King Kairo

Transcript

SureEyes: [00:00:00] you're listening to quintessentially mental a podcast hosted by SureEyes, please note that this host is not a mental health practitioner or professional, and this podcast is not made for treatment of any mental illness. 

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[00:00:43] SureEyes: [00:00:43] Hey y'all this is quintessentially mental the podcast, and I'm your host. SureEyes. I'm also known by my government name, Cherize Ross. I do some overcompensating for my mood today, I woke up feeling pretty bleak. Um, and this week I wanted to talk about loss and grief and trauma, um, things that have been affecting me on a very personal, very real level, almost daily for now, almost a year.

[00:01:18] Um, I woke up thinking about my. My baby nephew who lived with me from the time of his birth. Um, he was just a few days shy of turning 11 months when he passed away. Um, and that by far was the most traumatic thing that has happened to me in my whole life, in my whole damn life. Um, Before that had happened.

[00:01:50] I'd had other traumatic experiences, whether it was, you know, the number of racial incidents I had experienced where I had my identity, my being my existence, my essence questioned purely because of the colour of my skin, a trauma that I'd been dealing with since I was six years old. 

[00:02:19] Um, 

[00:02:22] the trauma of being arrested in London for speaking out against, um, a racial incident and maybe taking it too far by calling the British police colonial liars.

[00:02:35] Um, I guess in the heat of the moment, I, I really. Had my anger towards, you know, colonial mindsets and that type of oppression explode on me. And I ended up getting arrested. Another trauma was, you know, something I speak about quite often, which is the end of an eight year relationship. That was quite significant to me.

[00:03:05] And having that be the most traumatic thing that had ever happened. But since the passing of my baby nephew, there has been nothing. That's not true. Actually. I guess my, the birth of my son was probably as traumatic and maybe that's a conversation to have another day where we talk about, you know, almost maternal.

[00:03:35] Traumas and maternal mental health issues, something that I'm experiencing also quite deeply. Um, but like I said, this morning, I woke up thinking about my baby nephew Kairo. I'd call him aunty’s big boy, king Kairo. Um, I woke up feeling really, really sad, um, and really missing him in. I’m just thinking about, you know, he would have been turning two this year and what would he have been saying?

[00:04:11] What would have he, how, you know, what I could tell, even at the age of, you know, almost 11 months, the personality that was developing and, you know, he'd make me laugh. And, you know, I often have the events of that day running through my mind. Um, at the time of his death, I was pregnant with my son. I was about 20 weeks pregnant.

[00:04:39] Um, and I remember waking up on that, on that morning and going into my brother's apartment and, you know, yelling at him for not cleaning out the cat's litter because when you're pregnant, you know, you're not supposed to deal with kitty litter because of the toxins that they, um, that they, that they give off that could potentially harm an unborn baby.

[00:05:06] And usually every morning when I walked into my brother's room or my brother's apartment, I would immediately grab Kairo and kiss him and, you know, ask him. How he...