May came with a completely different texture than I expected.
If I were to assign a physical space to the month of May, it wouldn’t be a destination. It would be a waiting room. You know the kind, the ones with the fluorescent lights that hum slightly, the outdated magazines on a glass table, the ticking clock on the wall that seems to stretch every sixty seconds into a small eternity. You can’t leave, because you need to be called, but sitting there requires every ounce of your mental endurance.
Every month, I sit down to write these reflections. I look back at the thirty-one days that just passed, I extract the gratitude, I untangle the lessons, and I set my sights on the month ahead. Usually, I have a story of triumph. A story of a breakthrough, or a mindset shift that cracked the sky open.
But if I am being completely, brutally raw with you, May was not about breakthroughs. May was about survival.
May was about the agonizing, unglamorous, deeply uncomfortable art of patience.
There is a saying that you cannot force a fruit to ripen. You can yell at the tree, you can flood the soil with water, you can stand there and stare at the green skin until your eyes ache, but the fruit will not care. It operates on a timeline completely indifferent to your panic.
I spent the entirety of May staring at green fruit, learning how to sit on my hands and wait it out.
It started with the money, as these things usually do. Sales were low. And when I say low, I don’t mean “I didn’t hit my stretch goal” low. I mean the kind of low that makes the air in your house feel thin. The kind of low where you refresh your email, check your phone, open your apps, and are met with a deafening, terrifying silence.
When you run a business to support yourself, your nervous system is intimately tied to your revenue. A good sales week feels like breathing pure oxygen. A bad sales week feels like someone has their hands wrapped gently, but firmly, around your throat.
As the days ticked by, the shadow of June started creeping across the floorboards. June bills. Rent. Groceries. The inescapable, monthly toll that the world demands from you just for the privilege of existing. I looked at the numbers, and the math was not mathing. The gap between what I had and what June required was a canyon, and I had no idea how I was going to build a bridge across it.
And then, because the universe possesses a highly evolved, deeply twisted sense of humor, my printer broke down.
I actually had to laugh when it happened. It was one of those hollow, tired laughs that scrape the back of your throat. Of course the printer broke. Of course the one piece of equipment I absolutely need to generate the money I desperately lack decided to give up the ghost right in the middle of a drought.
I took the machine apart. I looked at the broken components, and I looked at the local prices for replacement parts.
It was extortionate. Buying the parts locally would mean draining the tiny, pathetic puddle of cash I had left, leaving me absolutely defenseless against the June bills. I couldn’t do it. But I also couldn’t just sit there with a broken machine, because a broken machine means a paralyzed business.
So, I did what you have to do when you are a woman who refuses to drown: I swallowed my pride. I took out a small loan.
Taking a loan when sales are low is a terrifying psychological game. You are betting against the drought. You are borrowing from a future that currently looks bleak, trusting that you have the grit to make it rain before the debt comes due. It requires a quiet, steely kind of faith.
But even with the loan, I couldn’t justify the ridiculous markup of the local suppliers. So, I went online, navigated to AliExpress, and ordered the parts straight from China.
If you have ever ordered anything from AliExpress, you know exactly what kind of spiritual warfare I signed up for.
Ordering from China is the ultimate test of patience. There is no Amazon Prime next-day delivery. There is no customer service hotline you can call to demand a manager. You place your order, you get a tracking number, and then you submit your life to the void.
For weeks, my morning routine consisted of waking up, making tea, and checking the tracking app.
Package has left the warehouse.
Package is in transit to the sorting center.
Package has departed the country of origin.
And then, the dreaded limbo. The days, sometimes over a week, where the tracker simply says: ”Awaiting flight.”
Where is it? Is it over the Indian Ocean? Is it sitting in a warehouse in Dubai? Did it fall off a cargo pallet? You don’t know. You can’t know. You just have to sit in your house in Nairobi, with a broken printer and looming rent, and wait.
I wanted to scream at the app. I wanted to hustle the package across the ocean. I wanted to bypass the system. But I couldn’t. I was completely, utterly powerless to the speed of logistics.
And that was the first major lesson of May.
There are seasons in life where your sheer force of will is entirely useless. You cannot out-work a shipping delay. You cannot out-hustle a dry season in the market. You cannot manipulate the timeline of a ripening fruit.
All you can do is hold your nerve.
