self love, and when I am done with that, I will take another few days break and start on my 30 days of being more confident (read: sexy).

What this means practically is that, if I am working on my Financial Awareness, for those 30 days, I will be consuming content on how to make more money, how to save, how to invest, how to keep track of my expenses, how to become wealthy; basically everything that comes with being financially fit. But that is not all. I have also had to incorporate some lifestyle changes, like doing exercises (Yoga and Meditation) every morning, taking a break from drinking and smoking, eating healthier, observing my skincare routine, and paying attention to my sleep patterns.

How does this relate to the new structure I want to introduce on Therapy Sessions, you might be wondering. Well, it’s simple: I would like for you to come with me to this journey. If possible, I would encourage you to look at the top pillars you want to work on this year. It could be very different from mine, but once you have a goal in mind, like, let’s say, working on going to the gym, then you commit a couple of days to it. You can start small. 30 days is my personal limit, but you could try 15 days, or 10 days, but for the entirety of these days, you commit yourself entirely to this goal and cut back on things that you feel will hold you back.

I also have to disclose that you might backslide and actually not finish the days you set up for yourself. When that happens, I want you to remember that it is totally okay. I mean, I started this challenge at the beginning of the year, and I was so determined and so sure I would finish the 30 days, only for me to backslide by drinking on day 11. Was I disappointed in myself? Yes. But it’s very important to show yourself some grace and forgive yourself during this period. Take as much time out as you need, but then get back on the horse, and see how long you will last this time round. You might just surprise yourself.

To keep yourself motivated, I will also encourage you to set up a reward system for yourself, like going on a solo date or going to some place you enjoy. And this is the point where I have to disclose that this system is actually not mine. I copied it from my best friend, who, last year, did a segment of working on herself for several days, and her reward was going on a solo trip to Diani. Every morning, I saw how motivated she was to get up and do her workouts, and how elated she was when she marked the day done. And then came the time when she was finally done, and was going to Diani, and let me tell you, I have never seen a happier person. It was such a wonderful trip for her, and you could see it. Heck, I could feel it.

So, yes, please set up a reward for yourself, something to look forward to when you complete your days, and I promise you, when you finish, and you are enjoying that reward, knowing you were working on yourself to get it, you’d be motivated to do more and more and more.

Now, for anyone who is thinking that this would be too much work to commit to, or they are just not ready to start yet, that is also okay. For you and for everyone else, I would like to invite you to follow my journey through this space. And this is where the structure change is coming in. As I wrote before, I have been learning how to become more financially aware for the past 10 days, and there are lessons and content I am consuming every day. I would like to share this content here. So in this way, my writing on Therapy Sessions every Wednesday would become about me summarizing and rephrasing the content I have consumed during the week, and how I personally relate to it.

I will also share, after every piece, the podcasts I have been listening to and which I hope you will also find educational. For entertainment purposes, I have also created playlists curated specifically for all three of my goals, and will also be sharing the Spotify Link in case you are also interested. The sharing will start today, but the writing will officially start next Wednesday, because I have yapped on too long, and now I will treat this as my introductory piece.

All in all, I hope you join me on this journey, whether by doing the challenges for yourself or by simply reading what I write. I am looking forward to being with you next week, and I hope you are too.

Love,

Amanda.

Financial Awareness Podcasts I listened to last week

Last week, I focused on the Mel Robbins podcast (recommended by my best friend), and here are the episodes I listened to. I would recommend that you listen to at least one episode if you are like me and are feeling stuck financially.

1. The Best Financial Advice You’ll Ever Hear - with Morgan Housel

2. Why You’re Broke: 5 Rules to Finally Take Control of Your Money with Tifanny Alice

3. The Truth About Money and Why We Have It All Wrong with Rami Sethi

4. 5 Money Habits That Will Change Your Life & Create Financial Freedom with David Bach

5. The #1 Money Rule to Live By: Understand The Psychology of Money with Farnoosh Torino

6. If You Feel Overwhelmed & Uncertain About Money, Watch This with Lewis Howes

7. The 51% Rule (and 3 More Strategies to Think Like a Millionaire) with Steven Bartlett

Spotify Playlist

Here is a playlist I curated and which I listen to every day to remind myself that I do want that moeny cominng innnn!!!

Share

Leave a comment

I am immensely proud of myself that I kept my end of the bargain and even prouder that I introduced a new flair to this space: featuring a female writer every month. As I wrote in my post several Wednesdays ago, this is a way for me (and my readers) to get different perspectives of multiple women and recognize that our wounds, joys, frustrations, happiness, and sadness are often the same. This is a way of healing communally.

Today, I am beyond beyonddddd honoured to feature a writer and a human I deeply admire — Rehema Zuberi, aka ResH. Always so beautifully dressed, Resh is such an amazing writer and an even more wonderful friend. Every time I meet her, I am usually dumbfounded because how can all this beauty, both inside and out, glow from one person? But enough of my yapping.

Please get ready to read ResH!!

Three Letters, One Vowel

by Rehema Zuberi

Not only do I not wear bras, I also don’t own them. After years of holding my breasts hostage in poorly fitting bras, I woke up one day and said FUCK THIS SHIT!

You could argue that the solution would actually be to wear fitting bras and to that I say, my epiphany was realizing that I actually never needed them from the very beginning. So I exist with my breasts bobbing up and down as I go about my everydayness.

And this is coming from a person who considers herself to have big boobs. People around me say no, they are average. I sulk a little saying I am the owner and in fact know of the weight. In truth, I don’t want my boobs to be big. I also don’t want them in the average frame. As a girl, I want you to agree with me even unconvincingly. I want to be pleased. Girls deserve to be happy.

One of my favourite days, other than Tuesdays when I was born (I love using the phrase Born on a Tuesday in reference to myself because there is a whole BOOK (not about me unfortunately), is October 13^th. It is No Bra Day and even if it is at least once a year, I am grateful when women put down tools they shouldn’t be upping.

It is in this fashion that a girl whose 3-letter name starts with a vowel found and followed me on one of my social media accounts. It is #MyYellowYear, so here I am dressing my body in yellows to the effect. A girl whose 3-letter name starts with a vowel messages me for the first time and says, “so sexy” with two emojis expressing love and heat. I take it to be the yellow drawing her in and I thank her.

