i know this might sound hypocritical coming from someone who runs a mental health hub and genuinely believes in seeking therapy and the power of healing. hold that contradiction with me for a moment because what i am about to say comes not from the professional but from the person. your friend on the internet. the one who has spent years and a significant amount of money in therapy herself and is still asking questions, still sitting in spaces of uncertainty rather than arriving at neat answers.

here it is: there is probably nothing wrong with you. there is something wrong with the world we have built and until we are honest about that, a lot of people will spend years medicated and in sessions without actually healing especially if you are existing in a Black body. especially if you are living in Africa and god forbid you are doing all of that in a female body, because the systems around you were quite literally designed to tear you apart.

Speaking of mental though, i also would like to name that it is normal for young people to have anxiety, depression and fear when none of them have stable incomes, land and housing is over the roof, their futures are unguaranteed, and they are expected to build nuclear families under these exact conditions (with these school fees? are you kidding me? Depression is not a disorder under these circumstances; it’s simply a rational response to an irrational world.

i keep telling every young person at the circle when they drop the word #ADHD, usually without any diagnosis whatsoever, just as shorthand for i cannot focus, i am all over the place and i hear them. i do. but i also think about what it means to expect neurotypical functioning in a world this hyperactive, this loud, this relentlessly productive. what does it even mean to be neurotypical here? to never be tired. to never procrastinate. to never lose the threa. because I will tell you what happened to me: most of what I thought were symptoms disappeared once I found some form of balance, yet Adderall was the only way I managed to get my college degree. which makes me ask the question i keep returning to….

what if you do not have ADHD? what if it is just attention deficit from social media consumption, or from a production pace that is fundamentally anti-human. or from the pressure of juddling life, school, work and brokeness in growing city alone? what if the disorder is the pace, not you.

and let us not forget Dr. Celestin, who gave language to women who have been living it without a name (kinda textbook whiteman discovers River nile if you ask me) when he introduced Relational Disappointment Stress Disorder. RDSD for women in loveless marriages, experiencing abuse, carrying absent partners who do not help raise children, running on hormones and chronic exhaustion and somehow the question becomes: what is wrong with her. not: what are the conditions she has been expected to survive? As a woman myself, i am genuinely surprised we are not all running through the streets with saggy boobs, bleeding between our legs, talking to ourselves and screaming. which tells me that we have accepted these conditions as normal too. we have absorbed them so completely that the breakdown seems like the aberration rather than the logical conclusion of what we are constantly asked to carry.

To me RSDD is not a new disorder. that is old textbook hysteria repackaged with a cleaner name. Misogyny and Western medicine renewing their marriage, and the question I keep returning to is the same one: how do we keep locating the problem in the individual when the individual is surrounded by conditions designed to break them?

i want to be clear: there are people who are born with conditions that require genuine clinical support. bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and chronic depression that has nothing to do with circumstance. the brain and the body are fascinating and complex and sometimes they need specific help. i am not dismissing that. what i am saying is that the vast majority of what gets pathologized today is a human being responding to inhuman conditions and there is a difference. and worse, we want you to pay it and be taxed for it because this is the capitalism babyyyy. BUT

there is nothing wrong with you, there however 100% something wrong with the conditions we are living under.

western therapy, as it was designed, tends to locate the problem inside the individual. It asks, “What is wrong with you, and how do we fix you?” It does not often ask: what is wrong with the system producing these symptoms, and how do we dismantle it? if you have ever sought mental health support from a professional who did not understand systemic racism, who could not hold the particular grief and confusion and depression that comes with navigating your identity as a Black person in a world that was not built for you, you may have left feeling more broken than when you arrived. i wish someone had told me this when i was looking for a therapist for the first time. i was so convinced that finding a white therapist was necessary to my complexity as a Rwandan, because i feared that someone like me would judge me or not hold confidentiality. what i did not yet know was that my problem was less about the presenting issue i was seeking therapy for, and more about needing someone who actually knew what it meant to be Rwandan. to be Black. to be a woman in Rwanda. to be a Black woman in this world. and even to be able to speak my mother tongue to name and heal my wounds. that only became clear to me about 5 years ago. and it changed everything about how i understand healing. anway back to my original reason for this piece….

Capitalism is not normal. colonialism as a psychological condition we still live inside is not normal. racism is not normal. the climate crisis is not normal. people living in isolation in apartments, cut off from community and land and each other is not normal. i know these things look like just how things are. but they affect your mental and emotional wellbeing profoundly, and you deserve support that acknowledges that rather than asking you to adjust yourself to fit a broken world.

the same system that manufactures the conditions causing your pain will also sell you the cure. think about how Black people spend billions buying wigs and bleaching their skin, while the system that manufactured the belief that Black skin and natural hair are not enough profits from both the wound and the remedy. think about how capitalism has made women its biggest consumers by first making them feel they are not enough, and then selling them everything they need to become enough. mental health is not far from this logic. the depression the system causes you, the exhaustion, the burnout, instead of solving the conditions producing these things, the system will monetize them. it will give you a diagnosis, a prescription, and years of sessions. and you will wonder why you are not getting better. it is because the thing making you unwell is still running at full speed outside the therapy room. That’s if they dont successfully manage to numb you to those conditions, aka making you functional again.

i am not saying do not go to therapy. please go. find someone who understands your context and your history but go knowing that individual healing inside a broken system has limits.

Toni Morrison said that when it comes to racism, we have to insist on being shocked every time. it does not matter how many times you have seen it. your resistance is in the refusal to normalize it. the shock is the thing that keeps you from accepting what should never be accepted.

i carry that into everything. i refuse to accept that this is just how things are. i refuse to let the system convince me that exhaustion is a personality trait, that burnout is ambition, that overworking yourself into the ground is the price of worthiness.

Audre Lorde said: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

and Tricia Hersey, in Rest Is Resistance, builds an entire politics out of this. rest is not laziness. rest is refusal. rest is the reclamation of a body the system wants to keep productive at all costs.

there is a 1,000% chance there is nothing wrong with you, sweetheart. i understand that you feel like you are being chased by a lion every time your phone rings because your nervous system thinks it is the boss asking for something again: YOU ARE OVERWHELMED. that is not a disorder, that is your body AND MIND being honest about what it is living through.

so here is what i want to leave you with i conclude: everything you need has already been provided through nature and through each other.

go see the sun. hug a tree. put your feet in water. rest without earning it first. take your sick days fully. take your leave. reclaim your time, a lot of it. have hobbies that will never make you money and protect them fiercely. charge corporations more for your skills and your time. spend intentional time with friends and family. be interdependent. live slowly. laugh. sit kw’irigara. make love. play. fall in love. go to the market, buy food, come home and cook it. visit your grandmother. help an older person cross the road. sleep. take the longer route home. sleep. drink water. read a book. Silence your colleague texts. dance under the full moon.

your regulated nervous system is resistance. your joy is resistance. your pleasure is resistance. your wellness is your resistance. your community is resistance. the system wants you exhausted, isolated, and dependent on the products it sells to manage the conditions it created. the most radical thing you can do is refuse that.

okay bye,

bose.

before i give you this poem…

we live in a world that has decided that emotional openness is a character flaw. that to feel deeply is to be naive. that to love without armor is to be asking for it. that presence, real presence, the kind that costs you something, is either a manipulation tactic or a sign that you do not know your own value. and that softness, in a person who has clearly survived a great deal, is simply immaturity waiting to be corrected by experience.

i want to push back on all of that.

the Black Flower writes from a place that i had to earn. not through becoming harder. through becoming more honest. through sitting with my own darkness long enough to know that the darkness is not the enemy, the pretending is. through choosing, again and again, to remain soft in a world that keeps presenting excellent arguments for why i should not.

and the poetry that comes from that place is vulnerability, it is not the romanticization of pain. it is the attempt to say something true about what it costs to love openly, without guarantee, in a world that has normalized the extraction of feeling without reciprocity.

because that is what we have been taught to accept. that you can be held without being cared for. that you can be wanted without being valued. that the person who loves more fully is the one who loses. and i refuse that.

this poem is a prayer. it is also a boundary. it is also a kind of begging, but the kind of begging that knows its own worth. the kind that says: i am offering you something real. i need you to know what you are holding before you decide whether you want it.

so before you read what follows, know that the black flower does not write to be consumed. she writes to be met.

if you receive this

if you receive this
know what you are holding

this is not a simple thing
that arrived at your door without history
without cost
without the quiet courage it took
to cross the distance between keeping it safe
and laying it at your feet

i have loved before
and i know what hands can do to something tender

i know what fear takes away from the heart,

so i am asking you
not demanding
asking

if you are not ready to hold this
let it go
the way you release a flower you did not mean to pick
gently
without apology
just open your hands
and let it return to where it belongs

do not pluck what you cannot tend to
do not take what you cannot carry
do not pull me close in the dark
and disappear in the light

the worst thing you can do
is not reject me
rejection i can hold
rejection is honest

the worst thing
is to take this and waste it
to receive something real
and treat it like it costs nothing

because it costs everything

to love openly
without armor
without guarantee
is an act of prayer

and prayer deserves a sanctuary
not a slaughter

so before you receive this
i need you to know
that what stands before you
has passed through fire to get here
has sat with its own darkness
has chosen
again and again
to remain soft

that is not weakness

that is the most sacred kind of power

so if you are ready
receive it fully
let it change you the way real things change you
slowly
permanently
from the inside

and if you are not
it is okay
i mean that

just say so
with the same tenderness
i offered you this with

and i will understand

for i would rather be released with grace
than held without care

love,

bose.

i thought to myself this morning how relentlessly life tries to harden us. perhaps that’s what life has always done. the more your eyes open, the more your heart opens, the more your mind opens, the more the world enters you. beauty arrives, yes, but so does grief, injustice, cruelty, loneliness and the impossible weight of loving in a world that keeps finding new ways to wound you.

it feels as though to be awake is to quarrel with the world and yet, as the great James Baldwin taught me, despair is a luxury i simply cannot afford.

so, when my mind became too crowded with everything i could not name, i do what i have always done: i let my poetry move my hands. i invite the Black Flower (my pen name) to listen to the whispers of nyabingi and when she did, she did not want to write about revolution or death or empire or grief. she wanted to write about love; the quiet miracle of meeting another soul and finding yourself becoming softer in their presence.

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a tribute to a lover.

to know you is to know love.

you are a flower in bloom, a sun that warms and powers souls,

one who has expanded my heart and my mind into realities i never knew i could inhabit.

look what we have created, a space of safety and beauty. a place where we both simply are.

what we have built together is a home of tenderness, a place where neither of us has to perform. where silence speaks as fluently as words. where our bodies remember what is sacred.

thank you for choosing i and i. i also choose you, now and here. and there are more moments to come, more skies to witness together, more conversations that stretch into the night and day, more lingering cuddles. quiet breaths deepening into each other. longer looks. and then deeper still, your weight settling into me. the unhurried arrival into each other's bodies, slow enough that we feel every threshold we cross. the way pleasure becomes another form of talk, with tongues but different kinds of sounds, another way of saying i see you, i want you, i am not going anywhere. skin remembering what words sometimes cannot hold.

and after, sit in that particular quiet that only exists once you have given each other everything, lying in it together, unguarded, completely known.

i look to the future with joy because it carries traces of you. more laughter i will make you giggle into. more ordinary afternoons spilling over with something warm. more hands finding one another without asking.

perhaps this is what life has always been: not an escape from the world's hardness but a refusal to let the world convince us that hardness is all there is. in knowing you, i have remembered that tenderness is resistance. it is faith. it is choosing to bloom when the skies and air freeze in winter.

and if love is a journey, then every day with you feels like coming home.

to know you is to know love.

lover,

bose.

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hello dear beloved,

This is a quick one because i was just reflecting on normalcy and what it actually means? could it be functional? acceptable maybe? digestible? i think the idea of it comes down to how easy you are for the world to receive and how similar and imitable you are in whatever environment you are in, which was so intriguing to me since for the most part, when i try to locate the version of myself that was conforming, i genuinely cannot find her. i have always been a misfit. an outlier. a rebel. the stylish, crazy one. a different one. i do not think i have ever known what fitting in actually feels like And if i had a penny for every time Rwandans told me, ‘you don’t look or act Rwandan,’ i would be a billionaire.

and yet, i have performed. just differently. because the world has a very specific idea of what is acceptable, and the cost of exceeding it is very high. especially as a woman, because the world fears the mad woman and there is almost a decree on how far you are allowed to run mad before it stops being eccentric and starts being dangerous. as a Black woman especially, there is only so much anger permitted before it becomes violence, only so much radical before it becomes extreme. even as an expressive person, tattoos are fine to a degree, natural dreads are fine to a degree, before people decide you have gone too far into the wild and need to be brought back to something they can recognize as normal. so we translate ourselves, we render the original into a language the room can receive without flinching and the real thing waits below the surface.

what i find philosophically interesting is how long that translation can last. how many versions of yourself you can inhabit before you realize you have been performing characters instead of living. i have existed in so many of them. the one who wanted to be accepted by rich kids, who would have done almost anything to belong in rooms that were never really mine. the one who was a bully in high school because indiscipline was the only way i could survive without being a model student. the one who shaped her entire ambition around what would make her seem qualified and intelligent in the western sense, because i simply wanted to be perceived as smart and capable, which i happen to be, but i did not yet trust that without the credential to back it up. the one who said yes or nothing when she found herself in contradiction with the belief or culture or collective thought in the room, because it was easier than explaining that she did not believe in that version of god, that nationalism, that gender, that sexuality bla bla bla…

Albert Camus wrote that the absurd is born from the confrontation between the human need for meaning and the world’s silence in response. i think about that when i think about this particular performance. there is something deeply absurd about a species that is collectively struggling and collectively pretending not to be, in rooms full of other people who are also pretending, all of us performing normalcy for an audience that is also performing (i mean do you ever notice the way we talk on Zoom calls? it is very non-human. literally. a whole different species of language that nobody actually speaks in real life but pretends its normal.) what makes it most absurd is that nobody actually lives in normal. we have invented a category and then spend our entire lives trying to qualify for it. the calm person is anxious. the successful person is lost. the confident person is afraid. the family that looks perfect is carrying ALOT of secrets and drama. the person who seems certain is improvising and still we uphold normal as though it is a real destination rather than a collective fiction.

i cannot decide who performs better between men and women. i think it is equally absurd on both sides. men have somehow convinced themselves and each other that they do not have emotions, that they are strong and stoic and naturally built for leadership, when behind that is just a scared child holding a very heavy thing alone. and women have performed softness and good manners and agreeableness when they are furious and disruptive and completely wild. behind every identity we wear so well is a small frightened human trying to get through. have you noticed how when our parents finally age into their full humanity, you look at them and realize they are just insecure scared creatures too and they just wantd a tight hug because they were performing for you the whole time.

now that i genuinely do not care about being perceived as normal or as anything really other than what i am, you have no idea how many mad people i have found. absolutely a bunch of crazy beautiful people who were also hiding it. i used to feel like, oh god, why am i like this? Now I am here like, oh god, why is everyone like this? but i think that is what happens when you stop filtering. the world reveals itself and it turns out it was always full of people like you.

and yet the performance is not entirely wrong. there is something almost generous about it. you spare people. you hold what is yours to hold and you keep going but the question is whether it ever gets to end. whether there are places and people where you are allowed to stop translating yourself. where the original can exist without apology. that, i think, is what we are actually looking for when we look for community, for love, for anything real. not an audience for the performance. a witness to what is underneath it.

i read a work partner’s email last week where they said how amazing it was to work with me and something landed in me clearly. i will be honest, i was scared going into that whole thing. tired of editing myself but also terrified of what it would cost me not to, because money dictates a lot these days and i could not afford to lose it and then the response came back saying you are exactly who i want and i thought oh. okay. so that is what this feels like. also i no longer had the energy to perform literally anywhere, be it in meetings, in friendships or in family honestly i am too old for that. i am literally 30 guys.

