But when love began knocking on my door, it wasn’t certainty that greeted me.

It was fear.

Not because anything was wrong, but because something finally felt right enough to lose.

I realised that falling for someone isn’t just about opening your heart to joy. It’s also accepting that your heart can be broken. Vulnerability has always been the price of intimacy.

When love finds me, I don’t want to interrogate every feeling until it disappears. I don’t want to mistake peace for boredom or confuse kindness with an agenda. I don’t want past disappointments to become the measuring stick for someone who hasn’t disappointed me.

I simply want to pay attention.

To notice whether his words continue to match his actions. Whether he chooses consistency over intensity, whether I can be fully myself without shrinking to fit into the spaces he has made for me.

Love, I’ve realised, isn’t built only through grand declarations. Sometimes it’s found in the quiet moments…the candid photo taken when I’m laughing and not looking, the conversations that stretch longer than intended, the comfort of being in someone’s presence without performing for their affection.

I don’t want to find myself chasing butterflies, but appreciating the person who gently reaches for your hand while they’re there.

If love finds me, I hope I don’t run from it simply because it asks me to be brave.I just want to remember that protecting my heart at all costs also means protecting it from being loved.

So if love finds me, I hope it finds me open…Not naïve and desperate but willing.

Because after all this time, I’ve learned that love isn’t something to conquer or control. It’s something to meet…we might meet it with honesty, curiosity, and enough courage to say, “I’m scared… but I’d still like to see where this goes.”

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however it didn’t.

It only meant I became the first person to abandon myself.

I rejected my body before anyone could tell me I wasn’t desirable. I questioned my ideas before giving them room to breathe. I apologised for taking up space before anyone asked me to. I dimmed parts of myself because I thought they were “too much” and even too emotional, too curious, too ambitious and too opinionated.

I then realised that there is nothing humble about constantly making yourself smaller. Healing didn’t begin when the world finally accepted me. Healing began when I realised I had been waiting for external permission to believe in myself.

I had to learn that confidence isn’t the absence of insecurity but it’s choosing yourself despite it. I stopped rejecting the woman who asks difficult questions, woman who is still figuring out what she believes, the woman who dreams of building things bigger than herself and the woman who loves deeply, thinks deeply, and sometimes feels the weight of the world a little too heavily.

I deserve compassion and not constant correction.

I’ve realised that growth isn’t becoming someone new. It’s slowly removing every lie that taught you that you were unworthy of love…There is a quiet grief that comes with recognising how harsh you’ve been to yourself. You begin mourning all the versions of you that only needed acceptance but instead received criticism.

So these days, I’m choosing something different.I’m choosing to trust my voice before seeking validation. Because the longest relationship I’ll ever have is the one with myself. And I no longer want to spend it rejecting the person who has been trying to love me all along.

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Someone is getting promoted.
Someone is buying a car.
Someone is travelling.
Someone is engaged.
Someone is graduating.
Someone has launched a business.

And then there is you, wondering whether you’ve somehow missed the train.

Your twenties are sold to us as a decade of endless possibility, but no one speaks enough about how they are also a decade of comparison. We scroll through carefully curated milestones and mistake them for the average timeline of adulthood. We begin measuring our lives against people who started with different families, different opportunities, different networks, different luck, and different burdens.

Comparison slowly becomes paralysis.

We then stop applying because someone else is already better, stop creating because someone your age has already “made it”, stop dreaming because your timeline no longer resembles the one you imagined at eighteen.

Ironically, the fear of being behind is often what keeps us behind.

There is also something deeply capitalist about this anxiety. We have reduced our worth to productivity and milestones. We ask, “What have you achieved by 25?” as though life were a race with a finish line instead of an unfolding experience. We celebrate visible success while ignoring invisible battles: depression, grief, caregiving, debt, unemployment, illness, burnout, or simply trying to survive.

The truth is that many people are quietly improvising. Some who look like they have everything together are drowning in debt. Some are deeply unhappy in careers they once prayed for. Others are maintaining appearances because admitting uncertainty feels like failure.

