Social media is a cold world!!!
- Thread starter Mask
- Start date
I would love to see this chick go against Kevin Samuels. I get the vibe that she would give him the true debate battle we want to see.
Her clapback game is
She is deadly. She would be like Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4, "In Hong Kong, Kevin Samuels would be dead already"
Her clapback game is
She is deadly. She would be like Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 4, "In Hong Kong, Kevin Samuels would be dead already"
once the battle starts:
I was just watching that scene before I posted mine. I was trying to figure out if I should post that one too, but you read my mind
Easy Work....
I actually NOTICED that Now This was in the opening credits. I remember seeing her original, and again on Now This News, but I didn't even begin to put it together that THEY had a hand in this. I didn't think much farther than the co-directors.
It's fucked up on their part and unfortunate for her, but I hope she continues to make a stink about it to expose and shame them for it.
I am wondering how can I explain it if I had one in my apartment when the wife came to visit.He should've found a chick for this.
Then again, it's all good in CAC humor.
"Have you noticed that audio equipment and our phones don't have eq lights anymore like our old component set? Yeah, I bought this to bounce off my Bluetooth speaker for an old-school feel, baby.
What an asshole.
When God falls asleep…. To the family and loved friends of… | by Jaykwon Hosey | Medium
When God falls asleep…
Photo by: Devan Bolden/bold.jpg
To the family and loved friends of Jhanae,
Mamma J, Richard, Tiana, Faith, Janel, Dominique, Halie, Jaleel, and Uncle Taye, I navigate through my own pain with you still. I cannot say that I understand or feel the same pain as you, but my heart reaches for yours. I pray healing and peace walk with you for all the days of your life. She is forever ours, and forever your sunflower child. Forever my fairytale that came true.
I believe there is no beautiful way to tell this story, it is painted with pain, death, tears, fear and all the emotions my mind and body underwent throughout these last few months. So often artists are loved for how well they’re able to tell the most gruesome horror stories, I refuse to fall in line with this trend, I cannot. Words can be used to paint pictures that are both beautiful and ugly, I use them to convey the realities of my journey, whatever those realities might be. It’s impossible for me to include every detail of my experience, but I do hope that even my ugliest scars can help others see that every wound eventually heals. I pray my story can serve as a compass to some who may be navigating their own broken world, lost.
In retrospect I hated the feeling of waking up in the hospital, the still noise, smell, the stiff cold air. I remember slowly scanning my body and feeling for my legs while noticing unfamiliar wounds and scars. I remember the soft whispering voices, beeping machines and sounds of carts and beds being pushed through the hallway. I rarely got any sleep at all. I counted the hours and watched the clock because there was nothing else to do. I usually lay up scrolling through tv channels trying to watch something that’d make me feel like I was home again. Usually Martin or Fresh prince helped me deal a little with laying in the same bed all day, they gave me the feeling of sitting around watching these shows back with my family or reenacting and quoting some of our favorite scenes with my siblings.
I often times paged the nurse from my bed only because I needed company, hospitals didn’t allow visitors due to COVID and restrictions. I eagerly waited for doctors to come into my room so they could update me on my status and what would happen for me next. I was only able to talk to my family through an Ipad and had no phone to even contact anyone so I could tell them I was okay. I felt alone.
Nurses would constantly come in and out of my room, asking for my date of birth, if I knew where I was, and if I could name the current president. “Sir? Jaykwon? Do you know where you are? You were involved in a car accident.” Eventually when I became conscious enough to notice I was in the hospital I was still confused as to why. It was hard to distinguish between what was me dreaming while in a coma and what was reality. “Car accident?” Going where? When? I lay in a bed for almost two weeks before surgery was performed on me, not exactly sure what doctors were waiting on but my body had gone through so much. By the beginning of August I was ready to leave, still unaware of the severity of all of my injuries. I just needed to be in a familiar setting around familiar faces. I wanted to be home.
