I’ve been meaning to write a reflecting blog post for a while now and I thought today would be the perfect day to go ahead with it as I had an interesting conversation with my friend about how we blame everything these days on people getting “brainwashed” and one thing topic led to another and I got lost in my thoughts about the “thinkers” in the world. I’ve always prided myself as being one, I knew I wasn’t a “do-er” but I always thought and thought and thought and I’ve spent twenty-two years of my life thinking and formulating my own opinions on things. I find it essential and vital to have an unbiased opinion of my own regarding most matters and it absolutely irks me when someone talks about something and I have no idea what it is. My brother is even worse than me; he reads and watches documentaries in his spare time so much that I believe he almost has an answer for everything. The way I’m describing this may lead you onto thinking that I’m implying that we are smart ( my brother may be), which is far from the case. We are simply two individuals with a large amount of curiosity and brains that won’t stop exhausting themselves.
I began to think of all the people I know and the type of discussions I have with them which led me into asking myself how I ended up being different, how fortunately until now no one has managed to “brainwash” me with religious and political opinions even after hours and hours of discussions with so many people from so many different schools of thought and growing up in a community filled with racism and materialism, and I remembered a very interesting point my friend brought up about being raised into an opinion. That was precisely the opposite of what the members of our household did. Me and my brother were taught to think, understand, argue, ask and most importantly discuss. We would sit down at a very young age and watch the news with my mother and two uncles and we were asked what we thought, who did we think was right or wrong and what did we think was fair. We were pushed to discover music and art in our spaces with no influence what so ever by their tastes. When I questioned religion they pushed me to find my own answers and come back to them and discuss what I thought was right or wrong. We were never spoon fed any opinion about anything in the world. So instead of “raising” us, they allowed us to raise ourselves, they pushed us to become individuals and my mother watched me in particular, make my own mistakes as she forced herself to stay quiet just so I could learn and grow. She bravely handed me my freedom in a community that could never comprehend a girl being given space to experience and mature. I believe my mother is courageous in all that she does but her greatest act of courage lies in the way she raised us; defiant and free.
We grew up around anger, insanity, manipulation and broken people but in the very same house I learned about unconditional sibling love that I have never witnessed among any another family, I learned to think for myself and to make my own mistakes, to forgive and to repent. We were however taught not to judge, we were taught respect and discipline and the most valuable lesson of all; never fall for the materialistic ways of society and life. They never sugar-coated anything in my eyes but they gave me a spine, I understood strength and independence by watching my mother carry six people on her shoulders and still manage to do a better job with them than most people do with all the resources she lacked, I gained my empowerment as a woman ironically from the two men in my life who pushed me forward while the women were gushing over my brother. And it is only now that I understand that my grandmother’s undying love, my grandfather’s soft spot for me, my two uncle’s continuous faith, my brother’s wisdom and my mother’s mountain moving strength were the driving forces that made every single inch of me today. That it may have taken all the people in my life time to know who I am and what I am capable of but these people knew all along, they loved me when I wore tons of eye liner and refused to dress in anything that was not black, they loved me when I packed my bags and moved out, they loved me even when I hated them and they knew who I was all along. These are the people who treated me like I was twenty when I was ten and spent hours listening to me as a child, declaring that I was going to become the president and that I would invent the cure to all the diseases in the world, and instead of laughing, they held my hands and told me I would.
The Moving Circus 