Holding your nerve is incredibly difficult when you are in a state of lack. The natural human instinct when things are slow is to thrash. To panic. To throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. But thrashing when you are in deep water only makes you drown faster. I had to teach myself, day by day, hour by hour, to just sit still. The parts are coming. The sales will eventually break. The month will end. Wait it out.
But the waiting wasn’t just financial. It seeped into my body, too.
I promised I was going to be raw in this journal, and I owe it to you, and to myself, to not gloss over the physical reality of being a single, 26-year-old woman spending her days alone in a quiet house.
In the middle of the financial anxiety, the broken machinery, and the looming bills, my body decided to introduce another layer of torment.
I was so incredibly, intensely horny.
People don’t talk about this part of the healing journey or the “villain era.” We talk about the empowerment. We talk about the money. We talk about cutting off toxic men. But we rarely talk about the sheer, undeniable biology of skin hunger.
There were nights in May where the quiet of the house was so loud it rang in my ears. After the chores were done and the laptop was closed, I would lie in bed and feel this deep, aching, physical yearning.
It wasn’t just about sex, though sex was certainly a loud part of it. It was the desire to be held. To be touched. To feel the heavy, warm weight of another adult next to me. When you are carrying the entire burden of your life and your child’s life on your own shoulders, there is a primal, biological urge to just surrender for an hour. To let someone else’s hands make you forget about AliExpress trackers and June rent.
The temptation to scratch that itch was overwhelming.
When you are lonely and horny, your standards develop amnesia. Your brain starts scanning your mental rolodex, looking for anyone who could provide a temporary fix.
I thought about texting old flings. I thought about unblocking a number or two. I thought about downloading a dating app just to get a hit of validation, just to have a man look at me and desire me. I knew exactly who I could call if I wanted an easy, no-strings-attached night that would temporarily silence the physical ache.
But this is where the patience of May became profound.
I sat on my hands. Literally and metaphorically.
I realized that seeking cheap connection just because my body was craving touch is the exact same logic as buying an overpriced, low-quality printer part locally just because I was panicking about time.
If I reached out to a man I didn’t actually respect, just to soothe my loneliness, I would be taking out a high-interest emotional loan. I would get the immediate gratification of the touch, but I would wake up the next morning with a massive debt of regret, self-disgust, and a complicated mess to clean up.
I have worked too hard on building my fortress to let a Trojan horse in just because I was cold.
So, I waited it out. I let the loneliness wash over me. I let the biological frustration burn. I lay in the dark and I told my body: I hear you. I know you are craving connection. But we do not eat out of the garbage can just because we are hungry. We are going to wait for the feast.
It is incredibly difficult to sit with your own desires and refuse to numb them with cheap substitutes. But doing so builds a level of self-trust that nothing can ever break. Every time I didn’t send that text, every time I didn’t invite someone over just to fill the quiet, I was casting a vote for the woman I am becoming. I was proving to myself that my discipline is stronger than my desperation.
That discipline bled right into the most challenging, and ultimately the most liberating, part of May: the social cleansing.
If you read my last piece, you know I have officially entered an era of absolute intolerance for disrespect. I made the decision to stop being the shock absorber for other people’s dysfunction.
But making the decision is the easy part. Living with the aftermath is the real work.
When you start enforcing your boundaries, when you finally cut out the people who have been siphoning your energy, the immediate result is not always empowerment. The immediate result is a massive guilt hangover.
For the last few weeks of May, I had to actively unlearn the guilt of leaving.
I cut off access. I stopped reaching out to people who only loved me when I was convenient. I stopped explaining myself to family members who wanted me to play small. I severed the dead weight.
But because I have twenty-six years of people-pleasing programming hardwired into my brain, my immediate instinct was to feel terrible about it. I would catch myself staring at the wall, thinking: ”Was I too harsh? Should I have given them one more chance? Am I being unreasonable? What if they are hurting because I walked away?”
That guilt is a parasite. It tries to convince you that protecting yourself is a crime against humanity.
I had to sit myself down and logically dissect that guilt. I had to ask myself: Why do I feel guilty for removing a knife from my own back? Why am I worried about the comfort of the person holding the handle, instead of the bleeding of my own skin?
I realized that my guilt was just a withdrawal symptom. When you are addicted to being the “good, accommodating woman,” setting a firm boundary feels like you are doing something illegal.