I honestly think that our twenties are less about arriving than they are about becoming.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy isn’t moving slowly. It is convincing yourself that because others are ahead, there is no point in taking another step.

Life is rarely linear. Some people bloom at twenty-two. Others at thirty-five. Others at fifty. History is filled with people whose defining work came long after they believed they had run out of time.

It’s time that you stop treating someone else’s timeline as evidence that yours has expired.

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For generations, South African women were not simply expected to be submissive because of patriarchy, they were expected to carry entire households, communities, and liberation struggles on their backs while doing so.

Black women, in particular, have occupied a contradictory position in South African society. They have historically been expected to be soft enough to serve, and strong enough to survive, to raise children while men were away in mines under the migrant labour system, to stretch impossible household budgets, and strong enough to hold families together under apartheid, unemployment, violence, and economic instability.

The “strong Black woman” was never merely an identity. For many, it was an economic necessity.

Perhaps that is why conversations around submission provoke such strong reactions in South Africa. For some women, submission represents the very gender order feminism sought to dismantle. For others, it represents something they were never afforded the luxury of experiencing in the first place.

Many South African women were never allowed softness, and many were never allowed dependence. Women had to work, mother, nurture, provide, and endure simultaneously.

So when some women say they desire traditional provision or submission within relationships, what they may be expressing is not a desire for oppression but exhaustion with carrying everything alone.

Of course, radical feminist critiques remain important. South Africa continues to experience staggering levels of gender-based violence, economic inequality, and intimate partner abuse. Financial dependence can become dangerous where women lack meaningful exit options. In a country where many women remain economically vulnerable, feminism cannot afford to romanticise dependency without asking difficult questions about power and safety.

But critique should not become contempt.

There is a difference between asking why women desire submission and mocking women for desiring it.

The feminist victory in South Africa was never that women would all become the same type of woman. It was that women would have options that previous generations did not.

If your feminism only respects women when they arrive at the same conclusions as you, then perhaps the issue is not liberation but compliance. South African feminism has always asked bigger questions than that.

The question has never been: “What kind of woman should women become?” The question has always been: “Do women have the freedom, resources, and safety to become whichever kind of woman they choose?”

The missing middle.

The children of nurses, teachers, police officers, administrators, clerks, municipal workers and public servants who earn too much on paper and too little in practice.

Children raised by parents who did everything society asked of them. The ones that studies hard, got a job, the ones that pay your taxes, the ones actively contributing to society.

Yet somewhere along the line, many discovered that compliance does not guarantee security. Their parents became victims of arithmetic.A household income threshold here. A calculation that assumes money exists simply because it enters a bank account before immediately leaving it again.

The state sees income while the household experiences expenses.

A salary in South Africa often stretches beyond the nuclear family. It supports grandparents, unemployed siblings, cousins looking for work, funeral contributions, church obligations and emergencies that seem to arrive monthly. One income can feed an entire ecosystem. But then we have policy which often imagines households as isolated economic units.

The result is that many middle-income families become financiers of public goods while struggling to access those same goods themselves. They pay taxes for public healthcare they cannot always rely on, pay taxes for public education while paying school fees, pay taxes for universities while taking out loans to send their own children there and low and behold they subsidise systems they themselves cannot comfortably use.

This is not an argument against redistribution…

The South African middle class often exists one retrenchment, one illness or one financial emergency away from crisis. Security is very much fragile and stability is rented rather than owned.

Perhaps that is why the angry middle-class child carries such a particular kind of exhaustion. For many families, hard work has merely secured survival, of which survival was never the dream. The dream was that the children would not have to inherit their struggle.

Not the kind of middle class that vacations in Europe and debates investment portfolios over brunch. The kind that knows sacrifice intimately. The kind where your parents work hard, pay taxes faithfully, contribute to UIF and pension funds, and still lie awake wondering how your tuition fees will be paid.

