Zibuyile iinkokheli

My mind is always wandering. It’s doing so as I type out this post. For this reason, I started having pages in my journals titled, “brain dump”. These are breaks in between my planning and journaling where I literally dump all my thoughts without the pressure to nit-pick, process or compartmentalize. I started doing this back in 2019 when my mental health took a huge knock. I would struggle to go about my day because my mind was always going. To some degree, this started to cripple my functioning. Perhaps there was an element of anxiety somewhere in the mix.

So what is a brain dump? Gents, think about when you empty your pockets after a day out and about or before dropping your clothes into the laundry basket. That’s if you do… Ladies, think about the last time you emptied your day-to-day handbag. Some of us take items out one at a time while others tip the bag over and let everything out all at the same time. A brain dump is pretty much that – an emptying of your mind through the act of writing down ‘stuff’ that keeps it occupied.

For me these thoughts range from to-do-lists to emotions, pending decisions, anxieties, celebrations, appointments, conversation nuggets and and and. There is no method to the madness really. I just write. The point is to spill out the thought, no matter how disorganised, without fussing over the fact that the thought itself probably needs further attention.

At a later stage, I then take time to go through the said dump and work my way through those thoughts. Some need immediate attention while others just take up mental real estate and are therefore tossed in the bin without further engagement because honestly speaking, I tend to think about random, useless things too.

Today is the first day of my last year in my twenties (happy 29th birthday to me yay) and I spent most of it snuggled up in bed watching true crime documentaries. I had a lot on my mind, still do, yet I chose to self-distract instead, which is oftentimes a poor coping mechanism which leads to an endless loop of rumination and avoidance.

At some point mid series, my mind started going off on tangents that had nothing to do with what I was watching. My thoughts varied from thinking about all of life’s balls that I’m trying to juggle yet I keep on dropping, to remembering that growing up, June was never an exciting month for me because my grandmother passed away two days before my seventh birthday, to the fact that I had worked through and survived a pandemic, then uprooted my life to work in rural Mpumalanga only to find myself contemplating resigning, to wondering whether I should be applying to study a totally different degree and where to get funding for that to contemplating going to the shops to get myself a treat for my birthday, to the fact that I have to study for ACLS next week yet all I want to do is read the book chilling on my bedside that I’ve been meaning to read for the past two weeks, to planning the rest of my week and thinking about the fact that I’m almost thirty yet my life looks like nothing I could’ve hoped for or imagined. It was a whole lot!

You see the thing is that I do not have a short attention span, yet when my mind does this, it bounces and pirouettes between ideas to a point where I can barely make out a complete thought. Talk about chaos! So I paused the episode and remembered that I used to do brain dumps and had stopped doing so a while back. At the time, I couldn’t pin the reason down but I had ceased all efforts. It was at this very moment that i recalled a conversation from 2022…

I had travelled to Cape Town to attend our church’s (@rucc_capetown) annual ladies conference, Alabaster, which happens to be coming up in almost exactly two months from now. I might share more about it later but here’s the link for tickets (or DM if you’d like to join us but cannot afford one), we’d be thrilled to have you!

You see, at the time I had been struggling with terrible insomnia for over three months. I was not sleeping. I would celebrate days where I was able to get 2-3 hours of uninterrupted snoozes and those were very scarce. Things got so bad such that I needed medication to help me along and even so, Zolpidem (a sedative or tranquilizer) was found slacking.

On that unforgettable weekend, I would like to think that I had a very special appointment with Holy Spirit because those encounters determined the trajectory of the rest of my life. After much resistance, I had agreed to MCing/facilitating/moderating the event, which was my first rodeo, so my mind was locked in on the task at hand and nothing else that entire weekend – my mind was technically clear and I was sleeping well regardless of the insomnia leading up to it.

I don’t know if it was just me but the rain that particular night was distinctly heavier and louder than any of the rains I could recall in a very long time. I remember being woken up by the sound of rain pummeling the roof on that Sunday morning, which also happened to be the last day of the conference.

“Great, now that I have your attention, we need to talk.” I sat up immediately. It was during this conversation that I discovered the underlying cause and subsequently, the solution for the insomnia. I had too many tabs open simultaneously in my mind. Some were important, others not so much but because I was not actively engaging with either category, they were causing my system to slow down, and a crash was later inevitable so to speak. I was thinking but not holding my thoughts captive as Paul implored the church in Corinth. Ultimately, these thoughts had no means of disposal so they just remained and were allowed to linger on, which tormented my mind. “Each night before you sleep, you need to sift through your day. Close tabs that you don’t intend on revisiting and pin the ones that need your attention. Your mind is too cluttered.”

Needless to say, I returned to “Bush” after the conference and had the most peaceful, unmedicated sleep. Something I had not known for almost six months. My mind needed decluttering and I guess it took getting me to a conference all the way across the country in order for me to be still enough to hear this.

As my mind begins to wander off yet again, I figured that this is not the tone I want to set for the rest of this 29th year. I cannot afford to. A lot is at stake. I need all my faculties, especially my mind, clear and sober. The less distractions the better. I don’t even know if this post will be coherent enough for you to follow but I am working on reigning and reeling my mind in as I type this out.

Finally, believers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable and worthy of respect, whatever is right and confirmed by God’s Word, whatever is pure and wholesome, whatever is lovely and brings peace, whatever is admirable and of good repute; if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think continually on these things [center your mind on them, and implant them in your heart].

Philippians 4:8 (AMP)

Dear Leader!

As you do life and lead, I hope you will join me on this journey of being intentional about the things you meditate on. I pray that you will make every effort to declutter your mind and set it on things that are truly worthwhile and beneficial. Your destiny is on the line. Let’s organise these chaotic thoughts, shall we?