I know almost nothing about romantic love. It is one of the few human connections I have yet to experience still I think about you often. I have written about you countless times in the pages of my journal.

I often find myself thinking about the day we will finally meet.

sizohlangana kanje? will it be in a tiny bookstore between shelves filled with books waiting to be discovered? A quiet library where silence says more than words ever could? Or perhaps in a grocery store, reaching for the same item in a quiet aisle completely unaware that an ordinary moment is about to become unforgettable.

What will it feel like the first time our eyes meet? Will the world soften around us just only for a moment? What color are your eyes beneath the quiet afternoon sun? How tall are you? What does your laughter sound like after I’ve managed to make you laugh?

Do you enjoy reading and watching films as much as I do? Do you feel music the way I do? Does it settle beneath your skin quieting every restless part of your mind and for just a few minutes the world feels gentle again?

I wonder how many times our paths have already crossed, How many times have our lives brushed against each other without either of us ever knowing, Perhaps we’ve stood in the same room, maybe we went to the same daycare, we probably have walked the same streets or passed one another without a second glance, completely unaware that one day we’d become each others favorite story.

Uyaphila kodwa Sthandwa sami?

I have so much to ask and so much to learn about you muntu wami
I can not wait to learn your heart and for you to learn mine. I hope I am not too stubborn with it. I hope to learn to let you in, slowly. I hope when you arrive in my life, you do not arrive to complete me but to simply witness me, to witness the woman I am and the women I will become. I hope we move gently enough to learn each others souls. I hope we become students of one another.

I hope we carry one another, I hope we consume every joy, every sorrow, every dream, every fragile hope until our hearts are stitched together by shared memories and kisses.

I want us to be patient enough to sit beside each others healing. I want us to learn the language of each others hearts until silence becomes as familiar as our laughter. I want us to notice the smallest shifts in each others souls before either of us has to explain them.

I hope life always us to experience that kind of love Sthandwa sami

A love so quiet, so gentle, so steady, so deeply rooted that it becomes impossible to imagine where one of us ends and the other begins that we become so impossible to separate not because we lose ourselves in one another but because we’ve built a life where our souls feel at home together.

That is the love I dream for us

Not loud enough for the world to hear but quiet enough for two souls to recognize the sound of ukubuya ekhaya.

Dear diary

I always knew something inside me was aching, though I never had the words to name it. Death was never a stranger, Death has never felt like a stranger. It has always lingered at the edge of my thoughts, patient, quiet, waiting for the moment I'd notice it again.

I remember standing at the edge of the backyard pool, staring into the water that looked almost innocent. The surface shimmered beneath the sun, calm enough to convince anyone that it couldn't possibly hurt them. I remember jumping, I remember looking up once, just once, and seeing the sky fractured into pieces of light, the sunlight scattering across the water like glitter. In that suspended moment, everything was strangely still. There was a kind of peace I didn't yet have the words to understand. That was my first attempt.

The second time I drowned myself in a bottle of pain killers it left me believing silence might finally answer the questions my mind never stopped asking. Instead, morning arrived as it always did, carrying a life I no longer knew how to hold. My mind was sick, my thoughts grew darker, despair had become quieter. I’d climb tall buildings, feeling the cold breeze sting my face, my button nose growing numb as the cold air filled my lungs. My heart pounded against my small chest, and my vision blurred with tears. I remember thinking, just for a second, only a single second

“What if I just jump”

But morning always came. My eyes would open, my lungs would fill, and I would find myself standing in my bedroom, in the same life I had been trying so desperately to outrun.

For a long time, I believed something was wrong with me. Now I wonder if what was wrong was never my existence, but the unbearable weight I was carrying alone.

(I know this piece feels a little scattered, but I wanted to preserve it that way. I was trying to capture the unfiltered thoughts and emotions of my younger self.)

