Sex Talk: Chei! Self-love can be hard 

In an exercise as part of a course I am currently taking, I was told to describe myself if glowing terms – in a table form, where each column requires you to elucidate on the ways you are awesome as stated in the previous column.

I have never sweated through such an ‘easy’ assignment! I mean, it is about me, duh?

I, at long last, came up with four rows and columns showering praise on myself, but when I handed in that assignment, I was informed that I had been too frugal with my praise. I was instructed to dig deeper and come up with more points. Eh!

This is when I really cursed our upbringing. Knowing one’s self-worth was majorly frowned upon in my younger days, and ‘yeemanyi’ (she is proud/self-aware) was considered quite a stinging insult when directed at you.

As a result, many of us grew up downplaying our strong points – physical or otherwise – and practicing false modesty. I am still uninstalling that software from myself.

It was also common for schoolmates to take our strengths and turn them into the yokes we bore; anyone trying to convince us otherwise later in life, becomes a problem.

The girl with a big bosom will be made fun of and called names, until she dreams of cutting her breasts off, even as the one with cup size A is also mocked into dreaming about getting a boob job.

My niece often came home in tears from Kitante Hill School, because some classmates called her rude names for her big eyes and bushy, natural eyebrows and lashes! She also wore her skirts low, because the same classmates had a problem with the shape of her big backside…

Later in life, how is that girl-turned- woman supposed to be confident in her skin and body? How, as a wife, can she comfortably undress before her spouse, unless he is the good kind that never tires of reaffirming his wife’s beauty and looks?

It took years of debunking the bullies’ theories for my niece to stop shaving off her eyebrows, in order to draw thinner ones with a pencil. For every woman (or man) that bleaches, there is most likely someone in her (or his) past who has picked on that dark, natural complexion.

For every woman having trouble making love with the lights on, there are deep insecurities about her body, planted by family and friends that never allowed her to appreciate how beautiful and gifted she was.

I thought I was more liberated than many; until I was faced with that table, and suddenly it just did not feel right to go on and on about the ‘goodness of me’. In fact, I am yet to return the revised, longer table, because I am struggling to find what to say about myself… shame!

It does not help that I come from a generation where parents did not openly flaunt love for their children; they fed us, educated us, clothed us and put a roof over our heads and hoped that by those actions we would figure out that they truly loved us.

Yet, in a way, their PDA-free method was effective parenting. But in some cases, it created emotionally empty humans that in turn, don’t know how to love and accept love. This cycle needs to be broken, starting with our children.

I hope you tell yours that they are beautiful and smart and destined for greatness. When they are asked one day to extensively praise themselves, I hope they type and type, until the fingers hurt.

And that when they meet the loves of their lives, they have no inhibitions during sex, because they know they are inviting these people to share in the greatness that is them!

Now, let me get back to filling those columns…

caronakazibwe@gmail.com