Anyway, what is normal? i think it is just the longest-running performance most of us have been cast in without auditioning and arriving at yourself, really arriving is the quiet radical act of finally walking off that stage.

so here is to 30. to the caterpillar becoming. to the conversations that crack you open just enough to find out you were already whole. to soft and kind and caring and dangerous as a complete identity that requires no apology. to the sandals and sweatpants at work. to knowing you are the shit without needing a western degree to confirm it. to never having to censor yourself again, body-wise, word-wise, thought-wise.

we land here by surviving every version of ourselves that was never really us and then we stay.

as James Baldwin once said: “You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”

did you all think i was going to give you a piece without Baldwin? tsk! you were wrong.

bye beloved,
bose.

Okay, first things first: who knows this old banger? Kigali yananiye by M1. sha when he said nisubiriye mucyaro, kigali... aho ye!!! as a matter of fact, let me share it here because that is genuinely me every day waking up in this city with these prices. i know Gen Z don't even know M1, so you are welcome…

Kigali has changed, and it is beyond the skyline; it is in what it now expects of you just to exist inside it. restaurants with entrance fees. events priced beyond salaries. rooftop bars and members-only spaces and curated experiences that present themselves as Kultured but yoh! what culture? the city keeps building upward and the question of who gets to belong keeps getting quieter but more expensive.

so this is my insights on what is happening but most importantly, why we need to be clear-eyed about it before it quietly bankrupts us, financially and psychologically.

i remember the conversation on X about people taking loans to fund weddings. or the quiet observation that somehow every 20-something owns the latest iPhone. or the fact that entrance fees keep climbing and yet the spaces are always full to which the common person says: sha abantu i kigali bafite amafaranga cg ni njye ukennye?. To some extent, it is true but the fuller picture is more interesting than that.

i came across a podcast or article a while back about the Central Bank and how people are taking loans for cars, holidays, and so on (i could not trace the source so if you have it please drop it in the comments) but it pointed at a widespread confusion between who is actually wealthy and who is performing wealth and in a city developing as fast as Kigali, how are we minimizing the damage to ourselves?

Let me to educate you first; there is a concept called “conspicuous consumption.” Thorstein Veblen wrote about it in 1899 in The Theory of the Leisure Class, the idea that people buy things to be seen using them, that our status becomes inseparable from visibility, and wealth transforms into something you display rather than something you live. For example, we know the filthy wealthy people make up approximately ONLY 1% of the global population. while the rest of us, as Gen Z would say, are on the hamster wheel, and the machine keeps running precisely because most people believe they are one good decision away from the top. every entrepreneur sees themselves as the next Elon Musk. every Black woman is an Oprah in waiting. every child is told they can be president. It’s a beautiful lie with fake promises like the so-called ‘American Dream.’ Veblen also wrote about “pecuniary emulation”: the way people copy those above them socially even when they cannot afford to, because proximity to a certain kind of life feels like safety (that’s why i use SAPE as a cover picture). we do this with wealth, with proximity to whiteness, with expressions of power in whatever form the system currently rewards. it is one of the ways people cope with being structurally excluded from the thing they are being told to want and it predates Instagram by a hundred years.

also this might surprise you, but i do actually know someone who owns a private jet personally. i met this person through fundraising work in New York and i think often about how they have no social media presence whatsoever. they are not even easily Googleable. their entire circle is the same. it reflects how the actually the rich are largely invisible to the rest of us which means what we are watching online is a performance for each other that has very little to do with real wealth. we watch influencers and entertainers simulate a version of wealth, and then we aspire to that simulation in turn. the cycle goes: the fake wealthy perform wealth. influencers perform that performance. the public performs the influencer and by the end nobody knows what is real and nobody wants to be the first to admit so.

i explain all of this because it matters when you see weddings funded by debt, cars bought for image, phone upgrades because being seen with last year’s model feels like announcing you are poor. it is easy to look at those choices as purely individual failures but they are not. they are the social conditioning cycle doing exactly what it was designed to do and that is my basic theory on why nobody is remotely interested in disrupting it because on the surface everyone seems fine, except the actually poor (a theory for another day) but understanding this is exactly why i am writing it down. because you cannot opt out of something you cannot name. once you see the mechanism clearly, you get to make a real choice about how much of it you participate in.

There is another phenomenon Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”: the idea that authentic social life gets replaced by its representation, that life stops happening and starts being produced. somewhere in that production process, the actual living gets thinner. what is visible (ex: social media) starts to carry more weight than what is real, and visibility itself becomes the thing people are chasing.

so bring all of that into Kigali 2026, the city’s surface looks immaculate. the events are full. the highlight reels are hot. people are spending time in expensive cafés even if they ordered water, not judging, i do the same. online, everyone is thriving, brunching, soft-launching something and if you are not, you feel the quiet pressure of that absence like a draft/akabeho coming under the door.

a friend was recently in a situation where someone wanted to celebrate a birthday at Mövenpick and essentially expected everyone in the group to pay 45K each without consideration of others’ finances. and what shook me about it was the recognition that this is a pattern, widely shared and mostly unexamined. when a city performs wealth loudly and consistently enough, it becomes genuinely difficult to locate where the city’s expectations end and your own desires begin. probably the birthday girl who planned her dinner might not be malicious but she has absorbed the logic of the environment so thoroughly that the price point felt normal to her and assumes so for everyone else.

i hope this piece does more than inform you though, information is just trivia. what i actually want is for this to build something in you, a capacity to see more clearly, to choose more freely, and to extend that same clarity to the people around you. so with that: i must convince you to stop judging people based on image, class or perceived lifestyle. to stop deciding whether someone belongs or belongs with you, based on what they appear to have or not have. that conditioning is not just unfair inside a community trying to build something real. it is corrosive. it makes you an accomplice of the very system you seek refuge from, without even knowing it.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. ~ Audre Lorde

i cried about this recently because a friend i had brought into the community, someone i trusted and thought we shared my worldview, said something along the lines of some community members not being their kind of people, solely based on how they presented. i was deeply hurt as the comment was rooted in exactly this, in reading people through the performance instead of the person. As James Baldwin said, “you have to imagine the person as also you.” (i will keep bringing this quote into every piece i write until it penetrates in all of our psyches) because when we lose that capacity, we have let the machine do its work on us completely.

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poverty is real and being broke or financially stretched is something a large percentage of people in this city are living with quietly. the way we judge someone based on what they appear to have, whether we read them as less intelligent or less worthy or less interesting because of it, that is conditioning accumulated through years of absorbing a system that equates money with value.

"What people hunger for beneath the performance is genuinely simple: to be known, to matter, to be loved without conditions." ~ bell hooks, All About Love.

we have built an economy of surfaces so elaborate that this kind of knowing has become structurally difficult. Rutger Bregman argues in Humankind that most of what looks like greed or vanity is people responding rationally to irrational systems. the person taking a loan for a wedding is doing a calculation that makes sense inside a world where perception is currency. understanding that does not mean endorsing it. It means knowing what you are actually dealing with and choosing differently every time, especially in a safe community.

Alice Walker also teaches us that belonging is a fundamental human need, as natural as hunger or rest. the trouble is that we keep trying to meet it through performance, and performance as i explained above, produces visibility which is a different thing entirely from actually belonging somewhere/anywhere. ntago nabyifuriza abana b’abanyarwanda. let alone a community I am working hard to build, rooted in inclusion.

all humans, in all their diversity of backgrounds, classes, and countries are welcome here. That is the ground on which we are building. and we cannot allow the same exclusionary logic we are trying to escape to quietly recreate itself inside our own spaces. if you claim to represent fully, then that must include people whose access, accent, and proximity to privilege look nothing like yours. i, too, have built my level of consciousness through constant learning and willingness to change and i assume we are all walking those steps together.

Though the harder work is individual. it is the work bell hooks points toward when she talks about being truly known, not the performance of yourself, not the version shaped by class anxiety or audience or inherited conditioning, but your actual life with its actual constraints and its actual joys. In The Circle, I call this self-inquiry: who am i when nobody is watching? What do I actually want? What would I choose if I were not choosing for an audience? Who am I without the conditions and systems that have always been busy defining me? if i gave you journaling prompt, it would be that.

I want to end with this quote by Audre, they say: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” and let you note, do not ever be pressured into a 35K dinner because the culture of the moment says you should. ask yourself what the value actually is. the most expensive things manufacture the appearance of joy rather than producing it. do not let a city that is still figuring itself out tell you what your life is supposed to cost.

there is so much about this city, this system, that we cannot control or change. the prices will keep climbing. the spectacle will keep running. the conditioning will keep conditioning. but what we can choose, every single day, is what we take personally. what we internalize. what we let define us and what we decide to set down.

Nanjye kigali yarananiye, but we are still choosing, living, and loving.

Good luck and love always.

Bose.

“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” ~ bell hooks

hello beloved.

its been a while, right? i know summer has started and i have zero good intention of living a quiet life: picnicking, partying, travelling, dancing, moving, loving, sexing, brunching, posting… doing all these with absolutely nothing in my bank account because i intend to live fully this summer like it is nobody’s business. Nawe uzakore ibyawe tu.

but today’s piece is a manifesto. a call-out and a reflection that have been sitting with me as i navigate adult love, friendships, family dynamics, and community. all of these things, for me, encompass love in various forms but i always feel like i have to separate them for translation. But honestly, friendships and cousinships are the most romantic relationships you will ever have in your life and how does romantic love even exist without friendship by the way? anyway…

we were seated outside. i happen to have a great terrace with flowers always catching light and birds flying in and out to drink water from the flowerpot that my cousin has actually found ways to refill for them since it is summer. See—EFFORT (you will understand why i am saying that in a moment. its the keyword).

this is a newer friendship, so we were doing what new friendships do: building connection, holding space, going deep as we share life and grief and shenanigans. and at some point she stopped performing okayness and she started crying… she was describing the exhaustion of always being the one who extends herself, always the one who remembers, who initiates, who stretches to make the relationship work, who is being considerate while nobody sees that she is also suffering and in the middle of her tears i felt ikiniga (Don’t know the English word, but its that thing in your throat when its tightening, man) rise in me. something cracked open because i could feel the depth of what she was grieving and craving but i could not bring myself to cry with her so i am writing about it instead…

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i too, for most of my friendships, have been the one extending more. i have let go of many along the way—nothing dramatic just because i simply got tired and i have had to sit with the uncomfortable truth that a lot of what i called friendship was actually acquaintances (but its an ugly word to use so i still use the word “friends” though the awareness has changed), people i was loyal to who were never quite loyal back, people i carried who did not notice the weight and i went through a season of cleaning that up and watching myself clearly too, which is also why i wanted to write this for sealing purposes, as much as anything else. i think we need to stop approving nonchalance within our close relationships. in romantic relationships. in friendships, in family, and in community. somewhere along the way people started treating emotional absence as a personality trait instead of what it often is: disengagement or frankly, bad behavior or just immaturity for lack better words.

They say; Oh! i am just bad at texting. oh! i don’t like calls. Too bad! i disappear sometimes. Sorry! i am 2 hours late or we say; this is a low maintenance friendship (WTF does that even mean?).

Listen, please never say that to the people you claim to love. because somehow you still answer work emails. you still wake up on time for meetings. you still remember deadlines. you still keep your phone nearby when your boss calls. You still perform consistently for corporations and institutions that do not love you back so clearly the issue is not capacity. the issue is where care is being allocated and what your priorities are.

and here i also have to say something that might be uncomfortable as someone who is deeply serious about community and mental health, i hate how often people use mental health as an excuse to escape the accountability and responsibility that comes with relationships. oh! i am going through a lot. oh! i have been going through it. etc…Listen!!! ndakumva pe, erega Ubuzima burakaze and you do not owe presence and effort to everyone BUT the people you choose to love deserve more than disappearing for weeks or even days without accountability. i have had a friendship where someone vanishes, calls are made to check on them, and in the process of their breakdown they damage credibility, harm people’s reputations, and then feel no particular need to apologize because the friendship is supposed to mean being accepting and supportive without any call-out (P.S: I have dropped this human as a friend though we have known each since we were teenagers because they were so inconsiderate all the time). i had a conversation with Denyse about this; how we often victimize ourselves so thoroughly that even in the validity of our suffering we forget to account for the harm we cause. people think that because they are struggling, nobody is allowed to hold them accountable. That if you see their pain, you must also absorb whatever they do inside it. Honey No!!! that’s abuse. Period.

but to actually get out of depression, as i have experienced, you cannot only wallow; you need to step outside and meet the sun, you need to move your body, you need to book therapy and actually attend, you need to journal, you need to open up and share, you need to do the work. it is work, work, and more work. there is no other way unfortunately and part of that work is also being honest about the harm you have caused and choosing to repair it and as much as it also pains to inform you, even in the process of repair and healing does not exempt you from relationships/love’s responsibilities. it is, in fact, part of how you practice them.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." — James Baldwin

i think capitalism has deeply distorted the way we understand effort in relationships. people will dedicate their entire nervous systems to productivity, employers, and performance while offering the people who actually sustain their humanity whatever is left over (literally, breadcrumbs). friendships are surviving on scraps. families are surviving on DNA. romantic relationships are surviving on vibes and smoke, and then we call that life. Child! count me out.

