Confessions of a libra

Work in progress | Credit: Here

08.06.25

I have once again used ChatGPT to select 3 questions per country to see what the women are wanting to know. If you liked this and you have a country suggestion, pop it in the comments.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe

1. How do I soften without losing the strength I’ve needed to survive?
   Sometimes as Black women our strength feels inherited. Other times it feels like we were forced into it at gunpoint. So, we fail to enjoy it or appreciate being praised for it because it feels like it wasn’t a choice. Well, if you feel you are all strength and need to balance it out with some softness, then therein lies the choice. I’m not sure how high up on your life autonomy goes, but for me being autonomous is about me catering fully to myself. So I never have to crave it from outside of me. It takes strength as well to choose to think this way. You just need to start being intentional. I also want you to consider being creative in your softness too. If you see a woman online who has a selfcare set up that you want to emulate, how can you use what you have available to suit your needs.

As a Zimbabwean myself I feel the need to also dispel that your softness needs to have money attached to it. You don’t need to prove you’re soft by buying materialistic things that give other people that impression. Softness is for you and you alone. A few first steps for anyone who needs it; meditate regularly, massage your stomach lovingly (talk to it sometimes too), get the comfiest home slippers, use candles on rainy days or when you’re journaling, practice gyrating in the mirror and marvel at your sensuality. Read up on what softness means to different people, then journal on what most resonated with you. Look up ways to regulate your nervous system and add those to your rotation. Not enough women are spoken to about nervous system regulation. You are as deserving of a soft life. Remember, if you want more of anything in your life – if you want to manifest more softness – you just need to start taking intentional steps.

2. How do I trust a man emotionally when I’ve seen generations of women carry everything alone?
We’ve watched generations of Zimbabwean women do the bulk of the emotional, physical, financial and spiritual labour. We are revered for our strength but at what cost? The only way to not carry this into the future is to be absolutely brutal about your own standards. You never have to settle for less again. I believe that when you meet someone one day who is both divinely orchestrated AND actually cares about you, they will put in effort to understand you as you are. As an individual not as part of a mass collection. Your standards are yours to have, you do not have to succumb to peer or familial pressure to fulfill a partnership in someone else’s timeline. If you want to be the woman in your family that refuses less than a high standard, stand ten toes down on that.

I have a life philosophy that if you can see it, you can be it. If you’ve ever witnessed another woman be doted on, receive equal partnership or be completely spoiled, it can be yours to have as well. If you decide that it’s more important that you get people’s approval, then you repeat the cycle. I also say, date where you are loved. A lot of Zimbabwean women are very shy to date non-Zimbabweans. Fears of being misunderstood and all that.

Only follow this if it feels true in your gut, but honestly you can honour yourself and your culture if you choose to make space for it. The ancestors will accept anyone who humbles themselves before them. I know that we are not always conscious about life before colonisation, but I truly believe many African cultures were very open-minded. We traded with other continents before colonisation. We would have inter-tribal marriages even back then. The fact that you can be polygamous and bigamous in our culture should signal to you how open-minded we really are.

3. Is it safe to lead in love as a powerful woman in a culture that teaches women to wait?
This is where we talk about binaries. Society masculinises powerful women, and that can make you uncomfortable to be fully in your power. You do not have to follow any social rules if you don’t want to. Look into dark feminine energy. This is the aspect of femininity that differs from the light, airy almost virginal picture that we are almost always advertised. When you lean into dark femininity, you can magnetise the things that you want in a way that satisfies a lot of your innate power.

Can you lead in love? Yes, and I recommend it. I think women have the mental capacity to orchestrate their love lives, especially in creative ways. I am someone with a Leo Venus and Mars so my opinions on things like approaching men or initiating them is all about being assertive. Just like I tell men, you can be assertive but watchful. Be prepared to sometimes be turned down. But is it worth it, to self advocate so that years on you’re not ruminating about “what if I had taken my chance?”? Yes.

Look up your astrological birthchart and learn what your Venus and Mars signs are. They will tell you your strength and approach where men are concerned. Your strength as an earth sign, would be to let them come to you. Men want to impress you, they see you as; feminine, grounded, expensive and someone to impress with their masculinity. For me with fire energy, I am the sun. I go where I want and I do it boldly. I don’t need permission to approach a man, spoil him, punish him or anything that I feel is right to do.