You grow up hearing that education is the great equaliser (the key to success), only to discover that access to education exists in a bureaucratic grey area where you are somehow considered too wealthy to need help and too poor to afford the cost yourself.

Too rich for NSFAS. Too poor for fees.

You occupy an invisible category.

The calculations say your household income exceeds the threshold. Reality says your parents are supporting siblings, extended family members, transport costs, bond repayments, medical aid, groceries that become more expensive every month, and a dozen other obligations that spreadsheets cannot account for.

And so begins the annual ritual…Registration season arrives and with it comes anxiety. Will there be enough for tuition? Can accommodation be paid? Should textbooks wait another month or should I settle for digital pirated ones ? Can this payment be split? Can this debt be carried into next semester or at least I graduate?

Meanwhile, your parents continue paying taxes into a system that successfully funds the education of thousands of young South Africans, something many of them are genuinely proud of…while quietly wondering why there seems to be no place for families like theirs.

There is a strange bitterness in watching your parents contribute to the collective good while struggling to access that same good for their own children. Not because others should not receive assistance, of which they absolutely should. But because the gap between “poor enough for support” and “wealthy enough to cope” is occupied by families being squeezed from every direction.

The angry middle-class child is not angry at poorer students. They are angry at invisibility.

Angry at being told they are privileged while watching their parents negotiate payment plans. Angry at carrying guilt for the financial burden their education places on their families. Angry at a system that measures income but rarely measures affordability.

Perhaps the most painful part is watching your parents try so hard to make sure you never feel the weight of their sacrifices, while you feel it in every delayed payment, every conversation cut short when finances come up, every “we’ll make a plan.”

And they do make a plan. South African parents always seem to. But sometimes children inherit the frustration of watching the people they love work incredibly hard and still find themselves caught in the middle.

I guess we are the missing middle!! Too comfortable to be considered vulnerable. Too vulnerable to be comfortable. Maybe that is the true middle-class experience.

I sometimes I wonder whether our “types” are truly ours or whether they were quietly handed to us by the world around us.

From childhood we are shown who is desirable long before we ever start dating. Films cast certain faces as the love interest and others as the best friend. Beauty campaigns praise specific features while ignoring others. Families make comments at dinner tables. Friends rank attractiveness in school corridors. Social media algorithms reward one aesthetic repeatedly until it begins to feel like fact rather than preference.

Some of our types are probably biological. Humans are often attracted to signs of health, compatibility, familiarity and shared values. Attraction is not entirely random.

But socialisation undeniably enters the chat.

Why do beauty standards differ so dramatically across countries and generations if attraction is purely instinctive? Why are some features considered attractive in one culture and overlooked in the next?

Maybe our preferences are part nature and part nurture. That does not make preferences evil. Everyone is allowed to have them. Dating is one of the few spaces where choice matters deeply and forcing attraction helps no one.

The issue arises when preferences become prejudices. Listen carefully….“There is a difference between saying ‘I usually prefer this’ and saying “I could never date that type of person.” One leaves room for humanity. The other often reveals conditioning we have never interrogated.

Many people have fallen in love with someone who was completely outside their “type” only to realise that connection has a funny way of rewriting our rules.

What if your type is not a fixed category.

Chomi what if your type is simply whoever makes your nervous system feel safe, your mind feel stimulated and your life feel bigger.

Okay ask yourself “What exactly is my type?” With a follow up question, “what if I don’t have a type and I just socially conditioned to have one?”

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Money pays for school fees.
Money buys medication.
Money gets your mother the house she deserves.
Money pays for therapy.
Money buys freedom, time, safety and options.

There is nothing shameful about wanting financial security. There is nothing shallow about wanting a soft life. There is nothing evil about wanting to eat at nice restaurants, travel the world, pay your bills on time and sleep peacefully knowing debit orders won’t humble you at midnight.

Nna ke nyaka chelete. Not because I worship it or because I think it will solve every problem. The reason I want money is because I understand what the absence of money does to people, families and dreams.

