Author: TheAyeshaSite

I am a Black Guyanese woman. I'm thirty nine years old. I went back to college to take Early Childhood Education classes. I want to get a second 48-credit BA degree in Early Childhood Education by 2021. I go to NJCU. I have a BA in Creative Writing from NJCU. I graduated from NJCU in August 2015. I transferred to NJCU from Mercer. I have my AA degree from Mercer in Humanities and Social Science since May 2007. I write poems, I write memoirs, I'm a blogger and I am taking a children's lit course. I love reading memoirs. I also do book reviews from time to time. My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson. I grew up in Ewing, New Jersey. I live in Princeton Junction with my parents!

Sunday a day to reflect.

I am forty now. I have come a long way from where I started from. I don’t judge myself. I try not to judge others. I pray. I seek God more. Sometimes in the mornings I pray to God when I first wake up. God’s presence in my life made all the difference. I appreciate the prayers that were prayed on my behalf. I pray for myself too. I know God is in this battle for my sanity with me. I am thankful that God cared enough about me. God chose to heal me. I appreciate God. I appreciate people in my life that offer help to me. I know there are going to be times when my mom needs me and my stepfather may need me too. My parents are getting older. I try to help my mom a lot more. My mom is in her early 60s and my stepfather is in his late 60s. My parents and grandparents made sacrifices for me to benefit from. I appreciate my mother and my stepfather. I feel like I should help out more. I do laundry and from time to time I cook. I try to help my mom with bringing the groceries inside the house into the kitchen. My mom is my primary caregiver but she gets burnt out sometimes and we stay inside and I do laundry. I love my mom enough to do laundry without a need to ask for anything. I help my parents out no questions asked. Once in a while I cook for us.

Sometimes it is good to stay in a situation rather than it is to try to run away from a situation.

I try to face challenges and difficulties in my life and not pretend they don’t exist. I had certain challenges in my life but it never stopped me from genuinely liking myself older feeling more comfortable in my own skin. I am just as nice the way I am. I am just as good as any other person. The enemy attacks me. I had been bullied by kids in school as a child. I used to get dissed a lot. I was teased a lot about my color. In my family family dynamics had always been stressful but I care about my mom and my family. I am thankful my mom always did nice things for me from time to time. My mom has her own life. I carved out my own little niche for myself. I wouldn’t want to do what my mom did. I like my role as a writer. I had to be true to my own choices and my own interests. I got advice to follow my dreams not have anyone tell me what to study or what path to choose.

I am in a silver or crystal phase.

I prefer wearing silver to wearing yellow gold. I like silver jewelry. I am in a minimalist mindset. I try to spend less. I try to only go to department stores when they are having sales. I like white gold too. I take care of myself. I try to take life each day as it comes. I know I can trust God. I have supporters but they are few. Sometimes my supporters get burnt out. I am stepping up to the plate more. I try to help my mom. I volunteer to cook a dinner for us all once in a while. I also try to think of my mom and stepfather as they are getting older. I want my mom to feel appreciated by me her daughter and only child. I always liked my mom. We have a good relationship. I try to always think of others. I try to be generous and think of other people before I think of myself now that I am older.

I try not to compare myself to other people. I don’t think the comparison works as well if I were to compare myself to people who look nothing like me. Being the first person like me to get four blogger award nominations was a really cool experience to have. However, if I were to compare myself to someone I don’t look like or someone who isn’t similar to me, I am sure it wouldn’t work because the person doesn’t look like me. I try not to compare myself to other people. As a forty-year-old woman I see wisdom in not comparing myself to people who don’t look like me.

I see wisdom and maturity in not comparing myself to others. I had some hard experiences but I have had some good experiences too. I am not giving up on my goal I set to get my license. If I get a few more driving lessons I will try again to pass my road test. I can do it! I’ll try again!

Sometimes it is good to go through the process instead of looking at when you will reach the end. I try to be more in the present, and more in the moment as I get older. I need to think about my parents and my grandparents too. My parents made sacrifices for me, and I try to honor, and appreciate my parents. I think of people who are in my life that make my life better. I try to appreciate the people in my life who enrich my life. I don’t want to take things for granted. I pray every morning thanking God for a good night’s sleep and the Lord’s mercies are new every morning. I know God is with me in these difficulties. I praise God for being for me and working in my life. Faith in God will cause me to be victor and not a victim.

Even though I have had my share of haters it never stopped me from liking myself and seeing myself as just as good as any other person. I made a decision that I was going to embrace what makes me unique. I am celebrating my life but I still have days I push myself to get through the day. I made peace with my illness. I have the illness but I thank God every day my illness doesn’t have me. I really enjoyed quality of life over the years from my involvement with NAMI as a volunteer and a consumer.

I wondered lonely as a cloud in a sapphire sky. I formed a few friendships and I try to socialize more. I know I need people in my life. I need allies. I need supporters. I try to help my family. I try to respect other people and I have to respect myself. When I was a child I had a lot of family members around. My family lived a two-family brownstone in Brooklyn, New York. I am a New York native. I feel good to say I was born in Brooklyn. Biggie the rapper who got killed in the east coast west coast beef was a black Jamaican guy but he’s from Brooklyn. His mom was a Jamaican immigrant.

Being the person I am I have taken a big step in the right direction because I try to do things on my own more. I used to get teased a lot when I was a child about my color. When I turned thirty I started to feel better about myself. I had a lot of experiences where I was bullied as a child. My life got better as I got older. I started to feel better about myself. I cried a lot the other. The teasing hurt me but I always wrote about my inner conflict that is my illness. I am still loveable but let’s face it there is a lot of stigma associated with mental illness. I feel more confident now that I am older.

I believe in God because he healed me from schizophrenia. God healed the brokenness of my life. I can praise God because His power has been holding my life together. I have supportive parents thank God. One day my stepfather said “Ayesha will get social security benefits from my job if something were to happen to me.” I thank God I have my parents. My grandma is still alive. I know you can’t plan life, life happens. I appreciate people in my life who care about me enough to have worked for me and left enough money for me to be taken care of. However, I am trying to generate some of my own income by getting a part time job and writing for children as a hobby. I try to help my mom with laundry and cooking. Yesterday I changed my bed sheets and I got some help yesterday putting on brand new Queen size bed sheets and pillow cases. That spruced my room after I made my bed.

I accept myself as I am. I don’t want to change to look like someone else. I knew by my late 20s that something started to change in how I felt about myself. When I was a little girl I got teased a lot about the color of my skin. I was always teased and taunted by other black kids. I sometimes even experienced racism as a tween going to restaurants in the area and having some of the people not like me. I went to a Muslim school in my early childhood years that I don’t want to mention the name of. The school was mostly black and the teachers were the daughters and sons of the female principal. I would never share the names of any of the teachers because I don’t want to risk any problems. The kids in my neighborhood teased me a lot and said I was too black. I know not to worry about what people say about me. I am somebody.