I remember sometimes laying in bed with nothing really to do except wander in my own thoughts and feelings. My parents had called me one morning to check on me and see how things were going, it felt good to see their faces and seeing my nieces and nephew always brought me a little joy. Their innocence reminded me of what it felt like to not have these kinds of worries, they hadn’t really been touched by such and unremorseful world yet. They had no problems to worry about at their age, their youth was so beautiful to me. Throughout the conversation with my parents I casually mentioned my girlfriend’s name, as though she were with them or had been around. I vividly remember seeing her come in and out of my hospital room to check on me the night before. “How is Nae?” “Does she know I’m okay?” “Can I contact her?” There was a long, still silence on the phone. A silence that I now fear, and actually have always feared. As a child I had a love and hate relationship with sleeping and sitting in silence, it wasn’t always a sign of peace and was usually an indicator that something was wrong. Either that or it came before terrible news. I saw the look on my mom’s face and strangely I knew something had happened.
“Ma, what’s going on?” Anxiety set in more than fear, I could feel as though something were wrong but didn’t want to speak too soon. “Kwon, Nae didn’t make it, she was in the car with you.” Denial, pain and confusion seized hold of me. It was that feeling of you wanting to speak but your throat tightens up and you begin to choke on your own words. With so much running through my head, things strangely started to come together.
The last I recalled was we planned on driving down to Miami so we could spend some time with her family. Prior to this the only day I remember vividly in June was the 19th. I rarely had any memory because of a head injury. My heart was crushed. I immediately blamed myself and felt as though I was the one who was supposed to protect her and she lost her life sitting right next to me. I grew up having to protect those I loved, my sisters, brothers and friends, by any means necessary. As a young boy that’s what made you feel as though you were a man, the ability to protect. Whether that be with a fist or words. It made you feel as though you had control, you could dictate the outcome of any situation you inserted yourself into. In this moment though, helplessness consumed me. I began to weep and soon nurses and a chaplain came into my room to sit around my bed to console me.
I was sent home early from ICU, not knowing that the next five months would be some of the hardest days of my life. The doctors believed I had an adequate amount of care at home for my parents to take care of me. I was happy to be going home although I was in a wheelchair with a catheter inserted inside of me still and a large drainage tube I had to carry around everywhere. In addition to this, I had fresh wounds that still needed to be cared for and treated to avoid infection. I needed to learn to adjust to my new life, which took a while. My energy was always low and as a result eventually my hygiene even took a fall. Often times I didn’t even have the strength to check my phone which was filled with text messages and calls, some from people whom I didn’t even know. I honestly didn’t want to do anything except lay in bed, all day. I needed help getting back and forth to the bathroom, in the shower, in bed and even the car. I became a new born all over again, as an adult.
I was lonely and hurting, having company excited me because I needed people, I needed to feel loved. I needed to lean on the heart, words and shoulders of friends and brothers. People brought me food, books and other things that would ease some of the pain I was experiencing, and maybe help me get back into some of my hobbies. I asked all of my friends if they could recall where they were when they found out about the accident, with hopes that hearing the same story over and over again from different angles would help me make sense of it.
When I didn’t have anyone to talk with, I talked to God. This became hard because of how emotionally and spiritually frustrated I was. It was similar to the feeling of not wanting to speak to a friend you had a falling out with, but feeling upset because they hadn’t reached out to make things better. I thought I was punishing God or teaching him a lesson by refusing to pray. I felt as though He owed me.
I remember as a child being constantly reminded of the nature of a God who never sleeps nor slumbers, who numbers the stars in the sky and counts the hairs on our head. In retrospect it seems like maybe on June 24th, 2020, God fell asleep? Maybe He missed this moment? He missed the 45–55 seconds it took to change my life, and take others. It’s not too far fetched, right? Maybe when God falls asleep these things kinds of things happen? I felt as though He had failed me. He was supposed to watch me but had his attention elsewhere. He allowed the world to take whatever innocence I felt as though I had left. No one is made to experience this, regardless of the resilience some say I’ve shown, I still didn’t think I was built for it. In actuality I had to learn to adapt to this world and it’s ugliness. Some days the pain of leaving this earth didn’t seem like it could be as bad as the pain of staying here and weathering this storm. My bones and heart felt crushed under the weight of it all.
