Confessions of a libra

Think | Credit: Here

26.05.25

Growing up in Australia I was often told I was ‘deep’. I have had people look at me strangely for bringing up topics like; births, deaths, marriages and existentialism. Am I deep or is Australian culture so predicated on nonchalance that it becomes uncomfortable for you to entertain depth and complexity?

I’ve never understood why people don’t ask the word why more often. Some of you can learn a lot from toddlers. Instead of judging the next immigrant mother for how many children she has, have you ever thought about asking ‘why’? People are too concerned with defending themselves because of insecurity, instead of doing the required learning so you can defend yourself from a place of knowledge.

Growing up no one would accept that I came from a country that could do anything better than Australia. It was simply intellectual laziness that you heard that African countries are poor, so you could never learn from them. Western countries are consistently rediscovering things that they stripped from older cultures and demonised when they couldn’t understand it. If you travelled to Zimbabwe and saw some little black children using charcoal for toothpaste, you would have judged them. Thought them to be poor and misguided. I still remember the advent of charcoal toothpaste in the West like it was yesterday. Even Shailene Woodley was going on and on about it like she’d invented it.

Africans did not need Western education to learn how to utilise their environment. Just because you don’t know that huts are not only eco-friendly but have amazing insulation – doesn’t make huts primitive. The lack of curiosity that some of you have on different cultures amazes me. I know a lot of random information about countries around the world. Not to prove a point but because people are interesting. We could all learn something if we genuinely tried.

People make education sound boring but maybe you never allowed yourself to chase breadcrumbs of curiosity. Maybe you’ve never engaged with information outside of obligation. It’s actually not weird to have someone ask at lunch what the basis of your individual identity is. Is it rooted in your race, your nationality, your core values or your aesthetic? Some people would respond to this question by saying ugh, I’ve never actually thought about that. Okay? Can you think about it now, in real time?

It shouldn’t be painful for you to explore an idea, even when you don’t know the answer. As a self-proclaimed intelligent human being, I have to be wrong to be right. That’s just how it works. Your refusal to get out of your mental and intellectual self-imposed box, means you get to exist in a bubble. You then struggle to relate to people deeper down, because your mind just frames them as weird or backwards instead of thinking critically.

I’m hoping that with my platform, I can encourage my audience to step out of their comfort zone and learn something new about anyone or anything. Ignorance is not cute and often we would rather not be called ignorant than actually work on it. Just like how people are more upset at the suggestion that they could be racist, over the impact of the racism itself. May my words seep past the ego, and deeper in the subconscious, in order to liberate the people that needed to hear this.