She confesses it is my nipples that drew her in. I zoom in and there, just one of my nipples playing against the dress. She loves it when girls have their nipples popping.

Her next message is to ascertain my sexuality. Was I straight? The answer was a no to which she replied was the same case for her.

Crickets. Until two weeks later.

The bombshell is her sending me a full picture of her, nothing on. I wonder what I am supposed to do with it. Of course she has taken the recommended precaution and put it on view once. I tell her she looks good. We are all beautifully and wonderfully made.

Having not followed it with the appropriate response she was expecting, maybe that my clitoris erected at the sight of her, she asks again if I am straight. Two weeks later, I still am not straight.

Now, I am self-trained in texting and that makes it all the types of texts out here, including sexting. I could have easily engaged her in the ways she wanted and I wouldn’t even break a sweat.

She reminded me of another girl of her calibre, her 5-letter name starts with a vowel before this 3-letter one, who threatened to distract me with nude pictures of herself when I told her I wanted to read. I plainly told her it wouldn’t work. There is an art to play, away from the common fore-kind, and this was not the way to do it in my world.

Girl whose 3-letter, 5-letter too, name starts with a vowel, there is a better way, even easier, of turning me on or even getting into my pants (if that’s how you wanted it to go and you did because your being horny automatically makes me horny too?):

1. Your naked body is not the first step.

A word to the wise is enough. I can already tell though, you believe them when they lie to you that a picture is worth a thousand words and apply it in every context.

Rehema Zuberi (ResH) loves art in the way of words; reading, writing, singing, Scrabble, googling them! She is the 2022 winner of the Qazini Writing Competition under the theme Courage for her essay, ‘Walking Naked’. They learnt how to deal with numbers other than counting money and to take a break from wording, they play Sudoku. You can find her works on Writers Space Africa, Kalahari Review, HerLore Magazine Issue 2 and Facebook/Instagram/TikTok if you roll like that. ResH has co-authored four anthologies as of 2024. 2026 is the year she finally lets the world see her memoir.

Share

Leave a comment

I hope you enjoy these five little poems from me.

1.Pelicans

the pelicans float on water

like angels singing glory

& i -

eyes glittering like

stars heading home

soul shimmering like the

colour the sky makes

before a sunset breaks

body swaying like

a good rhyme in a poem -

i am mesmerised by you

your smile is what gets me first

there is a sound your lips make

as they curve

almost like an invitation

to share a joy with you &

when you laugh, i laugh.

the sound as loud as

the clattering of thunder & lightning.

i love you, i want to say

but love has just sneaked in -

it has not yet been fully invited

into this dimension we have created

& so, instead i say:

you remind me of pelicans.

Hard Bargain

ever so softly

my mind brightens with

the possibility of a new beginning.

a fresh great start.

i picture mid - May

amidst the cry & the crisis

the birthdays wanting a lover.

the music tuning out the muse.

it was a hard bargain

fanning over you,

& yet, i did.

i did.

Yellow Yonder

& the years you yearned for the yellow yonder,

a brief break from

the bridge we laboured to build,

were they everything you hoped for?

was the water warmer?

the theatrics thrilling?

i, less interesting?

hold my hours, you said.

hold them and turn them into terrible torments.

my body breathed fire then

- a whole emblem burning -

& i tried reaching for your touch

thinking it a cure,

only it was the air charging the heat.

if I close my eyes,

i can still picture it;

us lying in your bed,

love sipping in from every pore,

& how, in that moment,

a decade became a day became an hour

became the minute, became the second

you finally sang your song to me.

i was alone attached to you, and i am alone without you.

& this is the moment we cue in our queen,

a separate being from myself,

screaming for help.

her king is like a knife in a gunfight,

& still she screams: save me! save me!

she is the damsel, you are the distress.

save her? how?

you are still yearning for the yellow yonder.

The Moth

do you ever think how the moth has no choice?

the quiet fluttering of wings

the slow pull to the light

the fast ascent to the flame

the temptation of going round

& round

& round

&round.

from this hotel room

from this hotel room

we watch the grass dancing in green,

the flamingos gliding in pink,

& the pelicans,

my god, the pelicans -

how their whiteness moves with the waves

is a metaphor to be studied.

it’s your birthday

& we have made a celebration out of our lives.

the sky embraces blue owning the colour like a lover

& to match, the lake becomes an object in a mirror

making everything appear as we step closer

& in this presence of god’s glorious art

merging as one with your beauty

i find myself having respect for how

a friendship can enfold you in its arms -

how it can make safety into

something you are not afraid to exist in.

happy birthday, i say

& in the distance,

the mountains whisper it to you too.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share Therapy Sessions

During the maandamanos, there was a meme that was circulating of Gen-Zs trying to give each other directions during the protest. Ati one of them, after running from the teargas, would call their friends and say: niko hapa kwa hii building refu, kwani nyi mko? The punchline of the joke was of course that Nairobi is full of tall buildings, how the hell would their friend know how to locate them? But, as funny as the joke was, this was actually my reality during one of the maandamanos.

The day was 20th June 2024. Midday. The hot sun was still scorching my skin. That day, I wasn’t heading to town with the purpose of going to the protests. I had planned to interview the singer-songwriter Liboi on her show Whispers of Power, and, in my naivety, I had scheduled the interview on the same day as maandamanos. Blissfully ignorant, I got out of the house dressed in a dark-blue sleeveless jumpsuit and black doll shoes, totally inappropriate wear for a maandamano. I boarded a super metro which on normal occasions would have been full to the brim but was only half empty (or half-full depending on your optimism level) and off we rode to town. Nairobi CBD.

The first indicator was perhaps the smoke, but before the smoke, there was my best friend, who I had been communicating with, and who, unlike me, was not naive. She and her coworkers knew how serious the protests were going to be, and they were prepared for it. Me? My head was up in the clouds, dreaming about how wonderful it was that I was going to interview the soulful, wonderful Liboi whose music has always pulled at my heart. In my mind, I was already fangirling and wasn’t even thinking about the smoke until I first smelt it then saw it as we neared town and the konda told us to get off before the main stage because they couldn’t risk going into the CBD.

