Relax child, relax! Something I tell myself every morning before I jump out of bed. Even before I say that silent prayer thanking God for giving me life. It might seem awkward to you but to me it is everything. “Why?” you ask, because I know what life without relaxing is. It’s having your heart race at the slightest things and feeling like something is constantly chasing you. It’s having your mind tell you all kind of things you should say and do but also playing out the worst case scenarios in 3D. Actually, it’s like having the biggest group of people hurling insults at you, telling you how inadequate you are and how you will never amount to anything sensible. Of course it’s all in your head. Any one you confide in will tell you to be strong and snap out of it but no one knows how hard it is. At that time, no one is in your shoes to empathise with you. So you do what you think is best, you wear that uniform that has kept you going all your life, the “I’m a nice person” smile, “I don’t give a shit” attitude, and the “happy go lucky” hair-do. It doesn’t get better than this, you believe, but your mind has other plans for you. The more you ignore its needs, the bigger it grows, until it overpowers you. Just like that little puppy you refused to train but now it’s too late to change it because it’s bigger than Marmaduke. It is no longer adorable (It is madness I tell you 😂) You keep going day after day, holding everything like a bra that’s too small until one day it BURSTS! Yeah, it spills over like a shaken soda, spilling everywhere and messing everything up; work, family, friends, health and worst of all your neatly intact emotions. At first you don’t know what’s happening, you shake it off as a bad day but the bad day becomes a week which carries on into a month. The month ends and another begins, no change. It suddenly dawns on you that you’ve crashed into a wall and you’re going nowhere. You start asking yourself what you should do and one thing resonates in your tired little mind, a whisper saying, “relax child, relax!”