Clueless Twenties

  My Dearest Reader, Hi, love. It’s been a while. I don’t know how else to begin other than thank you. For reading. For staying. For returning to my words even when I wasn’t always sure I still had them in me. Every click, every message, every email that quietly said, “I’m still here”, I felt it. And it meant more than I could possibly say. I’ve been fairing well, quietly moving through the days and letting life hold me in the ways it could. I truly hope you’ve been doing okay too, or at the very least, that you’ve had gentle moments to breathe in between whatever chaos life has thrown your way. It’s been a long time since I last sat down and really, fully wrote. The kind of writing that comes from that raw, open space in my chest. For a while, I lost my voice. Not literally, but in that slow ache kind of way, where the thoughts are there, loud and begging, but the words just… won’t form. And so I found myself sitting with that silence. Wallowing a bit, honestly, in the heavy quiet...

  Dear Reader, There’s something no one really prepares you for after sexual assault: how the body that you’ve lived in, laughed in, and loved in suddenly feels foreign. Heavy. Like it's wearing you instead of the other way around. And it’s not just the pain of what happened. It's the echo it leaves. The way it shifts how you see yourself when you pass a mirror. The way you flinch when someone says, “ You’re beautiful ,” and all you want to say back is, “ No, I’m just surviving. ” For many of us, sexual assault isn’t just about violence or violation. It’s also about theft. They didn’t just take something physical, they chipped away at identity, safety, and control. And when all of that goes, what do you have left? A body you want to hide. A body you want to shrink, change, or punish. A body that carries stories you never asked to be written on you. That’s where body dysmorphia quietly walks in. Not always with loud hatred, sometimes just with doubt. Questioning every curve, eve...

  Dear Reader, We’ve all heard it. Mostly ladies. “I don’t know how to do that.” “You’re better at it anyway.” “You should’ve just asked.” On the surface, these may seem like innocent comments, harmless even. But beneath them lies a deeply ingrained behaviour called weaponised incompetence , and it’s not just frustrating, it’s dangerous. Because it doesn’t only affect romantic relationships, it seeps into parenting, workplaces, friendships, and our expectations of each other as human beings. Weaponised incompetence is when someone pretends to be bad at a task (or does it poorly) to avoid having to do it again. It’s laziness dressed up as helplessness. It’s privilege masquerading as forgetfulness. And it’s everywhere. The African Household & the Training Ground of Incompetence. In many African homes, and this needs to be said with love and honesty, weaponised incompetence often starts with how we raise our children. Daughters are taught to clean, cook, and care for others from ...

  The weight of expectation is a quiet thing. It lingers like an invisible hand, always there but never acknowledged, gently shaping who you are and how you show up in the world. For as long as I can remember, I was the responsible one. The helper. The fixer. The one who never let the ball drop. They called me strong , but no one asked if I was tired. No one asked if I wanted to put myself first. As the eldest daughter, it was as if my role was set in stone, nurturer, peacemaker, caretaker, without ever really understanding the full weight of those roles. But here’s the truth I’m learning now: the journey to self-discovery isn’t just about finding out who you are . It’s about untangling who you were taught to be, and giving yourself permission to walk away from a script that never fully belonged to you. There’s something deeply ingrained in the role of being the eldest daughter, something that goes beyond family dynamics and taps into deeper cultural narratives. From a young age, ...