That’s when my ongoing communication with my best friend came in handy. I called her, or she called me, and she was trying to find out where I was, and I became the punch of that joke: niko kwa hizi buildings karibu na hii KCB, unaijua? Then, seconds later, before we could communicate clearly, the police had fired another teargas can, and I was putting my phone in my bag, and running as fast as my tiny doll shoes and sleeveless jumpsuit could allow me, all the while while trying not to inhale the smoke, because, of course, I had not even carried a mask.

In a podcast I was listening to a while back, the host was saying how ignorance is not a justifiable excuse. They were using the case of gravity to make their point and their case was this: imagine a three-year old child who does not know the law of gravity, is playing on top of a building and as they are playing, they think : hmm, perhaps I could jump down, and they jump. Now, the truth of the matter is, the three year-old child does not know that because gravity exists, and because their mass is heavier than air, they will most definitely fall to the ground and break a bone or two. They are ignorant of reality, but just because they are not aware does not mean that the law will not hold.

That is how I felt that day, running around town during maandamanos, while absolutely underprepared for it. That is also how I have been feeling a lot lately. Like a person who is not sure of their knowledge of the world, and then realizing that just because I am not sure, does not mean that world will stop and wait for me to be sure before it can proceed revolving around the sun.

There are a lot of things I do not know, a lot of things I am ignorant of, and a lot of things that I simply do not care to learn because, in all honesty, they bore me to the bone. But these things are important, and they are fundamental to my life. Just because I am bored learning my way around town does not mean I do not need to learn it. What it means though is that, everytime I am in town, I will always be unsure of my next step and where I am going.

This lack of sense of direction is perhaps sipping into more and more aspects of my life than I would care to admit. Last week, I wrote about how I wished I was one of those people who are sure of their one path and they stick to it to the core. I have never been one of those people. Rather, I am someone who wants to try everything. I want to have a taste of every world until I know how each feels on my tongue.

If I am a writer, I am not just sticking to one genre so I am writing fiction, and I am writing nonfiction, and I am writing essays, and I am writing scripts and I am writing web articles and I am writing cultural pieces. If I am a poet, I am not just a page poet; I want to also be on stage performing and I want to be somewhere recording my poem in a song, and I want to be directing and editing a poetry film because why not? And if I am a content creator, I want to be in front of the camera and also behind the camera, giving directions and editing and making social media calendars.

The problem with this is I could come out as someone who is unsure, someone who has not yet figured out what they want out of life, someone with no sense of direction. And it is true. I am an uncertain being. There is never a moment where I am unequivocal about what I want to pursue, and this constant need to streamline my passions is a constant strain on my nerves.

Lately, I have been thinking that maybe the solution is not streamlining to one definite thing. Maybe the solution lies in ridding myself of ignorance and trying to be knowledgeable in everything I do while finding a way to balance all my passions. Perhaps that is where the true beauty of my nature lies.

Thank you for reading! Therapy Sessions is free today, but this may not be the case in the future. For now, subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Stillness. How do you make yourself slow down when there is so much to do? A new year demands newness, demands you to actually stick to your resolutions, demands that you do a million little things so that at the end of it all, when that clock strikes 12 and ushers you into 2027, you will look back, smile, and be proud of yourself. But in the midst of it all, my mind feels like it’s splintering and dividing itself until it can barely settle.

Sometimes, I wish I were one of those people that know exactly what they want. It’s been bugging me for a while now — my lack of knowing what I want to be and who I want to become. I know I want to become known, seen, and heard, but is that enough of a dream? What if there are other dreams I can sleep and slip into? How do I become completely satisfied with this one path without looking over and thinking I might regret not pursuing another?

Stillness. How do I become completely still with the choice I make without wanting to split myself into a million pieces just to fit every new and exciting box that crosses my path? And is it a bad thing? Wanting to be a million versions of yourself? I am struggling with it, and it’s bugging me to an extreme. Have you ever wanted time to stop, for the world to quit turning, for the whole universe to hold its breath until you are able to breathe again? That is how I currently feel. Like I want to be a magician commanding it all to be still for just one second. One pure, unadulterated second.

But the world cannot stop, and time is not our friend, so I have to figure out my own way of finding stillness. Perhaps this is why, today morning at 7:45 AM, after finally managing to drag myself out of the warmth of Tiktok videos and my duvet, I put on my tights, my tank top, and off I walked to my living room and after scouring on Youtube for close to 10 minutes looking for good home workouts, I finally stumbled upon a 30 day Yoga challenge. Yoga. The one exercise that promises, nay, almost guarantees you stillness. I watched the introduction video and was sold.

But, if we were being honest, my being sold to the idea had more to do with the last three months of last year, where I became an avid fan of meditation. There was (is) something about the simple act of closing your eyes, taking a deep breath through your nose and out through your mouth, and being completely still with your thoughts and affirmations that tugged (tug) at my heart. And the thing about being drawn to meditation is that, eventually, you hear about its twin — Yoga. Both offer a promise of stillness, and both are what I desperately, desperately need right now.

I slipped into stillness this morning, and it was warm and wonderful. I loved the idea of being one with your mind and body; the idea of controlling your movement with your breath. It was only day one, and of course I struggled, but at the moment, when my 25 minutes were up, and I sat down to do a five minute meditation, it all felt so peaceful, so relaxing, so beautiful of a human experience. But of course, that only lasted until I sat down at my laptop, ready to begin my work day, and it all came tumbling down — my deadlines, my goals, my dreams.

At the moment, I am a nervous wreck. My heart is beating fast, and I know why. It’s because I have a million things to d,o but I am, instead, choosing to do this, to write about it all. I almost didn’t write here today, that is how fucked up the situation is. I kept thinking: with all I need to do, do I really have time to write? And that is when I knew that yes, it was absolutely necessary for me to write today. It is in those moments when you want to ignore your art that perhaps you should run towards it more, because those moments are the defining ones. Once you ignore your art once, you will ignore it again, and again, and before you know it, it’s been years, and you are calling yourself a writer but have not written anything in months.

Still, I crave stillness. I crave those peaceful 30 minutes I had in the morning. When the whole world seemed to be only focused on my doing a downward dog position, while the birds near my window chirped musically, almost like they were cheering me on. Then I moved into a plank, then the cobra position, then a child’s pose, and I felt like a child. That is the kind of stillness I want.

