Discomfort.

He told her that he loved her

She told him to calm down

“Just relax hon’. Here, have some water. Are you alright?”

She acted as if he had some sort of disease,

As if he was confused,

As if they had separate dictionaries or in fact, spoke different languages, in which ‘love’ in his language was a word for ‘tired’,

When he said “I love you”, he must have meant “I’m tired of you” he could not have possibly have meant the kind of love that was love in her language.

She looked at him like he was sick,

Foreign, alien.

He took the water she offered him, confused as to why she gave him water and not an answer of “I love you too”

He knew she did,

When he said “I said, I love you” after his last sip,

She looked at him as if she was disgusted,

She was disappointed, in his bad taste,

He had just admitted that he loved stubborn, book crazed, stay in doors kind of girls. The kind that could bore you to death with their knowledge of ancient cultures and historical artefacts,

Girls like her.

She had dated him and fallen for him before he even knew her name.

To her, he was unattainable, and being his girlfriend, she expected the relationship to end soon, but she didn’t mind,

She liked having someone to admire her, not love her

He would be Van Gogh, the artist people would talk about,

She would be the painting, admired for her so called aesthetic, not her substance, he would confuse the two, but that would be okay too…

Or so she thought, but here he was,

Doing something she was not used to…loving her,

And within the long silence that came after him saying that he loved her,

She began to resent him,

For making her uncomfortable.

 

All content on this site is protected by copyright

 

 

An Ode to Candid Girls.

They will always mistake your honesty for intemperance. They will take the tight embraces you give them as suffocations. They will often tell you, Candid Girl, that if you were to meet your reflection, that if you were to meet yourself you’d hate that person. Little do they know Candid Girl, that the honesty you give is always your greatest sacrifice, its your way of compensating, for all the slander you have encountered. Its your way of loving the way you want to be loved. You’d rather slap swiftly with truth than stab backs with lies. I urge you Candid Girl, to candidly allow yourself to love and be loved by ones lovely loving enough to be your kindered Candid Girl. They won’t always get it, but that’s okay, cause I love you Candid girl, the Candid girl way.

I wrote this to all the candid people out there I wrote it from a female perspective but it really is for anyone whose truth is unintentionally nonconventional to all those people who mean well but are never quite understood. You don’t have to hide your personality to be accepted you just need people who are willing to take the time to get it. Xo

Gossip

So I just watched a Tedx video on YouTube by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in which she talks about the danger of a single story.

In this speech she basically says how dangerous it can be when one only has a single story/perspective about an event, race or character. She herself said how she fell in love with writing at a young age, but when she would write she wrote about white families who ate toast for breakfast and ate ginger biscuits. Nevermind that she herself had never had ginger biscuits, but as a child, those are the stories she read and so she believed that was what stories were meant to be like. It was only when she read African stories about girls with kinky hair that could never form a ponytail, that’s when she realised she too had her own stories to tell.

What does this show, it shows how easily stereotypes can be formed, how easy it is to label a whole population based on one story. Just like gossip. Now, I’ve always had a problem with gossip not because its sometimes not true, but it makes people form one perspective of a person based on perhaps one thing they did. Not taking into account that they have many good attributes. It puts someone’s flaws into a single conversation and leaves little space for anything good. 

I know a girl who played hockey on the Zimbabwe U19 national team, she is a straight A student and an avid writer. A week ago, at her school, she was caught making out with a boy in a classroom. Now when I hear people talk about her to strangers, they say, “oh that’s the girl that was caught kissing in that classroom” and to people that didn’t know her prior to the incident now only have a single story about her. Kissing is not bad but I’m sure that’s not all someone wants to be known for.

So, next time you want to gossip, remember that the human you’re speaking of has thoughts and emotions just like you. And if it were you hearing that gossip would you bother to say “yes she did that but she’s not a bad person”. Don’t let people form stereotypes of other people right under your nose and do nothing about it. Because one day they’ll form a stereotype about you.

Why do I Write/Blog ?

I’m a firm believer in the power of story telling, I myself was only encouraged to take my blogging and writing after reading work other people had done. Writing isn’t only important, its an essential part of the human experience. From centuries ago story telling has long been a tenant of the human experience. And as we are introduced to every new character in a novel or book, we, in turn are introduced to ourselves.

When the pressures of this world get too much we can simply push pen to paper and create our own world. As we venture off with the protagonist/antagonist/persona in every piece of writing we realise that we too determine our story and are in fact our own biggest hero, cheerleader or villain. Reading other people’s thoughts often reminds us that we are not alone and after every comma we can find a new character who reminds us of ourselves or someone else.

I write because all forms of literature expose our humanness. As an advocate for human rights a common problem in the advocacy for Human rights is that some people often forget some people are human when they are presented as a statistic, telling their story makes them individuals not just another number in the billions of people on earth.

I write because I want to be the person to help someone have their ”I wanna write” epiphany. I write because I need too, I write to show you that you need to too.

© Protected by Copyright

When Art is Uniformed

I tried to hide my weird, but

It just so happens that weird is called

Artistic

When its put on camera,

So,  I got up, out of the hallows of wallowing in my indifference

Contoured my cheekbones

And smudged my eye makeup to look the part

I pressed record on the camera

And I realised that my weird began to feel strange

When it was all for show

When I was trying to make it a declaration to the world

That this, too, was acceptable

When I became an advocate for my weird

It wasn’t mine

It became something for all the grief stricken to march for

It became a hashtag for the media obsessed

It became a statement to excuse, not glorify my weird

So I took the regular face towel and rubbed the ordinary from my weird face

And when all the mascara and bronzer was off

I looked into the camera

Smiled

And took me and my weird outside to play

© Protected by Copyright

”Education… Enough?”

So as I sat down to write this little piece of enlightenment I contemplated its relevance and how to make it sound fancy… But this is just a human to human article.

For some people, the statement, “Education is not enough” is a common phrase, for some not so much. I’m a 18 year old girl from Zimbabwe and just like most Zimbabweans the common phrase was always “Shanda nesimba” which means “Work hard” and they meant work hard in school. So I did. By the time I got to high school I was an A student and as I was doing the Cambridge syllabus at school I got a bunch of A’s for my  O’Levels and A’Levels and I had dreams of being a human rights lawyer knowing that my grades made me eligible to be accepted to some of the best universities in Africa and abroad. But, hold on, before you start thinking this is a boasting thing, let me break it down for you.

After the liquidation crisis in Zimbabwe reached its peak in 2013 according to the Zimabwean newspaper the Sunday Mail about 300 companies were liquidated as of Dec 15 2013 and counting. My fathers company being one of them, this has resulted in many Zimbabwean children not being able to afford going to school. I myself studied at home for three quarters of my senior year and registered at a local school to write my exams and came out with flying colours as I don’t shy away from hard work. And as I started to apply to my preferred universities I found that I couldn’t afford the application fee or I found that some scholarship applications had an application fee. It became very apparent to me that education is not enough anymore, neither is hard work and passion. Not when you live where I do. I am in a society where the economy so pathetic that people with masters degrees and doctorates cannot get jobs because people don’t have enough revenue to pay employees even if they need them. Thus no amount of philosophical and practical understanding of Pythagoras Theorem or Shakespeare or the French Revolution and its importance in the modern world’s systems is enough to make sure that after almost 13 years of school I can actually go to university and then get a job. So I don’t know what to do but I do believe that everything happens for a reason. But it’s still kinda shitty don’t you think ?

So I pose the question: If there is unequal distribution of wealth in the world and its not enough to work hard in order to obtain that, what then?

© Protected by Copyright