Hello friends,
how are you doing today? It’s Monday already. Wow! Where have all the days gone?
Now you won’t guess how this title of the article came about. If you have been following my blog posts then you would have remembered last Monday’s article and if you’re new to this website, then I’d like to give you a warm welcome. Just so you can understand the context, here is the article from last Monday, Living with lies and secrets of others or yours? Set yourself free from it, here’s why
The reason why I support the documentary This is Paris and signed the petition comes as part of the cause I have mentioned in the “A note from the author” section of my book The South African: True Colours which is a book based on a true story. This is an excerpt from there, “Sexism has and still contributes to the rape culture in countries like India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries. I am not dismissing the institutional abuse with young girls, teenagers and boys in boarding schools within the United Kingdom either.”
This is the excerpt from The South African: Roamer also based on a true story from the “A note from the author section,” “While writing The South African: Roamer, suicide sat right at the epicentre of my heart for some reason and has become an essential topic to me since the release of The South African: True Colours. I have a sense of regret as to how late this book is arriving to South Africa and especially LENASIA. I have a sense of regret for all the people who have left and to never got a chance to say bye to them, and sadly they didn’t have the opportunity to see this book in their name.”
Let me just give you a bit of time to process all that information you’ve just read before placing it into context with this article.
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I don’t know, I didn’t really look too much into these celebrities and I have to say that I feel a bit bad to have a certain thought here and there over the years, but after watching this (documentary on the link above) the second biggest thing after the abuse that stood out was this, “This woman is smart, to have come so far, she’s smart.” I think to make an opinion about people you should learn about them, read what they say, watch what they did or do and see if there is something you can find on their genuine conversations. It was pretty hard when it came to this girl/woman, she (in the article on the link above) covered it all up and played a character pretty well. I have a lot of respect for her, and one thing for sure that I took note of is that people don’t often see how your day goes i.e. in and out, day to day to have the presence you have, to have the money you have, to why you say what you say, to have come where you are today. We read what the news gives us, we see what the news shows us, and we don’t ask questions.
The thing is that I believe that Generation X women can really relate here, whether you’re blond, white, Indian, coloured or African in whichever country you live in. I mean for me, in the article on the link I didn’t really get it i.e. that blond girl dilemma, blond girl jokes, and how the blond girl label forces a person to get back in the box so to say, only days after processing it, it made sense. How ingrained must that be or feel when you’re born blond, healthy, sorry I mean in a wealthy family (or for the matter of fact in any family) who already thought through your destiny, but what if I tell you that many women in Generation X have been playing the “dumb blond” stereotype even if they’re not blond?
Once, I was met with a situation, maybe I was tired of being a different woman each time for guys who had a crush on me and me on them and then I believe in the year two thousand and nine I said enough, and then I thought, how can I say enough when I know to keep a job which I like and can do better at needs me to play some stupid games and tricks because if I really show my genius I will be gunned down. So I started to play stupid and I guess I ended up gunning myself down, because there was a catch twenty-two, if I stayed my smart self, I’d be gunned down by someone else and if I stayed stupid (didn’t see this one coming until it happened) I gunned myself down. – T. Dench Patel, 28 September 2020, 16:22
I realise that the world doesn’t like smart people so it’s best to just play stupid, and the same thing happened eventually in my romantic relationship, I couldn’t keep up anymore, and I was torn from choosing between the smart girl or becoming the dumb girl, then I slowly escalated into the dumb girl persona, and by then the game was just too powerful that I got sucked in. Politics help patriots to strengthen the force against foreigners, a power that one person from the relationship can’t win no matter how hard they try as a foreigner. – T. Dench Patel, 28 September 2020, 16:27
The boss doesn’t like your smartness because it causes the whole office to stir so might as well stop teaching you from the third month on, the colleague doesn’t like your smartness because she/he wants to look smart all the time and what happens, the entire business loses out. This game is the reason why a woman hopes to find a man of/with more substance, why people can start a business that they can call their own because they are all too familiar with the game. You either play the game or you get sucked in (it’s only a matter of time when it catches up with someone) and so the question is, how many people do you know that don’t play games? How do you know the next person you meet isn’t already playing one?
So here I was, out of the relationship with domestic violence in the year two thousand and fourteen, and this is what I realised. All my knowledge was outdated, all the knowledge I was filled with were things around football, the teams and my soccer knowledge was that of an extension of my ex-partner, the knowledge about all his nonsense that had no substance sat inside me. What did I do and learn for myself in four years? Practically nothing, all that I knew, all who I knew, all that I was once aligned to, all that I had as a “go-to,” my social skills, my social life and all that I used to fill myself up with to remain positive and full was replaced with rubbish that had no substance or proof of being any good for me. I was out of the game completely and when you out of the game completely, you have to get up and rebuild “all-overs” again. This we know is not easy at all. Anyone who comes out/came out of domestic violence or any kind of abuse understands what this means.
I remember one time I liked this one guy so much that I wished I could just be myself and thought it was too late. Deep down inside I was the girl he was looking for but I was all too familiar with the tactics of our world that when the short-lived relationship ended I said to myself, “What if I was just me?”
So world, can we build this world around true geniuses so that no one needs to play a game to fit in a box while they wait to live the life they desire living only so that they can live their entire life out of the box so that they have full control of situations that won’t force them into going back into that box or in another one?
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comment section below.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by purchasing my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to re-evaluate them.