I never experienced what it felt like to be without breathe until now.. they say God can use pain, but often times it felt as though He wields it, as though it were a weapon of some sort. Can pain be used? Why use it anyways? Usually the answer is something along the lines of our pain or trauma being a catalyst for something greater that we will meet on the other side of it. Healing only exists because heartbreak and wounds are real. We experience joy because sorrow and weeping come before it. If it took being broken in this way for me to experience any form of healing then honestly, I can do without it. I don’t think I’ve ever cried as many tears as I have over these last few months. Though my knees were unable to touch the ground, I eventually found the words to pray to God. I prayed with hopes of gaining understanding or some kind of clarity, whatever that may have looked like. I pleaded for answers that quite honestly may never come, but that is okay.
One thing that I learned throughout this journey is that God is not transactional. Our culture has caused me to view the relationship between God and people in two ways, one is that if we lose something He must immediately replace it, the second is that if we hold our wounds up to him He must in that moment clean and bandage them. I’ve learned that both of these are far from the reality we actually live in. God had not removed any pain that I was experiencing, rather, He walked with me through it. He sat next to my bed as I cried and groaned at night from physical pain and cried with me as I wake up early mornings from bad dreams to the reality of Jhanae being gone.
Physical healing will come, most times that kind of recovery has a finish line. Your body reaches a point which it can ignore what use to be triggering, you can bend your legs, your limbs regain their range of motion, the muscle soreness goes away. Emotional and mental healing are what I believe have no end, there is no finish line or no rehabbing your brain back to normal. Your mind is never able to forget what your body experienced. I can learn to walk again, but there is no measuring when I’ll be able to love, think and laugh the way I use to.
Still learning that it’s okay for black boys to cry, to miss people, to feel upset and to express how they’re feeling. I am a man now and I still feel these things, that little boy is still here, with me. He is me. I learned how to be dependent in these last few months, and to say I need help. I hated it because I’d always made sure that I had the things I needed for myself. I realized how fragile I am and easily broken I can be, but that is okay. I found rest in knowing that only one person has the hands to repair me. To massage and mold my heart back to its original shape.
I am not healed all the way yet, often times people believed that being able to walk again was where my journey ended. I think the journey might be just beginning, my heart has been broken in such a way that it constantly needs care and repair. Some days are better than others, some nights are not so long. It’s been so hard for me to embrace gratitude and be thankful for my own breath when someone I believe was just as deserving of life as me is not here right now, smiling, walking and helping bandage my scars.
I forgot how to walk, but I’m thankful I didn’t forget how to smile. This journey is far from over and this story is far from done being told. It may never be done honestly. We sometimes believe that all stories need beautiful or happy endings, we crave clarity and closure for our own sanity. I don’t have much of that because I can’t even remember the last thing Nae and I spoke about. I’m still searching for peace, hoping God gifts me with it. I do know though, he is the creator of this narrative, and the story will hopefully make sense once I let him finish it. Peace and love.
When God falls asleep…. To the family and loved friends of… | by Jaykwon Hosey | Medium
When God falls asleep…
Photo by: Devan Bolden/bold.jpg
To the family and loved friends of Jhanae,
Mamma J, Richard, Tiana, Faith, Janel, Dominique, Halie, Jaleel, and Uncle Taye, I navigate through my own pain with you still. I cannot say that I understand or feel the same pain as you, but my heart reaches for yours. I pray healing and peace walk with you for all the days of your life. She is forever ours, and forever your sunflower child. Forever my fairytale that came true.