🇺🇸 United States

1. How do I stay soft without being seen as weak?
   The advice I am going to give you is very much from the lens of a Southern African woman, as a preface. It doesn’t matter if other people think you are weak. Strength comes from within. You need to believe you are not weak. That is some self work and shadow work waiting to happen. That’s what I had to do and on the other side of it, I have a comfortable knowing where I feel that my softness doesn’t detract from my strength. In general in Southern Africa we believe that things that are obvious do not need to be harped on about. People who meet me know I am powerful, even if they tell themselves they just hate how I’m too much and think I know everything. That’s just projection. So…embrace your softness, for you. Enjoy the girly things, for you. Paint your whole house pink, for you. And when you go for a doctorate, no one will be asking how you received it while so soft. Softness ≠ weakness.
2. Is wanting love anti-feminist now?
   Wanting love has never been anti-feminist. Extremists are the reason you have been made to feel like those two things cannot co-exist. Feminists have always loved AND they’ve always been fucking too. Feminists would have been the ones clocking the difference between their own sexual exploration being demonised by society vs the next white dude. Your feminism raises your standards of acceptable behaviour. You want a man that isn’t ruled by societal conditioning.
   • You need a different kind of strength to the ones the conservative men value. You need a man with mental fortitude. The type that doesn’t want to stab something because you had an opinion. The type you can trust to be safely escorting women home that he has found in unsafe situations. The type you feel could guide you or the community collaboratively as needed. The type who goes to therapy, one you can trust around children, one you can trust to hold your multiple desires (if that means being poly or supporting your own multidimensionality) as well as a man who craves a better future for women than anything we have experienced in the past. Love, but with discernment. Never apologise for wanting love or romance.
3. How do I let myself be loved when I’ve only ever been in survival mode?
   Receiving love is something you can practice just like anything. I had to practice it myself. First things first, if you are seeing someone or dating them, tell them. Tell them you want more love in quality, quantity or expression and you are struggling to receive. Some things I have practiced; when someone compliments you just practice saying thank you not rebutting, pick one thing in your life that someone could help you with and invite them to help. You know the type of thing, that people have already volunteered to help you with, yeah that. I don’t mean just practice this with your partner. Your wound isn’t purely romantic. Do some journaling about your childhood and how love was modelled. Were you satisfied with that? If you could give your childhood self the love she always wanted, what actions or steps would have had to change back then? Then apply that to your present day as an adult.

Mirror work. Start affirming yourself in the mirror about how deserving you are of love. Acknowledge and thank your partner when they do thoughtful things even if you felt it wasn’t deserved. You do not have to work for love for it to be deserved. You were born deserving of love. Someone expressing their love to you, is the highest honour. You want to work to receive love so you honour those you love in return. Also therapy helps.

🇮🇳 India

1. How do I know the difference between devotion and self-erasure?

If you catch yourself doing something you believe to be devotional, at the expense of your own needs, that’s self erasure. Let me give you a few examples;

• Your man is coming home late. You arrive home exhausted, you can barely keep your eyes open. You feel guilty because there’s no food in the fridge. You tell yourself you should make him a meal anyway before you go to bed. You have defied your temple.
• You are in a long distance relationship. You guys always have a great time together. Your partner lives far away but always has a reason not to drive over to you. You are the one doing the bulk of the travel. You are have made yourself unimportant by not demanding more.
• You make a meal, your partner comes home and says they don’t want what you made. They were really feeling like the other dish you make really well. Only you know how to make it well, maybe his mother as a close second. You decide to get up off your arse to make him a separate meal than what you made for dinner. HELL NO.

I’ll give you the most Libran advice ever. Use a ledger visual or even in your journal. You need to be constantly evaluating the flow of energy between you and your partner, within reason. This means while you have differing love languages how often are you pleasing each other in ways you both appreciate and at what frequency. If you even evaluate you are doing too much, dial it back and use that energy on you. Just to see if you like it.

2. How do I reconcile being spiritual and sensual in a culture that shames both?
I’m a strategist by nature so I would never ask someone who comes from a culture that is rooted in shame with also quite high consequences for women who don’t conform – to risk their lives by standing out. As a strategist and a Libra, I say the sensuality is one that you don’t have to display in any overt way. The sensuality is more a state of mind. It’s about your ability to be in the moment. To go slow. To enjoy your sense, decadently and excruciatingly. People might know you’re a sensualist purely by the swish of your hips. But that’s nothing they can weaponise because you are not sexualising yourself.