Leave a comment

Share

The rain gets heavier, the light showers turning into mightier droplets hitting my red jacket. Before I can ask the nduthi guy if he has an umbrella, he diverts, heads to the nearest petrol station where we park, alongside ten other bodas, under the cement roof. Then we wait. We wait for the rain to stop but instead, a few minutes later, it turns into a hailstorm. Icy stones hitting the ground at lightning speed with the harsh wind carrying all the droplets to our shelter. We squeeze further under the roof, all of us, nduthi guys and their customers, clamouring for a shield. Then we wait again. We wait for the hailstorm to pass as we wait for the new year to come. It is, after all, the last day of 2025.

As I watch the hails, I think of my childhood. How, as kids, we used to be extra jubilant whenever there was a hailstorm. Mvua ya mawe, we used to call it. Ona leo kunanyesha mawe! Then when it ceased a bit, we would run outside and collect the icy stones, pop them in our mouths and laugh as they melted against our tongues. I think of this, and I think of how now, as an adult, I find a particular enjoyment in taking ice cubes from my freezer and popping them in my mouth to savour the taste of frozen water on my tongue. Is it all a re-enactment of my childhood? Is everything we do, everything we are, just an attempt to be children once again?

The rain finally fades into light drizzles, so me and my nduthi guy, we are off. As he rides down the Kakamega-Kisumu Road, upto the turn at Shirere, he comments about how the rain was an unexpected blessing. “Hii ni baraka ya mwaka mpya hii, but imekuja tu suddenly.” To answer him, I say: “Unajua vyenye hao husema, man plans, God laughs.” Then he laughs. I was not attempting to make a joke, I swear, so I sit silent as he continues to laugh, and then as he diverts the conversation in another direction. In my head, I am still thinking: damn, man really plans and God laughs.

This year has taught me a lot. That was not one of the lessons. This year, my plans and God have not been laughing. Or, if they had been laughing, it’s because they were in alignment. I have accomplished many things, things I did not even have on my resolution list at the beginning of the year. I have performed on stages, I have attended workshops, I have met other creatives, I have edited cinematic videos, I have published a book, I have gone to new places, I have danced in a club at night, I have kissed strangers, I have bought a couch, I have loved myself, I have been scared and did it anyway, I have meditated, I have laughed, I have lived through it all. This year has been beautiful.

But, as it happens with beautiful things, they do not start out that way. Beauty grows. Slowly and steadily over time. At the start of this year, I was a mess. It was the main reason I started writing here. My first sessions were ramblings of my depression, of my sadness, of my inability to do something as simple as getting out of bed. But I committed myself to one thing: writing here every Wednesday. This space became my therapy session even before I named it Therapy Sessions, and slowly but surely, I started seeing the results. I started noticing the lightness in my steps, the lack of stammer in my words, the amazing way my thoughts took shape.

But even beauty has its scars. For a couple of days now, since Monday, I have been having trouble with my mother. I would call it an argument except she is the one that’s been arguing and berating me while I sit still and contemplate how I would want to disappear. Her argument is simple — she claims what I have been doing has no real value because my bank account is not getting fatter. In my defence, I think what I have been doing has value because my soul has been feeling a lot lighter. How can she not see that I have been happier, more jovial, more quick on my feet, more natural in my being? But it is true. My bank account is a model on a diet. Not enough meat on its bones.

The thing with mothers though, is that they worry, and the thing with daughters is that we absorb these worries. Instead of thinking of all I have accomplished this year, all I have been doing is worrying. My mother’s fears have consumed me, suffocating me until I can’t breathe. I am proud of myself, and many people in my life are proud of me, but in a second, it all ceased to matter simply because my mother was not proud of me. Instead, she is disappointed. “I am very disappointed in you, Amanda.” Her exact words. They stung. Those words.

I am not sure what next year has in store for me, but for these past few days, I have had this crazy incredulous idea that I want to make my mother proud of me. If I was actually seeing a therapist, they might say something like: what you are trying to do is futile. What you need to do is make yourself proud, not your mother. You are not supposed to care what she thinks as long as you are doing what you think is right for you. But, I do care what she thinks. It’s stupid and babyish and incredibly desperate of me, but I really really do care what she thinks, and I want her, for once, to look at me and think how happy she is to have me as a daughter. Is that a weird thing to put on a resolution list?

Anyway, it’s one hour to midnight. No time for backsies. I am sitting on a cream couch, my back resting on a patterned pillow. The TV is on, at the lowest level. The newscaster is shouting: wapi vigelele?? As they anticipate for the clock to strike twelve. Outside, the children are hitting broken pots and pans as they shout Mumboooo! Here, in our village, that is the tradition of crossing over the new year. It’s called mumbo, and it involves children walking around the village at night hitting objects as they shout: Mumbooo Mumboo. Legend has it that this is a way of chasing away the evil spirits before the new year ascends.That is why, in the morning, all the objects that were “beaten” are thrown into the river or far away from the homestead, otherwise, bringing them back with you means carrying the evil spirits you chased away into the new year.

I am not sure how true the legend is, but when we were kids, I used to loooove mumbooo. It wasn’t that I believed in evil spirits per se, but rather because it was the only time, as a child, that we were allowed to stay outside after dark. That and the ridiculous music we made with the clanging objects was a plus. Now, as an adult, I am still not so sure if I believe in evil spirits, but I do think there is something that exists as dark energy. Maybe this is why I am doing my own version of mumboo, hitting this keyboard on my laptop as I try to write my way into a happier new year.

Share

Leave a comment

Today, I am very very excited to feature the multi-talented, multi-disciplinary artist — Sheila Ngei !! A writer, a poet, an editor, a vocalist and a musician, Sheila is an encompass of everything beautiful. When she sings, her voice is ethereal, the music flowing directly to your heart. But that is not the only thing that mouth do. Sheila is fierce, bold and, when you are talking to her, trust me hatakuweka if you are wrong. She speaks her mind, always, and it’s the one thing I admire about her the most.

Today, she graces us with her words, which are just wonderfully wonderfully penned. I enjoyed reading this too much. I laughed, I yearned, I understood her, I raged with her and above all, I hoped with her. Hope you do too.