I believe there is no beautiful way to tell this story, it is painted with pain, death, tears, fear and all the emotions my mind and body underwent throughout these last few months. So often artists are loved for how well they’re able to tell the most gruesome horror stories, I refuse to fall in line with this trend, I cannot. Words can be used to paint pictures that are both beautiful and ugly, I use them to convey the realities of my journey, whatever those realities might be. It’s impossible for me to include every detail of my experience, but I do hope that even my ugliest scars can help others see that every wound eventually heals. I pray my story can serve as a compass to some who may be navigating their own broken world, lost.
In retrospect I hated the feeling of waking up in the hospital, the still noise, smell, the stiff cold air. I remember slowly scanning my body and feeling for my legs while noticing unfamiliar wounds and scars. I remember the soft whispering voices, beeping machines and sounds of carts and beds being pushed through the hallway. I rarely got any sleep at all. I counted the hours and watched the clock because there was nothing else to do. I usually lay up scrolling through tv channels trying to watch something that’d make me feel like I was home again. Usually Martin or Fresh prince helped me deal a little with laying in the same bed all day, they gave me the feeling of sitting around watching these shows back with my family or reenacting and quoting some of our favorite scenes with my siblings.
I often times paged the nurse from my bed only because I needed company, hospitals didn’t allow visitors due to COVID and restrictions. I eagerly waited for doctors to come into my room so they could update me on my status and what would happen for me next. I was only able to talk to my family through an Ipad and had no phone to even contact anyone so I could tell them I was okay. I felt alone.
Nurses would constantly come in and out of my room, asking for my date of birth, if I knew where I was, and if I could name the current president. “Sir? Jaykwon? Do you know where you are? You were involved in a car accident.” Eventually when I became conscious enough to notice I was in the hospital I was still confused as to why. It was hard to distinguish between what was me dreaming while in a coma and what was reality. “Car accident?” Going where? When? I lay in a bed for almost two weeks before surgery was performed on me, not exactly sure what doctors were waiting on but my body had gone through so much. By the beginning of August I was ready to leave, still unaware of the severity of all of my injuries. I just needed to be in a familiar setting around familiar faces. I wanted to be home.
I remember sometimes laying in bed with nothing really to do except wander in my own thoughts and feelings. My parents had called me one morning to check on me and see how things were going, it felt good to see their faces and seeing my nieces and nephew always brought me a little joy. Their innocence reminded me of what it felt like to not have these kinds of worries, they hadn’t really been touched by such and unremorseful world yet. They had no problems to worry about at their age, their youth was so beautiful to me. Throughout the conversation with my parents I casually mentioned my girlfriend’s name, as though she were with them or had been around. I vividly remember seeing her come in and out of my hospital room to check on me the night before. “How is Nae?” “Does she know I’m okay?” “Can I contact her?” There was a long, still silence on the phone. A silence that I now fear, and actually have always feared. As a child I had a love and hate relationship with sleeping and sitting in silence, it wasn’t always a sign of peace and was usually an indicator that something was wrong. Either that or it came before terrible news. I saw the look on my mom’s face and strangely I knew something had happened.
“Ma, what’s going on?” Anxiety set in more than fear, I could feel as though something were wrong but didn’t want to speak too soon. “Kwon, Nae didn’t make it, she was in the car with you.” Denial, pain and confusion seized hold of me. It was that feeling of you wanting to speak but your throat tightens up and you begin to choke on your own words. With so much running through my head, things strangely started to come together.
The last I recalled was we planned on driving down to Miami so we could spend some time with her family. Prior to this the only day I remember vividly in June was the 19th. I rarely had any memory because of a head injury. My heart was crushed. I immediately blamed myself and felt as though I was the one who was supposed to protect her and she lost her life sitting right next to me. I grew up having to protect those I loved, my sisters, brothers and friends, by any means necessary. As a young boy that’s what made you feel as though you were a man, the ability to protect. Whether that be with a fist or words. It made you feel as though you had control, you could dictate the outcome of any situation you inserted yourself into. In this moment though, helplessness consumed me. I began to weep and soon nurses and a chaplain came into my room to sit around my bed to console me.