I want abundance.
I want comfort.
I want generosity.
I want to be able to say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.”

Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy stability, and stability gives happiness somewhere comfortable to sit.

So yes, I want money.
Respectfully.
Shamelessly.
In large quantities, please.

This isn’t me romanticising polygamy. It isn’t me trying to be different. If anything, it’s me finally being honest with myself.

I don’t think I’m monogamous!!

I’ve realised that honesty matters to me far more than exclusivity. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been horrified by the idea of polygamy. Would I marry into a polygamous family?

Surprisingly… yes. On one condition. I’m the matriarch.

Not as Macele though. 💀

I say that jokingly, but there’s something serious underneath the humour. I don’t want to compete. I don’t want to beg for attention or fight to be chosen every day. If I’m entering a family, I want to enter it with dignity, security and clarity.

I’ve also realised how much I value my own space. I enjoy my solitude. I enjoy having parts of my life that belong only to me. Maybe that’s why the idea of one person fulfilling every emotional, intellectual and social need has never felt particularly realistic to me. Maybe I’ve been confusing independence with incompatibility all this time. Or it could be that monogamy simply isn’t the only way to love.

This isn’t me saying everyone should embrace polygamy. If monogamy works for you, I’m genuinely happy that you’ve found a relationship structure that feels like home. I’m simply questioning whether it’s mine.

Maybe I’ll change my mind one day.

Maybe I won’t.

But I’d rather ask uncomfortable questions than spend my life pretending certainty just because certainty is socially rewarded. I’d rather be told an uncomfortable truth than comforted by a beautiful lie.

Nna ka dlala…

I’m very much monogamous!!

I think what I’m really trying to understand is why some people choose polygamy. Why, for some, loving more than one person feels more authentic than loving one. Maybe I’m less interested in practising it and more interested in understanding it. Curiosity has a funny way of sounding like conviction sometimes…

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Then came the backhanded compliments.

“You’re pretty… for a dark-skinned girl.”

Imagine hearing that enough times that you begin treating yourself like a project. Changing your hair. Changing your personality. Wondering if being admired was something you had to manufacture instead of something you naturally deserved.

The thing about desirability politics is that it convinces you your problem is personal when it is actually political. It tells dark-skinned girls that they are the exception when they’re beautiful instead of allowing beauty to simply exist in them. It tells women that our worth is measured by how many people pursue us.

By the time I got to university, I had noticed another pattern. I wasn’t the girl men loudly pursued. Oddly enough that stopped hurting. Not because I suddenly became everyone’s type, but because I realised something much more liberating:

There was never anything wrong with me. People don’t desire in a vacuum. They desire through conditioning. Through movies, music videos, colonial beauty standards, colourism, peer pressure and through the fear of dating someone their friends won’t approve of.

Desire is far less organic than we’d like to admit.

Being dark-skinned has often been framed as something to “look past” rather than something to celebrate. Not because dark skin lacks beauty, but because generations of people were taught exactly whose beauty deserved to be centred. And then I realised something even funnier. Men often date for other men.

They date women who earn approval from the group. Women who elevate status. Women their friends will congratulate them for “pulling.” Sometimes attraction becomes less about intimacy and more about social performance.

You begin to notice how many relationships are curated for an audience rather than built for the people inside them. Once I understood that, rejection lost its sting.Because if someone has been conditioned to overlook me before they’ve even known me, then I was never competing in a fair game. Desirability politics didn’t just shape how people saw me. For a while, it shaped how I saw myself. Thankfully, it doesn’t anymore.

I only need to remain recognisable to myself and I think that’s a far more radical way to live

I’m in my twenties and everyone seems to tell me that this is young, my life has just begun, assuring me that best is yet to come… So why does it feel like I’m running out of time?

It’s a strange contradiction, to feel like your story is only beginning while also feeling as though you’ve somehow wandered closer to the ending. Every birthday feels less like an achievement and more like another page turning without my permission.

