Three Years
I want to understand myself. No one else seems to and I honestly feel like I owe it to myself to do so. I think we all owe it to ourselves to know who we are. To know why we are the way that we are. To feel love, to feel responsibility, for ourselves.
Fariha Róisín
If there is one thing I have embraced about myself is my laziness. I do not enjoy exerting (unnecessary) energy. I will find the easiest and fastest way to do something. Of course like many of us, the thought of being labelled as lazy was something that I didn’t want. Value was attached to productivity and therefore at any time, I had to be doing something. I do things therefore I am, you know? But now? I truly couldn’t be bothered. For example, only something spectacular will remove me from my house on Sunday. Do I feel like responding to this message right now? I don’t have the energy to.
I asked a friend whether she has ever thought that I was too helpful and she said yes. I had been thinking about it for a long time why I felt the need to go above and beyond (because I know humans have a tendency to overestimate our goodness I needed someone to confirm my thinking). Someone would ask me a question and even when I didn’t know - I would go out of my way to try help them get an answer. For what? What was my reason for expending all that energy surely? Was I attaching my value to being needed? Do I even really want to be offering?
Sometimes becoming yourself means losing who you are in relation to others, and it can take a long time to make new connections, within yourself, and between yourself and new people trying to find their way in.
One upside of adulthood is not having to force yourself to like things because people you surround yourself with like them or because they are popular or trendy. I think the desire to fit in, to belong, to feel included is part of this “connection” which we desire while also not knowing how to connect very well.
Who are you outside of the media you consume?
I think it is easy to relate what I watch, read and listen to and try to somehow apply it to my life. Most often than not, people can get caught up in the frenzy of trying to know/understand themselves through what they are consuming (take the ADHD self diagnosing happening on TikTok as an example). If you've been paying attention, you know what dresses suit you and which ones are cosplay.
People may not be replaceable but the role they play in your life or even the emotions they elicit in you feel definitely are.
I am the star in the movie of my life, the center of it and conversely, I am not the star in other people’s lives. I think a lot of issues arise from relationships because we want people to make us the center of their lives.
A fixation on the idea of what a person should be to you or in your life in some ways can deny them of their humanness. It also stems from overestimating ourselves.
Lately, I have been enjoying meeting my friends’ parents - it means something to me personally. I can’t explain it but it does (if you really insisted I could explain it though). There are things that our people do for us and to us that we choose to view as intimate. It helps to know what those are.
It is truly disturbing how we discuss individualism as if it something to aspire to. Truly if there is something that explains American imperialism well, it is how the ideal of individualism and capitalism are infiltrating our societies as Africans. We will not survive alone.