I recently came across a beautiful four page essay, Why I Write, by Joan Didion. The title itself is borrowed from George Orwell's famous essay of the same name. In it, Didion reflects on the "I" in her writing and offers a line that lingered with me long after I finished reading:

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear"

I found myself deeply connected to those words because I, too, write to discover what I am thinking.

I've been doing it for as long as I can remember. Long before I understood what journaling was, I was a little girl filling pages with observations and questions. I wrote about everything and nothing. The bird that sat outside my bedroom window. My childhood dog, and the strange questions she inspired, did she look at humans and find us just as peculiar as we found her? I wrote about books I had read, dreams that unsettled me, dreams that delighted me, and every thought that wandered through my mind.

Writing has always been my way of making sense of the world. I enjoy reading, but there is something uniquely thrilling about writing. The freedom of it. The possibility of it. The fact that I can write about anything, and that there is no limit to where a sentence can take me.

I wrote the most during adolescence. Those years filled my notebooks with stories of a traumatic childhood, the changes happening to my body and my life, the struggles of being a young Black woman, my dreams, my fears, and my worst nightmares. My writing became increasingly vulnerable. Sometimes I would finish a journal entry and find myself crying, left with a heaviness I couldn't quite explain.

No one ever read those pages.

I hid my journals beneath my mattress, making sure they remained unseen. I couldn't bear the thought of someone discovering my innermost thoughts, of seeing the parts of me that felt the most fragile and exposed.

That changed when I discovered Substack.

At first, I was only an observer. I read everything that caught my attention. I read essays about first heartbreaks, first loves, first kisses. Strangers writing honestly about their lives. There was something beautiful about it people choosing vulnerability and finding connection through it.

Then I did something I never imagined I would do.

I started writing.

Even then, fear followed me. My essays would sit in drafts for weeks before I gathered enough courage to publish them. When I finally posted my first article, the anxiety was overwhelming. I watched as people read my work, and instead of feeling proud, I panicked. Three weeks later, I deleted the article. Then I deleted everything else. My account, my writing, all of it.

That was in 2025.

It's 2026 now, and after months of contemplation, I decided to try again. I created a new account. I published one article, then another, and then another. Yet I would be lying if I said I don't still feel the urge to delete everything.

I don't know exactly why.

Maybe part of me is afraid. Maybe I still struggle with being seen. Maybe I don't trust my writing enough. Maybe sharing my work feels too much like handing strangers pieces of myself.

Or maybe writing has always been an act of vulnerability, and vulnerability never really stops being frightening.

What I do know is that I keep returning to the page.

And perhaps that's an enough reason to continue.

I recently rewatched Tokyo Ghoul, and I don't think I've ever felt as much empathy for a fictional character as I do for Ken Kaneki. While many people remember Tokyo Ghoul for its action, violence, and dark themes, what has always stood out to me is Kaneki's psychological journey. As someone who has experienced trauma, I find his story incredibly relatable. In many ways, Kaneki is one of the most accurate depictions of how trauma shapes a person's identity, relationships, and sense of self.

In the manga especially, we learn more about Kaneki's childhood and the abuse he endured from his mother. Although she wasn't portrayed as malicious in the traditional sense, she was both psychologically and physically abusive. She constantly overworked herself for the sake of others while neglecting her own well-being, and she passed those beliefs onto Kaneki. Instead of teaching him healthy boundaries or self-worth, she taught him that suffering was a virtue.

One of the most important lessons she instilled in him was:

"Instead of a person who hurts others, become the person who gets hurt. It is okay if you lose because of your love and kindness. Ken, a kind person only needs those things in order to be happy."

At first glance, this sounds noble, even admirable. But underneath it lies something deeply damaging. Kaneki internalized the belief that his pain mattered less than everyone else's. He learned that being kind meant sacrificing himself, that his own needs should always come second, and that enduring suffering was preferable to inconveniencing others.