Please get ready to read….Sheila Ngeiiiii

bY Sheila Ngei

The sweetest memory I have of you is also one of our last few. Before or after my birthday in March, your room was a sauna, the air heavy with dying love, and fucking. So much sex that we needed a break and were rising from that good old dirty bent position, our bodies sweaty and seeking balance. We landed on our knees: my arse pressed against your pelvis and lower gut, my back on your lovely chest, my thighs against yours, my hands finding yours, my breath filling into lungs that laughed at the mess, my relief when you said I didn’t have to humorize pleasure, that I could be worshipped, received and given relief, with you inside me and your balls knocking against my clitoris; I miss the warmth of loving you.

There’s a poem on Isele, ‘I Want To Be A Body’ by Brenna McPeek where she says, ‘I want to be a body. I’ve never been a body before. I’ve been a mind, an integrity, a value. Not a body…’ And I too want to be a body because I tire of spirit. Yes, my magic, sometimes I am tired of being lightning, sometimes I am looking for a tight hug, another dreamer to cry with and applaud. I took yoga sometime in the year and gained insight that the inner life is not imagined nor can it always be ignored. In Kikamba we call it kukwatika. It happens when you’re dancing and suddenly no one else can hear the music you’re moving to, but they also can’t stop staring. I live in kukwatika mode.

It’s how I walk into rooms and event photographers point their cameras my way; how I join an online meeting and speak up if the women are quiet; how people listen when I give feedback; how I’ve been building my own ecosystems since I left home with more dreams than plans—the way I was made, can be daunting. In June, I was a troubled being who needed to be held but the world was giving me shit. I’d wake up drenched in sweat, heart palpating at dangerous speeds and I recognized this fear. It kept showing up when I stumbled on the streets of Hachioji; when I wrongly lifted a heavy package at the factory in Akishima and hurt my back; when I wrongly swallowed food or saliva at the cafeterias at Soka University, all the time, I was thinking, please God don’t let me die this far away from home.

The fear wasn’t merely made up, nor did I want to let it consume me so I thought I’d see a doctor and get some kind of help. The plan landed me in a therapist’s office. Yaani, two oceans, a couple of seas and deserts away, I was seated sharing my grief— again. I couldn’t bear to do more than a single session. It didn’t feel right giving myself away to a stranger so I thought about my spirit, and I thought about the body that holds it. At the time, my body was all bruises from loneliness, work, school and the silence. Wah, the Japanese are a quiet people. I love the quiet too and this is the reason why I now live somewhere along the Eastern Bypass where ni mbuzi, ng’ombe, kuku na magari za Wells Fargo tu, but in Japan, man I got called out for being a noisy upstairs neighbour. Mimi, the recluse, I was a bad noisy neighbour. Aki saa kuoverplay Time Alone ya Bien ni kitu ya kureport? But it was, and the micro aggression did not stop there.

Back to spirit, mine feels explosive and not carefully contained like a nuclear bomb inside a Naivas grocery store bag. Such irresponsibility sounds insane, so why be careless with my own magic in this body? On the last weekend of June at my part time job, there was this man who sort of managed the chute I worked on and who loved to smoke and drink at work. I didn’t care much except that his laziness demanded I work double time on Sunday evenings; fuck, my body hurt so bad on Mondays. Anyway, kuna dame tuseme alikuwa Vietnamese juu I can’t be sure, the factory I worked for held bodies from all over the cruel globe. Anyway, on this Friday afternoon, Yengz wasn’t having our sloppy manager’s shit: she stopped working, and they both quickly turned to shouting and throwing packages at one another—absolute drama. But I was happy, man was I happy, I was also very pissed but I was happy. It didn’t matter that he didn’t get her, she was obviously upset and he was bullying us: girls who’d been working seamlessly for an hour before he’d decided to walk in late and demand I work the most difficult line, #43, which our lightning girl had been enjoying, ayi!

While they fought, I watched and learnt: when leaving/living, while packing that extra pack of nighttime maxi pads, next to the large bottle of cocoa butter, weka kiburi, my lawd, dial pro-max. You’ll need it to say things like, ‘わかりません/ Wakarimasen,’ for ‘Sielewi mimi!” Even if it is ignored, it will have been said. I took that lesson, while watching and thinking in Kiswahili, saa hawa. The man had now turned to gestures, pointing to the identity tag on the young Vietnamese woman’s hard hat, and then towards the admin office’s direction, to mean she was being subordinate and he would report her. If I’d called over my friend Chichi from chute #94, hata yeye angewaza in Kikisii and add to the drama.

Two days later when the part-time job came to an end, I left with a rule not to hurt my body any longer. I looked around and noticed there was more: the sun was warming up through what was now monsoon season; the Koi fish I’d loved watching on Avatar Aang swam in streams I walked by; and there was a boy. He was Belgian and I thought he’d break his neck staring at me. I’m a flirt, a tease and because I sat to his right, there were days I’d heavily accessorize my left and laugh kindanindani. Days like Thursday when I had my last class for the week and if I wasn’t heading to Hachioji Station for groceries, I had time to play games. One afternoon I asked if he wanted to do something about his incessant turning, it’s my only line aki. He said there must have been a miscommunication, that he’d been looking past me, at his French friend. Yeah right, because a boy will rush to avert his gaze from yours and never catch your eye directly once after because of the guy sitting beyond you? There’s group chats for that...watu si wajinga nani… But I was relieved, it was not my place to teach a Belgian man how to care for a Kenyan woman; not my place to teach a white man what to do with his desire for an East African woman. Not my biashara at all because my relationship with history and time is getting radical; boiling nicely kama supu na waru, mosmos tu.

While I understand that depth is universal, l would doubt the love of a different coloured vessel—always. I need my man, not just Black, because I learnt I am not made for winter and the cold that comes with that life; I need him not just African either because I learnt I don’t like to over explain myself nor translate sheng and on a less fortunate note, in Tokyo, I discovered the term blanketing and a quick excuse for the -isms. I saw it at work how men comfortably listed four jobs like it was normal; how they saw me as a comfort prize in a distant land. Nilikuwa nipige mtu btw, they dared offer to marry me for a visa, I could have spat at the fucker with this my Nairobi mouth. It was disappointing to rarely meet a sound African man, too many were thirsty and aggressive as if I shouldn’t have a choice. Mimi? MIMI? I shut it down bad because I neither want to edit nor curate myself to be seen, and man did I see my pipo fold in the little but real ways.

