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As I’m typing these exact words on my keyboard, I can’t help but notice myself silently laughing internally.

What a weekend. I feel tired, although I had enough hours of sleep. But I can tell that as my body is trying to slow down and rest, my mind is constantly trying to put the pieces together in order to see the full picture as clearly as possible.

Unfortunately, my internal smile doesn’t come from a happy place. It’s a reflection of the confusion and profound discomfort I find myself in after uncovering a big lie related to the story of my family.

The shock of reality.

I always knew that my father was a liar.

Growing up I was able to see how irrational his reflections and his actions were but then he would have this deeply convincing way of talking and looking at you that he could make you believe absolutely anything about you, the world and life.

As a child and then a young woman who was starving for love, affection and encouragement, I tried to persuade myself that there would be a day where I would finally be deserving of having all of these needs being met by my dad.

The hope I was holding to one day being worthy enough to feel seen, heard, understood and accepted would constantly bulldoze my inner voice that told me to leave and run.

I’ve then reproduced that same cycle with most of my relationships with men.

Going through all different kinds of neglect, disrespect and abuse but desperately holding on to those relationships, not listening to the wisdom of my intuition knew that I had the strength I needed to create better for myself.

I’ve made a whole episode about my relationship with my dad. You can listen to it here.

Although we are not close to most of the members of our family (cousins, uncles, aunts etc) there is one cousin all of us have a good relationship with.

My cousin who lives in France.

With my brother and sister, we decided to welcome him to our respective homes this weekend to spend some time with everyone together and get to know him better.

He spent a couple of days at my brothers’ place before coming over to my apartment for the rest of his stay here in Switzerland.

As we had our first dinner together and were talking about our extended family, we both suddenly realized that we weren’t holding the same perspective of reality:

There are 3 members of our family back in Senegal who were introduced to me (and to my brother and sister) as our cousins,

…

But there are all our brothers and sisters.

My dad had, indeed, built a whole other family before having the 3 of us (me, my brother and my sister) and then completely abandoned them as he built his new life in Switzerland with us.

For almost 30 years, I was made to believe that some of these people were my cousins, but they are actually my siblings.

Adjusting to reality.

Most of us probably tend to go towards denial when it comes to having to accept elements of reality that change our whole perception of someone, a situation or ourselves.

It’s a protection mechanism that allows us to hold on to our ego, which is way more fragile than we think.

Accepting reality (how things truly are instead of how you want things to be) simultaneously means sacrificing the part of our ego that desperately wants to hold on to the illusion of what we used to believe.

There are only two options when it comes to the truth and reality:

Resist it, keep your ego and continue living in an illusion.

Accept it, let go of a part of your ego and then re-adjust to reality.

As i found out about this news, I immediately felt ashamed for having a dad that confirms all the stereotypical ideologies and jokes we all can make about black men being responsible for creating fatherless families.

I felt disrespected and terribly sad on a very deep level for having spent so much time hating and harming myself because of everything my dad taught me about myself. To then realize that he himself is absolutely not someone who lives with respect, dignity and honor.

But that he chose to be someone this deceitful and arrogant that he truly believed that he could get away with it.

Then I sat with the pain my now half brothers and sisters had to go through growing up without a dad at all.

Zooming out - the key to navigating life gracefully. 

We probably all can think back to situations in our lives where we reacted impulsively and allowed our emotions to take control of our actions.

All situations that most likely didn’t turn out for the better.

Emotions are part of the core of our human experience in life. And through my work I always invite people to create space for how they feel instead of running away or repressing them.

But there are also moments where giving yourself up to your emotions can be very dangerous, detrimental and destructive.

Learning when to choose logical thinking over your emotional reaction is the ultimate key to navigating through life with grace and resilience.

There is a certain wisdom you develop as you get into the habit of taking a step back as soon as you find yourself in a difficult or painful situation.

Instead of diving into the mess and conflict, which is kind of an aggressive forward moving energy (a natural reaction from your ego), you choose the opposite direction, which is distancing and detaching yourself from what is happening.

Taking a step back allows you to welcome all the different emotions that might arise from that situation, to feel them without letting them impact what is happening and then to actually look at the full picture through the lenses of rationality and logic.

When you bring all these elements together, you hold the key to the door that will lead you to the most sensible decision. Because you took into account all the aspects of the situation instead of allowing one single emotion (like anger for example) to lead you to a scenario with terrible consequences, you then have to regret.

What I want to teach you through this letter, is that no matter where you are at on your journey with yourself in life, reality will always win.

There is no point in trying to resist what is or to believe that you have any chances of manipulating the rules of reality with the hope of getting away with a lie.

It won’t be possible to navigate life without ever coming into a storm again, but it is absolutely possible to go through the storm and come out of it stronger, more resilient and even grateful afterward.

I will see you in next week’s letter,

Until then, take care,

Oli