Reflections
Essays on self-trust, discernment, the African context, and the language we still don’t have for this kind of harm. Published on The Permission Letter first; archived here.
Welcome · Substack
Why I’m publishing this newsletter alongside the book, and what to expect in the weeks before launch. The first letter, written for the readers who are arriving uncertain and want to know if this is a place they can stay.
Read on Substack →The Language Problem
If you are confused all the time — if the people around you keep telling you that you are overreacting, that you are too sensitive, that you have a pattern of this — the confusion is data. It is telling you something about the environment, not about you.
Drafted · publishing soonWhy We Stay
It is not weakness. It is not a lack of intelligence. It is not the thing your mother said it was. It is the specific, predictable effect of a particular kind of harm — and naming it accurately is the first step out of it.
Drafted · publishing soonOn Love
One expands you. The other requires you to shrink. A short reflection in plain language — the markers of each, the way they feel from the inside, and why the difference is so hard to see when you are in the middle of it.
Drafted · publishing soonFaith & Pressure
On the specific, painful, well-documented ways religious communities, families, and traditions can be weaponised to keep a person in harm — and on the slow work of keeping your faith while leaving the system that has used it against you.
Drafted · publishing soonThe Cost
Most of the women I have spoken to about this do not lack competence. They lack permission. The cost of that — on a career, on a marriage, on a life — is the topic of this reflection.
ComingDiscernment
It is not suspicion. It is not cynicism. It is the practice of seeing clearly — including the parts that are hard to see — and acting on what you see with kindness, including toward yourself.
ComingThe African Context
Most of the well-known survivor memoirs were written for, and from, the Global North. What gets lost in translation — and what African readers have always known about harm, silence, family, and faith.
Coming