I was sent home early from ICU, not knowing that the next five months would be some of the hardest days of my life. The doctors believed I had an adequate amount of care at home for my parents to take care of me. I was happy to be going home although I was in a wheelchair with a catheter inserted inside of me still and a large drainage tube I had to carry around everywhere. In addition to this, I had fresh wounds that still needed to be cared for and treated to avoid infection. I needed to learn to adjust to my new life, which took a while. My energy was always low and as a result eventually my hygiene even took a fall. Often times I didn’t even have the strength to check my phone which was filled with text messages and calls, some from people whom I didn’t even know. I honestly didn’t want to do anything except lay in bed, all day. I needed help getting back and forth to the bathroom, in the shower, in bed and even the car. I became a new born all over again, as an adult.
I was lonely and hurting, having company excited me because I needed people, I needed to feel loved. I needed to lean on the heart, words and shoulders of friends and brothers. People brought me food, books and other things that would ease some of the pain I was experiencing, and maybe help me get back into some of my hobbies. I asked all of my friends if they could recall where they were when they found out about the accident, with hopes that hearing the same story over and over again from different angles would help me make sense of it.
When I didn’t have anyone to talk with, I talked to God. This became hard because of how emotionally and spiritually frustrated I was. It was similar to the feeling of not wanting to speak to a friend you had a falling out with, but feeling upset because they hadn’t reached out to make things better. I thought I was punishing God or teaching him a lesson by refusing to pray. I felt as though He owed me.
I remember as a child being constantly reminded of the nature of a God who never sleeps nor slumbers, who numbers the stars in the sky and counts the hairs on our head. In retrospect it seems like maybe on June 24th, 2020, God fell asleep? Maybe He missed this moment? He missed the 45–55 seconds it took to change my life, and take others. It’s not too far fetched, right? Maybe when God falls asleep these things kinds of things happen? I felt as though He had failed me. He was supposed to watch me but had his attention elsewhere. He allowed the world to take whatever innocence I felt as though I had left. No one is made to experience this, regardless of the resilience some say I’ve shown, I still didn’t think I was built for it. In actuality I had to learn to adapt to this world and it’s ugliness. Some days the pain of leaving this earth didn’t seem like it could be as bad as the pain of staying here and weathering this storm. My bones and heart felt crushed under the weight of it all.
I never experienced what it felt like to be without breathe until now.. they say God can use pain, but often times it felt as though He wields it, as though it were a weapon of some sort. Can pain be used? Why use it anyways? Usually the answer is something along the lines of our pain or trauma being a catalyst for something greater that we will meet on the other side of it. Healing only exists because heartbreak and wounds are real. We experience joy because sorrow and weeping come before it. If it took being broken in this way for me to experience any form of healing then honestly, I can do without it. I don’t think I’ve ever cried as many tears as I have over these last few months. Though my knees were unable to touch the ground, I eventually found the words to pray to God. I prayed with hopes of gaining understanding or some kind of clarity, whatever that may have looked like. I pleaded for answers that quite honestly may never come, but that is okay.
One thing that I learned throughout this journey is that God is not transactional. Our culture has caused me to view the relationship between God and people in two ways, one is that if we lose something He must immediately replace it, the second is that if we hold our wounds up to him He must in that moment clean and bandage them. I’ve learned that both of these are far from the reality we actually live in. God had not removed any pain that I was experiencing, rather, He walked with me through it. He sat next to my bed as I cried and groaned at night from physical pain and cried with me as I wake up early mornings from bad dreams to the reality of Jhanae being gone.
