Hello, Dear Reader.
I have missed you! I never planned on letting it get to 5 months. Sure, I took a bit of a break to restructure, but then death came knocking, and I’m learning that you cannot control grief.
It has a way of taking hold of your mind and rendering you helpless. You try, God, do you try, but grief is like quicksand. The harder you try to extricate yourself, the more you sink.
I have pulled up Substack countless times. I’ve stared at a blank page for hours with nothing to show. It felt like grief swallowed my creativity whole, locked it behind an impenetrable cavern, and plastered a giant warning in neon red on the door— Keep off! I’ll vomit you back when I’m good and ready!
Don’t get me wrong, I did write for work—Those are perils of freelancing; you have to freelance. But my writing was dryer than the Sahara.
Here is feedback from one of my editors🤫
Three months later, here I am. Grief has indeed vomited me back out, but I’m all banged up. I have a feeling this is the new normal. Grief brutally teaches you that there is now a before and an after, and you can never return to the innocence and naivete of before.
In the after, when a loved one tells you, “See you later,” anxiety engulfs you. An unbidden thought comes to mind, “what if I don’t?” You now know that sometimes there is no later. She also said, “See you at 4 pm” when she left that morning. But 4 pm never came, 6 pm did—when you got the call that she was no more.
I know I am not unique among men. To be human is to know loss. But that knowledge does not change how personal and alienating grief is. Surely, you must be the first person to go through this because how do people survive? How do they smile again?
But then several weeks go by, and you realize, ooh…you can smile, even laugh.
Grief is that genuine laughter after a funny TikTok, followed by crushing guilt and the slow descent into the realization that other emotions continue to exist alongside the pain. Laughter does not negate pain and vice versa.
So you keep on keeping on. One day, you realize it is 1st April, and you have your words back (muted though they are). You are finally ready to reconnect with your readers.
Thank you for sticking by me. I didn’t lose a subscriber in those 152 days. If anything, I gained 10. I appreciate you🤗
Let’s get back to it—Leveraging the Trade (AfCFTA), Technology, PanAfricanism and Regional Integration to build an Africa that is not an afterthought.
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