Patience was the only cure for this, too.
I couldn’t rush the process of unlearning. I just had to sit with the discomfort of being misunderstood. I had to tolerate the knowledge that there are people out there right now, talking about me, calling me cold, painting me as the villain, and I had to physically restrain myself from trying to control their narrative.
I had to let them be mad. I had to let them think whatever they wanted to think.
Every time the guilt flared up, I treated it like the AliExpress tracker. Acknowledge it, and close the app. Do not engage. Do not try to rush it. Just let the time pass, and the feelings will eventually settle.
And they did.
By the last week of May, the guilt had largely evaporated, leaving behind a pristine, echoing silence in my life. The house is quieter now, yes. The phone rings less. There are fewer notifications on my screen. But the peace… the peace is absolute.
I would rather sit alone in a quiet house, trusting myself completely, than sit at a crowded table surrounded by people who require me to abandon myself to keep my seat.
May stripped me down to the studs.
It forced me to confront my financial fears without panicking. It forced me to look at my physical and emotional loneliness without seeking a cheap fix. It forced me to stand by my boundaries even when the guilt tried to drag me back into the mud.
It was a month of holding the line.
But here is the beautiful thing about patience: it always pays off.
Just a few days ago, the tracking app updated.
Package arrived at carrier facility.
The parts are here. The printer will be fixed. The heart of my business is going to start beating again, stronger than before, without the burden of an extortionate local price tag attached to it.
And strangely, alongside that notification, the sales began to twitch back to life. A few inquiries came in. A delayed invoice was suddenly paid. The drought didn’t break with a massive thunderstorm, but the clouds have started to gather, and the smell of rain is finally in the air.
I survived the waiting room.
I didn’t compromise my body. I didn’t compromise my business. I didn’t compromise my boundaries.
I sit here on the edge of June, looking at the month ahead, and I feel a profound sense of pride. I look at myself, and I am in awe of my restraint.
My hope for June is entirely different from the hopes I usually have.
Usually, I hope for massive spikes in revenue. I hope for dramatic, cinematic wins.
But for June, I just hope to enjoy the harvest of the patience I planted in May.
I want to fix the machine, turn it on, and listen to the beautiful, mechanical hum of my business generating life again.
I want to take the money that flows in, look at those June bills that terrified me just three weeks ago, and clear them with a calm, unbothered hand.
I want to continue living in this newly constructed fortress. I want to enjoy the quiet of a life that has been cleared of emotional vampires and takers. I want to wake up, go to my kitchen garden, touch the rosemary, and remember that I am operating on nature’s timeline now, not the timeline of panic.
And as for the loneliness? The physical ache?
I hope June brings me the continued strength to protect my energy. I hope that by refusing to settle for the bare minimum, I am clearing the runway for something, or someone, that actually matches my frequency. And if that doesn’t happen in June, that is perfectly fine. I have learned how to sit with myself. I have learned that my own company is vastly superior to the company of someone who doesn’t see my value.
May was the soil. Dark, heavy, unmoving, and quiet.
It felt like I was buried, but I wasn’t. I was just planted.
I had to trust that the water was coming. I had to trust that the seed was cracking open in the dark, even when I couldn’t see any green shoots above the surface.
To anyone else who has been sitting in the waiting room this past month: I see you.
I see the silent calculations you make at the grocery store. I see the anxiety that spikes in your chest when the first of the month approaches. I see you looking at your phone, craving a text from someone you know you shouldn’t talk to, and I see the invisible war it takes to put the phone down.
I see the guilt you carry for finally saying “no” to people who have abused your “yes” for years.
Do not fold. Do not break your own rules just because the silence is deafening.
The things you are waiting for, the right money, the right people, the right peace, they are in transit. They might be sitting in a sorting center somewhere over the ocean, moving at a pace that frustrates you to tears, but they are moving toward you.
You cannot force the fruit to ripen. You cannot yell at the tracker.
You just have to trust your own ability to survive the wait.
May taught me that I am capable of surviving the quiet. It taught me that my discipline is the highest form of self-love I possess.
So, goodbye, May. You were difficult. You were heavy. You stretched me until I thought my bones would snap. But you didn’t break me. You just made me rooted.
And welcome, June.
The machine is getting fixed. The boundaries are set. The soil is ready.
Let the ripening begin.
