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Fareed Khimani: The best decision my ex-wife ever made was to dump me


Renowned media personality Fareed Khimani has opened up on his struggle with substance and drug abuse that forced his wife to dump him.

Sharing his story on Engage Talks, a platform where people share their life experience to inspire others, the 45-year-old said his ex-wife made the best decision of her life to dump him as he had put her in so much pain due to his drug addiction.

REHAB AND BREAKUP

Khimani’s wife walked out of him with two of their children in 2018 while he was in rehab in South Africa, an initiative he had agreed to undertake in an effort to try and salvage his marriage.

His wife had promised him that once he was done with the rehab and was clean, he would return home to find her and their kids waiting for him.

But that wasn’t to be.

On March 18th, 2018 his wife took their kids and left, on a day Khimani was on the 18th day of his scheduled 28 days stay at the rehab.

“It was a day where they called it a recovery day, they said it’s called ‘letting go and letting God’. It’s a moment in your recovery where everything kind of starts to make sense. Where you kind of see clarity and the reason you are doing this is for a greater purpose for yourself and people around you,” Khimani narrated.

MOVED ON

“But it is also the day I walked into my counselor’s office and my private counselling session at the rehab center and she was holding a slip of paper. It was actually an email from my wife. My wife had picked the kids and moved to Switzerland on that very same day. That completely broke me.” Khimani said.

He says at that very moment he felt very angry at his wife leaving him in the middle of a rehab session, something he thought would eventually put his family back together.

Khimani was angry and wanted to leave the center, but after hours of counselling he decided to stay and finish his sessions.

He finally accepted the situation and moved on, pointing out that perhaps it was a good decision for his ex-wife to leave him.

REMAINED CLEAN

“I had so much resentment, so much anger, so much animosity towards my now ex-wife but it was probably the wisest decision she’s ever made in hindsight leaving me because I had put them through 10 years of hell,” he said.

Khimani got hooked to drugs and alcohol while studying abroad at the University of Florida. At some point during his study he worked as a bartender.

He returned to Kenya in 2000 and immediately landed a job in radio. This offered a very potent environment for him to continue with his lifestyle as he enjoyed the privilege of always receiving invites to parties where alcohol flowed freely.

The wheels started to come off around 2016 as his own family began to despise him, while his close relatives shunned him.

It’s at this point that he decided to seek to help. Khimani has since remained clean for almost two years now.