At the start of spring, I hadn’t joined the Pan-African club at school because I didn’t care to and knew ntakua studio mahali naangusha banger nikiomoka one time. Life did other things and eventually I accepted the invitation to go, albeit reluctant. Walahi sipendi kujiexplain, and I’m an editor, I’m in trouble. On the fourth floor of Global Square, I found a room of about twenty or a bit more. On a desk and a seat, were kangas and generic shukas but sikaa zetu, they weren’t as heavy, someone had river-road-ed dem peeps. I thought, cute and listened to a session of trivia about our continent; the usual on capital cities, languages and so on. I didn’t mind, I like learning and seeing others gain knowledge brings me joy. The shindig began after the questions when someone and their friends began playing actual drums and the girls joined them, in a weird ruracio style formation. Listen, I was very offended. I make music and we have an FL Studio for all that. The instrument I do have is a stringed one I’m not sure I can call a nyatiti because it is made up of five strings that vary depending on how tight or loose the strings are. I rarely play it because I love the sound of the bass, boom and don’t mind being a vocalist on my projects while instrumentalists play their part. Therefore, to stand there and watch this madness didn’t agree with me. I walked to the front, asked for permission and changed the room screen and sound system to Nakam Saa Hii.

At that moment all I could see was my kid brother and his love for Genge. To watch his peers reenact some weird shit they must have imagined is what Africa is, was tragic to me, so I played Lil Maina and they stopped in their tracks, turned to the screen and watched. I tried to bop my head so they could see they didn’t have much to do. But it didn’t take and I panicked before quickly changing the music to Too Easy. I hadn’t seen the video before and was pleasantly surprised to find there was one. I walked down back to the crowd and tried to show them how to move to Bien but wapi? I was heartbroken when they gently returned to their drumming and line dancing. Here I was telling them who I was, and right before me, a past no one lives in was being reenacted in response. Once more, I learnt that perhaps carrying Africa is too much a task and while I plan on having a tattoo of her, I am not her. Mako, I am not a continent, I am a woman, a body with needs. These thoughts go deep.

Recently I’ve been having trouble distributing my empathy across history. In particular, the much I had for World War II is fast dwindling (naskia aibu kusema imeisha), because the Allies were criminals in my country, not just during but before and after. Setting up concentration camps across central, splitting families and sending members to Lodwar and Manda Bay, incarcerating, massacring and not giving a flying fuck, so why should I? I am tired of being the bigger person. At Soka, being one didn’t seem optional. I had to gently introduce colonization as the cause of Africa’s state; that the idea of an African state was a colonial tool but that was rarely well received.

Conversations were redirected towards us being dependent on the land. That our economic procedures did not go beyond raw materials and that we were dirt poor as backed by multiple global records by the IMF, the World Bank and like-minded partners. But none of my friends and peers are farmers nor miners nor soloists of an all tribal dance group. Many of them are writers, poets, music producers, rappers and musicians. In the past, some, like me, have either fallen prey to or instigated a pyramid/forex scheme. We live on the land, we depend on it for oxygen, food and the apartments that belong to the hot bodies we want to see past daytime, but we are not safari guides nor farmers.

In many classes I was easily disruptive, but it was June after all, how could I listen to all this jaba and not retell and explain why Boniface Kariuki was losing his life a year after so much bloodshed? Sikuweka watu. We read Amanda’s essay on the Elephant, ‘Revolutionary Baddie in My Soft Girl Era,’ I told my classes about Qwani, and that we’d one day get our freedom. My hot-headed discussions one day had me facing off a Ukranian-Russian student who thought Middle Eastern countries obtaining nuclear power was crazy. I asked him about Africa and South America and he went quiet, so I answered my own question and said Africa and South America should have nuclear power. Kwani iko nini? What’s all this international bullying? For a long time I felt the constant push to say who we are: educated, humorous, loving and patriotic, not what the media had said. Here, watch our YouTube shows or follow one of us on TikTok. But I could only play rebel so long before I decided that this fight too was harming my brains, mind and heart, and therefore my body.

I quit giving a shit during what had been my second favourite class after yoga, Environmental Science. I’d taken the unit hoping to learn how to write about the environment in my poetry—I really stopped being a stem girl a long time ago. All my classes were simple and in the social sciences, the most difficult one I had was the Japanese language class. I wasn’t really practicing and at night, sake was keeping me company enough for me to not to care. I think I was just rebelling against everything. In class, the sensei was American and at some point, had to stop referring to me for answers because it was obvious he liked mine best. One evening, a peer presented the usual about land dependency on the East Melanesian Islands (somewhere on the Pacific where peeps are dark and brown). I asked him what he thought the citizens should do. He said go modern, I asked if they already weren’t considering their internet access and schools. He went quiet and I introduced having partnerships with international studios which could film in these indigenous areas. I thought the idea would boost the area’s creative economy and better, give the children a broader selection of what they could do later on in life like acting, directing, designing, procuring and producing, scripting, editing, audiovisual work and so much more.

I was shocked when the idea was rejected as being disruptive to the environment. Building movie sets consumed local materials and supposedly, once a location has been shot in, there are less likely chances of different projects using the exact same sights. For the first time, my teacher had lied or hadn’t minded diving into my thoughts but he had lied. How many times have I watched a music video shot in Nairobi’s CBD? How many films show Table Mountain down in South Africa? How many times have you caught the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids and the Empire State on a show, a song, movie, ad or meme? Nilijam. Ananiambia aje places kaa zetu si worth multiple recognition in sight and memory? After that, we locked horns constantly hadi exam niliuma D. (Don’t tell my professors why, nilisema I was tired and wanted to come home, I partially wasn’t lying pia, hehe). But the professor taught me something new about myself: I think of people as my environment.

The reason why is that I grew up in Huruma. The only ‘natural green’ I could see and touch was in the vegetables on the stands on the streets; the grass and trees in AIC Mathari compound somewhere near no.10; and once in a long while, on a Friday, the playing fields in Depo near Utalii college when our primary school teachers needed an afternoon-long-break from us. The only river I knew stank with misery and literal death. And although there were years I spent at boarding school in Mwingi and Kajiado where the fields were wide, like Tokyo, I always knew these places were not home.