The thing is ‘love has never been a passive thing.’ It simply is not, my loves. love is an act. love is labor. even the most natural forms of love ex: a parent’s love without labor, is not love. love is not simply how you feel about someone internally. love is what you repeatedly do. it is attention. it is consideration. it is remembering. it is checking in. it is making time. it is noticing shifts in someone’s voice. it is calling back. it is showing up consistently enough that people do not have to question whether they matter to you.

And despite also what our mental health issues convince us we need, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.” said bell hooks. And it’s a fact. You need people, no matter what your character and personality might be.

people love saying they want effortless/casual relationships but effortless relationships do not exist. what exists are relationships where effort has become intentional, mutual and practiced enough that it feels natural and easy. there is always emotional labor happening. someone is remembering birthdays. someone is initiating plans. someone is checking in first. someone is holding the emotional temperature of the relationship. someone is absorbing silences and translating distance into understanding. the relationship is not (possibly NEVER) low-maintenance. one person is simply maintaining it quietly and women especially in hetero dynamics are taught to be that person—to stretch, to maintain connection, to make things work, to carry the consideration, the communication, the emotional labor. it is a conditioning and it runs so deep that many of us do not recognize it as labor until we are completely exhausted by it.

there is a concept for example called “mental load” that my friend Amber shared, it is the invisible labor of managing a home, a relationship, a community, and a life. it is not just doing tasks. it is remembering or anticipating, planning, organizing, and coordinating them. it is the constant background thinking that keeps everything functioning while everyone else moves through the world unburdened. the person carrying the mental load is the one who remembers what needs to be bought, which bills are due, whose birthday is coming, what is running out, what still has not been done, what everyone else forgot and when they hear just tell me what to do or make me a list, it can feel even heavier because now they also have to manage you, and I can’t stop emphasizing as a James Baldwin fan that"You have to imagine the person as also you."

and mental load is only one layer because on top of it, there is emotional load (who holds the feelings in the relationship, who absorbs the bad days, who regulates the tension, who creates the safety that allows vulnerability to exist at all etc…)

and then there is relational load (who maintains the relationship itself. who initiates the plans, who follows up after a hard conversation, who remembers what was said two weeks ago and checks back in, who tracks the health of the connection and tends to it before it deteriorates. who, if they stopped, would reveal that the relationship was running entirely on their effort etc…)

and then there is the physical load (who actually does the things. who shows up with food when you are sick, who moves the heavy thing, who drives, who books, who organizes, who handles the logistics, etc…)

and then there is the cognitive load (who thinks ahead. who anticipates needs before they are voiced. who plans for contingencies. who carries the future of the relationship in their head alongside everything else they are already managing etc…)

none of these are separate. They stack and they almost never stack equally. and the person carrying most of them is often so conditioned to carry them that they cannot even see it until the weight becomes unbearable. cc: Men have a lot more work to do in all these sections, except cognitive, i find. and consideration in a relationship is not one thing; it is the ongoing practice of asking: what am i holding? what are you holding? and is this actually shared?

let me give you a small example that Em and i talked through: 2 people are hungry. both say they are hungry. there are two options: order food or cook. if you order, someone has to pick up the phone, choose a place, navigate the menu, handle the money, track the delivery. if the other person says i do not know what i want, the entire mental load of the decision transfers to the other. Option 2. if they decide to cook, someone bought the ingredients, someone prepares, someone cleans. these are small choices but they reveal everything about who is carrying the invisible weight in a relationship and it only ever feels equal when both people are genuinely paying attention to the load. Capisce?

this is not only a romantic partnership problem. i see it in friendships constantly where one person remembers to check in, one person organizes group plans, one person holding the entire emotional history of the relationship, and it happens in community work too, where i see it most acutely in who send the follow-up messages, who remembers what was said three meetings ago, who carries the relational thread between gatherings, who notice when someone has gone quiet or someone is sick. that labor is almost always invisible until the person doing it burns out and then suddenly everyone wonders what happened to the community? you happened.

the older I get, the less impressed i am by people who mean well but never materially show up. i am even becoming allergic to the word “nonchalance” heavily. i no longer believe love lives only in intention. i think love lives in maintenance. in the small repeated acts that say: i considered you. i made space for you. i carried some of the weight too. not perfection. not constant access. not endless availability but participation. conscious, repeated, deliberate participation.

i am not writing this to shame anyone. i am writing it because i sat outside with my friend while she cried and i recognized every single thing she described and i think many of us are walking around with that same grief, quietly, having renamed our exhaustion as independence and our loneliness as being selective. we deserve better than that in every relationship we choose to show up for because the most beautiful relationships are not the ones that feel effortless; they are the ones where people consciously choose each other again and again, through action, even when it is inconvenient, even when they are tired, even when nobody is watching to give them credit for it.

That is what love actually looks like, and I INSIST on this.

Speaking of acts of love—my sister recently completed an 8-hour playlist of Black rock and roll for me and i am sharing it with you here (thank you, sis for the care and the intention: Here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3lWyNFFkfRRAHZ3WyImCjf?si=3fd36595236249d7

The manifesto

So, to end on a positive note, I am sharing a work-in-progress manifesto of what I am actually asking for in relationships and what I undoubtedly am offering… Here we go:

Dear Friend/Lover,

cuddle me. have long calls with me even when we have nothing to say. send me pictures of whatever you are doing — anything, everything. call me or send a long voice note just because. inconvenience me (I just remembered that my friend called me at 2am to come sleep over because she had been out all night and i missed it to which i feel bad my baby Chance) yoh, that is life. write me letters. make me playlists. watch movies with me. take me with you places. involve me. send me the memes the moment you see it. give me books and take my clothes. borrow my money and let me borrow yours. let’s hike. let’s picnic. complain to me about systems, men, women, neighbors, colleagues—all of it (i want to hear it). expect me to show up for your pain. i will be at your family functions and your funerals. i will know who wants what and how they take their tea. i will buy things for you, notice what you like, and report back to you on your own life. i will write your eulogy. i will tell you if the outfit is not working. i will tell you if the situationship is a disaster. i will be your wing woman. my mother will call you if i go missing. i will reply to your text and pick up your call like clockwork (you know that video of the basketball player mid-interview who picks up his mother’s call ? yes. that). you are my emergency. why would i choose the babylon over a person i love? That’s crazy.

To this and more as we grow…and that is what i mean when i say love is an action.

Okay! Bye, beloved.

bose.

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hello beloved,

“Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who are hurting.” ~ Audre Lorde

And most of us are hurting in ways we have learned to mask as personality. So this is the hard conversation i have been circling. i am writing this because sobriety is something i want to return to and this time i want to understand what i am holding before i let it go. i have been on this path before, back and forth, and the spiral keeps returning. i even asked for your opinions and some of you answered (Thank You!!!).

So let’s talk about The sobriety, i mean it cannot be about just transitioning to green juices. I find talking about sobriety to be uncomfortable because of what it actually takes to live without constantly reaching for something to soften the edges of being alive. Yes, Alcohol. Yes, Cigarettes. Yes, Weed. Yes, Tequila. Yes, Fast food. But also screens. Sugar. Noise. Distraction. Distractions. Distractions. Even Religion. Anything we reach for when life becomes too meh to hold on its own terms. Thats the conversation that I want to have about Sobriety.

At some point i even remember writing in my journal:

if i love myself, why am i living like i don’t? why am i drinking things that make my body tired? why am i sleeping late when i need rest? why am i eating this shit? why am i scrolling through infinite nothing?why do i treat my body like something i am trying to survive instead of a home?

then i think of a time, maybe 6years ago, when i lived very differently. i woke up, moved my body because it felt good, slept so well, stopped when something felt wrong. i meditated for hours, never missed yoga, was vegetarian for five years. and i yeah that version of myself is gone. Partially, yes she was calm and focused but also naive and largely oblivious to what the world actually was. i found that level of attachment to purity just as childish as the substances themselves. but Somewhere between that and now, I have also been negotiating with dumb dumb stuff. one drink. One drink turned into two glasses, two glasses into a bottle. then one cigarette because why not. one cig turned into a pack. i kept telling myself: i’ve got this. i genuinely believed addiction was below me. a part of me still do lol. i am too smart, too aware, too big for that particular trap. besides, this is life we are talking about.

and then you stop remembering things as clearly. you need 2 days to recover from a weekend. you miss few meetings. you avoid a family function. you are constantly tired in a way sleep does not fix. you try to go sober for one month to cleanse and that attempt alone exposes youe dependency/addiction entirely. The realisation that a wine glass has more power over you than you admit to self. Sirens getting loud!!!

and the body, mind and your skin give you away— the shrugging, the dryness, the weight drop, the voice change, i personaly used to finish five books a month without trying. now i scroll for hours and a single book feels like a stretch ( i only manage it because i joined several book clubs). There is also me sitting through a 90 minute meeting where i have to actually listen feels like dragging my entire spirit across gravel. Bessel van der Kolk writes in the Body Keeps the Score that everything we suppress and numb and delay does not disappear — it lives in the tension in the jaw, the shallow breathing, the tiredness that sleep does not fix. I think the body is the most honest thing about us, and I thought to myself that I would genuinely prefer not to manufacture an illness in a body I cannot afford to treat (this big girl doesn’t even have insurance), but how do I do that when my mind keeps negotiating. just one more, just tonight, just until things calm down, jokes, things never calm down because we have turned this earth into something that grinds you down daily. The chaos and hustle are by design, so we are in it, negotiating with ourselves for one more drink, like it is a personal failing and not also a very logical response to living inside all of this.

Honestly, thats my number failure, i do not believe life is easy to experience in its rawness. i do not believe feeling everything all the time is inherently rewarding. Life is heavy — grief, uncertainty, contradiction, boredom, and sometimes depression so deep it has no bottom. To be awake to the world, politically, emotionally, spiritually is not a light experience. In fact, it is so unfun, so no, I am not convinced that sobriety is good because at what cost?

Audre Lorde named this trap: “The ascetic position becomes the ruling obsession, not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.”

i have felt this when the spiritual coaches with that particular tone, the quiet hierarchy of who is more disciplined, more evolved. I refuse that framing entirely. I have also learned that I am more of a devoted person than a disciplined one.

We can not also talk of sobriety without viewing any substance as a coping mechanism. a few years ago in therapy i was working through ‘identities’ i had built to survive as a woman navigating patriarchy and the constant negotiation of selfhood when i became a feminist, i thought the goal was to let it go but my therapist Yvonne ( she is the best truly) told me: there is no need to let go of a coping mechanism if it is not serving its purpose. Coping mechanisms are solutions, but i as insisting that solutions are not meant to last forever. they are meant to be retired but how do you retire something when the reason you began is still there or maybe this is why Lorde also said: “Before i give it up i’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it.” you cannot simply remove and replace something with nothing and expect it to hold. so no, replacing wine with a smoothie will not stick if I am not convinced of why.

I think we learned how to survive this world too well whenever we learned how to wake up when tired, work when empty, smile when not okay, and keep on going. At some point, our survival became a habit and when survival becomes a habit, you don’t notice that you are no longer living. so you keep pushing even when you don’t need to because stopping feels strange since when life goes quiet you don’t know what to do with yourself.

Alice Walker wrote: “The periods when something inside us is waiting are the periods we are being prepared.”

i think about this every time i feel the urge to fill a silence. I dont do well with boredom at all then i ask myself what if the quiet i keep running from is the place i need to stay longest as she describes but then comes the harder question for someone like me, an overthinker: can i be bored in a world designed to entertain my every fidget? Can I sit in silence without spiraling into the big questions? Am I happy? Am I where I want to be? What do I actually want? And if those questions surface, can I meet them without falling deeper into myself? That is the real work of sobriety itself. the capacity to be still with my own mind. yuk. I needed more convincing, so I decided to have a conversation with someone who could examine this madness with me…

A conversation with brought another layer. for her, sobriety is not about restriction or believing a sober life is better or healthier. it is about willingness. A willingness to become the person she intends to be, solely and specifically that, because the life she is trying to build requires more presence than her current coping allows. That reframing kinda stuck with me. it moves sobriety away from morality and toward intention. It stops being about what you are giving up and starts being about who you are becoming.

And that connects to something political that I deeply value in my life; how do I talk about a revolution, about dismantling systems of power, while entangled in the very mechanisms that keep those systems running? The same systems we critique of capitalism, colonial legacies, patriarchy rely on our disconnection, our need for constant soothing, our inability to sit with discomfort long enough to imagine something different. to which Audre insisted that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” and self-preservation is not passive act, it will require awareness, clarity, and at times sobriety. Thomas Sankara also spoke about how political independence is mostly about mental and cultural liberation, the refusal to be dependent on systems that weakens the collective power. And Sobriety, in this sense, is not just about healthy living. it is about the resistance of the mind. the ability to remain present enough to choose and fight differently and here i was, it turns out i care about the revolution more than i care about the wine. That, more than anything else I have written here, is what finally convinced me. Sobriety is not something I/we need, it is something i/we must practice because the work cannot be built on a foundation of people surviving hangovers.

I push this further because when we talk about substances as coping, we cannot pretend the conversation is only personal. i visited a Native community in the United States and what stayed with me was not just the history of erasure and theft. it was the water actually. The Navajo Nation sits surrounded by abandoned uranium mines and coal-fired power plants that have for decades contaminated the air and water of the people living there. Over 500 abandoned mines on that land alone have poisoned drinking water and caused elevated rates of kidney failure and lung disease across generations. This is not an isolated case; it is a pattern practiced deliberately across native lands everywhere. Once again, I REPEAT ‘imperialism is a violent system, and it is especially violent when practiced by the state.’ The same logic ran through Australia, where colonization poisoned the soil, the land, the very ground people were left to survive on. they have in documented and deliberate ways, poisoned the bodies of the people it most wanted to kill and then we wonder why those same communities have high rates of substance use and cancer?

it is the same story in Black and immigrant communities in the western world but also in African cities; why alcohol and drugs move through Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali like a second colonisation. why African youth, especially poor African youth, cannot put the bottle down because the same system that poisons the water, strips language and land and spiritual practice and replaces it with nothing, and it will also charge us 45,000 rwf to consume that poison. Because why would you rebel when you are busy fighting cancer? When the only thing available to soften the weight of being poor and colonized and surveilled is the very thing that ensures you never rise.