I found this aspect of Kaneki's character particularly painful because it reminded me of my own experiences. Throughout my childhood, I experienced psychological and physical abuse from people who were supposed to love and protect me. Like Kaneki, I learned to endure rather than resist. I learned to suppress my feelings, minimize my pain, and convince myself that somehow it was my fault. When you're repeatedly hurt by the people who are meant to keep you safe, you start believing that the problem must be you.

What makes Kaneki such a compelling character is that his trauma doesn't disappear when his circumstances change. Becoming a ghoul wasn't his choice. The surgery didn't just alter his body; it shattered his identity. Overnight, he became something he feared and hated. He could no longer live as the person he once was, yet he couldn't fully accept what he had become.

To me, this mirrors the experience of trauma. Trauma changes you. Sometimes it changes the way you think, the way you relate to others, and even the way you see yourself. After trauma, there is often a period where you no longer recognize who you are. You're caught between who you used to be and who you've become in order to survive.

For me, maladaptive daydreaming became my survival mechanism. While Kaneki dissociated from parts of himself and struggled with his identity, I escaped into my imagination. I created entire worlds in my mind worlds where I was safe, loved, and in control. I created different versions of myself because the real version carried too much pain. Instead of processing my trauma, I buried it beneath fantasy.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of Kaneki's story is how often he blames himself. Even when terrible things happen to him, he searches for ways he could have prevented them. This is something many trauma survivors understand. Trauma often leaves people carrying guilt that was never theirs to begin with. We become responsible for everyone else's actions while excusing the harm done to us.

Kaneki's torture at the hands of Yamori serves as a turning point in his character. Many people interpret his transformation afterward as him becoming stronger. While there is truth to that, I think it's more complicated. Kaneki doesn't simply become powerful, he becomes hardened. He abandons parts of himself because he believes they are weaknesses. His kindness, vulnerability, and desire to be protected become things he feels he must suppress in order to survive.

This is another aspect of trauma that resonates with me. Survival often requires adaptation, but those adaptations can become destructive when they outlive the danger. Hypervigilance, emotional detachment, people-pleasing, dissociation. Sound familiar? These behaviors may protect us in the moment, but they can also isolate us from ourselves and others.

What makes Kaneki's journey so meaningful is that, beneath all the suffering, it is ultimately a story about self-acceptance. Throughout the series, he is constantly trying to choose between different versions of himself: human or ghoul, weak or strong, victim or survivor. But healing doesn't come from choosing one side and destroying the other. It comes from accepting that all of those parts exist within him.

I think that's why Kaneki resonates so deeply with trauma survivors. His story isn't just about monsters. It's about what happens when pain fundamentally changes a person. It's about identity, shame, survival, and the long process of learning to live with the scars left behind.

For me, Kaneki's story serves as a reminder that surviving trauma often means rebuilding yourself from the ground up. Not becoming the person you were before, but learning to accept the person you've become. And while that process is painful, it is also where healing begins. I'll end this article here before i go on a full rant but i hope you enjoyed.

I do not remember how old I was when it happened.

Memory has stolen many things from me over the years. Birthdays, faces, entire seasons of my childhood, but it never took that night.

That night remained.

Sharp. Patient. Waiting.

I was at my abusive nanny’s house with my little sister. We were never supposed to be there. She had taken us to her family’s home without my mother’s knowledge. My mother was away on vacation with one of the many men who drifted through her life, and we were left behind like forgotten luggage.

Before we arrived, my nanny warned us.

“ungalokothi utshele umah wakho, ngizonshaya namtshela”

She did not need to explain what that meant. My siblings and I already knew. Our bodies carried enough evidence of her anger.

The afternoon passed beneath a harmless sun.

My sister and I played with two boys from the family. One of them was called “Khekhe” which translates to “Cake” (lol) . The other was older. I cannot remember his name anymore. Perhaps my mind buried it. Perhaps it knew that some names deserve to be forgotten.

That evening felt ordinary.

And sometimes that is the cruelest thing about trauma.

