The Acne to my melanin

Life is all about making choices, and they come in varying degrees of significance. Some are as minuscule as deciding between two or two and a half teaspoons of sugar, and others are whether your current partner is someone whom you would want around at your lowest point or not. No one has all the answers and anyone who claims to is not someone you should take seriously. We are freestyling this life thing, but we all need some sort of method to our madness. A process of elimination to guide us when we feel lost and uncertain. A process that we can rely on so that whatever the outcome, we can live with it.   I have made many choices in my life and said a lot of things, I am not proud of some and I am ashamed of others. I find that with decisions, it is often best to choose the option that would cause the least amount of harm if it were the wrong one. If people were discussing the choice you are making in 50 years’ time, could someone defend you in good conscience without playing...

Bill Burr who is a comedian, has a joke where he talks about bravery and how the minimal qualifying criteria for it has dropped. He talks about how the understanding of bravery has gone from jumping into burning buildings to saving lives, to people just talking about their traumas and feelings. The first time I heard it I chuckled, but upon further introspection, I realised that it’s not necessarily a dropping of standards but an expansion of the understanding of the word and what it means.  Vulnerability requires a lot of bravery from you because you are allowing others to see something that cannot be perceived from the outside and only you are privy to it. They get an opportunity to see you naked without pretenses or facades. It also opens you up to a multitude of possibilities that could make life very uncomfortable for you going forward. When people find out something that happened to you or that you did, their perception of you changes and they view you in a different light....

The beautiful thing about the internet is that it allows everyone the opportunity to find a community that they most belong to. No matter who you are and what you are into, through the internet, you can find like-minded people to connect with. The unfortunate thing about the internet is that anyone can find a sense of community, for ANYTHING. The internet has a home for everyone from pedophiles and abusers to racists and homophobes.  Shaming people was an effective tool to discourage behaviour that is detrimental to the community without causing any physical harm to the person. It acted as a deterrent so that most people do not entertain the devil on their shoulders long enough to commit an offense that requires punishment from the community. The social norms of the community were meant to accommodate and protect everyone. The internet and social media enable people to bypass those mechanisms from their immediate communities and go find others of similar minds online.  Th...

Humans are incredibly complex beings with many layers and as a result, we all experience different versions of the same person. Siblings experience the same parent differently even though they all live under the same roof and have the same relationship (parent-to-child). The way the first-born child experiences their parents is very different from how the last born (if there are two or more children) experiences them. If the eldest says that her mother is “XYZ”, the youngest has no right to say that they are lying simply because they experienced her as “ABC”; more than one thing can be true at once. Someone can be a great father and rapist at once, a sweet boyfriend but monstrous neighbour, and a loving parent who is a nightmare to work with. Children start realising the benefits of not being truthful from as young as three years of age – sometimes even before they learn how to talk so how do you ever feel confident enough to publicly defend someone against an allegation as if you coul...