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My fasting and prayer worked well. I’m feeling truly blessed and even had some positive things come my way. I also feel better, probably helped to cleanse myself of all the junk that I put in me.
It had me thinking about my life – I spent a lot of time to talking to God – so led me to some self-reflection. Like holding up a mirror to myself. I felt like there was a disconnect.
People have one view of me and I have another one. They don’t really align. But the problem is that I’ve spent too much time believing or at least portraying the one others believe to be the true. And actually it’s exhausting living up to something you’re not.
For too long, I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror (not the superficial asthetics – nothing wrong there 🙂 ), but what I carried in me, or what people thought I was, yet I perpetuated it. I allowed people to judge the book by its cover. Not even letting them read the foreward.
So now that I’m a week away from my 3… birthday, Paulo Coelho‘s words can’t ring truer: ‘You may not know your path, but you must know what you don’t want in life’. I don’t want to pretend anymore. I want to be true to who I am. You may not like me, but you don’t have to. (How exactly is this my problem?)
Another thing I’m going to stop doing is explaining myself, I am who I am. We spend way too much time trying to please people, people that don’t really matter either. As we get older, we get more comfortable in our skins and less concerned with what others think.
This is another step in achieving my personal legend; re-inventing myself, or more appropriately giving everyone the real Cathy.
The last 10 odd days in Kenya and Ghana have been exhausting. But good. Africa is definitely an exciting place to be right now, so I’m no really excited about the prospect of returning.
I’ve met some really great people, inspiring people. We had conversations that got me thinking, provoked debate and made me think about things from a different angle. But the conversation that really stood out for me was the one I had with this older (clearly wiser) man in Ghana.
We were talking about what women, or specifically me, want in a man and in a relationship. And he was saying, the same thing I’ve heard before, don’t have to narrow a focus on men, but then he added, you have to know what you want out of a relationship.
And it got me thinking, us women are quick to identify what we want in a man, but not so quick to define what we want in a relationship. It’s interesting because that’s something my therapist once asked me, ‘why do you want to be married?’ and I couldn’t answer it.
I think too often in everything that we do, we don’t look at the big picture and focus on what or where we want to be at the end of it all. We get too bogged down in the details instead of taking the bird’s eye view. Our thoughts can also be influenced by media and society telling us what we should want or should be doing.
I spend a lot of time over-analysing things, but I think I need to start analysing the big plan and really spending quiet time reminding myself what is important to me, re-evaluating my values and really following through on what is important to me. To start looking at the forest instead of the wood. Maybe once I do this, I’ll even have better luck in my relationships.
I have to admit, I don’t really watch animated programmes, maybe a few on adult swim, but otherwise, cartoons are for kids, right?
So the other day when my sister asked me to get her a copy of The Princess and the Frog so that she could host a screening for ‘the kids’, I thought, maybe I should watch the movie and see why she wants to show the kids. I only knew two things about the movie; 1) it’s was Disney’s first film with a black princess and 2; the controversy of the frog/prince being some ambiguous race.
With my very short attention span, I did not think I was going to be able to sit through the whole thing on Sunday afternoon. But I did. And I actually enjoyed it, didn’t even forward most of the songs.
It was great because I stupidly assumed that it would literally be a remake of the classical children’s story about kissing the frog who’s actually a prince and you become a princess. So I was surprised to see the twist to it.
However, the only thing that really made the ‘princess’ black – her skin colour and the fact that she thought kissing a frog was disgusting. I shouldn’t complain about the lack of ‘stereotypical’ black nuances that we enjoy joking about, but hate other races talking about, because the reality is all black people are different. As long as I can show my future daughter a cartoon character, a Princess, that looks like her, I should be happy.
And the message in the show is so good too – the things that matter, that makes are human is love. Or is that we need to find someone to love to be whole? Hmmm, there’s a thought.
Anyway, it struck me how as children, we get all these messages through programming that teaches us about love, humanity, respect, being ourselves etc. As we grow up those messages change to be about being all about self, money, sexual gratification and all sorts of messages that you have to wade through to find something that actually matters.
Yes it is that as adults – or even teenagers – we’re supposed to have a sense of decision making skills, we don’t need to be told, we have the ability to choose right from wrong and make the best decisions for ourselves. But I just don’t think that’s the reality. I think there are so many mixed messages that young people, who very rarely have the acumen for life-skills, just get confused. They’re childhood upbringing (for most of them) tells them one thing, and the media they now consume, tell them another. So they are no longer aligned with their soul.
You’d say that my line of work makes me partial to programme that gives positive messages, but it’s not that, it’s the choice that I made. I have two loves: making TV programming and fighting injustice. And I believe in the power of TV. The power it has to entertain, and the power it has to educate. And children’s programming does that brilliantly.
I hope as we develop our campaigns we get stronger and stronger at this. I know it’s working already, just look at Shuga. In case you missed it, here’s the piece CNN’s African Voices did on Shuga:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2010/10/25/av.shuga.kenya.mtv.bk.a.cnn
cathyphiri.com 