Growing up isn’t just about getting older. It’s about watching possibilities become decisions.

It feels as though the older you get, the fewer versions of yourself remain possible. Doors quietly close. Dreams become careers, or they don’t. Relationships become marriages, or memories. Parents become older. Friends move away. Your body changes. You realise that time isn’t a concept anymore, it’s something you can almost hear ticking.

As a child, adulthood looked like freedom. Now it sometimes feels like grief. Not because life is bad, but because every new chapter asks you to say goodbye to another version of yourself. I miss the illusion that there would always be more time.More time to figure myself out, to fail, time to start over and more time to become whoever I imagined I could be.

Maybe that’s what scares me most. Not ageing itself, but the possibility of living a life that feels smaller than the one I dreamed of. I think many of us are mourning futures that haven’t even happened yet. We’re grieving imagined lives while forgetting we’re still living this one. What if growing up isn’t learning how to stop being afraid.I think it’s learning that fear is simply the price of having a future worth caring about.

So yes, I’m afraid to grow up.

What hurts is the fact that time is moving whether I’m ready or not. What is this what it feels like to be alive…

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Somewhere along the way, ambition stopped being about building a meaningful life and became about proving your worth. Suddenly, rest has to be justified, joy has to be scheduled, friendship has become more about “networking.”reading has become more of “self-development.”than what you do for leisure and our hobbies now need to become businesses. There is almost no part of our lives that capitalism hasn’t attempted to monetise. We’re no longer encouraged to simply exist. We’re encouraged to extract value from every minute of our existence.

The tragedy is that many of us internalise this logic so deeply that we begin policing ourselves. We feel guilty when we’re not working even when nobody is asking us to. The boss no longer needs to watch us because we’ve become our own supervisors and we are so good at micromanaging ourselves.

I’m not arguing against hard work. Building something meaningful requires discipline and devotion. I’m questioning why we’ve accepted the idea that life must be postponed until after success. Maybe the most radical thing we can do is refuse to delay living. I’m not saying ambition is wrong, all I’m saying is maybe the whole point of ambition should be to create a life worth living. Not a life that keeps asking us to wait.

“Momento Mori” : Remember you must and will die.

“Momento Vivere” : Remember to live.

For us, beauty has never been confined to galleries or museums. It has always been lived.

It is woven into baskets that hold tomorrow’s harvest. It is stitched into blankets that carry memory. It is sung into lullabies, danced into ceremonies, braided into hair, and painted onto bodies. Creation has always been part of living, not something separated from it.

I think that is why I struggle with the Western tendency to classify everything into categories: art, craft, design, fashion. African creativity has always blurred those lines as our lives have never been compartmentalised in that way.

The woman who knows exactly how to layer colours in her traditional attire is an artist. The child who learns the rhythm of a drum before learning to read is participating in an artistic tradition older than many modern states.

Artistry, for us, does not require permission, we simply breathe it!!

It does not need an expensive degree or a gallery opening to become legitimate. It is already legitimate because it is served in communities, honoured by us and our ancestors and celebrated through life.

Colonialism taught us to admire marble statues while dismissing beadwork. To praise European architecture while calling African homes “primitive.” We were told to frame masks behind museum glass while forgetting they once danced, healed, celebrated, and carried spiritual meaning. We started to inherit standards that often struggle to recognise our own genius.

Our Art survives. Survives in township jazz sessions on Sundays kwa Malume, gospel choirs, beadwork, pottery, woven grass, isiXhosa click poetry, Sepedi praise singing, Tsonga xibelani skirts, Ndebele murals, Venda sculptures, and hairstyles that continue to reinvent themselves across generations.

Our creativity has never disappeared. It simply adapted and we can see it evolve. There is something radical about choosing to see African artistry as complete rather than as something waiting to be validated elsewhere. This is because we were never a people without beauty. We were a people whose beauty was interrupted, renamed and too often exported before it was appreciated at home. I say we should work on reclaiming African artistry!

