The Inbetweeners

The concept of innocence is an interesting one; legally and socially speaking. For the latter, it is in the eye of the beholder and, as a result, it is malleable in light of demographic data (race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability) and unconscious bias. Think about how members of marginalised communities are more likely to be seen as guilty than as innocent ( Gross, Possley and Stephens, 2017 ) ( Driscol, 2018 ) As a result, there is a feeling that "societal" innocence must be earned;  like you would earn a treat for a job well done or like a slice of cake your cheat day.  Conversely, legal innocence functions as a pre-existing right. - i.e. it is  not earned. Innocence is, without getting into too many details, generally presumptive (i.e. innocent until proven guilty ) and extensive (i.e. it will always be, legally speaking, presumed).  Despite their differences both types of innocence concern themselves with the same question, in theory - who is to blam...

Hello! I'm back and this time, I will attempt to be less melodramatic and more reflective (or in the very least, inject melodrama into my reflections or vice verse).  Clearly, when I, last, wrote about my failures, I was hurting. Truth be told, I've never been rejected from anything before. Like Ariana Grande, "I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it." Not because I was spoiled though. Some of it was sheer dumb luck. Some of it was using my belief that if someone told me why they said no, we could work on the objections together to propel me towards the eventual 'yes'. But, truthfully, most of it was cowardice. I never asked for anything or tried anything that even hinted at failure. As such, I never learned how to believe in myself, never learned to back myself and, relevantly here, never learned how to pick myself back up. A perfect example of this would be my past romantic entanglements; I never, explicitly , showed interest in a potential partne...

They say that you haven't failed, you've simply found one way that doesn't work. Or that Eddison said that "I haven't failed, I've just found 10000 ways that don't work." Or that neither success nor failure is final or fatal. Or, to bring it home, that failure is just part of your 'come up'. But I think we, if not I, gloss over the fact that failing at something feels shitty. Perhaps it's my depression talking, but failing at something is soul-crushing. Yet, when we look at the highlight reel of our lives, we view failure in light of what comes next (which is, hopefully, success). From a biological perspective, this makes sense. We tend to forget things that hurt after a while (for example, I have forgotten what it felt like to be burned by the oven whilst making chicken nuggets). But what happens when you are met with failure, after failure? What do you do when your failure begets more failure? To contextualise, a little bit about me...

Before I begin, I'd like to preface this post wit several notices; My keyboard is slowly dying on me, so certain keys don't work (in particular "g", "h" and the apostrophe symbol. In the editing process, I did try to fix what I could ( unsponsored shoutout to GRAMMARLY for being the OG ), but if I didn't et them all, please be understanding. Or you could have some fun with it, and pretend you're Maura from Love Island :)  Second, as you read this, try to be empathetic and understanding. Read it completely , then comment  with respect . 

I recently posted, what I thought to be a relatively benign, status on Facebook. It read; Condoms should be sold; sanitary pads should be given for free. Sex is a choice. Menstruation is not...young girls are suffering. I posted this because I had, recently, read an article in the Daily Nation that said that young girls are resorting to prostitution in order to be able to afford sanitary pads. Prostitution, for me, is not the issue. The issue lies in the absence of a state mechanism to help these girls get the resources they need and the ubiquity of those mechanisms worldwide. It lies in the general treatment of menstruation by social bodies (governments and doctors for example), which informs the absence of the necessary mechanisms.  Hence, the status spoke to me; because there was evidence of this suffering. Yet, soon after I posted this, two people raised the fact that one should not be provided, for free, at the expense of the other and that both are equally important. As...

Hello one and all! As I write this, I am 40,000 ft in the air as I fly back to University, numbed by the exhilaration and fear elicited by flying and a healthy gin and tonic, and I can’t help but reflect on the state of Christianity and Christian culture; particularly about the inheritance, into Christian culture, of certain notions about disenfranchised groups in society. Now, all this was brought on by a documentary series called The Ascent of Woman (available on Netflix and comes highly recommended by me). This documentary focuses more on the creation of “woman” as a social construct, than on her biological formation and I am thoroughly enjoying it. As I rewatch the first episode, titled Civilisation , an important point was raised; about how the women in Ancient Greece were treated as well as the women in Afghanistan at the height of the Taliban. With this treatment, social notions about the inferiority of women accompanied and justified this treatment. For those who weren’t...

Do I seem like the type of person that you can easily walk all over? Like the type of person whose purpose in life is to be used; to be a springboard for others in preparation for bigger and greater things? Do I seem like the type of person unworthy of genuine affection? Be it by my own hand, or an inability to recognise and relate to my brand of humanity? Perhaps I am being a bit, melodramatic reader. Don't you think? What could have led to this harrowing portrayal of sadness you ask? Well, dear friend... good ol' fashion, character-building rejection. See, most people take rejection a lot easier than I ever will or ever could. For me rejection is a mark upon my conscience; it signals to me that I am not wanted and it feeds into my pathological insecurities. Especially when the rejection comes in the wake of emotional vulnerability and honesty, which is a rare colour on me.  Rejection tells me that it's better to be silent than to be vocal about how y...