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listen up you goofies, this week y’all get a treat. a whole goddamn wonka factory of sweet, sweet friendship and friendshit with my sister, friend, and confidant ashley hefnawy aka myyuh (pictured here transcending existence with pure joy, attempting to not be perceived) ♥️
she is a writer, painter, dj, music creator, and by mf god, so talented it hurts. oh yeah and she’s a fashionista, y’all mfs late, get on her level. on this week’s pod, we talk about everything (as usual): how good of friends were are, creating a safe space on the dance floor, digging into the emotional and spiritual reconnections of global music, being nicer to ourselves, the healing power of music and community, friendship expiration dates and vulnerable friendship, and she blessed y’all, no blessed us, with more fire fi ya headtop! stick around for the whole podcast to hear an exclusive edit by myyuh!
oh yeah, and you know what else? she’s hosting and spinning a party for you dingdongs this friday march 18th, 2022 at 9pm! arab? and afrobeats? tap tf in 🤝
the haza party live @ the sultan room in brooklyn, ny along with fellow dj carmen sandiego and a performance from lysistrata and some vibes by aryana alexa 🔥🔥🔥
***pull up triple vaxxed up. this party requires a negative covid test to get in or you gonna be hating from outside the club, two-stepping to the bass, looking like a fool. limited supply of rapid tests available but don’t get caught lacking***
ashley also has her own newsletter and…y’all. it slaps. check it out.
hope you dig the podcast and all the convos about healing. as you might know, i got knee surgery recently and i wrote a piece about it, lock in 🌱
one thing about me: if i'm going to play soccer i'm going to go harder than soft but softer than balls to the wall. i guess none of that makes sense but what i mean is if i'm gonna play soccer i'm not gonna take it od seriously. like, i want to win, but at what cost. the cost of my life? the cost of somebody else's life? no. this is a sport kids play to kick a ball into a net and unless you're being paid millions of dollars to play for a private club or for your country, you should not be playing soccer at a level where you are harming another person. period.
2017, i was a completely different person. i was in the height of confronting some physical and emotional trauma that was really paralyzing me. i was in the midst of what looked optically to be a successful job for a media company, but deep inside i knew that there were fractures to my soul and moral compromises that i had to make that did not make me feel like this opportunity was as shining as everyone else did. but who tells you “i’m fucking horrible, hbu” when asked “how are you?” casually?
but another thing about me: there are very few places that i can go into a complete flow state. djing when i'm fucking up the dancefloor, stand-up when i'm not doing any pre-written jokes and just ripping, writing directly from my heart in final draft, and eating taco bell with the homies and chatting shit, and finally when i'm on the pitch juggling, playing soccer, and passing with the homies.
to be clear, when i am on the pitch, i’m trying to play soccer, the beautiful game. i am not interested in being a capital d dickhead in any way, shape, or form but… if you get done up, i burn you down the sideline and put a goal in it just be like that, playboy. hold that l loosely, shake it off, come back harder, that’s where i’m vibrating.
and that's what happened on that day where i quite literally watched my leg turn into linguini. i just scored a goal, i was playing with some former colleagues of mine from my teaching days, and it was a beautiful spring evening down by the piers in brooklyn. safe to say, i was feeling myself but always humbly; i've never been the dude to airplane after i score a goal. but mere moments later, a man (and this can be corroborated by multiple sources, brett, david, joel, mike, back me up) wearing a custom “trump 45” jersey slide tackled me from behind and i went down. hard.
i make jokes about this but i'm serious; when i'm in midair i know what the fuck is going on. i am making contingency plans to land in the least painful way, at least that's where i've always been as a footballer; to put it in perspective, i too would have put the plane down in the hudson on some captain sully shit. but in midair, this time, all i could think was “i want all the smoke.” the moments that my body punched into the ground i heard that fateful “pop.” but that pop was nowhere near as loud as the voice in my head telling me to fuck this nigga up like tay keith.
immediately, i tried to stand up ready to beat the brakes off of this man, too completely let loose for the 99 and the 2000, but the thing about standing up? both your legs need to be in working order (whatever that may look like to you) and, yeah buddy, that was not my situation. leg was wet noodle status for real, so i crumpled right back down to the ground.
