Dare me to dream.
One of your earliest memories most likely includes an adult asking you, “What would you like to be when you grow up?” Your answer was most likely modest, something one of your parents was or wanted you to be. As you grow up, this shifted. In an honest breath, I would not be able to tell you what my response was because it was never my dream. It was a response to give rapport to whomever dared to ask a five-year-old that question.
I am an adult now and we were all brought up on the promise of being dreamers with ambitions and successes. This has never resonated with me. It made little sense, it felt like idealisation. Do not get me wrong, personal achievements are part of life’s progressions. You are not growing if you are not attaining and meeting personal goals. But, is that the epitome of individual existence?
Dreams are beautiful and success stories are building blocks to the plot of your favourite movies. This is instilled in us from the age we begin to comprehend language. You were born to be successful, to be the inspiration to the aspiring and the hopeful. You were born for this; your dreams are your fulfilment, your life’s hardest work. That is your autobiography and the youth will line-up to get a signed copy of it. Congratulations, tell your mother you have made it.
And, then what? Is this it? Is this the completion of your arc? It sounds pretty empty, if you ask me. Is my input in this world really going to be about pleasing that unkowing five-year-old who had to please an adult with a response? I have done all this growing up to regress to five-year-old me.
When I look around, I see a world full of pain and struggle. There are systems in place that make it certain that only a few will ever achieve true personal success. Many will die chasing their dream, some will give up without trying – and not to their fault, either. It is hard to dream big when your everyday leisure is insuring survival. Success remains an aspiration, something you will never truly actualise. It is the pain of reality, of existence. Individualism was instilled in you whilst you were teething and you have since gone out of your way to annihilate the competition because you were born to be successful.
I have tried to dream, but all my dreams feel empty when I imagine what someone else is going through. I am a prisoner of my experiences and those experiences have shaped who I am and what living means to me. It is insanity, to me, to contemplate living in bliss when the realities of many is of struggle, pain and survival. It is insane to imagine happiness in a world riddled with enslavement, suffering, phobias, ignorances and human cruelty. My success is unattainable, because my success includes seeing and wanting everyone else to actualise their own successes and not just my own. Let’s all suprise those adults who jokingly asked us our dreams by actualising and cheering for all our successes. Let’s succeed by making that five-year-old who could not dare to dream, to realise their own dreams.
Don’t let the insanity of your individualism rob you of you true success: being an empathic human.
Explaining Myself.
I think it’s easy for people to ‘open up’ when they’ve always had people they could reach out to their entire lives; or, at least, have people who cared enough to be attentive to how they were feeling. I guess. I don’t know. I’ve never had that luxury. I guess it’s what made me get lost in an online escape early in my teenage hood. It was an escape, I could manage to not be a relevant version of myself for those few hours. That stopped being the case when those platforms were no longer safe zones, or escapes. It’s been greatly overwhelming having to deal with myself. How sensitive I am to stressors. How easy compulsion takes control over me. How obsessive I am about how imperfect I am, my insecurities, my low esteem. I’ve never belonged, from a young age, or felt a sense of belonging which also made me not desire belonging anywhere. Thus my rejection of everything. I’ve never found joy in forming bonds and friendships, they all seem fickle and temporary, much like love, really. People come and ago, as the cycle of life goes. I’m amused at this epiphany about friendships, their longevity contrasted by mortality. Hilarious. Moving on.
Maybe, I just don’t belong, and never will. I always end up feeling rejected, and undesirable whenever I opened up about me, much like this. Someone I called a friend once told me they don’t have time for my ‘shit’ when I was emotional and needed someone to vent to.
Servers and pieces of paper have accommodated me as a friend better than any other being has, all beings combined, really. Anyway, this is not interesting.
Maybe I am the problem, maybe, or maybe it’s just what I am. This existence thing has no true manual besides the things we deem fit and a necessary requirement to be recognised as a functional human being. Mental disorders are abnormalities, interestingly enough.
In essence, I feel really alone even with people in my life who I love and would like to think I connect well with; I am still overwhelmed by feelings of extreme anxiety, loneliness and emotional agony. It’s not like some of them are not trying to be humane and be a form of support structure, or whatever. Maybe they aren’t. It’s easy for me to let my agony and pain continue to rot my insides than it is to vent. And sometimes, it’s when the little things are taken lightly that I retreat back to my shell. My lonesome point of comfort. Being comfortable and openness are foreign for me, and it always makes me anxious and uncomfortable when someone wants to get in my head, or wants me to share things that leave me with a face drenched in tears. That’s not how opening up should work, not to me. Not with me.