Looking at ordinary things with extraordinary respect. Realising that beauty has always been sitting beside us and within us in our homes, our languages, our fabrics, our music, our ceremonies and our hands. African artistry is not simply something we inherited, it is something we continue to create every single day. To me that is one of the most beautiful things about being African.♥️

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A necklace wasn’t just a necklace. It told you where someone came from, what stage of life they were in, whether you were married, grieving, celebrated, or initiated. Fabric wasn’t simply fabric. Patterns carried histories. Hairstyles were maps of identity. Homes were decorated with intention. Songs carried genealogy. Dance preserved memory. Even ordinary objects often carried spiritual, communal, or ancestral significance.

Nothing existed simply to exist.

Perhaps that’s why many African spaces feel “full” to outsiders. They are full because they are layered with stories.

The Western idea of minimalism asks, How little can I live with? Many African traditions asked a different question, “What does this object remember?” Those are fundamentally different philosophies.

The conversation becomes even more interesting when we consider colonialism.

Europe did not merely conquer land. It conquered taste. Colonialism wasn’t only about borders, language, labour, or governance. It also taught colonised people what beauty looked like, what sophistication looked like, what civilisation looked like. It established European aesthetics as universal while reducing African aesthetics to something tribal, primitive, busy, or unsophisticated.

The violence wasn’t just physical. It was aesthetic.

Suddenly, white walls became elegant. Empty spaces became refined. Neutral colours became signs of class. Ornament became “too much.” African homes, textiles, beadwork, carvings, and colour palettes were no longer viewed as expressions of culture but as things to outgrow on the path to becoming “modern.”

The question is: modern according to whom?

Because before colonialism, Africans were never waiting for Europe to teach them beauty.

We had architecture that responded to climate instead of trends. We had textiles whose patterns communicated identity. We had jewellery that functioned as language. We had hairstyles that recorded history. We built with earth, grass, wood, stone, and local knowledge long before sustainability became a global buzzword.

Europe did not introduce simplicity to Africa.

It introduced the idea that European simplicity was superior.

That distinction matters.

Even today, wealth is often marketed through European aesthetics. Luxury apartments in Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra increasingly resemble those in London, Copenhagen, or New York. We are told this is “timeless design,” as though history only began in Europe. But why should a Scandinavian living room be considered the global standard of elegance? Why should African abundance always require justification?

Perhaps what is dismissed as clutter is actually culture. Maybe what is labelled excessive is simply symbolism that colonial eyes never learned to read.

Decolonisation is not only about reclaiming land, institutions, or languages. It is also about reclaiming our imagination.

About asking who taught us that beauty must be quiet, that sophistication must be white, and that emptiness is somehow more intelligent than fullness. Maybe African aesthetics were never excessive. I just think they were simply never designed to be understood through European eyes.

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At what point did authenticity become a dating disadvantage? We have become experts at managing perception.

We arrive at first dates with rehearsed stories, carefully selected opinions, and outfits that whisper, “Choose me, and it not that we are dishonest but because we are afraid.

Afraid that the unedited version of ourselves may not survive the selection process.

So instead of allowing someone to meet us, we introduce them to our representative…an Avatar

We reveal just enough to appear emotionally intelligent, but not enough to risk rejection.

We’re no longer asking, “Who are you?”

We’re asking, “Do you fit the life I’ve imagined?Perhaps that’s why so many connections begin intensely and disappear just as quickly…Is it because eventually the performance ends?

Real people are inconsistent. We have bad days. We become overwhelmed. Sometimes we need silence instead of conversation. And yet, these are the very moments where intimacy begins not where it ends.

I don’t want to feel as though I’m constantly applying for the position of someone’s partner. I don’t want to optimise my personality into something more desirable. I don’t want to be loved because I passed every test. I want to be known. I want someone to ask questions that don’t have right answers. “What has been occupying your mind lately?”

Not because they produce certainty but because they produce discovery. The older I become, the less interested I am in finding someone who ticks every box. Boxes cannot laugh, they do not evolve and grow.