Physical healing will come, most times that kind of recovery has a finish line. Your body reaches a point which it can ignore what use to be triggering, you can bend your legs, your limbs regain their range of motion, the muscle soreness goes away. Emotional and mental healing are what I believe have no end, there is no finish line or no rehabbing your brain back to normal. Your mind is never able to forget what your body experienced. I can learn to walk again, but there is no measuring when I’ll be able to love, think and laugh the way I use to.
Still learning that it’s okay for black boys to cry, to miss people, to feel upset and to express how they’re feeling. I am a man now and I still feel these things, that little boy is still here, with me. He is me. I learned how to be dependent in these last few months, and to say I need help. I hated it because I’d always made sure that I had the things I needed for myself. I realized how fragile I am and easily broken I can be, but that is okay. I found rest in knowing that only one person has the hands to repair me. To massage and mold my heart back to its original shape.
I am not healed all the way yet, often times people believed that being able to walk again was where my journey ended. I think the journey might be just beginning, my heart has been broken in such a way that it constantly needs care and repair. Some days are better than others, some nights are not so long. It’s been so hard for me to embrace gratitude and be thankful for my own breath when someone I believe was just as deserving of life as me is not here right now, smiling, walking and helping bandage my scars.
I forgot how to walk, but I’m thankful I didn’t forget how to smile. This journey is far from over and this story is far from done being told. It may never be done honestly. We sometimes believe that all stories need beautiful or happy endings, we crave clarity and closure for our own sanity. I don’t have much of that because I can’t even remember the last thing Nae and I spoke about. I’m still searching for peace, hoping God gifts me with it. I do know though, he is the creator of this narrative, and the story will hopefully make sense once I let him finish it. Peace and love.
Strong dude.
Support systems should not be taken for granted. Lots of "hard" people think they don't need help, but life can change that in an instant.
When God falls asleep…. To the family and loved friends of… | by Jaykwon Hosey | Medium
When God falls asleep…
Photo by: Devan Bolden/bold.jpg
To the family and loved friends of Jhanae,
Mamma J, Richard, Tiana, Faith, Janel, Dominique, Halie, Jaleel, and Uncle Taye, I navigate through my own pain with you still. I cannot say that I understand or feel the same pain as you, but my heart reaches for yours. I pray healing and peace walk with you for all the days of your life. She is forever ours, and forever your sunflower child. Forever my fairytale that came true.
I believe there is no beautiful way to tell this story, it is painted with pain, death, tears, fear and all the emotions my mind and body underwent throughout these last few months. So often artists are loved for how well they’re able to tell the most gruesome horror stories, I refuse to fall in line with this trend, I cannot. Words can be used to paint pictures that are both beautiful and ugly, I use them to convey the realities of my journey, whatever those realities might be. It’s impossible for me to include every detail of my experience, but I do hope that even my ugliest scars can help others see that every wound eventually heals. I pray my story can serve as a compass to some who may be navigating their own broken world, lost.
In retrospect I hated the feeling of waking up in the hospital, the still noise, smell, the stiff cold air. I remember slowly scanning my body and feeling for my legs while noticing unfamiliar wounds and scars. I remember the soft whispering voices, beeping machines and sounds of carts and beds being pushed through the hallway. I rarely got any sleep at all. I counted the hours and watched the clock because there was nothing else to do. I usually lay up scrolling through tv channels trying to watch something that’d make me feel like I was home again. Usually Martin or Fresh prince helped me deal a little with laying in the same bed all day, they gave me the feeling of sitting around watching these shows back with my family or reenacting and quoting some of our favorite scenes with my siblings.
I often times paged the nurse from my bed only because I needed company, hospitals didn’t allow visitors due to COVID and restrictions. I eagerly waited for doctors to come into my room so they could update me on my status and what would happen for me next. I was only able to talk to my family through an Ipad and had no phone to even contact anyone so I could tell them I was okay. I felt alone.