K. Marx has described religion as the opium of the masses, but we do not escape that logic simply because we are agnostic or spiritual. the opium is whatever keeps you manageable. sometimes it is policy. sometimes the machine does not just benefit from your numbness, it manufactures the conditions that make numbness the only available option. Resisting that, choosing sobriety, choosing presence is therefore not just a personal act of self-love. It is an act of reclamation. It is refusing to finish what the colonizers have started.

which is why it is also a political act. not a comfortable one I must say but and i joked about “how do you start a revolution when the person leading the change is fighting cigarettes in his mind.” A fucking cigarette, and we laughed because it was funny, and then we stopped laughing because it is true. Liberation has always had to begin within the body of the person trying to build it. You cannot dismantle the machine while it is fully managing you, and none of us is exempt. not the thinkers, not the activists, not the people writing the essays, not the academics.

I see this in my own work, in the queer spaces in Rwanda, in feminist organizing, in the communities I have built, before we get to policy advocacy, sexual health, inclusion trainings, and the community itself (especially those in leadership) cannot resist alcohol and drugs. And that is not a personal failing, so I am not blaming anyone, but it is the root of so much chaos in the movement, the lovelessness, the unaccountable organizations, the intimate abuse, the corruption and theft, the strategic meetings where people are not present. If the community is being consumed from inside, any form of imperial power (be it church or state) does not even need to work that hard. The collapse of movements we keep asking ourselves to explain, some of it starts here. in the body. in what we are reaching for before we walk into the room.

I sat in a healing feminist gathering recently and one of the people i most admire arrived visibly hungover, describing themselves as such. These are the people we are counting on to dismantle patriarchy and i say this with love and without any complexity because i am in this too but we have to be honest about what the costs is. The movement cannot be built on bodies that are not present in their own lives. HOW?

because of the revolution, i have decided to give sobriety another chance. i am inviting you to do the same and seek support and help if you must. However, my own personal dilemma in making changes in life, specifically, is the trap that people like me fall into often. I, as the self-perceived, am the well-read one, one who has been to therapy, who knows the language, who can name the patterns in real time. We tell ourselves that awareness is the same as healing, that because we can see the wound clearly, we are somehow above it. That intellectual understanding is a shortcut to the actual work, but awareness without action is just a more sophisticated way of staying stuck, and the patterns return, again and again.

But I hope this piece is my first act of devotion toward it; then I am trusting my immediate community to save me, show up in recovery meetings, and a close friend to hold me accountable, and me to stay quietly consistent with writing. yoga. meditation. movement. doing it for myself, GOD the creator, and now for the revolution.

I wish you the same. And thanks for reading.

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love,

bose.

“We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life.”

~ Wangari Maathai.

Happy Earth day everyone….

What a beautiful remembrance day to me.

For all there is and my allegiance.

To the earth. To the trees. To the sun.

To the soil that holds all of us.

An allegiance beyond human force, beyond fear of man.

A process of returning to, again and again,

In the body. With our eyes. With our hearts.

To not be afraid of standing with what is true. Even when it asks for change.

To grieve what has been taken, What has been broken.

And to still; protest and protect.

To take only what is needed.

To resist the hunger that was taught to us:

to own, to accumulate, to consume beyond life itself.

To remember: enough is enough.

To be guided not by what a man built and imagine but by what has always been here and forever will be.

To be reminded of our birthright

to exist in this world like the sun that rises without permission,

like the rivers that move without instruction,

like the quiet intelligence of a seed becoming a forest.

We are made from the same dust.

The same source that formed the earth.

The same matter that breathes through everything alive.

So how could we treat it as lesser?

It is not magic, for this magic is the only truth not myth.

We know why the air is clean.

We know why the birds sing.

We know why the flowers bloom.

We know why the soil holds moisture.

On the last breath:

the earth does not belong to us.

Not more than it belongs to the fish in the sea, to the wind of dry lands, to the roots that move beneath us.

So today and every day after, As one of my spiritual teachers, Dr. Karambu, once taught me:

to remember is a full sentence.

To remember is not nostalgia.

It is to re-member, to return yourself

back into membership with life.

Not above it. Not apart from it. Back in it.

Not as its master.

Not as its owner.

But as one who belongs to it as it belongs to you.

Today for me, I return to this allegiance as a way of living. To walk gently among what’s alive and breathing.

To value what lives beside us as I reject what’s imagined above or below to control us.

May we be willing to be transformed.

May we exist in rebellious ways that resist every hand that extracts and steals for the sake of its own greed.

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I will close with what a Rasta man once told me:

Do not fear the return. Everything that heals you comes from the earth. Everything that powers you comes from the earth. Everything that feeds you comes from the earth. Even the man who threatens you steals from the earth to do it — his weapons, his medicines, his systems, all of it, hers. For the earth is the oldest pharmacy, the realest energy, the purest force in the universe. A man cannot create anything from scratch. He can only take what was already here. So the return is not a loss. It is a coming back to what is real and true.

In solidarity with the earth & humanity,

bose.

“We live in a capitalist society. We suffer not only from exploitation but also from alienation.” ~ Angela Davis

hello beloved!

You already know i hate capitalism, so that’s not new information. But i know, just like many, that hating it doesn’t move you out of it. In fact, sometimes I feel like my awareness of it adds to my misery of living in it entirely. But we are here and how else can a man get bread? But isn’t it crazy that the average person spends more of their waking life at work than with family, friends or themselves? And somehow that became normal. Not just normal but it is expected. Aspirational for many of us. Yuk!!

when you complain, people say "You are so privileged” (it is true, i am). So let me use my privilege subscription to radicalize you while i still can.

i think most people don’t sit with capitalism realities long enough to understand it (the violence of capitalism in general) Even most activists i know, feminists especially, can usually contemplate the violence of patriarchy but submit to class and the whole machine because it’s bittersweet. And most of them are as privileged as i am or think girl boss feminism is liberation but i often have to remind them of bell hooks:

“Patriarchy, like any system of domination, relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party.” ~ bell hooks

i also think capitalism’s violence will always be ignored by most because we are comfortable enough inside it. Most of us belong to the upper working class or come from money or the so-called elite. i guess it’s easier for all of us to assume it’s not that bad. Because while gas prices rise, the first thing on the Rwandan twitter is: oh my god, i have to park my car. (Yuk. wamaze bro!!!)

Anyway. Enough of the hate.

Because what do you do with it? i am in my era of providing solutions rather than preaching to the choir. Resistance and little acts of rebellion matter in this life and i can’t think of a better day for this than right now on Lundiose married 4/20.

Angela Davis’s quote (at the start) speaks to the violence better than i ever could. We are suffering from alienation, guys. Alienation from our true selves. And nobody wants to talk about it. So this is not a manifesto. This is just a list. Simple, rebellious, quietly communist things you can practice inside the machine without the machine knowing.

i hope at least one lands. Now or later. Even if you want to resist me with your chest because we suffer from the same illness of conditioning. I am not your enemy and beside, you can say No. so Let’s Go………

1. Cuddle without it meaning anything transactional. Big spoon. Small spoon. All afternoon if the body wants.

2. Nap during the day without apologizing for it. Even at work. You and your colleagues should invest in a comfy beanbag for your breaks. Advocate for a screen-free room, a nap area if you can.

3. Normalize doing absolutely nothing. i grew up with an African mom and doing nothing as a woman was literally shamed out of me. i had to justify sitting without doing nothing all the time So its only recent that i am returning us to our ancestors’ pace. Sit by the window. Watch the sun move. People-watch. Kugasima in Kinyarwanda. Ku Iragara as our Burundian cousin says. Insist on being unhurried, being unproductive and being unbothered.

4. Be with people without doing anything together. Presence is not a passive form of activity. It is the activity itself. I know it sounds crazy but i do it all the time and trust me, it is well with my soul. You don’t need a plan to be together.

5. Have long phone calls that go nowhere. i know we are all very nonchalant these days. One thing i genuinely cannot stand is the normalization of DND, no calls, no texts. i don’t understand how it became romanticized and praised, because it is not emotional maturity. i think it’s how hyper-independence gets celebrated inside capitalism until people doing it don’t even realize how isolating it is. A lot of it also comes from work and personal life bleeding into the same phone, the same apps therefore interacting with people bleeds so much anxiety in you. one practical tip: separate your contacts if you have work anxiety.

6. Text at your own pace. Your personal phone is not a customer service line. You are not obligated to be available instantly. Those of you who know me know I have the privilege of instantly replying to friends and family ( another stupid thing that hyper-independency is stealing from people because I always have to argue with the youngsters on when I should text back), but I have long unlearned the pressure to perform availability for my work especially clients or strangers and that’s how i make space to reply always to people whom i love or care about. Once i did that all my anxiety around communication apps left a while ago and i never apologize for late replies anymore.

7. Gather without money at the center. We were never meant to pay for each other’s company in that way, guys. also please stop meeting in very expsensive places.

“In the feudal village, no social separation existed between the production of goods and the reproduction of the work-force; all work contributed to the family’s sustenance.”

~ Federici, Caliban and the Witch

8. Do hobbies that will never be monetized. just do it for the sake of i, for the feeling or keep it or burn it. And most importantly, don’t monetize all your hobbies especially if you are an artist or a creative. i beg you. Create a song you won’t add to the album. Make art you plan not to sell. Write a piece you don’t care who will critique or edit. Do you. Capitalism has a way of creeping into our hobbies when we professionalize them, turning what was joy into a productivity score. RESIST

9. Borrow. Lend. Resist the myth that ownership is the only way to access things. And if you want to go deeper, read about how wealth is built on the back of natural resources and how land ownership should frankly be illegal but today let’s just start here. Become someone who shares and gives away what you can’t use. Pass the blunt.

10. Re-wear your clothes and shoes without shame. There is a whole social media trend making recycling outfits look dirty and that is entirely by design. Consumption guilt is a capitalist invention to keep you spending. You can always recycle fashion, you can always reinvent yourself with what you have. Get your stylist friend to help if you want. (Speaking of which, I have a closet event coming up in May at mine and I am very excited to share because this girl is going full black wardrobe only. so your next outfit is probably mine now.)

11. Walk. This one is hard for me because i live life at a quick pace, but i am unlearning my relationship with transportation and mobility entirely. Take the long road. Take the bus. Let the city be something you move through slowly. The moment i realized that modern cities are designed around efficiency and not people, i started walking home. And honestly, the joy i am writing this letter with? Walking sponsored most of it.

12. Let conversations take the time they actually need. That’s it.

13. Practice collective care without calling it labor. Check in on people. Show up when things are heavy. Hold space. It’s I and I, as the Rastaman said. i don’t understand why checking on people and doing simple human things has become treated as this enormous emotional output. I get it, I was taught that way too but start rejecting it. We have social responsibility toward one another.

14. Make something with your hands. Cook from scratch. Sew. Build. Plant. That’s where gardening comes in (wink wink).

15. Make love. i think that one is clear.

16. And if you are an employee, take your sick days and your leave days in full. i say this from experience. i remember when i first started working how our HR used to guilt-trip us about leave. It got into my head. i genuinely believed that being absent from work was a sign of being unqualified or not being serious. Then i got burnout and post-COVID fatigue and my body made the decision for me ( i will tell you how my body shitdown on me another time). i had to learn rest by force. That’s a longer story for another day. But i tell you this because shame around rest is a design of capitalism.

bell hooks said it clearly: “Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.”

i am even rebellious enough to say: call in sick here and there just to rest. LIE. They will be fine. They always are.

Okay beloved? That’s it.

Capitalism will still be here tomorrow and so will the sun.

From your beloved Bose: Rest well. Love freely. Be wild.

Two books worth your time:

Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. On rest as a political act. On reclaiming your body from grind culture.

Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown. On joy, desire, and delight as tools of liberation. Not rewards for surviving first. Tools.

"How are we supposed to fall in love with the world if we don't pick berries?"
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

hi beloved,

remember that moment in Their Eyes Were Watching God when janie floats in the water and looks at the sky and says she is watching God. Mmmm that kind of God. the God of the sun, the river, the sky. the God of all things created in one. the one you see when you are not rushing or proving anything. just alive. feeling and breathing.

this piece is about returning to that God. a God less concerned with rules and punishment and more interested in you alive. a God who created us as animals and plants. wild, slow, free. this return is also not to ask of you to worship God as in praise and church on sunday rather to enjoy life as your birthright, as in worship only done by living the life as all other living things do.

the breaking

do you realize how hard it is these days to actually live your own life?

we wake up. work. scroll. worry. survive. sleep barely. deadlines, reports, meetings then we repeat. life has become so serious we forgot how to actually be alive.

the last few months of my life felt like a breaking. a shattering. i thought what was closing in on me was the outside world. we are watching genocides, wars, extraction, abuse of power. everything feels unstable and interconnected in a way that makes your body carry things that aren’t even yours. the weight is real.

but if i’m honest the most intense part has been internal.

my own life has been breaking me open. i had moments where my mind felt like it was splitting. at one point i was in something that honestly felt like a mental psychosis. i was completely sober. just feeling everything at once. all my thoughts. all my fears. all my memories. all my contradictions. all my truths. all my pain. my world felt like it was collapsing and rebuilding simultaneously.

then one day while sitting in that darkness i realized something. maybe i’m shattering because i’m not actually living. maybe i’m drowning in self pity when i should be dancing.

so i stopped. and this is what i did instead.

the return

before i tell you what brought me back take a deep breath. the first step in returning to yourself is being willing to feel everything and be uncomfortable. you have to be ready to feel silly, awkward, even a little mad. there will be a voice in your head saying GURL what are you doing? this is weird. stop.

don’t obey that voice.

what helped me return is not complicated. it’s basic. it’s dance. it’s conversation. it’s being ridiculously serious about what i actually want out of my life. because it’s my life. God gave it to me.

on dancing

i used to love ecstatic dance. free dance. just moving for the sake of moving. but i had stopped because the only place where dancing felt normal was the club and i don’t feel called there anymore.

then one sunday i tried again.

i had been listening to cuban music all week. the sun was soft. the afternoon felt slow. i decided to dance in my garden by myself.

volume up. bare feet. loose clothes. no bra. no audience. just me the music and God.

it was one of the most euphoric things i have felt in a long time.

standing there sweating and laughing and completely free i thought. this is it. this is what freedom feels like. not the loud kind. not the performative kind. the quiet kind where you realize nobody is actually stopping you anymore.

i cried because finally i felt how constrained it is to grow up in this world. especially as a woman. as an african woman. as a rwandan woman. the watching. the shrinking. the rules. the things you are not supposed to say. be. do. whatever.

then i danced with no bra on and cried again for the complete opposite reason. because now i can do whatever i want. get whatever tattoo i want. wear what i want. love who i want. speak how i want. and stand in it without apology.

that freedom is quiet. it is enormous. and it belongs to you. it is your birthright.

every time i feel that hesitation. that voice saying don’t call. don’t try. don’t say that. that is exactly the moment i need to do it.

call the person. send the voice note. have the conversation. say what you want.

i reward myself after like a lab rat. a snack. a treat. something soft. it works. i’m literally retraining my nervous system. i also started allowing myself to do things that make me feel alive even if they make no sense.

leaving the city.

reading in the afternoon during work.

talking for hours with people i love.

spending time with people whose presence feels good.

proposing friendship to someone and saying: i like your mind. i like your presence. i want you in my life. (terrifying. beautiful.)

skipping monday because who said work has to start on monday?

calling friends at 11am and saying: let’s go to muhazi.

i hate that this is a luxury that most can’t afford. i hate that its luxury at all. but now to those whose been granted even the slightest favor in this life to experience things with ease, please do not just survive life. Live it.

i know not everyone can do this easily. we live in a system where even rest must be negotiated. time must be earned. joy must be justified. sometimes we hate life not because bad things are happening but because we’re never allowed to experience it fully.

and that is why robin’s question keeps coming back to me. how are we supposed to fall in love with the world if we don’t pick berries?