i had never suffered a lower extremity injury as bad as this. when i went in to get an mri the next day, my leg was swollen up black and blue and i was prepared to hear that i could bounceback in a few months. and i did hear that but i also heard that i tore my acl, my lcl, and my pcl. first thought: “how many fucking cls are in your leg, damn!” second thought: “will i ever be able to play soccer again?” answering the first: there are four cruciate ligaments in each of your knees and i had torn 75% of them in my right leg on some ccccccombobreaker shit. second answer: there was no real answer.
this was the first time i was forced to rest. briefly after this injury, my whole team at work was let go because our incompetent company did not know what to do with comedians (honestly same, sis.) what was difficult about resting for me, is when my mind was idle all the other traumas and painful memories came flooding back. but i physically could not go anywhere so i was forced to contend with all of these feelings at the same time, i was dating somebody, [redacted], who, in retrospect and in the moment, was terrible for me, cold shoulderer, wild manipulative, gaslighter, cheated on me, the whole nine. shorty even had me limping over to her apartment to see her just to ice me for hours, and my goofy naive as kept seeing that red flag as magenta in the wrong light. i was, as the kids say, down horrendous.
but in the intervening years, i relearned how to walk, it took a long time because of the fact that i never actually got surgery to repair my knee; that's the funny thing about not having insurance and i'll post you all the question the same question that i asked myself everyday: was 96 bands worth it? or should i just charge it to the game and give up one place where i truly felt free, i felt like i was in my flow state, soccer?
hell yeah, i chose the latter, you mad, fam? almost 100k was not going to be an option for me without insurance and even then i didn’t know. end that was 96k without factoring in physical therapy, braces, cars back and forth from appointments, etc. fooook that bro.
four years after my injury, i finally had a job that gave me decent enough insurance to go get not only surgery but also pay for the physical therapy aspect of it as well.
shout out to ted lasso because your boy had pretty much given up on ever really playing soccer again. i would go to the gym and hyperfixate on my poorly-performing right leg, knowing it wouldn't ever be like my left one again. it was an acute form of body dysmorphia where i was hypervigilant about how i looked when i was walking, sitting down in a way that hid my leg, and generally being very unkind to and impatient with myself…until i started kicking a soccer ball again.
nothing serious!!! i promise. just lightly batting the ball around with the homies. in those four years, i did a lot of healing work. intensive therapy sessions, gaslighting recovery program, actually told my friends what was plaguing me, went to codependents anonymous (it wasn’t for me but i tried it), processed a lot of grief, read every book about healing from trauma that i could, and i rebuilt a stronger community not just for me but for the people in my life that i would go to war for on any day, on any block. but anyone who's done healing work from a huge trauma knows that one of the hardest things to do is to face that one big final boss. emotionally, it was becoming more visible; i had convinced myself that i did not deserve to exist for so long that in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, i started to accept that i had every right to exist that everyone else did. spiritually, it was reconnecting with my family, pon yard and abroad (sorry jamaica, i had to borrow for the content, i’m no better than chet hanks, i know). we have been through a lot in the last few years and i'm still not ready to talk about all of it publicly, but we still here dawg. the grief was so consuming and having lost so many family members and friends in the last few years, i felt very disconnected from people, as a protective mechanism but i also knew that it was protecting me from anything; i was just preventing me from feeling healthy and whole again. but physically, it was my knee.
okay i lied, i didn't just bat the ball around with the homies. i was out in these streets really playing playing. on a knee with no goddamn ligaments in it, lionel messi himself was like “chill bro” and “vosotros” (he’s argentinian so he says that sort of thing). and i was still cooking people on the pitch. i felt like my soccer chakras were aligning, however, i was playing with a little bit of fear. fear of hurting myself and then having to be stuck in one place again with some of the still unprocessed things that remained from the last few years of therapy to continue to plague me.
but, i knew that seeing as i was becoming more comfortable with my social anxiety and being more vulnerable and visible, and reconnecting with family members and friends, the final infinity stone for me to feel whole was to go through with the surgery. so i did.
september 23rd, 2021 i went under the knife and boyyyy was i zooted off that anesthesia. they told me to count back from 10 i think i got to 9 and a half and then i woke up and they were like “yeah we got you a new knee, my g. sign here initial here” big ups to the nyu langone pit team, doc alaia, y’all freaked it for real.