Nurses would constantly come in and out of my room, asking for my date of birth, if I knew where I was, and if I could name the current president. “Sir? Jaykwon? Do you know where you are? You were involved in a car accident.” Eventually when I became conscious enough to notice I was in the hospital I was still confused as to why. It was hard to distinguish between what was me dreaming while in a coma and what was reality. “Car accident?” Going where? When? I lay in a bed for almost two weeks before surgery was performed on me, not exactly sure what doctors were waiting on but my body had gone through so much. By the beginning of August I was ready to leave, still unaware of the severity of all of my injuries. I just needed to be in a familiar setting around familiar faces. I wanted to be home.
I remember sometimes laying in bed with nothing really to do except wander in my own thoughts and feelings. My parents had called me one morning to check on me and see how things were going, it felt good to see their faces and seeing my nieces and nephew always brought me a little joy. Their innocence reminded me of what it felt like to not have these kinds of worries, they hadn’t really been touched by such and unremorseful world yet. They had no problems to worry about at their age, their youth was so beautiful to me. Throughout the conversation with my parents I casually mentioned my girlfriend’s name, as though she were with them or had been around. I vividly remember seeing her come in and out of my hospital room to check on me the night before. “How is Nae?” “Does she know I’m okay?” “Can I contact her?” There was a long, still silence on the phone. A silence that I now fear, and actually have always feared. As a child I had a love and hate relationship with sleeping and sitting in silence, it wasn’t always a sign of peace and was usually an indicator that something was wrong. Either that or it came before terrible news. I saw the look on my mom’s face and strangely I knew something had happened.
“Ma, what’s going on?” Anxiety set in more than fear, I could feel as though something were wrong but didn’t want to speak too soon. “Kwon, Nae didn’t make it, she was in the car with you.” Denial, pain and confusion seized hold of me. It was that feeling of you wanting to speak but your throat tightens up and you begin to choke on your own words. With so much running through my head, things strangely started to come together.
The last I recalled was we planned on driving down to Miami so we could spend some time with her family. Prior to this the only day I remember vividly in June was the 19th. I rarely had any memory because of a head injury. My heart was crushed. I immediately blamed myself and felt as though I was the one who was supposed to protect her and she lost her life sitting right next to me. I grew up having to protect those I loved, my sisters, brothers and friends, by any means necessary. As a young boy that’s what made you feel as though you were a man, the ability to protect. Whether that be with a fist or words. It made you feel as though you had control, you could dictate the outcome of any situation you inserted yourself into. In this moment though, helplessness consumed me. I began to weep and soon nurses and a chaplain came into my room to sit around my bed to console me.
I was sent home early from ICU, not knowing that the next five months would be some of the hardest days of my life. The doctors believed I had an adequate amount of care at home for my parents to take care of me. I was happy to be going home although I was in a wheelchair with a catheter inserted inside of me still and a large drainage tube I had to carry around everywhere. In addition to this, I had fresh wounds that still needed to be cared for and treated to avoid infection. I needed to learn to adjust to my new life, which took a while. My energy was always low and as a result eventually my hygiene even took a fall. Often times I didn’t even have the strength to check my phone which was filled with text messages and calls, some from people whom I didn’t even know. I honestly didn’t want to do anything except lay in bed, all day. I needed help getting back and forth to the bathroom, in the shower, in bed and even the car. I became a new born all over again, as an adult.
I was lonely and hurting, having company excited me because I needed people, I needed to feel loved. I needed to lean on the heart, words and shoulders of friends and brothers. People brought me food, books and other things that would ease some of the pain I was experiencing, and maybe help me get back into some of my hobbies. I asked all of my friends if they could recall where they were when they found out about the accident, with hopes that hearing the same story over and over again from different angles would help me make sense of it.
When I didn’t have anyone to talk with, I talked to God. This became hard because of how emotionally and spiritually frustrated I was. It was similar to the feeling of not wanting to speak to a friend you had a falling out with, but feeling upset because they hadn’t reached out to make things better. I thought I was punishing God or teaching him a lesson by refusing to pray. I felt as though He owed me.
