A Goodbye to Goodbyes

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This blog has spent so many years waiting for us to finally come back to it, to be inspired again. And honestly, I can finally say that we are. 2019 is our year to make this blog the best its been and to give it some love. 

Love,

Fatima and Zoha 

I've had enough

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I've had enough of ignoring this blog and trying to shy away from writing a post (ever). I've had enough to attempting to conceal my lack of effort when it comes to the blog because I haven't put in any effort in perhaps one year. I've had enough of trying to pen posts in which I don't get back producing two decent sentences before zoning out. I've had enough of watching one of my passion slowly disintegrate into a hollow activity to which I give little to no regard.

My 11 year old sister recently started a blog, focusing her attention on crafts, DIYs and baking. Three things which I have watched her obsess over ever since she five. Her commitment and dedication to these three projects remind me of how much I had always liked tweaking with computers and writing. Two things that I eventually combined and showcased proudly on two different blogs.

Her blog reminds me of myself.

I started blogging as a 12 year old, fussing over makeup that I didn't wear and giving out tips that I would never apply to myself (not that they weren't genuine, they were just researched from the internet). Two things excited me when I first started blogging- firstly, finally having an outlet to write somewhere and express my opinion on certain topics (namely makeup at that time) although they were numbered down to one and secondly, having to do it with my best friend Fatima (with whom this blog is still shared at this moment). 

I loved blogging. Wait, scratch that-I still love blogging. I've just kind of lost cause. I've lost ambition and dedication that I once had. I feel hollow and drained. I feel as if I'm suffering from a never ending writer's block.

This post was mainly motivated from my close inspection and analyzation of my sister's blog. Her posts trickle the same love and obsession I had for blogging and sharing content that I had 3 and a half years ago. They remind me of how much I liked to blog regardless of whether I had hundred people reading my posts or not. I liked it. I loved every second of it.

And now, it just feels like a drag. 

I think I've shimmied around this particular post for a long time. Trying to force myself into returning to normal instead of having to type out this post and giving an excuse for my irregularity and lack of motivation or dedication towards a platform and a community that my heart swelled with love for until a year back.

But this is the honest, cold hearted truth.

I do love blogging but perhaps, I'm just not in the right place or state of mind to whole heartedly write the stuff I want to write. 

I've concluded perhaps a year back that I would start a solo blog, independant of Fatima since her focus was slowly deterring from full time blogging and I did not want to force her into committing to a hobby for which she did not have time nor the same amount of dedication that I held. She does love blogging but she treats it differently than I do and that is where we clash. That solo blog somehow never came into being to this day.

I was entirely focused and determined on starting it when I first decided. We would surely continue this blog but I would put more effort into that one. It would be my space and I wouldn't have to force a fellow blogger into helping me or having to consult with a fellow blogger every once in a while like I had to with Fatima. My determination however was short lived.

I don't classify myself as a lazy person although I am quite lazy with certain things but with things like blogging and writing. Anything related to my passions-I am nothing but hard working. Regardless of my love for blogging, I started toying around with the idea of separate blog.

I am still unknown to the exact reason why that happened. There are several reasons though but I cannot, to this day, settle on one.

I've hid myself too much. I've ignored, pushed aside, brushed off, disregarded this blog and just blogging in general for too long.

And I have seriously have had fucking enough.

I have spent enough time envying people who religiously put up post after post, each of them crafted and curated to perfection as if it had taken days upon days to finish it up although it probably had been an hour or less. I am more than just sick of staring at my drafts, dwelling in the misery of how unrefined and uncomposed they were.



But it probably hadn't been about the clarity or quality of my posts-it had everything to do with myself and the way I had started treating blogging. I've struggled to categorize my blog. To categorize my blogging style.



Since my exams are now done and dusted and the school years rolls into it's conclusion, I realize how much time I have in my hands when I don't have an alarm clock set up 7 am for school. When I don't have school nagging me. I believe it's time to perhaps start working on a few things. Namely; this blog.



So I am back.



Let this be a fresh start. Let this break be a rejuvinating experience that has cleansed me and taught me a few many things about blogging and about myself as a blogger and writer.



I'll see you very soon.

 - Z O H A -

And Maybe That's All It Really Was

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There is a monotone to this life that I call mine. 

A background noise, whiny and droning.

