Confessions of a libra

Mother of words | Credit: Here

03.11.25

It is 3 months since I wrote the last milestone post, that I had surpassed 200K words. That means in the last 3 months, in the midst of depression and professional changes – I still managed to squeeze out 100K words. I know the post ‘From Missionaries to Polycules’ got tongues wagging. It will requires time to ferment and be digested, as leftists often don’t like to be criticised on the basis of morality. And that’s okay. We don’t grow without discomfort. If I as a leftist, hadn’t been harmed more by other leftists, I wouldn’t have had 3.3K words to describe this in great detail.

I also don’t believe lying to ourselves or others will help any change occur. It can’t just be me who feels the tectonic plates of our worlds shifting. With what is happening in America, what is happening with France, the African nations liberating themselves more from old chains and the humanitarian crises (Congo, Palestine, Sudan). It’s not a time to be fluffy about where you stand when it comes to human rights. You can’t claim you hate inequality, then not want to hear when it occurs and who is affected by it. That is simply not fair. But I am not hear to lecture. I wasn’t even trying to lecture the first time. Only to reveal, with language that leaves no room for doubt as to the meaning.

Now I prepare for the next phase of my life. I want to build worlds. Live in daydreams, spilled over keyboards and implanted in your mind. I want to return home, humbly. First to learn, then to teach. I have so many dreams but if you were to ask me the highest expression, the overarching title to encompass all the things I want to do in this life – I would love to be a Philanthropist. THAT is how I actually see myself. I know my words cut. My lens of life is awfully crystal clear, think 8K when you’re used to 1080p. You might be like, this woman overthinks. You might even think I’m angry or upset when I am merely telling what you what has long been understood within myself.

This blog, this project has been a way to exercise my author muscle through my own lived experience. I just grew bolder, once I felt I had laid enough ground-work to limit misunderstanding. When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with the idea of being one of those prodigal teen authors like Christopher Paolini of Eragon fame. It was passion seeking to be expressed early but without enough grounding. What I didn’t know then is, how much I need to steep in a concept. I am someone who needs to dive deep. The longer I flirt with a topic, the longer I entertain it in good fun never forcing it – as I have done with Astrology for about 12 years now – the more I can integrate and understand it.

I feel that my writing tone actually hasn’t changed THAT much from my earliest writing. Obviously now it’s sharper, deeper, richer, delectable… but I always had this knack for making words flow like a river. I was raised in a family of people who enjoy linguistics, accuracy in phrasing, expansive vocabularies and general passion for academics runs in the family as well. I was raised by my maternal side of the family. The matriarch, my grandmother is someone who loves learning and she loves helping people. She finished school at 14 because that’s all the education you could get back then under colonial rule. She was also from a rural area so that number might have been slightly different to the suburban girls.

She went on to study nursing then worked as a nurse for several years. She then turned to Telecommunications, began to do admin for this one company for over 40 years. Sometime in her 60’s she picks up Counselling because people were increasingly coming to her over the years with their woes and she hoped to assist them better. She had her first stroke while sitting an exam, though I don’t recall if it was this course or if she even did another one I am missing. She is the type to value education for education’s sake. She didn’t marry and have kids until 26 which is fucking amazing for her time. This was a choice. She was a very boundaried, serious, Christian pious woman.

My mother has always had her nose in a book. She also went on to do Telecommunications for decades. Libraries are sacred to us. I feel at home going to a library. Libraries have held me through youth, through joblessness and through fantasies. She has a fantastic vocabulary but like most immigrant kids, I like to make fun of her accent. But don’t be mistaken, accent or not she could run circles around your mind. In my mind, she’s often the smartest person in the room, but the most quiet.

Then came me. The boombox. The loud-mouth. The brave, the bold and the beautiful. I love alliteration. I have both their loud cackles. I have their sharp tongues. But I do not have their caution. Caution that served them well in their differing environments. What I have is an ancestral bravery. A torch I picked up and said, if not me then who? Sometimes it grates me that we as a collective do not come to resolutions because we want to dance around the topic. We are too busy trying to skirt each other’s feelings, that we end up having solved nothing at all.

Everyone’s offended at how the thing sounded, how it made them look and not the thing itself. How are we even debating whose lives deserve saving? In any context? How are we still bargaining with tyranny? How do we know and talk about active corruption and remains an ideas forum? Who, if not me is going to tell you that blaming immigrants for everything wrong in your country is the oldest trick in the book by the rich to keep you distracted?

While you blame immigrants for the housing crises, the house prices remain high. The rich pay only less taxes, investment properties are accumulated then left unoccupied. People try to say these things are complicated, yet countries like Singapore have grants, subsidies and regulations to keep housing affordable. As such they have high homeownership via public housing. Some countries have free healthcare, as covered by taxes, while other countries state that it is simply ‘impossible’ and not how it works. Also, while you blame immigrants, do you know how many of your own countrymen are in other countries? Overstaying their visa’s and committing crime? Immigration doesn’t happen one way. And Westerners migrate to developing countries too, if you can imagine that.

Governments all over the world are creating false problems. Every single person deserves shelter. Are we humans with empathy? Or do we lean on ‘this is just how it’s done’ so some lord over others? I think writing should be raw. It’s the rawness that sinks its fangs in you, releasing dopamine. This is why I love being an adult. As a teenager for example, I confounded many an authority figure by asking questions they didn’t want to answer. I remember this lovely Psychology teacher wanting to dissect the objectification of women through rap videos.

She had an issue with the women twerking but as an African, I see it as cultural. There’s not an African culture I can think of, that doesn’t have heavy waist-to-butt movements. The premise of her lens was relying entirely on interpreting the video through White culture, since that is what she is familiar with. She was also ethnically Czech (if I remember correctly). When I see people twerking or when I twerk myself, it’s fun, it’s sensual and it’s expressive. There is no, let me twerk so this man finds it attractive. Black women would twerk without a man in the room any day.

Which to me, just makes twerking cultural since African Americans are descended from West Africans. So then, in a rap video, having twerking is expressive and directly speaks to the target audience. Of course I couldn’t express myself as well as I can now, but still when I pointed out that there is a cultural element she could be missing – I could see that I stumped her. She hadn’t prepared the lesson with that thought in mind. So then she said something like, ‘oh, yeah but we’re not looking at it from a cultural lens today’. Bless her. I really liked her, no issues with her as a person and she clearly wasn’t being malicious.

I genuinely adore an exchange of ideas. That is why I adore reading, and that is the vein from which I write to you. You do not have to like everything I say, nor do you have to agree. It is only a moment in time, that invites you to see things from a different perspective. That is where the magick lies. Now, I work on packing up my life. I work on my publishing dreams, and I will return occasionally when the wind changes and the blog calls. In the meantime, I want you to go through the 200+ post archive. Read, reread. Keep me in your memory. I would love to grow with you, for years to come. Thank you for every like. Thank you for every subscriber. You have helped my faith in myself. Now let me surprise you.