“While coming out of shame and guilt, I had a lot of rage burning in me.” —Arinze Ifeakandu
After I finished this book I was like I need to start therapy. I remember telling my writer friends that writing actually does help a lot in terms of dealing with things but therapy is better. I remember writing like Mother’s Love and I had written it around the period when I had just traveled for my masters. So, there were unresolved emotions of things that were going on and I remember I would write sections of that story in my room and sometimes burst out crying. It was a huge thing for me. I think for me part of that was rage sort of married with sadness. Because the rage comes not necessarily from seeing what people around me have done to me and the people like me. But in seeing the ways in which they are capable of being better and the ways that they are failing to be better. I look around and I’m like we’re quite like wonderful people, we are so joyful. There’s all these wonderful qualities and people you love to spend time with. To be more specific, for a very long time all my life I’ve been a choir boy and lot of my relationships and part of my identity also comes from being an Anglican choir member. So, there’s this sense of community that I have and there’s a love that forms from that. Then being told all your life that you’re a crime or a sin and that all your existence and of course, you’re fighting that.
I remember when I was a teenager in my early teens, I would like a boy or write love letters and I will still go and be like God my love with this boy please change me Lord. Putting yourself through unnecessary guilt and unnecessary shame. So, when I had to come out of all that, there was a lot of rage. There was a lot of rage but there was also sadness. I couldn’t quite stay angry. I’ll look at him and see the ways in which they were better in other corners of their lives and I’m like why can’t you be better in this area of life. My biggest frustration was that there were people who needed to get new information. These people are not necessarily bad people but they have been told a lot of rubbish in churches and they are holding up to that rubbish. They don’t even want to listen to this new information. So, the door is already closed to us and that for me was really a source of sadness. I think writing these stories was like a way of sort pushing it with those complex emotion.
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