but confronting that physical moment also plunged me into a world where i had to physically heal. and bitch, it wasn't valvoline, i couldn't just drive off the lot. i'm still healing at this moment and i probably will be continuing the hill for the next few years, but it's worth it. and somehow, through turning (oh god) 29 + 1, or through reconnecting with friends and family, and being kinder to myself on my own journey, it really took me getting the surgery to really understand just how long a healing process really takes. turns out it's not just one “chicken soup for the one legged niggas soul” long and it’s helping me reconnect my brain, spirit, and body every day.
you cannot force healing. period.
healing does not happen on your timeline, all you can do is create the safe space for healing to occur and be ready for anything. shout out to dan, brett, and yera because they have to deal with my goofy ass coming in every week asking all these questions about the timeline of healing and they tell me every single time “everyone is different” which is exactly what the healing process is emotionally and psychologically are. even though we live in an environment and a time where people give their own personal experiences as a one-size-fits-all solution to each other's problems, truly every single person is different. even the injury that i sustained (a multiligamental tear) doesn't have a lot of research behind it and every person with this injury has recovered differently. my stubborn ass keeps asking, however, i have accepted that and therapy, whether it's got “cognitive behavioral” before it or “physical,” has helped me accept that truth every day.
social and emotional atrophy is normal, you can bounce back
one thing that happens after you get a major knee surgery is your quadricep shuts down. it is a preventative measure to stop the inflammation from propagating pain throughout the entire leg, but because of the type of injury that i had sustained, my quadricep took a little bit longer to reactivate. and because of that, it lost a lot of its strength, it atrophied. and honestly, that's how i felt as a person for the last five years of my life. the social anxiety i already had got ratcheted up to 1 million by being around people and places i didn't feel safe around and then, in a pandemmy, i was not even around people so i could work on restrengthening that social muscle.
trauma can make you socially atrophy and it can make you emotionally atrophy; i have been working for the last few years to just feel safe and comfortable enough to trust myself undo to recovering from shit that i have been through and just like i said about therapy, you can't rush this shit. my quadricep took a calm 5 months to decide to come back online (dial up speed, i guess) and there was not much i could do besides adapting a routine of healing to help reactivate that quadricep and it mirrors closely the routine that i have for myself to combat depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. yeah, it's a routine, yeah, routines can be monotonous, but they are the structure that helps me get back on my feet, emotionally, spiritually, and now physically.
one day’s balance may not be the next day’s balance
now, my quadricep is reactivated (took its goddamn time, shit) and i can walk around the city without a brace on looking like a lick. that is just the first step because we all know that sometimes we have structures up around us that are supposed to protect us but when they're gone who are we? what do we do? just because that support system is gone does not mean that the recipient of that support is completely in the clear. my right leg is way weaker than my left leg and it's been like that for five years but for some stupid reason when i went through surgery, i thought “they're going to give me a bionic leg, they're going to help me kick through concrete, i'm going to be in the mcu, wait on it, y’all bitches ain’t ready” but the reality of the situation is i will never be the same. ever. what happened to me happened. taking the step to get surgery to start a real process of healing happened. and the balance that i found in my life before my injury and surgery is not going to be the balance that i need in my life now.
as for now, i’m slowly getting the strength back in my right leg. everyday i feel a little bit stronger, i can go up more of these goofy ass new york city staircases, i can jog after a bus a little bit, but the leg that i had my entire life doesn't exist anymore this is a new entity something that is trying to get me back to feeling whole and just because i feel different does not mean that i am not becoming more whole.
left foot, right foot, then faster and faster
so where am i on my journey?
i don't know.
i don't know when i'll be able to walk without thinking about whether i look like i've had surgery or not? i sure would hope the stop having that thought. i don't know if the next time i hit a pitch, go play some footy with the mandem and gyaldem, i will be feeling like i was dancing with the ball at my feet, like i did before my injury.
i'm trying to enjoy the process of healing, celebrate my many victories, and not fixate so hard on my failings, sorry, my “moments of not progress,” and instead focus on putting one foot right in front of the other.
so i guess that's where i am. learning how to put one foot in front of another, faster and faster until i can get back to running, back to that flow state where i felt all that joy all those years ago and got a taste of last year playing with the gang.
this time, i don't think that i will be running to escape something or a lot of somethings like i was in 2017. i'll be running towards whatever life has in store for me and that, for me, is progress.
back next time with yung gonkers aka ify nwadiwe. thanks for keeping it locked all this time, see you later, mad love, hope you saved enough daylight this time around ✨
digging in the emotional crates 🎶