Mask

I was scrolling through facebook and came across the Afritondo Short Story Prize 2025. The theme is "masks" and the first thing that I noticed is that the word mask contains the word ask. And that is what I will write about. There is a proverb that goes like this, "closed mouths do not get fed." Many of society teaches us that we must be strong. We must be able to stand on our own. We must fight our battles individually. No one cares. Everyone is busy fighting their own battles. We wear our battle masks to face the world full of problems and strife. We pretend that we are strong and that everything is going well. As someone who lives with mental illness and who has battled for more than twenty years, the best advise that I can give, is to ask for help. Take off the mask and ask. Ask for help from God. Ask for help from relatives. Ask for help from the professionals. Ask for help from the internet. Ask for help from the books. Ask for help from wherever help is available. You will be turned away. But not all the time. You will be ignored. But not all the time. You will be laughed at and criticized and mocked and misunderstood and the likes. But not all the time. You will find your people. You will find your help. You will learn to not need that mask so much. You will learn that it is ok to ask for help. You will learn who you can depend on. You will learn who you can trust. For me I found that in God the most. I pray to God to give me the strength to ask others for help when I need to. I do not ask for help enough but I am in a position where I can recognise how helpful it is to ask for help. I am not speaking to you as an expert on asking for help but as someone who struggles to ask others for help. We are in the same boat. I feel like I can help others by turning you away from the path I have taken by trying to do things on my own most of the times. I am unable to make the word count of 3000 to 5000 words to enter the contest and I feel like that is an unnecessary ask. A message should not be judged by the length of the message. I will ask them if they could remove the lower word count limit. The most they could say is no. When one door closes another door opens. There will be other opportunities for my essay to win a prize. My friend Gemini thinks that my essay is a powerful personal narrative that resonates with the theme of "masks." It's clear that I have poured my heart into this piece, and my message of seeking help is both important and inspiring. I hope my essay and message helps you and others. I love Maths and equations. Mask = my + ask. My ask of you is to not be afraid to ask for help.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My notes from the book "Sick to fit"

My notes from this book. If you are interested in what I noted then give the book a read. Free on Amazon Kindle - https://a.co/2bTlDVF Fun and scientific Life changer Josh's story Eating, moving and thinking right I think my genetics and mental illness and meds makes it much harder to lose weight and get fit Hope is important Free on Amazon app NAQ - naturally attainable quantities Community is important Eating to deal with problems Pragmatism and self-love More than a fitness journey, its a lifestyle journey Avoid burn out One step at a time Don't fall into the perfectionist trap Learn from failure Overconfidence Positive feedback loop Results matter - it is the feedback we have Beware of plateaus Look for results that cannot be measured like happiness and curiosity If when then plan Unconscious vows and character decisions NAQs answer the question, "does this question make sense" The downside of living in our comfort zone Find your community You are what you eat We ...
Read more

Who makes the best cheesecake?

This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns It's three in the morning and all through the house is quiet and not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse. I bet a mouse's favorite dessert is cheesecake and so is mine. So it's in the wee hours of the morning and I am thinking about cheesecake and specifically who makes the best cheesecake? I suspect it would be some recipe handed down from generation to generation. Probably someone's grandma from the town where cheesecake originated from. I read that even though we may think that cheesecake originated in New York that it actually goes further back to over four thousand years on the Greek island of Samos. The Greeks there created the earliest known cheesecake. No wonder I think that the cafe in my village that sells Samosas makes the best cheesecake. Is there a connection between Samos in Greece and Samosas? There is not much written about this on the internet but I did find one blog post that tried t...
Read more

Trinidad and Tobago Developer Hub Thoughts

I like the direction this is heading. I like the idea of it. I think that it can be innovative. I think once they react positively and actively to the feedback they get, this will be a success. I am cheering for this to be a success. I saw that it was launched today on their social media. They did not say what the url was but I made a guess and it was there - dhub.mdt.gov.tt I had watched Delving Deeper on TTT where they talked about the Developer Hub. One of the questions was about challenges. I think one (a big one) of the challenges would come from the selection of ideas/solutions. Some people might feel cheated that their ideas/solutions are not being selected. The Ministry might be accused of bias and favoritism and cronyism. I think what might help with this is that a component of the choosing of ideas/solutions has to come from public voting and scoring and also from other developers rather than solely from a few persons in the Ministry. The Ministry has to be open with scoring,...
Read more

Prayers

This is a chapter from my fifth book called Freedom There is freedom in praying to God. I have been connecting with and getting closer to God for the last few years but I only recently started reading my salat (5 daily prayers in Islam). Before that I would do one voluntary salat everyday after I bathe. I am a late bloomer in this regard and I still have things to do to master my salat and my faith and my life. I play the azan and iqamah from youtube and also the prayer after azan. I follow along the steps of the salat from youtube until I could on my own. I have an app called prayer alarm that lets me know it is time to pray. I also have the Quranly app I use to read daily verses from the Quran. This is my journey and I thank God for guiding me along this path. In hindsight my life could have kept me and taken me down the wrong roads but somehow my heart was always on the straight path even when my mind and desires and circumstances and flaws were sending me the wrong way. The word ra...
Read more

The beautiful mind

I write this blog post as a re-mind-er of how beautiful the mind is. The mind can study itself. This is known as metacognition, and it is a uniquely human ability. The brain is the physical organ whereas the mind is a more abstract concept. The mind is our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. There is a myth that we use only ten percent of our brain. The consensus is that we use all of our brain at different times. If the mind was a computer what would the specs be? We have to keep in mind that the architecture of the brain and the computer are different and that any answer will have to be taken with a grain of salt. I asked my friend Bard this question and this was his response. If we were to try to build a computer that could match the specs of the human brain, we would need to develop a new type of computer architecture that is much more efficient than current computers. We would also need to develop new types of transistors and memory chips that could be used to create a computer t...
Read more