Uhuru Rising

Kilimanjaro was the hardest thing I've ever done. 
4ft9s with asthma, aren't built for mountains and high-altitude sickness.
Every step is double the pace just to keep up with everyone else's Pole Pole, 
while your already-compromised airways 
fight 50% oxygen like it's only half that.

Still, I climbed.
Higher into the thinning air.
Deeper into myself.

I felt my body unravel,
and with each step, 
the past peeled away.
Every chain undone.
Every fragment made whole.

At Stella Point my guide said,
"Kajana, you look sick. Your lips are blue. We need to descend now."
I snapped back:
"It's gna feel like shit either way."
Then dragged my stubborn ass forward.
One step. One breath. 
Even half a breath - a victory.

Ten hours of absolute agony until:
"Kajana, look up. 
You're at Uhuru Peak now!"
And I broke. 
A rib-shattering cry from my soul:
I did it. I did this.

Kilimanjaro stripped me bare —
until all that remained was my soul,
dancing freely above the clouds,
on the roof of Africa.

---

Kili Kaj
Forged from the tension
of her ground pulling apart
the weight of every silence
she’d ever swallowed.

Inner pressure rising
through her dissociated cracks
like magma rising in a rift zone,
up a dormant volcano
that holds the same fire,
beneath the calm exterior
of her self-contained identity.

Pressure peaked inside
the fires of Kilimanjaro,
and she rose
like the freestanding mountain
beneath her feet.

---

Dormant Volcano
Earth Exterior, Fire Within

July eleventh, twenty-twenty-five.
Summited Kili… barely alive.
Top of the world, but the vibe was grit,
seven straight days, feeling like shit.

A convulsive choice so impulsive.
But I had to reach that summit—
Alchemising pain through this prison,
I didn’t know the vision,
But my body knew the rhythm;
I needed that collision to heal my self-perception.

Lungs burning, legs shaking, lips blue-in frost.
Thousands spent, asthma attacks—
why this cost?
For Uhuru. For freedom.
Because in that brief moment,
I stood on the roof of Africa.

I felt it. I held it.
A vision of me I’d only met in cloud-9 trips.
Asthmatic beat, in size 3 feet
planted on icy boulders,
At four foot nine,
I’m soaring on my own shoulders.
Weight stripped by altitude and nights,
Tears streaming, cells screaming—
this underdog won the fight.

Spent a lifetime underestimated,
felt degraded and isolated.
Once self-doubt clouds perception, it dismantles the soul,
Especially when your youth was fed to snakes in a hole.
That shit I battled was harder than Kili.
So I shed all the crap and stepped out the trap
One step at a time until
my soul cracked open,
To the vastness above.

I became a skinny skeleton to build the beast I’ve always been.

And once I caught that,
I swore I’d never let it go.
I’m a mirror to that dormant volcano,
An Earth exterior, but fire within.

---

I was fucking exhausted. Two asthma attacks, ribs shattered from 10 hours of gasping, water pack frozen solid. Survival mode running empty.

But when I reached Uhuru, I felt free.

And in that moment as I stood at the top on the edge of the world, heart pounding, breath stilling, clouds beneath my tiny size 3 feet – I realised, that I did something hard, and I did not quit. That I did this, step by step, along with all the broken fragments I used to hide in shadows – now, integrated.

Because to climb Kilimanjaro, I had to tap into everything I already am – Not to become her, But to recognise her reflection in me.

Because my freedom was never waiting to be found at Uhuru, It had always been inside of me. A self-belief so hard that nothing, and no one can ever dismantle me again.

Type 2 Happiness is a rare kind of spiritual transcendence, like the humbling awareness that i brought myself up 5895m, step by step, through my own willpower (and the porters of course).

I found my Uhuru. Not the peak—me.

P.S. ‘Uhuru’ in swahili, means ‘freedom’.