Pole Pole

 I've never been more awake. That's kinda bad, because I have to work in a few hours. Yet here I am.

I spent the last month in Tanzania. Nah, I'm not here to brag. I'm here to write another masterpiece for the future generation to learn from my mistakes, as so it seems it took me thrity-one and a half years to do so myself. I thought I paid for a vacation, but it turned out to be a three-week therapy. Never play Never have I ever with me again, you'll lose.

Have you ever turned a maasai into your own personal psychologist? I have. Let's start from the beginning. I started the trip with a head full of confusing thoughts on past romances, current disasters and worries about the future. That's kind of my normal mental state, so I didn't give it any importance. All those things that I've written about, all my anger from my previous post, everything I couldn't get over - gone now. During the first week of my stay, I visited a maasai village. Best fuckin decision ever. Not sure if it was the African Sun or the cow poop that made my tiny little brain get to work, but something definitely started there and then. I spent half an hour talking about relationships with a maasai guy whose house we visited. He explained how things work in his tribe - the chief has fourteen wives and sixty-five children, #NotYourEverydayMaasai. It's pretty common now in the younger generations to have less wives (not a surprise, who the hell can handle that many women on their periods), but still, they can and do have multiple. According to him (and he didn't dare to say anything else), the wives get along. The husbands sleep with a different wife every night, but in order. So it means the chief sees the first wife every two weeks for a night. Pretty much the same availability as any European guy has in their dating schedule, they just choose a different marketing strategy. So then he asked if I was married - hah - no - why. Well, I just said it was complicated over here and people don't want to commit to each other. He said it was because of jealousy - if men had more wives, there would be no space for it at all. I doubt that a man here would ever reach fourteen, considering that they are around fifty when they start to think about marriage, but let's take a look at it anyway. Would it really be worse to know for sure that your husband is seeing someone else too, than not knowing it and calling it cheating when you find out? He saw desperation in our eyes, so he offered to marry both of us right at the scene for twenty cows each (at least now I finally know my exact worth), and honestly I wouldn't mind being officially one family with the friend I traveled with. Either way, we declined the offer. That might have been my chance to grab and stop whining about being single, but oh well. I don't know what my parents would do with twenty skinny cows with a hump. We digged deeper and I told him how relationships crap out over here and how it became the women's job to seduce men and trick them into marriage. He was shocked. Not the fake-kinda-shocked as all men around here pretend to be when you talk about this topic, but really surprised by the fact that men don't play their part. At least we now know that they still have one in another continent. After the conversation, he cleaned our shoes and waved goodbye.

That's when my brain went like okay, hold my gin tonic, I gotta get to work. I started to re-evaluate all my experiences. All the shit I tolerated. The ways I let them treat me. The things I closed my eyes to, because compromise and whatnot. No.

No.

Why do we make things okay that are very far from being okay? Why do we want to stop being women and let men be princesses that need to be rescued? Why do we let them hesitate about what they want from us? And we're perfectly comfortable sitting around, waiting for them to decide if they even want us.

No.

Since I've experienced what it's like to walk on a white sand beach with a male companion that picked up every single broken shell from the way just so I don't accidentally step on one - needless to say the bar is set much higher. This is not a summer love story. There was no romance. This is not fiction. Shit's real. Honestly, I left Europe running around with unworthy men and crying about losses from years ago, and came back as someone you won't even have the chance to mess with. No, there are no broken shells in Luxembourg, but there are doors that sometimes I don't really want to hold for men. I don't always want to be looked at as someone that you need to be afraid of, that she's on a date with you for your money. I have my own money. I can pay for my own dinner. That's why I take myself out for a dinner from time to time. But when you ask me out, I take it as an in-vi-ta-tion, shocking. Yes, the money thing still bugs me. I'm tired to be looked at as a gold digger, especially when there's not even gold to dig. Chill, man, I'm only dating you for your lovely personality. Which would show, if this was out of question. If two twenty-something maasai students could open their wallets in Zanzibar, so can you. I now chose to be a woman. I refuse to tolerate things I'm not okay with. So should you. Let's stop normalizing women fighting for men's attention. Because no matter how we look at it, that's why we all post that insta-story selfie. Otherwise, how else would the conversation start between you and the current love of your life. But that's probably a conversation that should never start anyway. We literally get naked for men to look at us and decide if they would do us the favor. I'm old enough to remember a time when it was a big deal for a woman to show her ankle, yet still got marriage proposals. We're twisting the shit out of the roles.

Returning was hard. Being surrounded by the same people that made me feel sick to my stomach was hard. Finding out what happened while I was gone was harder. If there's one thing I've taken back with me from my trip, it wasn't the souvenirs, but the hakuna matata. I know it doesn't really show from above, but the anger's really gone and a lot of things became crystal clear just by having those conversations. I learnt to appreciate the people that treat me well a lot more. I learnt that being nice and friendly with everyone you meet goes a long way. I learnt that most of the problems you have are generated in your head and can be erased by changing mindset. I learnt that you can be happy anywhere, even if you have nothing. I learnt to let go. I've never been more awake.

And I fell irrevocably in love with the maasai.

Until next time,

V