My point is, it’s not easy for me to talk to people. To trust them. To trust that they will see me as functional. To trust that they want me to be a part of their lives. To trust that I am genuinely interested in them. To trust that they are genuine too. To trust they have decency, to trust they can display plausible comprehensiveness of me. I have never belonged, and being an island has left me purposeless with no real desire to partake in the simplest forms of the human experience, or, as they say, enjoy life, seek adventures, and whatever pleasures of life.
A tribute to a companion.
The splendidness of awakening each morning;
With the vivid vision of you crawling my thoughts;
Painting my day colourful even before dawn commences.
You are the perfect scene;
My zenith of imagined love fantasies;
The treasure to a map hidden only beneath the apex of my heart;
With wavering tears upon your eyes,
in them do I see a future of us stumbling across what we can only see as forever;
Ignoring all the whispering from the issues barred upon us;
Hovering over us;
memories of our past mistakes;
Our misfortunes of misguided love;
Broken minded spirit;
Torn breathing.
In you,
I see change;
Bring change;
Be about change;
For when your love crosses paths with mine;
An explosion of perfect romance.
Rascals of love;
Unorthodox lovers;
Awaiting to carve your name within the books of my forever.
Love.
For you are;
and I are;
Love.
Whose Tradition is it Anyway?
There is so much speculation about
Tradition. Where does tradition come
from, it’s origin, where are its core
laws, who is meant to follow tradition. Is
Culture a Tradition or is Tradition a
Culture?
Let me start off by laying down the
definitions of both these words:
Culture: (1) – the behaviours and beliefs
characteristic of a particular social,
ethnic, or age group.
(2) – the sum total of ways of living built
up by a group of human beings and
transmitted from one generation to
another.
Tradition: passing of beliefs or customs
from one generation to the next, without
writing.
So basically Culture and/or Tradition are
passed on beliefs created by those
beings whom believed that these beliefs
or practises would better their way of
living.
As an African, there are many cultures
dividing our beliefs and our ways of
living. Different persons believe in
different things.
Since tradition is “passed on beliefs”, it
is not really YOUR own belief. Someone
who believed in something either
because it was situational or worked for
them is passing on unwritten laws/
beliefs unto you. It is not YOUR OWN
belief, rather someone else’s belief.
This Tradition does not belong to you,
you have aligned yourself underneath it
because someone told you so. Your
Tradition worked for Him who created it,
it might not work for you.
Tradition is just like religion, it binds you
within a shell, blinding you from living
outside the box.
Someone’s belief cannot be your belief.
We all believe in different things,
because not every method out there
works to an advantage for all of us.
It is okay to believe in Tradition because
it is within your own will to believe in it.
Just do not be ignorant about it. Those
who do not like your customs are not
wrong either, they chose their own
paths. You have bound yourself under
someone else’s belief, allow free
thinkers to choose otherwise. Let us not
forget, customs and methods that
worked well for the beings who lived in
the 19th century, will not work for
everyone in the 21st century.
Times have changed, we live in a world
of science. Do not blame western
influences just because someone
refuses to be bound by Tradition, your
‘African’ tradition. We might share the
same Ancestors, but we DO NOT share
a common Future.
If Tradition works for you, fine. If
someone else does not agree to it, it is
their decision to. You cannot look down
on them, that is just ignorance.
We live in a world where Education is
prime. Tradition came from a time when
education was not popular. It worked to
benefit those people in society, most
likely positively. In this time, different
things work for different people.
Different people require different things.
Personally, I am against Traditional
beliefs. I will not be bound by someone
else’s beliefs. I choose my own way,
you chose yours. Not believing in
Tradition is also MY Tradition. I am
making this MY Custom and I will live
according to it.
What works/worked for you, may not
work for me, therefore I will not make
use of your customs. Do not Slay me for
MY Belief, it is mine and I am not
forcing anyone else to follow it. Follow
your own beliefs. Tradition is not
compulsory, it is a belief one chooses
to follow, I chose not to.
This ‘love’ thing, I want it too
I find myself fighting with my thoughts. I’ve seeked and found all the wisdom, courage and happiness one can have inside, sharing it with someone else is the primate step.
Nothing needy about me wanting to be and to fall in love. It’s an emotional decision, an emotional boundary I want to find myself reaching.
Well, of course, a great man once told me, “Growing up, you’ll realise that the one person you’ll depend on, trust, befriend and truly love… will be the woman you’ll marry and spend your life with.” – realest words, the exact words actually, my father has ever said to me.