Where rebellion is concerned, you need a good balance of showing the world that they aren’t going to die by adding entertaining a new or modern idea – and honouring your own safety. So you might want to wear more revealing clothes because you yourself are sex positive and have no bodily shame, however if it puts you at risk, consider getting creative in your outfits without showing more skin. This is where creativity comes in. You might be the gal who wears beautiful layered draping in a unique way, and people know you as that girl. You might inspire other women to take up self-expression in similar ways.

Where spirituality is concerned, again depends on where you live and how progressive it is. I didn’t walk around telling the wrong people I was a witch. Maybe your spiritual practice is something that only you honour, and you don’t talk about it willy nilly to invite other people’s opinions. Maybe you reserve talking about your spiritual beliefs at the events that you go to, that align with your interests. I was raised Christian but no longer am. I can talk to Christians about Christianity. I can entertain them and sensor my own beliefs. But censorship as a form of safety makes logical sense to me.

3. Can I trust a man who wants me to be both goddess and girl-next-door?
Yes, you can trust a man who accepts you in your dimensions. When he arrives he might feel like an outlier which would be unsettling to your spirit. As with anything though, you watch that man like a hawk at first. You make sure he has earned the trust that you give him before you unfurl. People get different versions of me depending on what energy they bring to the table. Make sure he is enthusiastic about your self expression, make sure he defends it when you are there and when you are not around. You should feel protected by a man you are with, no matter how eccentric you think you are.

🇵🇭 Philippines

1. How do I stop feeling like I have to earn love through caretaking?
   Boundaries, boundaries and more boundaries. You need to have a code of conduct for how much you help people and what it simply too much. You should know, based on past experience. Those times where you were driving to collect a relative while sniffling and crying. Or that other time you gave away your last money before payday out of guilt. You can be a kind person, a giving person and still need to have some parts of your life that are just for you. When a relative suddenly asks why you’re not giving them money or time like you used to, you tell them that it’s for your health. You leave it at that. Worse comes to worst, you got a pay cut and can no longer afford it in your budget. You can no longer baby sit people’s kids all hours of the day because you have exams coming up. Read books on boundaries. Watch videos. Journal. Implement.
2. Can I be both submissive in bed and powerful in life without being misunderstood?
   Yes, you can be submissive in bed and powerful in other aspects of life. Funny story. When I was younger, I was walking around conducting in person surveys with friends and strangers, because I am weird like that. Once I evaluated how dominant the person was in daily life I would ask them if they considered themselves a dom or a sub. In fact that question is the first thing I ever said to my soulmate and bestie Weneiya. That’s how crazy and sex positive I was already at 19
   • The results of this informal survey is many people are actually opposite to who they are in real life. I think many of us life in duality and multidimensionality but the institutions that be demonised these things. So we end up in guilt because we think we aren’t in alignment, when really we are. All that to say, it’s actually not unusual and your colleague doesn’t need to know that you like it when Daddy holds you by the throat and whispers all the naughty things he’s going to do to you.
3. How do I know if he truly sees me—or just the fantasy of the ‘sweet Asian girl’?
   Girl, I love this question as a black woman who has dated outside of her race. Firstly, many people are uneducated about other races and ethnicities. Many people accept the narratives they read in the News or watch on TV. It’s not wrong to meet someone who doesn’t understand you up front. What is wrong is if you feel you have to be erased to honour the fantasy in his mind. Here are some red flags to watch out for;

• When you teach him about your culture, does he retain it? If he retains it, that’s fine. If instead he keeps making ignorant comments based in stereotypes RUN GIRL, TODAY. If he only wants to talk about interests that pertain to your cultural background even though you have interests that span outside of that, same thing girl.
• One or zero strikes for the following statements. One strike if you are willing to educate and wait to see if there is growth and integration; I’ve always wanted to date an Asian girl, Asian girls are so submissive, You’re hot for an Asian (that’s a straight NO).
• If a man wants to argue about your experience as a woman of colour, no. It’s not debateable and he should be lucky to even have a seat at the able.
• A man who makes disparaging remarks about your people, people that look adjacent to you and makes you the exception (that’s a losing battle).
• If the man himself is lazy but wants you to do everything for him, that’s an example of a man who believes in the stereotype of the sweet Asian girl.