That continues every second,

every day,

every hour.

At first, I tried to make sense of it.

Was I corrupted?

By the complete unoriginality of every day life.

My mind a careful mess

That had been put together.

And then I tried to change it.

Like blasting music into my eardrums

Would take away the pandemonium inside my head.

At last, I tried to accept it.

It was a noise.

Clamor.

And maybe that's all it really was.

I could live with that.

No I could not.

At first I tried, but it was futile.

No one can spend their lives

Listening to something

That they did not create.

And at times, it got in,

And I would be alone,

With only this mosquito whine to keep me company.

I had to get rid of it.

I woke up a sunny day

And walked.

And walked.

Until it was dark.

And I was alone.

At the waterside.

The waves were pulling.

Whoosh they went.

Buzz I went.

Buzz Buzz Buzz.

Every second.

My feet touched the water and shivers ran through me like a current.

The waves. So blue.

In and out.

Whoosh. Whoosh.

Every second.

I walked faster.

In and out.

In and out.

Dragging me.

Inviting me.

And I ran.

Until I was waist deep.

Liquid needles.

Numb.

In In In.

Out Out Out.

The waves were different here.

More wild.

More ferocious, but they were pulling it from me, my buzz.

Buzz....Buzz

Every other second.

I closed my eyes.

Or maybe, they were already closed.

And I shut my mind.

Or maybe, it was already shut.

Time trudged on but I was oblivious.

The world no longer felt my presence, nor did I feel it's.

It was me.

Alone.

In waves and waves of water.

And when I opened my eyes.

I stood and counted the seconds.

1..2..3

4..5..6

7..8..9

10

The sounds around me was sharper.

But that which had always been there.

My buzz.

Was gone.

Euphoria flooded me like the waves that had now drenched me.

My garments waterlogged and heavy, 

I trekked back.

Out of the depths.

And into the blue.

My life was just beginning.

x Fatima x

15 Things I Learned in Twenty-Fifteen

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Here are fifteen things that I realized in the year twenty fifteen.

 1.Friends come and go. All the time. Your squad eventually breaks up and a new one begins. Cherish every friendship and always keep that one best friend by your side.

    2.Detaching yourself from the internet and your mobile phone every once in a while contribute to your sanity and health.

3.Good grades aren’t the only route that is going to lead to success. Dream big and always always be optimistic about your future.

  4.Find out what your passion is. What your spike is. What your talent is. That’s where you are going to genuinely excel as well as love every single fucking second of it.

 5.Don’t let jobs labeled as ‘practical and promising’ stop you from chasing something more fun and creative, if forming an underground band is your passion as you stumble from bar to bar to score gigs then own it and live that way if it makes you happy.

   6.Enjoy life a little more than you always do. Laugh at every lame joke because you want to smile and be happy. Stop taking things too seriously.

 7.Adapt to situations and even when you feel like you can’t-tell yourself that you can. Nothing is certain in life and life is going to give you a hard time because it’s destined to do that but what matters is how you act during that hard time and in what state you come out of it.

   8.Nobody is better or less than you are. Nobody is more beautiful and/or has a better body. Learn to love every flaw and own it. Don’t consider your flaws ‘flaws’ unless you’re a shitty person then that is a major flaw.

 9.Corresponding to the previous point, love yourself. You are all you have. If you’re gaining weight or if you’re losing it. If you have scraped knees or scars on your body-love every single one those things because they are a part of you and they make you ‎‎’you’. There’s only one of you in the entire world-take pride in that.

  10.Motivate yourself constantly. Be your own coach. Give your high fives and pep talks. Drive yourself and push yourself when you need to.

   11.Don’t lose hope. It all gets better because you will eventually adapt to the situation as it’s in a humans nature to adapt and accept. Things will get hard and at one point, at one fucking point they will begin to get better. Play the biggest role in making your life better.

   12.Give little importance to what other people think. Wear pajamas out in public when you don’t feel like changing. Chew your nails in front of people when you’re nervous. Dress for yourself and yourself only.

 13.Change for no boy or girl. If you feel like this certain personality is contributing to your positive attitude and life, never change. Don’t chase boys or girls that aren’t worth your time, money or energy and they don’t even deserve you. Love yourself more than shitty relationships.