It is genuinely the reason why there is no love. no romance. no blues. no jazz. no art.

how are we supposed to love life if every moment must be productive. every hour useful. every break deserved. every joy explained? this is why i am suggesting in a world where we’re taught to escape let’s return. we’re told to relax by drinking more. forget by partying more. survive by working more. but that is not rest. that is not even life itself. I always tell my friends I learn the meaning of life by observing animals, and there is a reason why they are not drowning in addiction and wars, even though they dont have presidents and all the constitutions needed to keep them in check.

sometimes what we need is something much older and wise than that.

to sit on the ground. to talk for hours. to braid. to dance. to cook slowly. to walk without destination. to sex. to laugh until your stomach hurts. to visit your grandmother. to watch the sun. to go to the lake in the middle of the day. to stare at the sun and watch God.

things that feel useless to the system but necessary to the soul.

returning to slowness

when i talk about returning to slowness, returning to life, even returning to God, i am not telling you to do exactly what i do. i am not recommending one specific path. i am actually saying the opposite. you have to search for your own way back. you have to find the things that already live inside your memories, inside your body, inside your childhood, inside your land.

when i first saw the title braiding sweetgrass, it called me immediately even when i had not understood the philosophy, it reminded me of something my mother told me; she said that she learned how to braid my hair by practicing on sweetgrass. she braided grass before she braided my hair.

i loved that story, and i still love that story.

my mother braided my hair since i was a child. it used to take hours. it was painful sometimes, slow, quiet, intimate. a small secret ritual between a mother and her daughter. when she was not there to braid my hair anymore, i cut it all off completely because i never learned how to take care of it the way she did. that is how deep that connection was.

so when i saw the words braiding sweetgrass, something in me felt called. grass, hands, patience, practice, love. there was something about it that felt familiar before i read the book.

and the more i read, the more i realized the book is not really about grass. it is about returning. returning to the land, returning to slowness, returning to the parts of life that make you feel human again.

recently my cousin has been going through her own transition. after years of working, living in foreign lands, living in fast places, she is now spending time back in the north, in the hills where the soil is dark and soft and the air feels heavy in the morning. that place has always felt different to me.

When we were children, we used to walk to school for almost 45 minutes every day, carrying lunchboxes, walking through empty roads that never felt empty, because there were always farmers, mothers, people cooking, people living quietly in the hills.

back then i did not think it was special. as a teenager, i even felt like i was supposed to hate it like life was somewhere else. life was in kigali. now when i think about it, i feel like the north has a spirit. not musanze the tourist place, not the hotels, not the gorillas, not the restaurants, but the real hills, the wind, the soil, the silence, the songs. something there moves slowly, and because it moves slowly, it feels alive.

one of the things my cousin has been doing there is learning how to braid mats with our grandmother, kuboha ikirago. when she told me about it, she said it takes hours. your fingers hurt, your back hurts, sometimes you have to start again, sometimes it looks wrong and you undo everything and begin again.

but while you are doing it, you talk, you listen, you laugh, you hear stories, you sit with elders, you sit with yourself.

the mat is not the only thing being made.

that is what i think about when i think about braiding sweetgrass, not the grass itself, but the life inside the process.

a few years ago i felt the same thing in a completely different way. i was in love at the time, and love always makes me pay attention to life more. during covid, when everything was closed, we went to a farm somewhere past kayonza. i don’t even remember the exact place, i only remember the sunset felt like it lasted two hours.

we sat on the hill drinking milk from a mug, watching the sky change slowly. later we made a fire, told stories, drank too much, laughed too much, danced like children.

in the morning i woke up with the worst hangover of my life. Urwagwa is no joke.

everyone else was already awake. they had fed the cows, milked the cows, cleaned the place, and i was still there trying to understand what planet i was on. i went to help anyway, even though i had no idea what i was doing.

i did not grow up around cows. my farm was crops, goats, pigs, garden work. but standing there, holding the bucket, smelling the grass, hearing the animals, i understood something i never understood before.

people are not supposed to live in apartments. we are not built for speed all the time. we are not built for screens all the time. we are not built for noise all the time.

we need slowness.
we need land.
we need ritual.
we need moments that have no productivity at all. or different kind of productivity.

that is what robin means when she asks, how are we supposed to fall in love with the world if we don’t pick berries.?

picking berries is not about berries. braiding grass is not about grass. it is about the moments where life slows down enough for you to feel that you are actually here.

and it is very hard to fall in love with life when you are exhausted. it is hard to feel joy when you are always busy. it is hard to feel connection when you are always surviving.

i see people asking every day why dating feels flat, why friendships feel dull, why life feels empty even when everything looks correct.

the answer is simple. people are not picking berries anymore.

so this piece is not about telling you what to do exactly. it is about reminding you to find your own way back.

find your grass.
find your mat.
find your farm.
find your ritual.
find your slowness.

and then live. because this is your life.

iso, if you are in a season of breaking right now let me tell you. break. break open. break enough to bloom.

and if nothing is breaking. if you’re just hustling. juggling. surviving. still remember to pause. do not wait for something to collapse before you give yourself permission to live. do not be like me. needing everything to fall apart before realizing i was allowed to breathe.

challenge the system in small ways. find moments where you remember that your life belongs to you before it belongs to your boss. your schedule. your phone. your responsibilities.

Go pick berries now. fall in love with the world while you are still in it.

with love,
bose ♡

Dear beloved!!!

I’m back. It’s been a while, I know. Actually, I’ve been writing pages and pages, pen on paper, the old-fashioned way, but every time I looked at what I had written, I couldn’t quite find the thing that felt ready to share. Nothing that wouldn’t shake up my world or yours a little too much.

until NOW.

I finally found the courage to share something, and honestly, I have a young Rwandan woman to thank for it. She came to my office recently and without even knowing it, gave me this.

So, here we are…

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One of the things that truly, genuinely scares me is this:

Getting to the end and realizing I never lived for me. That I didn’t live the way I wanted, not even because I couldn’t, but because I was afraid.

That fear alone is enough to make me choose the harder, fuller, more terrifying path every single time. I want to know love and loss. I want to know life and death, pain and joy. I want to know sadness and happiness and really know them, not just pass through them. I want to feel euphoria and madness. I want the whole thing. I want to know God and worship her.

I know that I am so desperate in my lows. I am such a whiner when life gets too hard, or nothing works the way I want it to. Something about the human experience can be so unfun and I do hate it. So even as I write this, I know I don’t enjoy being hurt. I don’t enjoy losing. I don’t. But I would never trade any of it. Not for anyone. Not for anything.

Take for example: the loss of a loved one. That grief. yuk! Grief is ugly.

And I mean that as the deepest insult I can think of right now. It is the worst of it. It is terrifying to survive grief and then find yourself standing at the edge of love and joy again, feeling them knock at the door, having to decide whether to let them in, knowing full well what they might one day cost you.

But love. LOVE. My god. LOVE. Love is so sweet.

I love love so much. The way it makes everything collapse into one, all the noise and chaos of the world suddenly merging into this one important universe, this person, this one moment. Everything becomes significant. Everything means something. Life suddenly makes sense.

That is why grief is ugly. Not because it destroys you but because it is proof that you loved something real. And when you lose it, you finally know what it means to have been loved, or to love. And I would rather have loved something real and lost it than have kept myself safe, small, and untouched.

I don’t know about you but for me, I want to have lived.

When I finally die. I want to say to death,

thank you.

for allowing me

to be alive

long enough

to notice life.

Now onto Women,

Hello women. Hello, beautiful creatures of the world.

I have something to say to you. I say this not to make you uncomfortable. I wish you well always. The very best because I love women deeply because i am a woman and I love myself and I never wish us to spend forever in hiding.

You might wonder why a stranger would care for you so much. Honestly? I don’t always know either. But I do. I suppose its because i see myself in every woman and do actually think I am every woman.

So, this 21-year-old woman reached out to me on Instagram. She said she wanted to meet me. I assumed she wanted to talk about mental health. That has been happening a lot lately, people finding me in their deepest moments of anguish and despair. I always try to make space for that. So I finally opened my schedule to meet them.

We met. I made sure we had a safe space. And she told me she was confused about her sexuality. Yoh! I know what this is and how the song goes, so I will tell you what I told her.

I have lost touch with the politics and semantics of who you are allowed to love and when and how it needs to look. i don’t have a clear response to it. Please go search for what fits. Find whatever letter in the alphabet speaks to you. That part is yours to discover. I didn’t even know those letters until a white man wrote them and taught me about them and told me to let everybody know about them. To put it simply, thats enough reason for me to conclude that it’s half a truth. so……

What I can tell you is this: I enjoy a man as I would enjoy a woman. Perhaps even more a man than a woman or vice versa. And perhaps just as much as I enjoy myself. I say that not to shock you, but because it might come as a surprise that someone you thought would have a particular answer does not. You are allowed to be disappointed. But I hope, more than that, you feel free.

Go find what you enjoy. Who you like. Release all the shame and guilt that stops you from meeting yourself. Remove all the layers of who you have been taught you need to be. Your freedom and your identity live somewhere underneath all of that, and they have been waiting for you.

I also want to say this carefully: some of the people who speak loudest about open love and freedom to love whoever, who claim to be the most awake, can be the very ones who hurt you most. Who treats your body and your heart with the least care. So the question is never really about who you love. It is always about how you are loved. And how you love yourself. I love being touched and reached. I love the intimacy of being truly seen. I enjoy love, real love, and the company of those who see me and whom I see in return.

I am finally free, not because the world is free or the policies are right but because they are not and they may never be ( le’s hope not because the fight is still on). I am free because I have finally allowed myself to live the way I want to, without asking for permission.

That is what I have to say about sex and sexuality. But do the same with God. Do the same with everything. Remove the permission-seeking. Remove the performance. And whatever you land on, I hope you are loved well. I hope that when you share your body, you have the best orgasm there is.

Now or whenever you are ready. I wish you nothing but pleasure. I sometimes say this to women, and they laugh. But sexuality, for me, is the freedom to finally know pleasure.

Love,

Bose.

To be Aware. Feeling.

It Is to live in a thousand mirrors,

all reflective,

all screaming

at all times.

It is to be Mad.

This is not the madness they study in textbooks. Not the named one.

It is the kind of madness

that doesn’t come with beds or medication,

but with just knowing.

With seeing.

With never being able to unsee ever again.

You wake up and everything feels

alive and heavy. Small and Wide. Beautiful and Dark.

You can’t even buy a toothpaste

without feeling the weight of knowing the empire.

You can’t scroll without sensing grief in pictures.

You can’t have sex without hearing the ghosts.

You can’t pray without hearing your grandmother’s voice and wondering if God is even real.

I guess one would call it anxiety. Some say trauma. Some say despair. They are all wrong. I know that those who are mad know that too.

I think it’s just…

CONSCIOUSNESS?

What if madness is what happens

when you stay awake In a sleeping world?

When you choose to feel in a numb world.

When you carry truths not meant to be carried alone.

What comes after that?

What comes after you’ve become undone?

After the flood,

after all the rage,

after the breaking,

after it all?

I used to stay enraged for weeks after each awakening or feeling or leaning…

puzzling myself into exhaustion.

But now? I don’t know. I feel that I aware of all of it. It might sound cocky but am just wondering Where do I go?

I find myself longing for the bliss

before I knew.

Before I knew that the ones

who preach God

often lie, cheat and steal.

Before I knew that birth

can be a scream of protest

against being forced into this world again.

Before I realized that love is pure,

but everything around it eats it alive.

On and on and on……

No one knows how to live after you’ve gone mad. As I told my therapist maybe you wanna know too:

I’m not depressed. Not angry. Not anymore at least. Not hopeless. Not suicidal. Not psychotic.

I’m just…

off trail. For the lack of a better word.

I could become anything but the questions keep chasing me.

How to hold joy without suspicion.

How to breathe without hyper-awareness.

How to laugh without explanation.

How to be held without flinching.

How do I walk out of this room and act like everything is fine when nothing is?

How do I live with knowing that we are all just holding it together in tiny spaces on big rock in the sky, we call meaning?

She told me,

“As long as you are okay. And to be honest, you are doing wonderful things. keep doing what you do.”

But that’s not an answer.

That’s just survival. Or I don’t know.

Can I have an option where I am not doing wonderful things. Just chill. Relaxed. Dumb. Sitting by the water and drinking a coconut water that I didn’t have to pay.

She laughed ofcourse.

I am not healed. Not cured. Not restored.

I even wished my 40k rwf back because under this empire maybe I could give it to a woman I ignored in the streets with a baby in the back asking for money.

