Kigali
is my second home, but has one particular trait that I despise. Gossip. So many
people here gossip about anything and everything, all day and all night. If you
are someone like me, they will talk about you non-stop. What's worse is that
the concept of "casually dating" someone or a few people just doesn't
really exist here. You are either in a very serious "heading towards
marriage" relationship or you are completely single and just waiting to
get in to such a situation. So if you are seen talking to a guy anywhere here,
everybody wants to know what's up, and many people, it seems in many cases,
want to paint you in a negative light.
And
it doesn't stop there. This kind of culture of gossip is all-consuming. People
will feel the need to hunt down information about you on Facebook to scrutinize
and criticize, and see if there is anything they can read about you that will
give them something to trash talk about. As many of my friends back home in
Vancouver will appreciate, for someone like me with an open and uncensored kind
of personality, all of this really starts to get me down.
Which
brings me to a recent discovery. People often comment to me that I seem like
such a happy, bubbly person, and I can say with confidence that this is true. I
am happy, quite happy, most of the time. So why should I start to feel sad, to
feel attacked, to criticize myself because of the influence of others? People
whom I have never met, in most cases?
The
reason I feel so happy in my daily life is because I feel free. Nothing is more
important to me than being able to be myself, fully and freely, and to know
that those close to me really and truly love me for exactly who I am, flaws and
all. I don't want to be merely tolerated - I want to be embraced. I have been
judged and rejected so many times in my life for being "too much" or
"too little" of this or that. I have been bullied by both girls and
boys in my youth, and alienated by the opposite sex more times than I can count
for being too confident, too outspoken, too "unfeminine", too much of
something, too intimidating in my assertions, my personal strength, my power,
my energy, and absolutely my sexual expression.
I
remember distinctly feeling smothered at many times in my life, feeling
suffocated by the expectations and judgment of others. The pain and frustration
this caused me is difficult for me to describe.
All
I want is to be free and to be loved for it. And because this is so important
to me, I try to give that freedom to others, to not judge them for things they
say or do that may shock or surprise me, but to recognize that all people are
essentially rabbit holes of colliding thoughts and feelings and needs and
wants, and that what I may see or experience in a fleeting moment with one
person is only a fraction of what goes on beneath the surface, and to have
compassion for that process in myself and in all people, as much as possible.
As I
said, I don't want to just be tolerated; I want to be embraced. I want to be
loved.