I remember as a child being constantly reminded of the nature of a God who never sleeps nor slumbers, who numbers the stars in the sky and counts the hairs on our head. In retrospect it seems like maybe on June 24th, 2020, God fell asleep? Maybe He missed this moment? He missed the 45–55 seconds it took to change my life, and take others. It’s not too far fetched, right? Maybe when God falls asleep these things kinds of things happen? I felt as though He had failed me. He was supposed to watch me but had his attention elsewhere. He allowed the world to take whatever innocence I felt as though I had left. No one is made to experience this, regardless of the resilience some say I’ve shown, I still didn’t think I was built for it. In actuality I had to learn to adapt to this world and it’s ugliness. Some days the pain of leaving this earth didn’t seem like it could be as bad as the pain of staying here and weathering this storm. My bones and heart felt crushed under the weight of it all.
I never experienced what it felt like to be without breathe until now.. they say God can use pain, but often times it felt as though He wields it, as though it were a weapon of some sort. Can pain be used? Why use it anyways? Usually the answer is something along the lines of our pain or trauma being a catalyst for something greater that we will meet on the other side of it. Healing only exists because heartbreak and wounds are real. We experience joy because sorrow and weeping come before it. If it took being broken in this way for me to experience any form of healing then honestly, I can do without it. I don’t think I’ve ever cried as many tears as I have over these last few months. Though my knees were unable to touch the ground, I eventually found the words to pray to God. I prayed with hopes of gaining understanding or some kind of clarity, whatever that may have looked like. I pleaded for answers that quite honestly may never come, but that is okay.
One thing that I learned throughout this journey is that God is not transactional. Our culture has caused me to view the relationship between God and people in two ways, one is that if we lose something He must immediately replace it, the second is that if we hold our wounds up to him He must in that moment clean and bandage them. I’ve learned that both of these are far from the reality we actually live in. God had not removed any pain that I was experiencing, rather, He walked with me through it. He sat next to my bed as I cried and groaned at night from physical pain and cried with me as I wake up early mornings from bad dreams to the reality of Jhanae being gone.
Physical healing will come, most times that kind of recovery has a finish line. Your body reaches a point which it can ignore what use to be triggering, you can bend your legs, your limbs regain their range of motion, the muscle soreness goes away. Emotional and mental healing are what I believe have no end, there is no finish line or no rehabbing your brain back to normal. Your mind is never able to forget what your body experienced. I can learn to walk again, but there is no measuring when I’ll be able to love, think and laugh the way I use to.
Still learning that it’s okay for black boys to cry, to miss people, to feel upset and to express how they’re feeling. I am a man now and I still feel these things, that little boy is still here, with me. He is me. I learned how to be dependent in these last few months, and to say I need help. I hated it because I’d always made sure that I had the things I needed for myself. I realized how fragile I am and easily broken I can be, but that is okay. I found rest in knowing that only one person has the hands to repair me. To massage and mold my heart back to its original shape.
I am not healed all the way yet, often times people believed that being able to walk again was where my journey ended. I think the journey might be just beginning, my heart has been broken in such a way that it constantly needs care and repair. Some days are better than others, some nights are not so long. It’s been so hard for me to embrace gratitude and be thankful for my own breath when someone I believe was just as deserving of life as me is not here right now, smiling, walking and helping bandage my scars.
I forgot how to walk, but I’m thankful I didn’t forget how to smile. This journey is far from over and this story is far from done being told. It may never be done honestly. We sometimes believe that all stories need beautiful or happy endings, we crave clarity and closure for our own sanity. I don’t have much of that because I can’t even remember the last thing Nae and I spoke about. I’m still searching for peace, hoping God gifts me with it. I do know though, he is the creator of this narrative, and the story will hopefully make sense once I let him finish it. Peace and love.
Post reported anyway, my nigga...
wtf
Similar threads
