Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent”. In the last six to seven months I have been reflecting on that statement. It is a statement worth repeating to oneself during this prolonged pandemic. I first heard it when I was in high school, I struggled with maths quite a bit, though other subjects seem to come easier. I could never get my head around the math I wanted so badly because all my guy friends were in the math class. We laughed together about many things, I enjoyed being one of the boys. But in math class I wasn’t and my boys let me know it and it broke my heart every time. One day while I was sitting sulking my math teacher said to me no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
During the pandemic many things big and small have broken our hearts but based on conversation by people, the worst of those heartbreaks aren’t loss but betrayal. Little acts of unkindness, when friends turn and in some cases foe. These feel worse to us because this time where we seem to need people more than ever.
I read a fascinating New York Times article about a young woman who felt abandoned by her friends during the pandemic so she started something called no more lonely friends. What a wonderful idea to take our hurt and turn it into something positive. For me, reading it brought me back to Ms Roosevelt and her statement. Where actions by other people hurt us, be an unkind word, a lack of caring or simply not returning our calls or texts or being there in our darkest hour – these patterns of behaviour, little innocuous things that crush you. Often we carry those hurts, giving them permission to break our hearts every time.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. So why do we keep giving these people power to hurt us? To show us more and more that they don’t care about us? We do it because we don’t want to take accountability for the role we play. There is only one thing within our control – that is how we react. How we react to things around us is us taking responsibility for our emotions. We can control how someone makes us feel but often don’t want to, we don’t want to take back consent – because that might mean that these people don’t actually care.
I have started building these systems for myself that really helped me manage how I react, how I look at things. There’s a lot of compartmentalizing which works for me because 2021 has been particularly terrible for me but I refuse to let it be the narrative of my life. So I build systems to manage the moments.
We live in a world of problems and everyone has their fair share of it. Personally I think it’s better to find moments of kindness than unkindness – but that’s just me. Most people’s anger or pain will intentionally or unintentionally hurt everything in their path. Some regret and they repent. I am a big believer in forgiveness, I try to give it often and freely, there is no peace in holding onto things. Giving forgiveness means I don’t want to give people consent to hurt me.
I don’t want someone’s callous words or silence to break my heart, tiny heartbreaks hurt because they come every day, I learnt. There is a lovely saying in Yoruba, which loosely translates as “you know who you love but you don’t know who loves you”. Ain’t that the truth. People can be so easy with their I love you, so careless even. But you don’t know who loves you. So do we choose to over emphasise our importance in someone else’s life? Especially in this time of the pandemic, where the entire world seems to be conspiring to hurt us and keep us down in some many ways. Why would you want to give people consent to hurt you by thinking you are important to them? Why would you allow yourself to be disrespected in that way?
People shouldn’t have the benefit of your heartbreak or your tears, not when the world is burning. You shouldn’t give them consent to make you feel inferior. You are fully in charge of how you react. It is a long pandemic and we cannot be out here dealing with C+ nigg*z and basic b*tches.