You know them and you let them

You know them and you let them.

They talk to you without any respect.

Degrade you and dress you down to the very core and make you feel like you are worthless, useless.

You know them and you let them.

They beat you up because you said a word or two to offend them.

Beat you up like a common criminal if only to drive the point home that you should have warmed their bath at a certain time, or kept their meal warm right until the moment they staggered in drunk in the early morning hours.

You know them and you let them.

They talk about issues concerning you as though you are not present, make big life changing decisions while you look on and not once murmuring a word of protest even though you don’t like it.

You know them and you let them.

They rob little children of their innocence, molesting them, raping them and stripping them of all their dignity in the process and they still get away with it.

You know them and you let them.

They take your lunch away from you at school whilst you look on. Meanwhile you are thinking they have only taken your lunch, but like a thief in the night they have scurried away with a lot more than your lunch for in life they will continue to steal a lot more from you.

You know them and you let them.

They toy with your emotions, lead you on and enjoy the attention you give them, make you believe there is hope for more and go on to claim it was all in the name of friendship and you misread the signs.

You know them and you let them.

When frustrated with their marriages they come to you, expecting you to make them feel better ,stroke their egos one more time and make them feel like they can conquer the world again whilst you gain nothing from that whole experience except have your time and emotions wasted.

You know them and you let them.

They take credit for all your hard work, reap where you sowed and look damn well good whilst doing it

Sweet and Sour

 I always wonder who on earth made those sweet and sour sweets that so many people i know like. Well guaranteed, I see how that tingling feeling you get when they start to melt in your mouth can be fascinating to some people but I can’t help wondering what is the point of making them sour when they r going to be sweet anyway, like seriously, can’t we have sour sweets separately? But i guess there would be no fun in that right? I admit i am one person who often sees things in black and white. I mean, you either like that girl or not ? You either like playing tennis or you don’t? However, over the years I have come to the realization that this view is rather narrow minded and in practice not realistic though it might be strictly applicable to other situations.

Personally I can relate to many of these sweet and sour moments. Going back to school at any age was one such time for me. Since I was in boarding school for the greater part of my school going phase, going back to school meant getting lots of snacks, cereals, lollipops and other things all at once. It also meant getting new stockings, shoes etc, definitely sweet if you ask me. The sour part undeniably was saying goodbye to family members and friends for a good three to four months. Another example is each time I travel the 7 hour journey, usually overnight, to visit my boyfriend. I dread the journey as much as the next person but it’s definitely a sweet moment when I get there to find him waiting, smiling from ear to ear and knowing that it was worth it, the sour moment returns without fail when I get back on that bus to head back.  To other people I guess it translates to bigger things in life such as accidentally getting pregnant when you and your spouse are not ready for a baby, yet overjoyed at the prospect of being parents. Feeling blessed to have a job at a time when unemployment is rife but hating the sound of the alarm each time you have to wake you up to prepare to go there. That awesome moment when you get together with your whole family before the fights and grudges start to surface again. In the end they are all just sweet and sour moments.

I say this because often times life is full of sweet and sour experiences and much as we would prefer to have only the sweet there is no escaping the reality that comes with the sour experiences accompanied with them and similar to those sweet and sour sweets aforementioned the sour parts are often short lived leaving us to enjoy the sweetness of life. From experience, the sour parts normally feel longer than you expect and seem to go on forever. Sometimes however, the sour parts are dominant because we choose to focus more on them meanwhile missing all the good stuff.  If however this is not the case, well, hang on because like one unknown author once said, “Everything will be alright in the end, if it’s not alright then it’s not the end.” Right?

Teenagehood

Today i was just thinking that my teenage years were some of the hardest to date. For starters i thought i knew everything and hence any instruction from my parents was of course up for debate. As you can imagine this did not sit well with my parents who knew better than me and also knew that i really did not know anything and was just a normal teenager, going through a normal and very uncomfortable phase for everyone. Unfortunately for them I was their first teenager and sometimes they were just as enraged as I was and frankly sometimes we all did not know how to cope with it all.  All my crushes at the time were on guys who would never look twice at me or give me the time of day if only to say hi and most of my time, when not writing in a diary (which was usually torn in a few months for security reasons) was spent looking at the world map in an attempt to pick a suitable destination that I would go to as soon as I won the lotto or got enough money to run away in a similar miraculous fashion. My teachers were yet another drag story and not being able to fit into any of the fashionable cliques and not interested I was pretty much a loner. I was convinced no one understood me and in my mind it was indeed me against the whole world.  

Looking back, I realise I had no idea of who I was and everyday was a journey to discovering myself and who I wanted to be in life. It was also a stage where I became very self-conscious and every outburst of acne seemed worse than a tsunami in any part of the world. It didn’t help me much that I had a very small body and as a result my peers felt they had to do a whole lot of censoring when around me when discussing the trending topics which were boys and dating. My oversized pair of spectacles were not of much help either and quite often you would find me buried in a book, reading was one of my favourite hobbies and it still is. It gave me a chance to live in another world, to be someone else and picture a lot of places that I had never been to. What I wanted to do when I grew up changed almost every year ranging from being a lawyer, psychologist, tour guide, farmer amongst other things. To be fair, it was not all bad experiences, it was also a time that I made some of the friendships that I have up to this day, read most of my bible, got my first valentine’s card and eventually my first boyfriend, discovered video games and what a great and bad thing the internet was and though I might not have known for sure what I wanted to be, what I did not want to be was very clear to me even at that time. 

I have been privileged enough to live through teenage hood all over again, mostly through my younger sisters and seeing them struggle and somewhat striving in it all has made me understand that some things can only be understood in reverse. I see the look of confusion in my youngest sister’s eyes when I try to explain how a few years from now most of the stuff she worries about is not going to matter and she will not be seen dead with any of the guys she envies now lol. I however realise that like me, she will have to live it all and probably only understand it later and all I can do is to give this advice that sometimes, oh wait, usually falls on deaf ears and hope that she doesn’t burn herself and leave scars in the process for some often do at this stage. I definitely would not want to go back and do it all over again but I know for sure that I would not want to take anything away from it all for it was part of a long journey to self-discovery.