LEARNING TO LOVE MYSELF

Self love is something that has been neatly packaged as something that is easy to do. Most marketing has shown us that this love is achieved primarily through self gratification, self acceptance and reckless indulgence. This love has taught us how to love all of our flaws and turn away from those who notice them. This love has taught us how to satiate all our short term cravings regardless of how they will impact us and others in the long term. It has taught us to lock ourselves in echo chambers where everything we expose ourselves to vindicates our personal biases and demonises anything contrary. It is a quick fix; a sugar high- sweet cocaine followed by a horrific crash. Ultimately it is a toxic, selfish and narcissistic kind of love. Something malignant; veiled as love but is truly a sure path towards destruction. It is a love I have had to unlearn painfully. One I am still unlearning today.

BEDROOM INTERIOR DECOR ON A STUDENT BUDGET

Your bedroom is your sanctuary. It is a haven for shedding off the stresses of the day and unwinding. We spend at least a third of our lives in our bedrooms, and for many of us, a lot more time. This personal enclave can therefore have significant impacts on the quality of this third of our lives. The design and colour of one’s bedroom influences mood, ability to relax and overall sense of comfort. Due to this, the importance of a personally designed space cannot be stressed enough. One’s room is a mirror of one’s persona. The more thought you invest in it, the more comfort and serenity it grants you. You have to invest time, effort and some money towards creating a space that is compatible to your personality and aids your relaxation. I carry this idea with me in all the rooms I have occupied. Over the years I have seen that the more effort I have put into curating my space, the calmer I felt within it. This year I have put in the most effort in creating a little haven. I also managed to do so on a minuscule budget of £100.

MY ATTEMPT AT A 3 DAY FAST

Throughout this year, I have been undergoing a gradual health and lifestyle transformation with the purpose of enhancing the quality of my life. I started off the year going on a very strict ketogenic diet (high fat, moderate protein and very low carb diet). Over the year, I gradually learnt to listen to my body and track my nutrition and its effects on my physical and mental wellbeing. After about 5 months of strictly following the prescribed keto macros, I decided to amend the diet to a less restrictive low carb diet that would allow me occasional treats like cheesecake and pizza. My caveat for these additions were that if I had to have these treats, I would have the best possible versions of them. Though adding cheesecakes initially felt like a simple once in a while treat, I have recently come to regret my decision to do that. Sugar is a very slippery slope.

WEIGHT ON MY CHEST

The two mounds that sit heavily on my chest have always felt like weights to me. My initiation into carrying these weights happened when I was about 9 years old and became known as the youngest most heavily endowed girl in lower primary school. The weight was foreign to me. It felt like a disassociation between my body and my mind. My mind was a child’s naivety; my body a young woman’s. People treated me differently because of it. The girls were perplexed and the boys, excited. It all felt like a curse to me. Like I was being forced to play a role that I had not signed up for. So my shoulders hunched forward under the burden of that weight in an attempt to hide my blossoming body.

WAR 1: GENDER EXPECTATION

Human beings are social creatures. We live in groups who create certain norms and functions that at inception, had the intention of extending the lifespan or well being of the collective society. These ideas are not always infallible, and often uplifting one group in society will have disparaging results on another. Some of these systems include capitalism, gender roles, democracy, the education system, religion, consumerism, etc. These are all flawed concepts that began with the idea of benefiting the collective society. And some of these certainly did. But these structures are not rigid. They evolve. We evolve, and so do our needs and subsequent expectations. We have the ability of holding two conflicting ideas at once. This dissonance is crucial in that it is the spark that enables us to keep making strides forward to a more inclusive, more fair, more responsible society. I will call this dissonance war. Because it is. It is a war of the mind. A fight between the ideas that shape us and form our identity. The following post will be based on the first big ‘war’ I had to fight. The war of gender expectation.

THE 4 WARS OF THE MIND

More often than not, we devalue or ignore psychological wars. For some reason their impacts on the physical world are interpreted as negligible, especially in Kenya. But your mind and its chaos is inextricably linked with your external environment and how you exist and navigate within it. It is the cell within which you are either trapped or sheltered in. It touches and taints everything with its poise or poison. And if we are honest with ourselves, even in our external picture of peace, we have to admit that nearly all of us are at war. We are always at war- with others, with ourselves, with our existence. And war makes you strong or it kills you. It breaks off the pieces of you that slow you down. It builds muscle. It sharpens the mind. It pushes you to survive until you can’t. War is a salt- packed tightly against an large open wound to disinfect it. But you can die from the pain if you are not resilient enough. There are many ways to die. Death does not have to be literal. As Robert Greene says in his new book, laws of Human Nature, death is stillness. It is immobility. It is the inability to move; to progress. And I have died a little for days, even for years- many times; and just barely found ways to breathe life back into myself.

HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF

The first thing to understand is that love is an action, not a feeling. And to love yourself should come hand in hand with tangible actions and not just pretty words. And because of this, true self love is difficult. It requires active dedication everyday, working towards the most beneficial long term goals. In order to do this, we all have to create a relationship with ourselves based on growth and accountability. The most important relationship I will ever have is with myself. And that is true for everyone. The body I reside in will be the most important thing I will ever have to take care of. The mind through which I process life is the most essential component I need to safeguard. Fundamentally, we all know this and we act according to what we feel will bring the most advantage to us. No one ever purposefully sets out to self destruct, and yet we do – sometimes permanently. Most times however, we tear ourselves up slowly and in little pieces until the work to put us back together is so much and so difficult that we instead choose to sink deeper and faster into annihilation. And even this action is a form of perverted self preservation. It is important to understand that even at that time, and in that moment of self destruction, your mind was acting in a way that it thought was beneficial for you. You were protecting/ nurturing/ gratifying yourself, regardless of how twisted the method was. Knowing that, we must approach ourselves and others with sympathy, kindness and abundant love.

NATURE IN ALL HER BEAUTY

Colour is an easy indicator of beauty. The more vivid and elaborate it is the more it’s wearer is able to claim that it is beautiful. For that reason, many flowers can be heralded as beautiful. And they are. But more than being beautiful, they steal the spotlight from the other less vibrant parts of the flora that nourish their beauty. It is for that reason that I am fascinated with leaves and bark. Because their colours are muted, their uniqueness is found in the details of their textures, age, vein arrangements, symmetry and shapes. I took the following pictures in the Oxford Botanical Gardens. This park is dotted with tones of gorgeous flowers in various varieties; showcasing all colours imaginable. In this post however, I have chosen to focus on the quite beauty of leaves.  More so, all the pictures are in black and white to emphasis the nuances in different textures and shapes.

EVE AND HER EDEN

The topic of feminism and women in society is inexhaustible. There are many layers that we have to unpack, some obvious, and some more subtle. Today let us talk about how we as women, view our women- the roles we foist on them, the duties they have to serve and the dichotomy between them and members of their society. We will look at this topic from a more nuanced perspective and view how certain (even positive) presuppositions can influence how an entire sex will be treated based on what is expected of them and what we in turn expect of ourselves as we inadvertently mirror the social projection. I will speak based on my own personal experiences as well as draw from the common stories that many of my peers have gone through. I merge these stories into a short story about a millennial girl’s journey. Let us call the subject of our story Eve. I use the name Eve because the first woman named so epitomises the journey of most women. She is valued solely for her relationship to man; A relationship that positions her as an object of desire and despair (The siren), a lifelong partner to him (The wife), a caregiver for his children (The mother). Her journey had been and will continue to be mimicked by many women in society, both knowingly and unknowingly. The past has almost always viewed women in relation to other people in society. The present has improved and granted women some existence outside of this narrative, but this idea is very pervasive and still mars how we relate to our women. The patriarchy though diluted, still drenches our tongues and marks how we gauge each other as women. I will use the Kenyan context as my setting because this is where I grew up. This is the story of Eve. A beautiful Kenyan girl navigating a field of dreams that society had for her.

AM I WOMAN?

I have been trying to write about this topic for the last two weeks- often starting, stopping and questioning the validity of my argument- concerned about the impact that I am trying to have by broaching this sensitive topic. I am currently reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  The book is an examination of the evolution of people, culture and society. It is a truly profound piece of literature that has definitely had an impact on how I view and/or interpret what people consider normal, right or innate.  More so, I am also reading some publications about gender roles and their origins, by various writers and scholars.

One of the things highlighted in Sapiens is that everything we prescribe to as a society is an imagined order. Our cultural norms like gender roles, human rights, justice, politics, our economic systems, etc, are all part of the humans’ collective imagined order- a necessary structure to create social cohesion. The more people believe in an idea, the more valid its claim to be the truth is, and the more it is woven into the fabric of our tangible reality. Take for instance, the value we place on money. In itself, money is just a piece of printed paper, but due to the value we have placed on it over time, money has become the foundation of our economic society, our national hierarchies and the basis for the determination of our individual self-worth.