Author: TheAyeshaSite

I got my first nomination when I was 37 years old. I remember the experiences I had been nominated checking my stats and seeing my following and feeling so cool to have a presence on this WordPress.com platform. I like having a social media presence. I am one of the first people to have this experience  to have different countries like India, UK, Canada, France and other countries seem to like some of the content. Top influencers have a much larger following but I appreciate the other bloggers and the nice people on this site who write poetry, have memoirs in the works or even soon to be published like Hannah Blum. I feel excited about it on rough days even. I feel young but I had never really had perspective on life until I had been working on a memoir that was to be a shorter piece. I remember the support of my memoir professor Dr. Edvige Giunta. I got from my memoir professor at NJCU and had challenging assignments after choosing memoirs to read by popular memoirists I admire. “Tale of three half sisters” was my memoir it was an eighteen page piece about my early onset mental illness. One day in class Dr. Giunta had us read a contained piece called “The Giara of Memory” where she shared a piece from one of her memoir anthologies. I was blown away by how nice she had been to me. I just love reading other people’s memoirs.  I read Lil Wayne’s memoir. I read a memoir by a black actress I don’t really care for as much but I read her memoir and her name is Taraji P. Henson. She has a memoir called Around The Way Girl. It was kind of cool to get a glimpse of her life and you know popular actresses and even rappers write their own memoirs. The next book I plan to read is probably Free Cyntoia.

I always had an interest in memoir writing. Having my professor of memoir writing workshop and also advanced memoir writing  workshop like me and support me in an amazing way. I learned that she is actually Sicilian American and I thought of how kind and sweet she is as a person just having her like my short eighteen page memoir I wrote for advanced memoir was really cool. I had went to a few events Dr. Giunta held on campus and it felt really cool to wear makeup and go to a party and having one of the young women I remember say “oh my gosh Ayesha you look so good you have make up on I almost didn’t recognize you.” Little things like me having a small circle of people that also say I’m very nice too. It makes my Christmas holiday to have gotten a special journal from my secret santa and to just have a few new friends I can socialize with I feel so much less alone. I don’t want to run the risk of isolating myself and I’m living more in the now. I’ll be forty soon and my birthday is in January I’ll be 39 in another month.

I had my first appointment with a chiropractor when I was twenty five years old. I got my first adjustment. I found things the natural doctors or the wholistic wellness route was the best. I never trusted doctors. I feel like the doctors that train as chiropractors are really healers. I had a chiropractor who cared about me enough as a patient to treat my curved spine by putting special hot packs on my back. The doctor even put a special device to treat my spine and the curve in it. I have been seeing him since maybe 2012 or 2013. This man is a healer that knows and understands things about medicine and science that I don’t understand. I so appreciated him doing what he did to treat my back. I’m feeling better and I have an adjustment tomorrow morning at 11 am. The way to healing is through wholistic avenues not medication though it also helps. I know when the doctor explained what he was doing to treat my spine I felt such a feeling of gratitude to him as a doctor caring about me as a patient and treating my sciatica that was once bad scoliosis I had as a teenager. I had such bad back pain that you wouldn’t imagine. I remember how bad I felt sleeping with the worse pains in my neck and my back. I knew by the time I was twenty five that when I had found my first chiropractor I was on the road to feeling better. I dealt with severe back pain for a decade before I had my first experience with a female chiropractor. My weight is also a factor but I’m happy to say I’m almost 50 pounds down in the past nine months. I lost my weight on my own following a vegetarian or pescetarian diet.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Sometimes people live in the future. Others live in the past. I on the other hand have been staying more present trying to enjoy the life I have and not planning too much. Every year I make new year’s resolutions but this year is slowly coming to an end. Tomorrow is Christmas eve. I am looking forward to Christmas and I’m going to a New Year eve party at NAMI. I have had quality of life over the years because I had NAMI a place I could go. I know mental illness is hard and there is a lot of stigma. I was happy to say I had a poem on this website on schizophrenia poetry website. I have also published quite a few of my poems in the Messenger NAMI Mercer NJ’s newsletter. This was something that I felt happy about for the years Miss Maddy included my poetry in the newsletter. I want to wish all of the bloggers in this blogging community a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

I feel like I am just as good as anyone else. I have friendships but I don’t really have a lot of friends but I have a few. I have my good days and I have my bad days. I like working with children. I want to become a teacher. With this blog I became an author too. I love to write. I have a memoir book project. I am trying to build my work experience. I had a summer job but my illness is difficult. I find ever since I made peace with my illness I’m less afraid of dying. I was hospitalized too. I feel this pain in my chest. I have said no more to smoking cigarettes and that was over five years ago. I just feel like some people are never going to like me. That has kind of always been my experience but I’m done with trying to be accepted and have kind of moved to a place now that I’m almost forty of letting the offenses go and letting go of the past and trying to live more in the present.

I feel like I am just the way I am supposed to be. It used to be very hard for me as a kid but I find myself putting on my favorite black cherry Revlon crème lipstick and saying chocolate girl you’re not bad. I can’t explain it any other way but God I thank you for allowing myself to see myself the way you see me thank you. I really like the Gospel song Imagine Me. I love the piano playing and I love the concept for the song.  Music has been one of my favorite hobbies other than art or journaling or even working on my memoir.

I am a person who has a lived experience with my mental illness. I know through my own life experience that mental illness is difficult. The best thing you can do is find peers that have the same problems with their mental health. For me NAMI was that place. I have volunteered for NAMI for nine years now and I even worked for three years working as a Mentor for a program for students with intellectual disabilities. I wanted to give back to Mercer. I have special brick that has my name on it outside of the student center. Mercer was a school that gave me a small community college experience that was mostly good but I had a bad experiences there when I was stolen from. I enjoyed being a mentor. I know Mercer is having work done on campus too.

I had some successes in my 30s as a writer. I just submitted an assignment to my new writing teacher at Institute of Children’s Literature back in November. I got the assignment back and my new writing teacher gave me amazing feedback. I am so happy about it. I feel like I can possibly have a career as a children’s author. A friend of mine said that he had an experience in his childhood with children’s poetry through Shel Silverstein’s books for children. I like Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss. I want to be able to write for children but I just wanted to be clear that I do not have an agenda. I just want to be able to write for children.

I remember my childhood and it was hard sometimes because I got teased a lot. The things I share in my memoir I’m sure many African Americans can probably say “I can relate to Ayesha’s story more.” Now that I’m older I surprise myself. This was definitely not true at all for me as a child but the change when I started to like myself I was in my early 30s. I like myself so much more now. I treat myself. I’m honest about my life experience and I think that’s why more people can relate to my memoir. To be honest about your experiences in life is to find more people will say it makes it easier for people to relate to. Readers may say “I can relate to this person’s story more because they rendered their experiences or what it was really like for them. They were so honest about their life experiences.