Boxes cannot surprise you five years later with a completely different understanding of the world.

But people can.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern dating isn’t that people don’t commit. I think it’s that we rarely give each other the chance to arrive as whole, unfinished human beings. We’re so busy trying to be chosen that we forget to be known.

I don’t want to audition anymore.

If love ever finds me, I hope it happens in a conversation where neither of us is trying to win.

Only trying to understand.

Because I have a suspicion that the healthiest relationships are not built by two people performing compatibility. They are built by two people brave enough to stop performing altogether.

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It was meant to be lived.

I am beginning to realise that I do not crave the love we’ve collectively been taught to desire. I do not dream of romance because it photographs well. I dream of companionship so ordinary that it becomes sacred.

I would love to live with my partner before marriage, not because I reject commitment, but because I long to know the person beyond the ceremony. Kodwa ngiyasaba. I fear the judgment. I fear the traditions that tell us love is only respectable once it has been sanctioned. Yet I wonder how many people marry strangers simply because society applauds the timeline.

I don’t want to discover you through anniversaries. I want to discover you on a random Tuesday.

I want us to bond over a cup of coffee while reviewing current affairs, disagreeing over politics without questioning our love, breaking down philosophy until two in the morning because we’re still trying to understand what resonates with each of us. I want conversations that stretch beyond “How was your day?” into “Who are you becoming?”

I want us to debate which industrial apartment has the best natural light. To spend a Saturday hunting for pieces that make our space feel like ours instead of something copied from Pinterest. To schedule work dates at Mamashaka & Friends because your presence makes even silence feel productive.

I want us to disappear into a bush retreat, not because it’s trending, but because nature has a way of returning us to ourselves. To leave behind deadlines, expectations and algorithms, and remember that before we were partners, we were simply two human beings trying to make sense of life.

I want to be able to tell you, “I’m not okay today.”And I want that sentence to be enough. No fixing. No pretending. No performance. Just understanding. I want the same freedom for you.

I want you to tell me when life has become too heavy. When you’re exhausted. When you’re afraid. When you don’t know the answer. I want you to exist beyond the prison that masculinity often builds around men not the lie that being a man requires abandoning your humanity.

Strength has never been the absence of vulnerability.

Perhaps the bravest thing a man could ever do is remove the mask. Perhaps the bravest thing a woman could ever do is stop expecting him to wear it.

Maybe love isn’t found in perfect compatibility but in the courage to remain unedited in front of another person.

I don’t want the polished version of you…Not performing love well enough for the world to applaud. But creating a small corner of the world where neither of us has to perform at all.

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We can’t disregard how women have always occupied a peculiar place in society such as being loved, desired, protected when convenient however rarely regarded as fully autonomous human beings.

It made me think of a notion I once came across…”if apartheid had primarily targeted women instead of Black people as a whole, would Black men have resisted it with the same urgency? Or would it have been accepted as just another unfortunate reality women were expected to endure?”

History offers uncomfortable clues.

Women’s suffering has often been treated as collateral damage. Wars are fought over land, power, and resources, while violence against women is dismissed as inevitable. Even in liberation movements, women have repeatedly been asked to postpone their own freedom until after everyone else’s had been secured.

Perhaps that is because many societies have never truly stopped seeing women as property. Property to protect. Property to control. Property to inherit. Property to exchange. But property nonetheless.

Even our language reflects this. A man is simply Mr. His title reveals nothing about whether he belongs to someone. A woman, however, is often asked whether she is Miss, Mrs., or Ms. Before she is recognised as an individual, society wants to know her relationship to a man. Is she available? Has she been “claimed”? Her identity is too often introduced through her marital status, while his remains his own.

When you are viewed as an object, your oppression is rarely seen as a crisis. It is seen as an inconvenience.

This isn’t to diminish the brutality of apartheid or the courage of those who fought against it.

It is to ask a different question…why does injustice become intolerable only when it affects those society already considers fully human?