Where I’m from, the length of our races ran across the fifth and fourth floor corridors; the height of our dares included crossing into each other’s buildings via slanting roofs, and if we came home early from school, we’d wait with neighbours watching cartoons while having blue band bread and tea, or wait playing on the shared balcony until someone came home. Where I’m from there’s so much grey, we have to crack through the concrete before we see the sunshine. So to live with this drive and to follow it for so long and to meet not one, but enough hurdles to redirect myself, so far from home, has been toiling on this body. Minataka kupendwa na mtu nikiambia niko Wabera Street, ananishow nipande nimngoje EcoBank kama Maureen Kunga kwa video ya KooKoo. Hii mambo ya kutaka yaliyo nje yangu sitaki tena.

Subscribe now

Kenya, the land that lies between latitudes 4.5ºN and 4.5ºS, and between longitudes 34ºE and 42ºE, this too is the globe. This land that lies east of the Americas, the Caribbean and the Atlantic; south of the Mediterranean, the Sahara, the Red Sea, the Pyramids of Giza and Kush; this land that lies west of the Pacific, Indonesia, the Arabian peninsula and the Indian Ocean; this land that lies north of Zanzibar, Malawi, Madagascar and the Southern Ocean, this too is the world—and self containing. I refuse to accept a history that spans merely two hundred years past and presents me as faulted and in need of rewiring to become a tool of labour. I want to be made of love for myself and country, the same one that murders its youth, because if I am quiet, whose peace is it? Whose tranquility am I maintaining?

The question formed last June after the night of 25th. I couldn’t sleep for weeks and found it absurd how we’d wake up and walk kids to school, catch matatus and head to town for work where scores had died. Whose peace were we maintaining? It surely wasn’t the youth’s because I was going crazy. This selective amnesia, selective memory, selective pain, I am done with self editing. I want to find out what more we inherently had passed down to us, save for defiance and the will to survive, can we inherit love? Can I trust a Nairobian man with my heart, mind and body? Because I need to be held. Yoh!

I have accepted that at heart, I am a city kid looking for love, so dem boys wid dem silver fangs, shiny chains n like fifty rings on dey fingers? My type, very bad, but I had to learn I can look for love further than my neighbourhood. I then met dem geeks who love to read and speak in puns; lawd! My type, very very bad. But I’ve had to learn to leave this man behind because while he may adore me, he only loves to watch me fly from the inside of a window and I tire. Some bodies need to shelter from the storm but not this body. I need to feel the wind, the rain, the rage and emptiness of the sky. I am now ready for you, the one who flies with me, we’ll live in the blue, and take shits on racist peeps, like this one Asian curio store owner in tao using Kenyan staff to keep track of me when I shop, nikaa mimi ni mhalifu. He should really go home and on his way, we’ll take runny shits on his cruel shoulders and they’ll never tie it to us, so high here, they could never believe birds are this intelligent. So find me soon, because kuna hii wimbo ya Kodong Clan, Kodong where Okello says, “...Atatiii!” Mimi nataka kutii and what this body wants, this body gon’ get.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy listening to Sheila too. Stream her music here.

Share Therapy Sessions

Leave a comment

I am not complaining though. I am healthy. I am safe. And I am feeling particularly good about how my life is going. There is a slowness in my days which I have been enjoying, even in the midst of this Nairobi city craze. Two weeks ago, I was in some deep village in Kwale. When people talk about the coast, they talk about how slow life moves there as compared to Nairobi, and after being there for only four days, I can attest that indeed, they do live slow. I found myself relaxing there — moving steadier than usual, taking my time with things. Perhaps, they have taught me a thing or two.

Also about two weeks ago, the #16daysofactivism against Gender Based Violence began. I have never before participated in it, but for one reason or the other, I felt that this year, I should participate. Since this was my first time, I wanted my participation to be personal, and for it to begin with the first step — awareness. I created a system: for the 16 days, I would read an article about gender based violence (and all forms of it including SGBV and TFGBV) and then, I would use prompts (provided to me by ChatGPT) to write down a paragraph or two. Some of the prompts included questions like:

What does safety feel like in my body? Where do I ignore my boundaries? What part of womanhood feels powerful to me? What does respect look like in a relationship? What behaviour do I never want to tolerate again? How can I honour my intuition more?Where have I silenced myself before and why? What does justice mean to me on a personal level? What promise am I making to myself about my safety and voice?

They were great eye-opening prompts. As I sat down to write each morning or sometimes in the evening, I would discover how crazy it was that I have never once contemplated some of these questions before. I found myself lacking the answers at times, and then I would just write whatever came to mind, whatever felt the most true to me.Today is the last day of the 16 days of activism, and have I found what I was looking for when I started this challenge? I am not sure. I am more aware about the injustices women face all over the world, but when it comes to my own personal safety and boundaries and voice, am I stronger? That is what I am not sure about, but even the fact that I am asking myself these questions for the first time might be an indicator of a great start.

I have also been learning about rage. It seems like a weird thing to say: that I have been reading and learning about rage, but it’s true. On one sunny afternoon about two months ago, I walked into the Prestige Bookshop along Mama Ngina Street, and I picked up a book by Audre Lorde, titled: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. It’s a collection of her essays, and in one the essays, Uses Of Anger, she writes:

We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything else than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and of what we are trying to do here.

Here, she is talking about racism in the feminist movement in America. She writes about how white women often neglect the needs of black women even when they talk about gender equality and she writes about how important it is to remain angry; to access our rage in all forms of injustices. Now, I am not a black woman in America, but I am a black woman nevertheless and this essay, more than enlightening me, challenged me. I am not a person who is often angry. You will find me sulking, you will find me laughing, you will find me romanticizing, but you will rarely find me angry.

As I read Audre Lorde, especially that sentence: “we cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us…” I felt like she was speaking to me. The truth is, I fear my rage. I fear accessing it, I fear utilizing it, I fear showing it. It is much simpler for me to be sad about an injustice rather than be angry about it. And sadness is good, it helps when it comes to immersing yourself in all your feelings, but is it helpful in all cases? I don’t think so. For instance, when it comes to establishing your boundaries, you cannot approach it with sadness. You have to approach it with rage, with anger, with clear statements that whatever happened cannot be tolerated again. And this is where I falter. But, as I said, I am slowly learning. One step at a time.