Anyway I’ve just come here to say:

I’ve been mad. Insane. I don’t know the word.

Maybe there is no word. And it’s not just now.

I have been Mad for a while.

So, if we met before then— know that I was already mad. And now,

I simply ask:

Where do we go after we go mad?

Love,

Bose

Sometimes I wonder:

what it means to hold the DNA of an Abuser?

Yup! Plain and simple. I thought of writing him off as a monster rather than a man but then I felt like I am complicit in the world that continues to hurt women and ask of them to polish the language or tone down the sound of their voice. So I am naming it.

Let me go again.

Sometimes I wonder what it means to carry the blood of a human who carries so much darkness.

Who chooses harm.

Whose life is so twisted by pain

that the line between victim and villain

blurred into one long shadow.

What does that make me?

When the blood that builds you

also bruises others.

When the one you call Father

is still feared by those whose wounds never closed.

Does darkness pass down

like a family heirloom?

Do we inherit sin as scripture says

‘unto the third and fourth generation’?

Or what? You tell me.

Because when we laugh and talk…

I remain confused.

What does it mean?

when the man I resist in the world

is no different from the one whose blood lives in me? It’s a strange grief.

it feels like a ghost I invited, sitting on the front seat beside me, whispering what I do not choose.

So I ask you again and I plead:

Must I carry this?

Or am I simply holding it

until I learn how to lay it down?

I once did a ritual with my girlfriends

to let go of all who had been inside me.

Welcomed and unwelcomed.

A ceremonial cleansing.

We soaked in bathtubs

with petals and flowers.

We hummed and chanted in the wild.

It was the best fun I ever had.

Well! I do enjoy spending time with sisters.

I don’t know if what we did worked.

But it was cleansing at the time.

See…I already gave you another secret. That’s 2 secrets already.

You must be wondering yourself…

why would I let you in on all of these secrets?

You might tremble at the thought of holding me, when you don’t even know me or know

how to hold yourself in truth.

Do NOT worry.

I write and release all together,

because I know for certain that

shame belongs where it is born.

And this one is particularly not mine.

Neither is it yours. I mean you barely even know me. But I do apologize for the discomfort this truth might cause you. I think it’s important we become attuned to hear raw truth. It is the most radical way to live in this world that insist that we perform everything.

Now back on track:

That ritual only helped me begin the work. These days I find that instead doing a bathtub. I just practice Celibacy. I’ve found it to be a deeper exorcism.

So in a way, me writing you today is like soaking myself in the tub with my girlfriends except this is between you and me + 36 other subscribers. No petals, No flowers.

And the cleansing we need is beyond this little ceremony, I think the kind we need to heal bloodline may require much depths. Don’t you think?

I mean this one is less about the body and more about the energy, the make up of being, my creation? It has to have magic for something to be erased.

Can you see my confusion? I didn’t even have to ask myself this questions up till yesterday. But since I couldn’t find an answer myself, I came to ask you.

what does it take to cleanse a bloodline?

To un-become?

To un-choose?

To refuse?

When you are already born

carrying the blood of the abuser.

Is it the darkness I fear?

Or the possibility that It makes me a flaud when I call out another man on the streets?

Do I reject it outright?

Or close my eyes and pretend not to see?

Does that make me just a half monster or What? Tell me…

Oh Dear,

Look, I have let you into my abyss: confused and unraveling. Tell me ‘how does it feel in here?’

I’m sorry. It was all unnecessary—because I have my answer. I know.

I chose to share this with you now because it’s simply where my heart and mind have been in the last few hours. I don’t understand why so many of us live in the shadows of anguish and despair that belong to others. Especially as women. Not for sins we’ve committed, but for the shame the world insists we carry on their behalf. To be accountable for their guilt because they feel none.

We had just talked and still my chest was heavy. Not because of you, but because this is what womanhood often is: smiling with sorrow quietly tucked behind the ribs. Carrying weights that aren’t ours. Answering for silences we didn’t choose. Becoming mirrors for other people’s unprocessed grief.

I’m learning that just because the pain didn’t begin with me doesn’t mean I have to keep passing it forward. I don’t want to inherit silence, shame or performance. I want to feel things fully, say things honestly and release what isn’t mine to carry.

Maybe this too is what it means to reclaim myself by speaking even when it’s messy, by telling the truth even after I’ve already closed the door.

Thank you!!!

That’s all. Be well. I will too.

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The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.”
—Echoed by Audre Lorde, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and countless women.

That’s where my reflection on mental health begins because without this knowledge people adapt rather challenge, then wonder why nothing works. I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was a teenager. Today, I run The Circle, a healing and wellness space in Kigali. I’ve trained in counseling So No!!! this is not a rejection of therapy. It’s a refusal to see healing as neutral, apolitical or untouched by power.

Because in Rwanda, what we call mental health is still largely imported western diagnoses, frameworks, and assumptions about what’s “well” what’s “sick” what’s “normal.”

This isn’t about discarding it all. It’s about asking better questions. If we don’t examine how systems like patriarchy and capitalism shape what we practice and preach, then we’re not healing people. we’re replicating harm.

This piece is my reflection on how those systems show up in the mental health and wellness spaces in Rwanda. And why we can’t keep pretending they don’t.

When Patriarchy Writes the Diagnosis

Nowhere is the weaponization of mental health clearer than in its treatment of women.

Recently, a Rwandan psychotherapist, Dr. Celestin, introduced a diagnosis: “Relationship Disappointment Stress Syndrome.” It’s being used to describe the emotional distress some women experience after heartbreak or marital collapse.

Breathe in, breathe out. I mean… really?

A man lies. A partner betrays. A patriarchal society grooms women to over-function emotionally, to tolerate neglect, violence, and lovelessness and to stay “just in case.” “Niko zubakwa.” “He will change.” And when she finally breaks her grief becomes the disorder.

This is exactly what feminist scholar Sara Ahmed meant when she wrote “When you expose a problem, you become the problem.”

Instead of interrogating the structures that produce harm, we pathologize the person who dares to feel it, name it, or refuse to perform strength through it. This isn’t care. It’s control. It’s patriarchal power disguised as clinical support. The same old story behind hysteria which was patriarchy dressed up in diagnosis codes.

I’ve lived this gaslighting myself. It’s the entire textbook on how we misdiagnose and mishandle women’s health.

And the thing about patriarchy is that it doesn’t just live in relationships. It influences how issues are named and handled. That’s what power does, it reframes harm in a way that protects itself. It creates labels that shift accountability away from men and onto women. I first learned this when I started calling myself a feminist and joined Twitter. I believed naming harm could help dismantle it. But I quickly realized that in many spaces, naming harm makes you the villain.

You speak about rape, abuse, femicide and suddenly, you’re seen as the problem. You start a platform to call out violence and instead, you’re treated like the perpetrator. I’ve watched this pattern again and again: society silences critique in the name of “neutrality” while women are labeled angry, unstable or “too much.” All while the actual violence continues unchecked.

Where’s the diagnosis for the man who lied?
For the men who cheat, abandon, gaslight?
For the men who abuse their partners until they break or worse, until they die?
Where’s the diagnosis for the cultures that groom boys to devalue intimacy?
For the fathers who disappear and the systems that ignores it?

There isn’t one. In fact, those systems protect them. In one of The Men’s Circle conversations in Kenya, someone said “Men are just naturally polyamorous.” As if that explains betrayal. As if it justifies harm.

And in the case of OneTaste, a U.S. company that claimed to offer sensual healing between men and women, what was marketed as a sacred, liberatory space turned out to be deeply exploitative. Their teachings instructed women to accept violation as inevitable, even spiritual. Men were called “beasts” and women were expected to “surrender” to that violence/rape as part of the journey. That’s not healing. That’s indoctrination.

This is what happens when patriarchy dresses up in academic and mental health/wellness language. When rape culture puts on a soft voice. When harm gets spiritualized or normalised and women being hurt are told that something is wrong with them.

If we truly care about healing of women then we must stop treating women’s emotions as disorders and start treating patriarchy as the actual disease eating through families and communities.

As Toni Morrison once said something similar in this interview with Charlie Rose on racism . (Check it out). anyway, my Best friend and colleague who is a therapist recently wrote a critique of this diagnosis. Feel free to read this article in The New Times to understand further.

Because until we start questioning who gets to write the diagnosis, and who benefits from it, we’re not doing therapy. It’s called Victim-blaming. It’s entire agenda is always to avoid accountability of the real disease in our societies.

The Class Politics of “Wellness”

In Rwanda today, Top therapists charge $100 per hour. The lowest I’ve seen, in public institutions or insurance-covered services are around $10. Most wellness offerings, be it yoga, sound baths, guided meditations, or safe space sessions range between $10 and $25 per person. Please note if prices look cheaper compared to your country (talking to my US and Europe readers) kindly research the average income for Rwandans. You will be flabbergasted.

I mean this is just a luxury industry. We know this. we been knew.

But here’s the contradiction: nearly every practitioner, facilitator or “healer” insists that “healing is for everyone.” And I believe it should be.

But who can afford a $35 trauma workshop and a $15 yoga class? Who can pay $50 a week for therapy or $15 just to journal in a sound bath space? in Rwanda?

When I interrogate this dynamic, people get uncomfortable because it points to a certain demographic of people. We know the answer to this and it’s problematic.

But as someone who identifies with the working class yet still moves in privileged, exposed spaces, I’ve lived this contradiction. For ex, Between 2021 and 2023, I paid for therapy out of pocket. I wasn’t even on medication, but I was still on the brink of bankruptcy just trying to stay afloat emotionally. which also made my healing journey worse because Ihad extreme financial distress that made feel like i was getting chronically depressed.

So when I critique these structures, it’s not because I have the solution. I wish I could end capitalism and patriarchal violence with a substack post.
but what I am attempting to do and what I believe all of us in these spaces must do is remain intentional. Be accountable.

“If our circles and practices are only Available to the wealthy, there is nothing Revolutionary about then, and nothing even spiritual about them.”
—Ebyän Zanini, Somali-Italian poet and founder of Mother Tongue

When wellness becomes exclusive, it stops being Healing or sacred. It becomes a performance. A lifestyle. Another form of elitism wrapped in BS-ness. Unfortunately, this is the spiritual era we’re in. And yes, it’s largely driven by capitalism.

Now Yes, I don’t have a grand solution. I’m not naïve enough to think I can fix centuries of systemic harm on my own. What I do know this: we all replicate the systems that protect us.

It’s why feminists say men can’t be feminists.
Why white folks are asked to be anti-racist.
Why cisgender people are called to dismantle heteronormativity.

We don’t need everyone to become a revolutionary. It’s about creating alignment with our intention and Accountability in place. That’s why I do need practitioners to be mindful of the tables they’re feeding from. To ask: Who is being left out of this room, and why? And How can I bring them in? And actually work on doing it.

If your offerings only reach people who look, live, and earn like you then your wellness is not community care. It’s comfort care.
If you find yourself saying “this isn’t for them” ask yourself why you think they don’t deserve it. Literally, One of our Rwandan therapist said something along the lines of “Maybe we’re not meant to work with those kinds of clients.”
By “those kinds” they meant: Local. Rwandan.
I was stunned. I am still stunned. This is what happens when our care work gets shaped by classism, internalized coloniality, and market logic.

So no, I don’t have a formula to dismantle capitalism.
But I believe in care that doesn’t condescend. In practice that doesn’t exclude.
In circles that don’t perform sacredness but embody it by being inviting to everyone.

And that starts with asking better questions about the systems we serve, and the ones we recreate when we’re not paying attention.

I received this as criticism from my Business Coach in my last sessions, which gave me an opportunity to further highlight that I am not JUST a business owner in fact, I might not even be a Business owner. I am a visionary. I am a healer. I am a womanist. I am an advocate... and imagining a reality where those identities don’t interact would be lying to people I serve.

The Real Trauma is Systemic

“Trauma in a person, decontextualized over time, can look like personality.”
—Resmaa Menakem

Patriarchy and capitalism are just two pillars in a much larger architecture of harm. And trying to heal within that architecture without naming it, is like treating smoke while ignoring the fire. ( Rwandans can insert that proverb that I forgot)

Modern wellness often teaches us how to regulate, how to ground, how to breathe. All of that matters. But rarely does it ask the deeper question:
Why are you gasping in the first place?
Why are you anxious?? not just as a person, but as a people?

When trauma is stripped from its social, cultural, and political roots, it gets misdiagnosed as personal dysfunction. But what if the dysfunction is the system itself?

Take the RDSS diagnosis we’ve already spoken about, what is that, if not patriarchy dressed up as psychiatry? I will also write about something similar when it comes to disconnection to Nature, land and identity and how It manifests as mental health issue.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
—Jiddu Krishnamurti

I see this play out constantly. If you’re exhausted by hyper-productivity, you’re called lazy. If you respond to injustice with anger, you’re unstable. If you’re sensitive or deeply feeling, you’re “too much.”

A fellow Rwandan once told me that Afro-American anger over racism was exaggerated. I understood where he was coming from, he had never lived in a Black body in America. But I also knew: until you’ve felt that constant surveillance, systemic rejection, and racial threat in your nervous system, you can’t judge the intensity of that rage. It’s not excessive, it’s exactly right.

It’s the same way I’m told I’m “not fit for business” because I refuse to define sustainability outside of circularity and regeneration. Or the way I’m excluded from some spiritual spaces because I won’t stop naming white supremacy, classism, or cultural appropriation. Apparently, doing that makes you the disruptor not a spiritual person. Bullshit.

Here’s my radical realization:
There is nothing wrong with us. At least Nothing Wrong with most people anyway.
but there is something profoundly wrong with the world we’ve been forced to survive in.

Even then, I think most reactions from oppressed groups are still incredibly kind. I say this as a woman until we are bleeding in the streets, birthing rage into fire, refusing all rules and restraints, honestly… we’re doing fine. I joke a lot with friend that My Dream in life as a womanist is to find the courage to become a wild woman.
We’re not hysterical. We’re surviving.

I think of my friends working in marginalized communities, their burnout, their quiet addictions, their aching confusion. People are not simply “unwell.” They are carrying Modern and ancestral grief, systemic stress, Lovelessness and lives without land, nature, clean food, or Lack of rooted authentic community. And yet they are expected to perform wellness as if it can be bought in an eight-week program or branded in a morning routine. Bullshit.