Women’s humanity has always had to compete with men’s entitlement.

Until that changes, our freedom will continue to be treated as negotiable!!!

She thought she’d shout, cry or even leave by instead she froze.

The man in her life insisted they were never officially together. He rejected the label of a relationship, but still expected loyalty, exclusivity, and access to her life. She was expected to be his girl whenever it suited him, but never enough to be acknowledged as one.

When he discovered she had been speaking to other people, he decided she deserved punishment.

He slapped her.

He burnt her with an iron.

He forced her to bathe with cold water as a form of humiliation and control.

He held her at gunpoint.

And one day, he pulled the trigger. Had she been standing slightly differently, her story may have ended there.

What fascinated her 2 years later was not his violence. It was her lack of reaction.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t fight.

She didn’t become the version of herself she always imagined she would be.

She endured.

That is when she learnt something many people misunderstand about abuse…survival does not always look like resistance. Sometimes survival looks like silence. Maybe it looks like compliance.

Sometimes it looks like becoming so still that your body prioritises making it through the moment over expressing what you feel.

People often ask why victims don’t leave, don’t fight back, or don’t make a scene.

What they rarely ask is what fear does to the human body.

Fear can make a person disappear into themselves. Fear can make survival feel more urgent than dignity. Fear can make silence feel safer than confrontation.

The greatest lesson she carried from that experience was…when she was being violated, she was not a reactive person.

She became still.

Not because she accepted what was happening.

Not because she was weak.

But because her body understood something before her mind did and maybe staying alive was the only reaction she had left.

What is not valid, however, is mistaking political disengagement for political awareness.

Democracy does not stop existing because you refuse to participate in it. The decisions made by elected leaders will still affect the quality of your education, the state of public healthcare, the availability of jobs, the price of electricity and the safety of your community. The only difference is that you surrendered your opportunity to influence those outcomes.

Not voting is often presented as a protest. But a protest only works when it creates pressure for change. Choosing silence at the ballot box rarely achieves that. Instead, it hands greater power to those who do vote.

History shows us that hundreds of people fought, suffered and died for the right to participate in democratic processes. In South Africa especially, the right to vote was not freely given, it was won through struggle. Treating that right as meaningless ignores the sacrifices that made it possible.

Voting does not mean believing that a political party is perfect. It means understanding that politics shapes your life whether you pay attention to it or not. Democracy is not about finding a flawless candidate. It is about making choices, demanding accountability, and continuously participating in the direction of society.

The most dangerous form of ignorance is not a lack of information. It is believing that opting out somehow places you above the consequences.

You can opt out of politics, but you cannot opt out of its consequences!!

There is always something.

Women are told that self-improvement is empowerment, but often it feels like an endless list disguised as liberation. Lose the weight. Gain the curves. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be ambitious, but not intimidating. Be independent, but still desirable. And somehow, even our most intimate parts are not spared.

We are sold teas, supplements, washes, pills, and home remedies promising to make us tighter, wetter, sweeter, fresher, more desirable. Every few months there is a new trend telling women that our bodies require fixing before they can be worthy of love, pleasure, or attention.

Drink this.
Eat that.
Smell like this.
Taste like that.

The message is subtle but relentless: who you are naturally is not enough.

Then there is the modern obsession with becoming a “high-value woman.” Another title. Another performance. Another standard to chase. Now womanhood is not only about beauty but branding. Your femininity has become a project.

You must heal.
You must glow up.
You must level up.
You must optimise. You must always be becoming…yet exhaustion follows.

It seems as though women are not allowed to simply exist!!

Not as projects, products or as potential. Just as people.

The exhausting truth about being a woman is that the goalposts keep moving. The moment you meet one expectation, another appears. The work is never finished because the standard was never designed to be attainable.

Perhaps the most radical thing a woman can do today is refuse.

Refuse to spend her entire life correcting herself.
Refuse to believe her worth is hidden behind product purchases or diet plans. Refuse to treat her body as a problem to solve.

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