The first time I used an oven, I made banana bread. It was also the first time probably since I was a 12-years-old, frying Chin-Chin with my mum, that I had felt flour on my bare hands. I welcomed the smell of the flour mixing with the baking powder, the nutmeg, the sugar, the milk. It gave me the same feeling of cinnamon sticks in a boiling pot of water, with thin bright yellow lemon slices also in the mix. The aroma. Add that to being in a wooden bungalow in the middle of a rainy forest, and you would have recreated one of my few escapist fantasies about slow living.

The problem was that my life has always been far from slow. When I was 4, I wandered one evening streets away from my family compound. The search party found me late at night in the middle of a group of strangers dancing. At 16, a guy who had a thing for me was involved in a car accident alongside our mutual friends; he could only remember my name – for months. He wasn’t my boyfriend. Or when… The stories are not few. The dramatic has always found its way to me, but just like my newfound culinary hobby, trauma is new. It’s either new or – as I am led to believe sometimes – so old, it had been completely forgotten.

Even though baking or cooking as a hobby was a very unusual foray for me, I am too obsessed with winning that at my first attempt, it was by all standards well above average. So was my unravelling after an experience I can only describe as one of hell’s best moves. I noticed my newfound culinary curiosity fast. I was now saving videos of colorful recipes on Instagram instead of lying face up on the bare ground in my tiled living room, bawling, asking God why He chose me for this battle. Instead of begging my mind for a little silence, I spent hours scrolling through online stores looking for cumin seeds and coriander. Marinating, instead of spiralling.

It seemed like a healthy escape to want to engulf yourself with the aroma of carefully beaded seasonings. Either that or there was something about slaving away in the kitchen that significantly reduced the useful hours of the day. Maybe it was the final outcome; something tangible to show for all that work. Mini projects with the gratification of a tasty meal or simply their completion to look forward to every single time. Cooking allows you access performance with key metrics almost immediately. After every step. Mistakes are useful data to approach repeated projects with a level of experience.

When rocky life events first happen to you, part of the recovery is accepting that the event will change you in certain ways. You assume that you will begin to see life from a different, and ideally, better perspective. I had believed that I would quit the unending quest for success. Tone down the size of my ambition. Rest. That it was okay to be mediocre in whatever sense of it as long as I had peace. As long as the pain was gone and I could wake up with a semblance of normalcy, even if it bored me to death. I believed that I would return to being the girl who wrote about the moon or threw stones at the waves. The girl that savoured the experience of rain, sunsets, big chandeliers, abstract art, watching men in baggy corporate outfits arguing at newspaper stands, or beautiful music.

You will eventually discover that nothing changes. You don’t suddenly become better because the universe forced a jawbreaker into your mouth and hung you under a guillotine, waiting for execution. The only ever-present thing is the chaos of the trauma itself in all the creative ways it decides to bind you. Time will pass but trauma will remain.

“I’m not sure again what I was supposed to learn from this experience,” I asked a therapist. “What was I supposed to change? How do I know when I am healed?” He then asked me to talk about what being healed looked like, and my answers led to even more spiralling.

I spoke about how my desired state of being was peaceful, balanced, stable, winning. About how my life had terribly fallen out of my control, so much that I was willing to take whatever I was offered as long as it was not this. I know they say the grass is not always greener on the other side, but I was willing to swap lives with anyone else. I spoke about how I was now too scared to dream. Scared to believe that there was a better reality than this one, where pulling my hair out of its roots was not metaphor enough to depict the torment of the noise within my mind.

I spoke about how I wanted a happy life filled with beautiful experiences. How I wanted to explore. About freedom, in all the good and bad ways that it can be expressed in one’s lifetime. How I wanted to be agile and fit; not wallowing in self-pity. How I wanted to feed my creative genie, but also how I was so lost in a maze of a thousand mirrors revealing different angles of my reflection but with no knowledge of who the real version was. Who is the real me?

I know this.
I know myself.
If I could just think clearly.
Concentrate.
Meditate.
Be aware.
The pain isn’t real.
Nothing is real.

I spoke about how the search for who I was had resulted to changing hairstyles and hair colours for a hint. One night, I even cut the locs I had grown with love for the last five years with a kitchen knife with “Voilà” by Barbara Pravi playing in the background. As if to say, this must be the real me now. I’ll know I’m fixed when I love my daily reality, at least to a higher degree than all the ways I hate it. When I love who I see when I look into the mirror. When I’m back in the fucking driver’s seat of my fucking life. When I can glide like the wave and morph into all the new, sophisticated, and feminine ways my evolution requires of me. When there’s something exciting worth looking forward to. When there’s something that drives me to wake up and anticipate the day.

Fixed me is free. Creative. Confident. Powerful – or at least has a semblance of it. Basking in her genius. She is strong. She is audacious. She makes moves with skill and tact. Beautiful. Fixed me is a force. Fixed me is all the best parts of my magic and madness. Fixed me knows how to stay within the boundaries that keep her safe and valuable, but also radical enough to take the liberties that make her feel alive. Fixed me is experienced, cautious, but not unemancipated or incapacitated.

 

Herein lies the difference between cooking and trauma. You may be able to mentally note to use more yeast in your dry ingredients mix and end up with a dope next Puff-Puff batch. You may read somewhere that the bay leaf should be amongst the first set of ingredients in the pot for a killer Jollof Rice. I was even able to master Akara simply by learning that with the seasoning, less is more.

With trauma, what worked yesterday may not have the slightest chance today. You would realize that even with a full guidebook on what healing or being ‘fixed’ looks like, you could still turn out a nasty piece of work on a fresh day. You will try not to make the feeling worse, but you will fail because karma (repeating cycles) with taunt you. You would be ashamed of your fragility. At how easy it was for chance or ill-fate to break you. You will hate the projections, the advice, the sympathy messages, the questions, the judgement, the disappointment, and the damn small talk. You will hate the flashbacks. You will question why it had to be you. Why your odds could not have been what you wanted, or at least simpler.

Then one day, you would choose to pay more attention to the senses that have not been completely overwhelmed by darkness. For me, it was the realisation that my tongue was still sensitive to touch, so I could taste the viscosity of frozen Greek yoghurt in my mouth. Opening the oven to bring out my slightly burnt but scrumptious banana bread was one of the few things that made me smile, albeit temporarily. Same as cooking a full pot of Indian curry because I mistakenly bought chickpeas instead of beans.

It reminded me that pain was not the only new thing that came with my version of adulting. My trauma hobby showed me that you can see things, decide to recreate them, and have them turn out the way you want – or close enough. I may not be able to control the direction of my life, but I suppose a tray of grilled potatoes and chicken breasts perfectly orchestrated, makes a ton of difference to a heart too shattered to break any further or be pieced back together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash