Bokali Chishi Mughavi,
Maurice Wylie Media 2025
Here is a book every woman and man should read. It makes sense of the incomprehensible periods of your life, the times when no one can touch your darkness, the times when you are so close to giving up. Bokali Chishi has indeed broken the silence. It is okay to say you are not okay when you are not. Community life is all about conformity, all about trying to be the same as others. But we are not Xerox copies of each other. We are wonderfully and fearfully made even in all our imperfections. And we live in a world that teaches us to hide the abnormal, to ignore what the mind is trying to convey, if it doesn’t fit into the template of normalcy. This beautifully brave woman has opened the door into a world we are all so afraid to encounter. With a raw honesty, she unravels family history and personal experiences that had been self defeating throughout her young adult life. By doing so, she hands a key to anyone plagued by the same ailments but unable to put words to it, and ignorant of how to seek help.
I quote from her poem:
I look around me
I see great beauty.
Creation, art, relationships.
I also see brokenness and ugliness
Darkness of sin.
….Happy faces, manicured gardens and lawns
….I look beyond these beauties
Beneath the surface
I see the brokenness of hearts
Messed up lives
Souls running helter skelter
In need of healing and restoration.
This is what she shares in the book – the story of her restoration and long road to healing. It is a book full of hope. A book written with honesty. It offers hope for those who are struggling but have had to hide away all their lives because society has no room for those who are different. This is not the first book about mental health written by a Naga. That means we have many numbers suffering in silence among us. And we lack the means to help them. It is not enough to send the unstable, the addicted and the lost to prayer centers. Not that I am dismissing prayer centers. Anxiety, depression, trauma and its lingering effects need care. Bokali writes: ‘In my case, realizing I am not alone, and that mental illness is like any other illness that many others suffer from and struggle with, was the first step towards feeling a sense of normalcy about seeking psychiatric help. The second liberating step was learning that the mental breakdowns that I experienced every few years were not my fault. The next painful step was to consistently go for therapy, take my medicines regularly, and stop beating myself up every time I felt weak or vulnerable, or when I slipped into some of my old habits, especially hurting those who cared about me. In retrospect, I realize I would not have felt so isolated and alone had I been able to confide in someone about my confusions, fears and doubts while I was growing up. Instead, I did the opposite by suppressing all my angst and feelings and became so good at acting that I ended up being a phoney. It was a very sad realization when it dawned on me that I had been thinking the wrong way, treating myself the wrong way. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I deserved better because Jesus had provided a way for me to live without self-condemnation. As found in Romans 8:1 ‘Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’
This extract highlights the crux of her mental journey through pain and hopelessness and finally, deliverance.
Read the book. Slowly. Learn from it and give it to someone who needs to know these truths. This book needs to be in school and college libraries especially in those institutions that have a good number of adolescents and teens struggling with self-worth and many other related issues. Adults need to read it too, especially teachers, parents, leaders, so that a culture of gentleness and sensitivity may be generated for children who are struggling. Thank you Bokali Chishi for writing truth.