How ordinary everything feels before your life quietly splits into a before and an after.

My little sister and I slept on a couch in the living room. We argued over a blanket until exhaustion won. The television remained on. I still remember the channel that was playing, E.tv. The first Percy Jackson movie flickered across the screen.

The house slept.

The television hummed.

Cars occasionally past outside.

I wore my favorite Minnie Mouse pajamas that night. A bright glittering top and polka-dot shorts. The kind of pajamas only a child could love so completely.

I do not know what time it was when I woke.

Only those cold hands found me in the darkness.

Hands moving carefully.

Slowly.

As if kindness and violence could somehow wear the same face.

My body froze before my mind understood.

There are moments when fear is so large that it leaves no room for movement. Your body becomes a statue. Your voice disappears. Your soul folds itself into silence.

I pretended to sleep.

I felt his hands touching places that had never been touched before without my permission.

Behind my eyelids, television light danced.

I remember fighting the urge to open my eyes.

I remember losing.

For a second, I looked.

It was Khekhe’s older brother.

I shut my eyes immediately.

Beside me, my little sister slept peacefully, her small breaths rising and falling in the darkness.

My prayer was simple.

“Ungamthinti”

“Please, not her.”

I do not know how long it lasted.

Time behaves strangely when something terrible is happening.

Eventually, it stopped.

I heard his footsteps.

The click of the television turning off.

The sound of him leaving.

Only then did I open my eyes.

Darkness swallowed the room.

The only light came from the streetlamps outside, slipping through the cracks of the curtains like thin strands of moonlight.

I stared into the darkness.

My heart raced against my ribs.

I did not understand what had happened.

I only understood that something inside me no longer felt safe.

The next morning, I convinced myself I had imagined it.

I told myself it had been a dream.

But dreams do not leave pain behind.

And the ache between my legs greeted me like a truth I could not outrun.

So I said nothing.

Silence became my first survival skill.

I carried it for years.

I tucked the memory away like a splinter beneath skin and pretended it wasn’t there.

Then one day, in a Grade 7 Life Skills class, I learned a word.

Molestation.

A word for something I had never been able to name.

A word for a wound that had been living inside me all along.

For years, I told myself it hadn’t affected me.

But trauma is patient.

It waits.

It grows roots beneath the surface

I became suicidal long before I understood why.

Anger lived inside me like a storm with nowhere to go.

Anxiety wrapped itself around my ribs.

Dark thoughts arrived like unwelcome guests and refused to leave.

I feared men.

Not because every man had harmed me.

But because one had.

And sometimes one is enough to teach a child that nowhere is safe.

I feared being alone with male relatives.

I feared public transport.

I feared closed doors.

I feared the dark.

Most of all, I feared vulnerability.

As a teenager, I avoided love.

Avoided boys.

Avoided anything that asked me to trust.

Now I am twenty years old.

And somewhere deep inside me lives a girl who still dreams of soft things.

Gentle love.

Safe love.

The kind of love that does not demand survival.

The kind of love that feels like coming home.

But no matter how many years pass, part of me remains trapped in that living room.

Still wearing Minnie Mouse pajamas.

Still staring at a television screen.

Still listening to the silence of a sleeping house.

Still wondering why.

So I built another world inside my head.

A kinder world.

A world where someone noticed.

A world where someone believed me.

A world where a child was protected instead of abandoned.

A world where that night never happened.

But grief does not care about the worlds we create.

It always returns us to the one we live in.

And in this world, that little girl survived.

She carried a burden far too heavy for her small shoulders.

She walked through darkness she never should have known.

And though she is twenty now, though the years have moved forward, though the seasons continue to change

sometimes she still lies awake on that couch.

Waiting for morning.

Waiting for safety.

Waiting for the childhood that was stolen from her to finally find its way home.

And some days, it still feels like a part of me is lying on that couch, staring into the darkness, waiting for morning to come.