One of the most life-shifting conversations I had was with a friend doing research on the psychological impacts of poverty. Not just the financial strain but the trauma of scarcity. What it does to your nervous system and I also finally understood my long-standing relationship with money, wealth and security. I won’t trauma dumb you lol but I realized then that many people are not suffering from personality disorders.
They are suffering from systemic abandonment. From lives where survival leaves no room for softness, for vision, for pause. for care. for family.

Another example; There are Black psychologists especially across the Caribbean and U.S. doing groundbreaking work linking trauma in Black bodies to slavery, racism, and generational oppression. Their findings reveal how many diagnoses like bipolar disorder, paranoia, or PTSD are disproportionately assigned to Black and Brown people. Not because of inherent dysfunction, but because the frameworks themselves weren’t designed with our realities in mind.

You see the same legacy in how mental health systems once diagnosed LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill because heteronormativity shaped the baseline of what was “healthy.” And that’s the pattern we keep repeating:
Pathologize what we don’t understand.
Label the reaction, not the cause.

So to those of us who move between therapy sessions, healing retreats, and $15 sound baths, I say this gently:

We are not more healed.
We are more sheltered.

And if we don’t recognize that privilege, we risk confusing comfort with wellness and perpetuating the same exclusion we say we’re against.

When I insist on challenging this, it’s not because I’m angry for the sake of it. It’s because I have access. Because I am in the room. And because I refuse to be silent in spaces that speak of healing while contributing to harm. And because As a healer/practitioner/Therapist, I need you to make room to educate yourself about this.

About these two systems and beyond them like colonialism. Classism. and more…

Healing, if it means anything, must help people become more resilient, more connected to their true worth by also recognizing it’s not just THEM.
Anything less is branding. Anything less is betrayal.

What Then?

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”
—Audre Lorde

Still, we try.
We keep adjusting ourselves to the very conditions making us sick.

Like I said in the beginning: I am not against therapy. That’s why I built The Circle. That’s why I hold space.

But I am against any model that ignores power.
That decontextualizes pain. And I can’t stop resisting that. As I am on the journey to Deconstruct it till I die.

I believe care is a political act.
That healing is about reclamation. Abolition even.
I believe in In land-based remembering.

I believe in sustainability models that are circular and regenerative.

I believe in therapy that doesn’t just hand you a diagnosis but one that asks and helps “Members” navigate:

• What systems hurt you?

• Who were you before the wound?

• What does it mean to come home to yourself fully, fiercely, freely?

I believe in healing that works beyond convention. Healing that is Patient with time and Money. So, I admire and only want to work with practitioners who don’t just charge, but challenge. Who don’t just want to open studios and practice to take more money from the same people hurting but who educate themselves, organize together, and build offerings that are accountable, accessible, and aligned with justice.

I need us to dream together of spaces where:

• A woman’s heartbreak is honored as righteous grief not pathologized.

• Poverty, state violence, and systemic stress are named for what they are: trauma.

• Therapy doesn’t just help us survive a broken world, it helps us dream a better one.

• Yoga honors its roots, not as a fitness trend with expensive mats and matching sets, but as a sacred practice of rest, remembrance, and return.

• Spiritual spaces aren't cult-like brands, but circles of care where people awaken to justice, fight for the living, and remember the dead. Because those people are us.

That is what I believe the most human, conscious revolution looks like.

So no, I don’t believe healing can be neutral.
Not when Dr.Celestin will be diagnosing women for expecting love.
Not when wellness continues to exclude the very people who need it most.

Okay, bye.

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And I wanted to make my own. A reminder of what I believe in when I slow down long enough to notice. A few things I do or feel that bring me back to myself. In no particular order.

Slow mornings.

I used to be one of those 5 a.m. people. Proud member of the 5 am club by Robin sharma. I loved it but now, I’ve shifted. I wake up when my body’s ready. I take my time. I make my bed slowly, choose a playlist before I shower, and just move through my morning like it belongs to me. That’s what I love about slow mornings. they feel like freedom.

Tea.

Tea Masala specifically is spiritual. Tea doesn’t ask anything of me. It just says, pause. Feel. It feels like a warm blanket, like a quiet breath in a mug. When I drink tea, I am happy.

Cafés/ Coffee

I know I know. But I love coffee. Cappuccino, latte with cinnamon on top? Heaven. But I also know it’s one of those things tied to burnout culture. Overproduction. Hustle. So I don’t drink it every day. Tea is still that babe But when I do drink coffee it’s usually in a café. Because cafés are my joy. I love a good café, a cute restaurant. Somewhere I can sit, work, people-watch. Coffee + café = a little ritual with a question mark.

Walks alone in nature.

Barefoot if I can. Sand if I’m lucky. There’s something sacred about being outside alone. Walking without talking. Letting the earth hold you. Nature doesn’t ask for performance, it just invites you to be. And I love it soooo much.

Sunlight on my skin.

My mom used to joke that I was a lizard because of how much I love the sun. And it’s true—I live for sunlight. Even when it’s too much, I’ll sit in it like “it’s you and me until the end.” I recently got a sunburn that lasted a month and I still don’t regret it. I envy people who live by water, who can bathe in sunlight, naked on a beach. That’s my dream.

Music.

I don’t have a type. My music taste is all over the place—soul, reggae, jazz, R&B, Afrobeats, old-school hip hop, even EDM sometimes. Music moves me. I love the way it shapeshifts with my mood. Some nights, I’ll go from Beyoncé to Brandy to Mary J. Blige to 50 Cent and be completely gone. Music brings me back to life.

A well-deserved sleep.

I struggle with insomnia; my brain is always thinking, spiraling, deep-diving into rabbit holes. AI, articles, books, strategy—I can’t stop. But when I finally sleep, I want it deep. Like dead-to-the-world sleep. The kind where you wake up and forget what day, what country, what timeline you’re in. That sleep heals me.

Babies.

Not my own but babies in general. Their smell, their little feet and hands, their tiny giggles. Pure magic. I love humans when they’re that small. When they’re soft and unformed and full of wonder. It’s hard to believe we all started like that.

Candles.

I could live in a world of candles. Every scent, every shape. I love lighting them at night—no big lights, just a quiet glow. And essential oils? Life. I’m trying to become a plant mom too, but I think plants know I’m faking it. We’re working on our relationship. Every plant I have ever owned died. But this time, they have no Choice but to love me.

A clean room with clean sheets.

There’s nothing like walking into your room and it smells like lemon and lavender. Everything in its place. Bathroom clean. Bed freshly made. That moment when everything feels reset—I’ll trade anything for that.

Letters.

Please. A letter from a friend, a lover, a parent? I will melt. This year, my sister sent me a letter and I haven’t recovered since. I read a letter from someone I love in a café and just started crying. I love the handwriting, the effort, the intimacy. I love writing letters too. They slow us down. They say things texts never could.

Rewatching old classic movies.

One of life’s most underrated things on earth. I don’t care if I’m alone or with someone—give me a classic film and I’m good. I’ve started deep-diving into old Black American cinema, and I’m honestly sad I didn’t grow up watching them. Every time I press play, it’s like I’m entering a soft time capsule. It’s romance, it’s memory, it’s joy. And don’t even get me started on old anime—those storylines still hit. Honestly, watching an old film feels like a way to love life again.

Changing into something soft at the end of the day.

There’s a kind of peace that only comes when you take off the world and put on softness. The earrings are off. The bra’s gone. The rings hit the table. You pull on something cozy and oversized and you’re like “Finally. I’m back.”

This is what life is about. For me.

Not a timeline. Just a quiet collection of things that remind me I’m still here. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s time to make your list too.

And if you do, make it yours. Make it messy. Romanticize it.

Because sometimes the most sacred thing is simply remembering what brings you back to life.

Love,

Bose.

Rastafari is not a hairstyle. Not a weed aesthetic. Not just reggae. It is a spiritual, political, anti-colonial movement rooted in Black liberation, consciousness, and deep connection to self, land, and God (Jah).

Like most indigenous movements, Rastafari has been misunderstood, commercialized, and erased, while the pieces of it most digestible to the West have been consumed without context.

Rastafari is a resistance movement. A spiritual, cultural, and political identity born in Jamaica in the 1930s in response to colonization, anti-Blackness, and Christian missionary domination.

Rastafari reveres Haile Selassie I, the former emperor of Ethiopia, as divine. It embraces Africa—especially Ethiopia—as Zion, a symbolic spiritual home. It critiques capitalism, Western materialism (Babylon), and promotes Livity—a way of living in alignment with nature, community, and righteousness. It is not a religion—it’s a way of life. A daily rebellion. A soul practice.

And so, what follows isn’t an academic essay or a definitive take—Its my personal tribute to the Rastafarian movement and a deep appreciation for Reggae music—for all lovers of rhythm, resistance, and spirit. But more than that, it’s a reclamation letter. A reflection for healers, seekers, and wellness practitioners who are on the path of decolonizing wellness in their own way.

Not because I have it all figured out—but because, in this process, Rastafari has become one of the movements I believe we must study, honor, and learn from. This isn’t a conclusion. It’s an offering. A gathering of thoughts, questions, and memories that I’m still unfolding and in that unfolding, I believe Rastafari offers something worth sitting with.

How I Found Rastafari

Like some of us, I came through the music- REGGAE. Reggae always hit me like a memory especially root reggae. because reggae isn’t just feel-good beats. It is prophecy. It is an archive of resistance, grief, healing, and Black liberation.

Every rhythm felt like something I already knew—passed through my bones, whispered by ancestors, held in the hum of hills.

The first time I heard One Love by Bob Marley, The message hit me so hard. That love was universal. That liberation was spiritual. That suffering was collective.

Who else was saying this in such a radical way? And who else was making sure we felt each word as if it were protest and prayer wrapped in song?

I’ve found myself in recent years trying to reclaim spiritual movement rooted in African tradition, not stolen culture. Wellness today often ignores the legacy of resistance. But almost every spiritual movement began as revolt—as a return to spirit when systems failed. So I don’t know how anyone can find awakening without rejecting and resisting these systems.

Though I grew up listening to Reggae and admiring Rastafarians from a distance, I only turned to the Rastafarian movement later in life. It was actually the first spiritual path I embraced after walking away from Christianity and the Catholic church.

By then, I had dabbled in almost every religion I could find, eventually landing in a kind of agnostic space. But even that label felt too white, too Western, too disconnected from my roots. I mean—imagine telling an African mother you’re an atheist? Yeah, no. Even if she let me explore, there’s a line—and not believing in anything was a bit too far.

Rastafari, on the other hand, felt like home. It aligned with my love for Pan-Africanism, my decolonial fire, my belief in justice—and still held space for God. Not the God of fear and control I was taught, but the Most High. The Love. The Light. A God who could walk barefoot through struggle and still sing.

Rastafari: A Sacred Rebellion

Rastafari is a rejection of Babylon—the systems of white supremacy, greed, empire, and oppression that colonized and controlled our minds and lands.

The dreads? They are not a fashion statement. They are resistance. They are sacred. They are the refusal to cut, tame, and conform. They are a return to what is natural, what is ours.

And yet, I watch dreadlocks worn at music festivals by people who don’t know Black people were—and still are—denied jobs, dignity, and safety for wearing them.

People forget dreads were demonized before they were aestheticized. Rastafari was punished, feared, and criminalized.

Now it’s repackaged in many spaces as “boho chic.” To be honest, this is partly because the Western world had its own rise of the hippie movement in the 1960s and 1980s, which borrowed elements of Rastafarian fashion and ethos and blended them into its own aesthetic.

But for many of us, it was never a style—it was survival. A spiritual declaration.

Even as a child born in the late '90s, I remember how wildly demonized Rastafarians were—because of the dreads, because of marijuana, and because our colonized minds are trained to reject anything that resists colonial norms.

Everyone who went to school on the continent knows—shaving our heads was the rule. Unless you were white or mixed, your hair wasn’t truly yours. So if you dared to grow dreads? You were a rebel. An outcast. A disappointment.

On colonial lands like mine (Rwanda), anything that doesn’t fit the image of “progress” (read: whitewashed) is seen as backward. But Rastafarians refused erasure—and still do. Even if the movement has lost momentum, it lives on.

Back then, in Rwanda, it survived through One Love Clubs, art centers (I actually used to run one post-COVID—just me, some Rastas, and a handful of expats trying to keep the flame alive), and sacred drum circles.

For many, Rastafari became a movement, a spiritual home—the first one outside the confines of colonial Christianity.

The Ganja Is Political, Too

“While not all Rastafarians use ganja, it has long been a sacred part of the movement for many—used not for escape, but for elevation, meditation, and connection to Jah. Ganja has also been the site of deep injustice: it was the excuse used to criminalize Rastas while now being commodified into billion-dollar wellness markets. We can’t talk about the erasure of Rastafari without talking about how ganja was used to erase them.”

Let’s be clear—ganja was never just about getting high. In Rasta tradition, it is sacred. It’s medicine. It’s a plant of the people. A tool to relax the body, open the mind, access the spirit, and resist the noise of Babylon.

But while Rastafarians were being jailed, beaten, and demonized for smoking ganja, the same governments that hunted them are now running billion-dollar cannabis wellness industries. The irony is chilling.

Weed is now legal in many Western countries—except, of course, in the same communities where Black and Brown people still get harassed, arrested, and locked up for it.

Ganja didn’t just carry a scent—it carried stigma. And that stigma was racialized. It was used to criminalize the Black body, to justify surveillance, incarceration, and erasure.

And now, the mainstream wellness world has picked it up and made it aesthetic. A vibe. A trend. Something to roll at festivals or use for “self-care Sundays.” You smoke it because it’s cool—not because it’s sacred.

But Rastafari always knew: ganja was never just a plant—it was a protest.

It was a challenge to state power, to colonial morality, to the systems that wanted docile, controlled people. Rastas smoked ganja to reclaim their minds. To meditate. To connect. To resist.

And when ganja is stripped from this context, it becomes just another capitalist tool. Another wellness product. Another thing to sell without soul.

That’s the danger of legalization without liberation.
When the spiritual is commercialized.
When something once punished becomes profitable—but only for the powerful.

That’s why I always tell my European friends: legalization of weed means little if it doesn’t come with the liberation of people’s minds.

Because the intentions today are different—and honestly, often confusing. The current politics around “drugs” have been swallowed by artificial highs, chemical compounds, and synthetic escapes. It feeds a narrative of escapism, not expansion. Of zoning out, not tuning in.

So yes—ganja is political, especially in today’s society.
But it’s also spiritual.

