A Letter to My Teenage Self

Darling, everything feels like the end of the world when you’re fifteen. By the time you’re twenty-one, you will have learnt that nothing really is. You’re such a sharp, charming, ambitious girl; I promise you, you can not be stopped. Not by the horrible girls who set you up for heartbreak by getting your crush to prank-call you and ask you out, not by the damning B on your report card, and certainly not by the fact that your breasts haven’t come in yet. Breasts are the least of your worries, as you will soon learn.

The world is a hard place; its rough edges are designed to sand girls like you down into submission and meek conformity. You must resist this. Your voice is powerful and necessary. You must not let those people who say your age means you have nothing to offer silence you. You must certainly not let the gender police keep you from asserting yourself in all of your complexity and humanity. You are deserving of your own life, and your dreams are valid.

Acknowledge your body. Remember that it is first and foremost your own; not a debt you owe the men who seek to prey on you, not an apology to those who accuse you of seduction when you are merely existing, not a pile of inadequacies that you must compensate for. Your body is your home in this world. Be grateful for and to it. Use it. Dance, laugh, run, swim. Let the air and the sun and the water kiss it and remind you that God lives in every crack and corner of it, of you.

Forgive yourself for believing that you are to blame for the people who invited themselves into your body and did not wait for your permission. One day you will be strong enough to stare the trauma of the break-ins in the face, but for now, hug yourself and love yourself and forgive yourself. There are people who will take what they have not been offered. That is not your fault. Take your showers; let your tears lance the wound and help you towards wholeness. You will find support when you are ready to lay their violence down. Do not doubt this: when the time comes, there will be loving hands to help you unburden yourself. I cannot wait for you to experience the indescribable lightness that awaits you.

Never forget that you are so much more than a body. You are a force; invincible, rising, here. The world has never seen anything like you, so it will fight hard against you. You are strong enough to push back, to claim your space and to make room for the others who will follow. You can not be broken; you will learn this for sure because life will try. 

Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. You are so much more than you realise; so much of what you need is already within you. Give yourself time, especially when you are sad. Don't let anyone tell you you cry too much. All of the sorrow that you experience is fashioning within you compassion, a heart that is too soft to break, that swells with love for people like you who are told that they are unworthy. 

You are a date palm, dancing in the desert, bending in the wind, majestic and life giving and undeniable. You are the first of your name, and the world will say it. Oh, darling, it will.

This Woman is Becoming

This evening my heart is breaking and swelling, all at once, for myself and for women like me. There is a burden that I can't place or name, but it is so, so real. 

I am thinking about self-love of the radical variety, the kind that allows me to strip myself and accept myself, to break down this person that I have been told I must be to be worthy, and to become the woman I will be proud of dying as.

I am thinking about love for my sisters - African women, single mothers, lonely women, women who have tamed their voices so long they don't remember the sound, women carrying trauma because they don't know how to set it down, motherless women, shamed women, lost women. I am thinking about women like me, who are desperate for better because somehow we know there is more. The knowing is in our bones, in our feet, in our song. We know there is more. 

I am thinking about my daughter and the boldness of her spirit, the way her heart breaks for me when she sees my sadness, the way she loves herself so completely that my own sadness can not take away her joy, the generosity with which she heals me with kisses, the streak of defiance that makes her stand up to me - the streak I know I have somewhere but can't always find. I am thinking of her way in this world and the ways in which her identities will shape her and bend her, and I am worrying about the ways it may break her.

I am thinking about the work that we have ahead. There is so much building to be done; it is exhausting that we have to spend all this time tearing down what is already there, what is trying to kill us. When will it be time for rejoicing? When will the load be lighter? When will the leaves of the trees planted by our mothers and our mothers' mothers be lush and abundant enough for us all to sit under their shade?

I am burdened with a grief I don't understand, and a fury too. There is so much building to be done, and yet the people who shore up the systems that must be destroyed before we can build are too numerous to count, too powerful to ignore, too content with the status quo.

A lot of the time I want to scream.

There is not enough of me to go around. And yet, I must find a way to become enough. I must find a way to become this woman who will water the tree and plant fresh seeds and clear a path for our daughters and sisters and mothers to do the rejoicing we have been denied so long.

There is a calling on my spirit tonight. 'Hasten the time, sister. Hasten the time.'

I am not enough, but I will become so.

The Scenic Route Still Gets You There

I wrote my last exam in Uni this morning. Can I get an "Amen!"?

I'd been looking forward to this day, anticipating this moment, for such a long time that I didn't know how to feel when it finally came. The end of my apparently endless undergraduate career, lengthened by three strikes that lasted a total of a year, and a year-long break to have my daughter (and, as it turned out, grieve my mum), arrived this morning at 10.24 am, and there were no fireworks! I found it a bit underwhelming, in all honesty.

But here I am done, dusted, on my grown woman shit, and pleased as punch. My sixteen year old self would never have been able to picture the events of the last six years - hell, my current self still has trouble recognizing my reality sometimes, but I am finally done with the University of Ibadan and vowing never to write another exam ever again in my life.

I still believe going to Uni was a waste of valuable time, considering how crappy the system is, but I'm grateful for the friends I made. I really lucked out in the friendship department, a fact which was never more obvious than when I fell pregnant in my not-so-final year and then lost my mum months later. If you're one of those people who think female friends are too much hassle, you need new friends (or a different attitude). I never liked school, but having people who genuinely had my back and with whom I could make awesome memories definitely improved my experience.

I'm really not sure what the point of this post is supposed to be, beyond sharing this small seed of happiness that I have. Like one of the half-unread books on my shelf says, life turns man up and down. Even if it was not part if the plan, you can still make it work.