In 2017 at the height of police brutality in Kisumu, the period between the first & the second election where officers tortured and maimed residents, uncouthly breaking into their homes & killing them, there were people I was Facebook friends with and some in real life, cheering. Cheering with the insinuation that Luos are stubborn; they should note vote if they didn't want to. They're always throwing stones at police and looting. It's okay if they die.

A Letter to Parents & Would-be Parents 🧵
#InternationalDayOfFamilies**
1. Please speak life into your children.
What you breathe into them when they’re young is what they’ll breathe into the world when they grow up. 🌍 2. If all they know is criticism, they’ll grow up believing love sounds like a critical voice.

3. You can instill discipline without harm. The beatings I got as a child didn’t teach me responsibility. They taught me fear. And later, resentment.

My father kicked my mum out of our family business. He wanted to control the money. And yet it was my mum’s ideas to begin the school; which he initially was opposed to. He at the time, wanted to buy a car. (thread) But mum insisted we should buy land on which our home would be built, with the vision to start a school someday. And so it was.

The business picked up pretty quickly. He was still working. Got sacked twice in the span of three years.

In 2015, after trying to help my parents solve one of those endless fights with each other, I told my mother I don’t think marriage is for me. I fear marriage. And she said, “hii kitu ni bahati yako tu. Unaeza pata mtu mzuri ama mtu mbaya.” I wish somebody would have told me early on in my life, that love had nothing to do with the treacherous gendered upheavals patriarchal cultures demand of me.

One unsuspecting February evening in 2012, my father returned home with fury in his hands. Mother, obviously from a long day, had forgotten to send some 350/- (mark that amount) to our village home caretaker. She knew it would cause fracas if he came home and that money hadn’t been sent. So she asked my cousin, Phelix, whom we lived with, to go deposit it at an M-PESA shop. Phelix took longer as many M-PESA shops had closed.

When I was depressed & suicidal in 2017, my close male friends would come home to keep me company. They'd do my laundry, my dishes, wash my house and open the curtains for me. None even knew what depression was, but they knew I was down and needed help. Their love lifted me. I would later get into therapy for the first time in my life. And I met terms like anxiety and PTSD. Finding a language for my pain was liberating. I'd gravely suffered for 15 years trying to understand myself. Finally, I had hope of having a life. Never looked back since.

I really appreciate how much I've grown with not being hard on myself whenever I break a glass in my house or spill tea on the carpet. In our home nearly every mistake was punished. I later became hard on myself for inviting punishment, making me aspire to be a perfectionist. Because mistakes led to punishment. And punishment led to pain, which I wanted to avoid at all costs. But then I carried this survival tactic into my relationships and work. I wanted my partners to be "perfect". I'd take so long with work or procrastinate until I felt perfect.