I’m matured enough and ready for this. I’ve gone through juvenile behaviour, been through the irks of non-platonically attached companionships. It’s like riding a bike, when you’re old enough, you realise that you need to give it to a younger person and for you to buy a car and move out of your mother’s house.
That’s, for me, the metaphor of love. Ride the bicycle enough until it sickens you, buy the car you won’t mind driving until your muscles can no longer hold that steering wheel.
Then again, for honest and mutual love, you have to be patient. Be willing to build it from scratch. Find someone with the exact mindset, so that when a wall falls, no one walks away easily, knowing how much hardwork was needed to build that Burj Khalifa of a relationship.
Someday, maybe. I’m in no particular rush. “Only fools want to build where there’s sand”.
Acceptance of Cyber Love?
Remember your first girlfriend/boyfriend from Mxit? That’s where the fiesta of cyber relationships began for most of us.
It seems like it has grown even more. One does not even find it odd hearing how a companionship has formed among your facebook friends or twitter followers.
Has society come to acceptance of this? That looks to be apparent.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with the norm of cyber lovers. We spend half, if not most, of our days gazing at texts from stangers. It is not strange at all for one to fall in love with the mind and the thoughts one depicts from these strangers.
Although it is quite risky, you may fall for someone who, in fact, is displaying a fake personality online. There you are giving all of your loving to a stranger you have not met, putting yourself in physical amd emotional danger. Besides all the negatives, it takes guts and belief to enable yourself to engage in a platonic relationship with a stranger.
It’s beautiful… when it’s real, hey!
Some of the people I see dating today all basically had first encounters of one another on an online site. You would swear they have known each other for a long time, depicting from how they are able to connect and love one another.
Social media is the way we people manage to find and meet new people, love was bound to form from this.
So, with all that, why would you turn a blind eye if love ever came to you by means of a person you met online? Whether you may or may not know them physically?
Don’t inspire me.
It’s so hard to get inspired these days. I hate how I’ve always received flawless compliments about the quality in my writing, yet, to me it has never been that big of a deal. I’m a lazy ‘good’ writer, apparently. That’s my contradictory self-critic.
I should, like most persons I’m acquainted with, be indulging myself in the non-beneficiary activities that seem to be hitting peak levels among social ‘life’. It’s barely social life nowadays, wouldn’t you agree? It’s just a zombie apocalypse, the cause being mobile devices causing us to struggle to succumb to normal breathing when we’re offline. When last did you open a book and read through it thoroughly, without being disturbed by the painful sound of an incoming message on an Android OS operating device? When last did you manage to attend an event where no one took pictures to add to their infamous #ThrowBackThursdays archive?
Odd, is it not? Your favourite girl is more concerned about her next perfect avatar instead of sending you back that text.
The only time your mother tells you they love you is through a slow Cell C network traffic, with duplex connections that are moving at a snail’s pace due to the large number of thirst messages being sent simultaneously via blackberry curves.
It’s like our lives are being led by the urge to belong, somewhere on the online world. We’re all sitting with our legs crossed, our coccyges succumbing to constant pain, our eyes losing their natural ability to see, self-inflicted insomnia. It is quite astonishing, really. It has been a sudden escalation, just 3 years ago it wasn’t like this. One enjoyed going out, spending with the boys doing nothing greater than unnecessary inebriating activities on weekends. Actually, those were the great old days, ‘old days’ are 3 years ago to our generation. At this rate, we’ll gather the wisdom of centenarians before we surpass our third decade of life. Ridiculous!
It’s ridiculous how social media has become our breakfast, the reason we purposely miss lunch ’cause we’ve got to instagram it first. As much as being social online is taking up our time, there are those who put this good time into good use. Online productivity is actually a common thing, I won’t get to that – I’m not your online advisor.
However, my biggest concern with this whole apocalypse is how most individuals totally lose themselves. That false online persona you so believe is solely yours, is in fact… not yours! It’s the drug phase of this era, likely to be the disorder that will be related to it in future, unlike the times when your parents were worried you might turn out like thug Jabu from down your street. The worried dad, about his daughter, in contemplation if she might bring home a Bricks Mabrigado as a fiance. Well, we, the future parents will probably be more concerned about if whether our kids have got enough followers, to whom are they distributing their under dressed images. At the end, it’ll all be ironic and fortunate.
So much for evolution, brethren, ’tis round about the ideal time you might want to stick your thumb in your skull, force yourself to think about how awkward the next few years are to be in society.
Dark Skin Problems 