   14.Be thankful. Be so fucking thankful even if you lost your job, your partner left you, somebody’s giving you a hard time because someone out there has it so much worse than you do. One day when all that you had gets snatched away too whilst you were blaming others and/or God for your loss, you will realize how good you had it. How you had practically everything you ever needed compared to now. Thank everyone. Thank yourself. Absorb every blessing and treat it as if nothing could be better. Take a few moments out and literally cry in happiness for how much you have and how there are so many things you have to be thankful for.

  15.Get your priorities straight. Once you know how you’re supposed to live, the kind of people you should be mixing with and what is important and what’s not-you’ll finally start living and everything will seem better from that point on. Small things will not bother you. Money or wealth or a person’s looks won’t be the first thing you notice. You will know how to live and won’t just be breathing, you’ll be alive. This was the biggest lesson for me in 2015. You think you know what you’re doing but until you really analyze your life and what you’re doing, you find out how wrong you’ve had it. How you should’ve considered certain things differently, treated people differently, lived differently. Find out what’s really important and what really matters.

You only get one life and you will only be one person so love yourself. 

-Z O H A-

In search of creativity

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Oh my, it's been a while. From fixing up my schedule at school to working out and catching up on TV shows, all that and balancing my social and family life; I would not disagree if you said that I had indeed put the blog on a back burner. 

This whirlwind of events and daily tasks left me drained of energy and time to devote to a blog that so very much needed some curative energy, content, people to read it's posts. It's been so long since we've been blogging regularly, sometimes I forget I'm a blogger and when I go remember, I hate myself for even for a millisecond forgetting that I am one. 

Blogging has been fucked up for me and for Fatima as well. There's so much we want to do in terms with this blog, so many things we want to write, so many people we want to reach and yet that's exactly what we're giving the least time to but despite everything, we have little motivation to even attempt to work on these things. Despite over 50 to hundreds of reads on our posts, we have been unable to receive even a single comment. 

And that is even more fucking annoying. 

If you read a post, you should comment unless it sucks beyond belief and I know for sure that our posts in no way suck. They're the best that we've ever put up. Nobody deserves this yet we are getting exactly this when we least need this. 

Things blog-wise are difficult enough without anyone being there to motivate us to move on. Even an non genuine comment like great post, please follow me on bloglovin etc etc would have been better than this void space that this blog is experiencing. 

I've never wanted to blog more and less at the same time. There's so much I want to say but there's no use when there's no one to hear what I have to say. Fatima got over a fifty reads on her last post and was up for over a month before she got barely three-four comments. Despite the fact that yes, we did get comments; we had one blog posts hoarding our blog for over a month, no new content, nothing refreshing to talk about, no professionalism.

Emma Gannon, once wrote in her post:

Call creativity what you want. Call it hobby, call it job, call it a calling but to me it’s a lifestyle that is crucial to who I am as a human-being, and what makes me feel like I’m actually living as opposed to just dragging myself around. Creativity and the art of writing, photography, making, communicating isn’t something anyone can ever take away from you. It’s a life that you have to go and get. The more you put out there, the more that will come back to you.

Creativity is physical matter for me. It's a part of me and for it to not inhabit my body and my work for so long was draining me.

I could feel the creativity slipping from underneath my fingers, from the tip of my tongue. All the effort I had put into rejuvenating and re-defining the blog was slowly making no sense if there was nothing we had to share in that aspect. What was the use of that huge post we had written when there was nothing similar to follow?

I have so many ideas for what I want to write about yet when I come here to type them, they make no sense. I have no grasp on my content anymore. No idea how to sculpt my posts.

At the same time, the blog lacked professionalism, a stable audience, curative content and so much more which I KNOW I can put out yet I am unable to.

Disappointing. Very fucking disappointing.

So here begins the search for creativity. Not that kind of creativity that a bloggers in writer's block requires. The kind of creativity which I know I have inside me, I just need to find it.

So, I'm currently on a hunt for creativity. I'm doing anything to get the curative energy flowing.

But I need your help at the same time.

If you're reading this, help this poor old writer out.

How do you find creativity? How do you find inspiration to produce the content you want to produce? What helps you write? What helps you write a comprehensive and whole post?

What is creativity to you?

Write me something. Email me. Tweet me. Provide me with inspiration is all I'm asking for.
Help me restore a bit of my soul.

Zoha x