And the thing about learning something is that when you decide to do it, the universe kind of conspires to make it happen. I have been involved in a project called Whispers Of Resistance, created by Bint Aisha in collaboration with some truly amazing people. The project is all about rage, about screaming, about letting our pain and survival be seen and heard as women. During the entirety of creating this project, whether it was writing a piece for the magazine or shooting and editing the poetry film, I have found myself immersed in a space where I feel comfortable accessing, or starting to access my rage, and I am grateful for it. The project is going to be at the ForumCiv Artivism showcase tomorrow from 9AM - 5PM at the Kenyan National Theatre and it will be an honour if anyone reading this could attend.

Register here if you would like to come.

Another thing that has happened in the past few weeks is that I lost a teacher and a dear friend to our family. His name was Mr. George Achala. He was my mother’s colleague in a previous school they used to teach at. He taught Biology and she teaches Biology so I guess a friendship was bound to ensue between them. But that is not how us, the children, came to know and remember Mr.Achala.

During school holidays, Mr.Achala came up with the idea to establish a tuition system so that even when we were home, we will still continue learning. The tuition took place at Kakamega Primary School, and we, the children of the teachers, would go there, every holiday, and learn, take tests, and generally, build friendships that have now faded but seemed very important at that time.

Mr.Achala was kind of like our headteacher. He was very strict, but he was also very bubbly. When he laughed, you could hear it in miles. His joy was contagious, and you could not help but laugh with him, even when he had just admonished you for failing a simple Biology quiz.

Later when we finished high school and grew up, Mr. Achala still remained a great friend to us, and we would visit his house, where his wife, his daughter Lily and his sons, would welcome us with open arms, laughter and kuku kienyeji.

Today, they buried him. I wanted to be there. I wanted to pay him my last respect and remind him, or more so myself, that the lessons he taught us through all these years still held water. But since I couldn’t, I figured the closest thing I could do was write a little about him here and immortalize him with my words. I hope this still counts.

Rest in peace, Mwalimu.

Today, I’m more than honoured to welcome the one and only Natasha W. Muhanji !! Oh, Muhanji, where to even begin with her? She is a writer, a poet, an editor, a model, an art connoisseur, a voice-over artist, and a graphic designer; she is a mover and a shaker! Muhanji is one of those people who, when your paths cross, you know you are in the presence of greatness. She is a wonderful, wonderful, creative, and even better person to hang out with – lighthearted and always ready to share a laugh.

And when it comes to writing, there is no writer whose torch is always burning as bright as Muhanji’s. Her fiction, and I have told her this several times, is something I ardently admire. And her poetry. Oh, her poetry. The most gentle, most beautifu,l and most pressing lines of verses. And then comes her nonfiction, which you are about to witness. I will allow you to be the judge of that (but spoiler alert, you’ll be blown away!)

Please get ready to read… Natashaaa Muhanjiiii

bY Natasha Muhanji

It is Sunday evening, and the estate is silent. I am seated before a cracked, full-length mirror, staring into my own eyes, tracing the word that has become my ghost—tenderness. I can hear my blood moving, feel the pull towards my own reflection. Earlier, my canthus itched after I removed my synthetic lashes; my eye is still a little red. The faster I blink, the more I tear up. It’s the irritation. It’s the tenderness.

To be tender is to be gentle. To be tender is to be sore. I am beginning to wonder if they are different things at all.

In the show I am watching, the female lead has just been swallowed by a wave of tenderness for someone she logically shouldn’t. I love fiction. My chest is sore (tender) and there are ten episodes left. The characters are too happy for my liking. I am afraid, because most romance series end up tearing me apart.

I was raised on this tenderness. I was stewed in it from birth, like a lily in still water, fed on Walt Disney and Barbie movies. This amniotic romance. My amniotic romance. I remember loading GenVideos on wonky WiFi, battling a million ads to watch The Fault in Our Stars after sobbing through the book, rewatching 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless. Like a flower, tween me consumed every chick flick she could find to bloom. I was an unabashed romantic, in love with the world and with love.

I don’t think it was a bad thing. Is it a bad thing?

At some point, I just… stopped. I clammed up. I can’t remember the precise moment, which is why I am writing this enquiry. I am trying to poke a little into why I began circumventing tenderness.

I realize now that I had consumed so many “perfect endings” that I slipped into a consumption slump. I started curating my media like an echo chamber, meticulously avoiding any story with a string of hurt in it. I knew the answer why (I was avoiding the sting of reality) It’s one thing to know that perfect, easy romance is fiction but it’s another to actually face this.

Avoiding pain is only natural. But what happens when you avoid pain so thoroughly that you begin to feel nothing at all? What happens when your blood freezes from inactivity, and you taxidermy your own psyche?

This self-preservation has seeped from my screen into my life. I have always been a little too cold with the people I care for most. Tenderness feels raw, revealing; it hurts. Unconsciously, I become a little mean, a little rigid in the face of absolute intensity. I have been told, more than once by people I was besotted with, that they assumed I was uninterested. It puzzled me then. It still does, a little. I didn’t know how to explain that I was simply afraid of being actually seen.

I remember just over 2 years ago, someone I was falling in love with asked me how I expect to be understood if I do not bare my guts and face that which I harbor within. I remember how my breath caught at this observation and how calculated every move I made after that was.

—

I do not blame anyone. I am circumventing tenderness of my own volition. I slow-glide through interactions like a ghost through walls, finding it hard, on some days, to banish my rigidity, to shed this hardened exoskeleton. I can still melt into a hug, a smile, small talk. I am polite but unreachable, offering warmth but only in controlled doses.

Yet, sometimes, in the silence of a Sunday evening, I feel it. I hear it whispering. This slow, deliberate process of my own preservation (avoidance?)

Sometimes I think I have taxidermied my own psyche. Preserved myself so well that I can no longer tell if I’m protecting my tenderness or avoiding it. Sometimes I think I am fossilizing myself while I breathe and it terrifies me.

Follow and subscribe to Automated Nat to read more of Muhanji’s work on substack.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now