Sikiliza

'I am a community leader. My phone is always ringing—it is always one crisis after another. My community expects me to have the answers, to be the solution. But when I have been depleted for far too long and running on empty... who can I call? My comrades are just as busy, and the community I serve cannot help me back. So I ask, who can help me?' This candid question, shared by a courageous activist during a recent session I was leading, hit the virtual room with profound silence. It is the unspoken reality for so many of us in social justice, advocacy, and community work. We are the healers, the fighters, the supporters. We give, and give, and give... until we have nothing left. One leader described it as 'giving out, out, out' until you are drowning. For decades, we have been told that burnout is a personal failure. That if we were just stronger, more organised, more passionate, more determined, more more more..then maybe we would not break. But a recent gathering of ...

  Some nights, the sky feels utterly starless, doesn't it? A heavy blanket of darkness where you lose the felt memory of the warmth of the sun or the gentle light of the moon. I have been walking through one of those starless nights lately, a season when my own heart is learning the clumsy dance of holding grief while composting old wounds that have scarred over and healed. It was in this quiet darkness that a gift arrived, not with a loud announcement, but like a steady, gentle flame. That gift is Faith Njahĩra Wangarĩ’s newly published ebook,  Love, Grief and Healing: Your companion through loss and discovery .  It is a bright torch, and its light is guiding the way home to myself. I am honoured and touched to know Faith, my fellow feminist sibling, and so it is a profound experience to receive the gift of her words and reflections. Her book is a generous, raw, honest, and profoundly moving account of her healing journey, which validates the path I am on to be more pres...