If your wellness doesn’t open your consciousness—
If your “relaxation” doesn’t move you toward truth, clarity, or justice—
Then you’re probably doing it wrong. Or smoking the wrong plant.

What Western Wellness Won’t Say (But We Must)

Mainstream wellness loves meditation, breathwork, plant medicine—and the aesthetics of it all—but constantly finds ways to separate them from the blood and struggle of the people behind them.

And as an African, every time I honor these practices, I can’t help but think—this is stolen culture. Still, this is the wellness world many of us try to enter.
Or if you’re like me, you’re already in it.
And you’re realizing how easy it is to become just another player in Babylon’s system if you don’t pause and unlearn.

So no—I’m not critiquing the West for the sake of it.
In fact, I’m often in awe of how brilliant many Indian and Asian spiritual practices are.
There’s so much wisdom there.
And in many of the principles and beliefs, I find echoes of my own.
Reminders. Remembrance.
Sometimes I wish I had learned them from those who bled for that knowledge—without it coming through a Western lens.
But it is what it is.

And just to be clear—when I say “Western wellness,” I don’t just mean white practitioners.
Sometimes it’s Black and Brown folks too, reproducing the same diluted practices, the same aesthetic spirituality, the same disconnect from root and resistance.
It’s the system, not just the skin.
That’s why this is a personal reckoning.

With that in mind, in this peace I’m speaking to us—African wellness practitioners, healers, seekers, space-holders.

Because the things we go searching for in Western spaces?
We already had them—here.
Our ancestors lived it.
Our people created it.

Movements like Rastafari and Ubuntu or so many more I hope to explore in future writings held spirit and justice together.
They knew healing is political.
That breath is resistance.
That music is medicine.
That plants are teachers.
That liberation is a daily practice like meditation or movement.

But if we never study our own roots, we’ll keep getting lost in someone else’s blueprint.

So here’s the invitation:
center home. Center Africa. Center Blackness.

Don’t just copy the poses, the crystals, the cacao—without remembering what your people already knew.

And if you heard me right, I’m not saying stop practicing yoga or abandon the practices that serve you.
But I am saying—don’t fall into the trap of individualistic, isolated self-enlightenment.
That “growth” without community is often just ego dressed as evolution.
We should aim to do better.
Even if it doesn’t fit the mainstream.
In fact, it’s better when it doesn’t.

That’s why I recommend revisiting Rastafari—because it never separated spirit from struggle. And neither should we. (I’m gonna die on this hill.)

Livity: A Way of Life, Not Just Vibes

Rastafari as a practice. beyond dreads and ganja and reggae—it’s Livity: divine living in alignment with Earth, truth, and justice.
Livity is a call to live righteously—to walk your spirituality, not just speak it.

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being present.
Living in a way that nourishes you and uplifts the people around you.

Livity asks:

• Are you consuming mindfully—from your food to your content to your conversations?

• Are you resisting Babylon not just in theory, but in the way you spend your money, treat your neighbor, and move through the world?

• Are you aligning your values with your actions?

• Are you high on vibes—but low on integrity?

Livity isn’t just self-care—it’s collective care.

If you’re on a spiritual or wellness journey, here are some practices drawn from Rasta you can begin integrating—not for aesthetics, but for anchoring:

✅ Eat Ital (natural, plant-based foods)
Rastas often follow an Ital diet—free of processed food, chemicals, and excess salt. Even if not fully, try eating closer to the Earth. Clean. Intentional. Alive.

✅ Use Earth-made products — reject Babylon’s toxins
Rastas reject artificial, manufactured things that disrupt the natural balance.
Perfumes filled with chemicals? Toss them. Choose essential oils, natural herbs, shea, or coconut oil instead. Clean your space with herbs, not bleach. Let your body return to the Earth it came from.

✅ Start your mornings with word & rhythm
Play a roots reggae song instead of scrolling.
Listen to the lyrics. Dance.
Let your body pray before your mouth does.

And if you’ve ever met a true Rastafarian, you’ll notice—many don’t have social media.
Some don’t even own phones or use laptops.
Not because they’re disconnected, but because they refuse to be consumed.
They resist the machine—the surveillance, the noise, the overstimulation.
Long before we had digital detoxes, they were unplugging from Babylon.
Long before we feared algorithmic control, they were calling out governments that listened in, tracked minds, and monitored movement.
Rastafari didn’t just resist colonial rule—it resisted the spiritual erosion that comes with constant consumption.

✅ Practice ritual over routine
Light a candle. Brew herbal tea. Offer a blessing to the Earth before eating.
Rastas live with reverence—make your everyday tasks sacred.

✅ Serve your community
Rastafari is service. If your healing doesn’t ripple outward, it’s not Livity.
Show up. Share food. Help someone with no camera or clout in mind. Let your resistance be relational.

✅ Use ganja, if you choose, with intention
Ganja in Rastafari isn’t about escape. It’s about clarity. If you smoke, ask:
What am I seeing more clearly? What truth is being revealed?

✅ Speak truth. Always.
Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it costs you power.
Rastafari is about word-sound-power. Speak as if Jah is listening.

✅ Rest. Trust. Praise.
Rastas say “I and I” to reflect unity between the self and the divine.
You are never alone. Rest like the ancestors are watching. Move like freedom is yours.

Rastafari Is Soul Work

I wrote this because Rastafari deserves more than hashtags and festival looks. We love the music. But forget the movement. We smoke the plant. But ignore the prophets. We claim the aesthetic. But forget the sacrifice.

To me, Rastafari is one of the most powerful, decolonial, spiritual resistances in Black history. It isn’t perfect. But it is prophetic. and we must learn from it as Africans following the path to spiritual growth.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery—none but ourselves can free our minds.” – Redemption Song

Gender & Power: My Own Critique of Rastafari

After everything I’ve said, you might wonder—why am I not still a Rasta?
Why critique the wellness industry when I had found a movement that already felt aligned?

That’s the thing about critique: it doesn’t mean rejection. It means I care enough to stay curious. To ask more of what I once called home.

So here’s the truth: I walked away from Rastafari as a personal path. But I’m still listening. Still learning from its depth, its roots, its rhythm.

Rastafari—like many ancestral and spiritual traditions—has struggled with patriarchy.
Rastawomen have too often been sidelined. Their voices softened. Their power overlooked. For too long, it’s been carried, shaped, and defined mostly by men.

Because I used to be a Rasta. I used their prayers. I studied their texts. I listened to reggae like it was gospel. Every Rasta I met, I received like a preacher.

And it gave me so much. A sense of purpose. A way to name the systems I had always resisted. But it didn’t give me space as womanist “black feminist”—when I started naming power, questioning silence, reclaiming the feminine—I realized: even movements that resist empire can still uphold patriarchy.

What good is liberation if women remain in the background?

What does “freedom” mean if it still centers men?

And so I return—again and again—to the words of Thomas Sankara:

“There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women.”

That includes Rastafari.

So yes, I still honor the roots. I still bow to the truth. I still feel the fire.
But I also hold space for the feminine divine—for Jah9s and priestesses, for mothers and mystics, for softness, multiplicity, and rage in sacred form.

The future of Rasta must be inclusive.

Because soul work is incomplete without women.
And any liberation that silences the feminine is only half awake.

📚 For Those Who Want to Go Deeper:

Songs to Feel, Not Just Hear:

• “One Love” – Bob Marley

• “Redemption Song” – Bob Marley

• “Different Colours / One People” – Lucky Dube

• “Back to My Roots” – Lucky Dube

• “Marcus Garvey” – Burning Spear

• “Steppin’ Out of Babylon” – Marcia Griffiths

• “Jah Live” – Bob Marley

• “Jah Glory” – Rita Marley

• "Exodus" – Bob Marley, A powerful anthem not just of physical migration but of spiritual awakening and resistance. “Movement of Jah people” is not just poetic—it’s prophetic. It reminds us that liberation is collective, not individual. It’s about finding your people and walking toward freedom, together.

These aren’t just songs. They’re sermons. I hope you will get the message.

Read:

• “Rastafari: Roots and Ideology” by Barry Chevannes
  A deep dive into the philosophy, theology, and socio-political background of the movement. Essential for anyone wanting to understand beyond the surface.

• “The Rastafari Reader” edited by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
  A collection of essays exploring the breadth and evolution of the movement—including gender, politics, diaspora identity, and more.

Watch:

• "Africa Unite" (2008) – a documentary that blends Bob Marley’s music legacy with political commentary and the Marley family’s continued activism.

• Netflix: “Reggae in Babylon” (if available in your region) – a rich documentary chronicling reggae music’s rise in the UK and its roots in Rasta philosophy.

Note: Rastafari isn’t just something to vibe with—it’s something to study, reflect on, and grow through.

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What started as a small gathering now sometimes holds over 90 people. And while that growth is beautiful, it’s also a reminder of how deeply people are yearning—for truth, for connection, for space to simply be.

We never intended The Circle to be big. We intended it to be safe. Quiet. Deep. But from it, new spaces have been born:

The Sober-Friendly Circle, the Men’s Circle, the Motherhood Circle, and more.

Each one is a response to something real. A reflection of a truth I keep seeing:

One-on-one therapy alone will never be enough.

Especially in our context as Africans—healing must be communal. It must feel familiar, culturally resonant, and safe.

And so, we’ve kept going. Kept building. Kept showing up in the firelight, even when we’re tired.

Because we know the world wears people down.

We know how easy it is to forget who you are.

We know what it means to be silenced, dismissed, or told you’re too much.

The Circle is our way of saying: come back to yourself.

Break the silence. Break the cycles.

Sit in community. Let it hold you. Let it heal you.

This is an invitation—for you, for all of us.

To resist the exhaustion.

To remember.

To begin again.

Doors open. Fire lit. You’re welcome here.

I’ve always been a critical thinker—not because I’m a pessimist, but because I believe questioning things leads to deeper understanding. I critique civilization, identity, politics, and modernity not to reject them, but to truly grasp their impact on how we live and what we value. I used to assume everyone approached the world this way, but I’ve come to realize that people navigate reality differently.

Last week, I was reflecting on building authentic community in a capitalistic world, and this week, I’ve been diving into modernity and its impact. I’ve realized that many of the things we consider “progress” have actually left us disconnected—and that disconnection is something people are now desperately trying to reverse.

Modernization & the Loss of Community

We often talk about civilization and modernization as good things, and in many ways, they are. No one should live in poverty without access to clean water, healthcare, or stable infrastructure. True development should aim to improve quality of life. However, the more I read about postmodernity, the more I see how much we loose in the process.

Take the rise of “conscious living” movements in developed nations—people in places like New York and other major cities are now obsessed with:

• Sustainable living and “returning to nature”

• Building authentic relationships & communities

• Rejecting mass consumerism & industrial food systems

• Disconnecting from mainstream media & political propaganda

These ideas—often labeled as progressive—are actually attempts to reclaim what modernity erased.

And yet, in developing nations, modernization is still sold as the ultimate goal. Cities like Kigali, Nairobi and Accra are rapidly expanding, adopting Western-style urbanization and economic models. But at what cost? The push for new infrastructure, high-rise buildings, and consumer-driven economies often means removing what is old rather than integrating it into the future.

Take LOVE for example The paradox of modernity doesn’t just shape our economies, our cities, and our sense of belonging—it also profoundly affects how we experience love. Modern love is a contradiction in itself in my opinion. It is constantly being redefined, theorized, and restructured, yet the more we try to contain it, the more it evades us. In the past, love was intertwined with duty, family, and community, existing as part of a larger structure that made it more stable, even if it was very restrictive and oppressive especially to Women. Now, love is framed as an act of self-fulfillment—something deeply personal, individual, and free. But this hyper-individualization of love also makes it super fragile. It is something we consume and curate, rather than something we live within. The very forces that tell us we can design our own love stories are the same forces that make love harder to sustain. And just like modern life makes us crave community after years of prioritizing independence, modern love makes us long for depth and longevity after decades of casualization, detachment, and endless options.

Were We Always This Individualistic?

I used to think individualism was an inherently Western phenomenon, that nations like the USA were naturally more self-centered, while African cultures were more community-based. But the more I explore history, the more I see that even Western societies had strong communal structures—until capitalism rose and modernity reshaped them.

The reality is, modernization didn’t just change infrastructure—it changed how people relate to each other. What was once the foundation of human connection—community, shared labor, family ties—was replaced by economic structures that prioritize profit over people.

And now, ironically, people in highly developed societies are desperately searching for what they lost. The rise of wellness movements, slow living, and alternative lifestyles is proof of this. People are paying thousands of dollars to go on retreats and “reconnect” with nature, to unlearn what modern life has imposed on them. But how authentic is this return to simplicity, when it’s being commodified and sold back to them?

The African Dilemma: Civilizing Ourselves Away from Ourselves

As an African, I was raised with the idea that modernization = progress and that to be civilized meant to move away from “savage” ways of thinking and living. Yet, here we are, witnessing people in the most modernized societies yearning for what we were told to abandon.

Are we modernizing just to eventually search for what we lost? Because if the final destination of civilization is to circle back to what was once considered primitive—but with better aesthetics and branding—then what was the point?

Let’s TALK Cultural Preservation Acts

Preservation is a comforting idea for people worried about our identity like me, but also an illusion. Every generation believes it is witnessing the decline of something that must be saved, whether it’s culture, values, or identity itself. But history repeats itself. The things we fight to hold onto today were, at one point, seen as new disruptions to an older way of life. We are not the first to feel like we are losing something, and we won’t be the last.

And yet, we convince ourselves that we will be the ones to do it differently. That this time, we will find a way to resist the currents that shaped every civilization before us. But how? If societies that existed long before us—ones that were deeply rooted in tradition, community, and stability—could not resist modernity’s pull, then what makes us think we can?

The more I think about it, the more it seems that what we call “preservation” is actually just a way of grieving loss in slow motion.

So if everything is cyclical, and if every structure eventually collapses into something new, what should we be asking ourselves?

So, I ask

• Am I truly preserving, or just romanticizing the past as a reaction to uncertainty?

• If every system eventually collapses, should our focus be on resisting change or preparing for what comes after?

The downfall of modernity isn’t that it advances societies—it’s that it disconnects people from what gives life meaning. And in the end, no matter how modernized we become, we always seem to search for what was stripped away in the process.

Then the paradox remains: we crave what modernity took from us, yet we continue moving in the same direction that made us lose it in the first place.