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| Shine brighter than a diamond |
Last week, I was at a "girls’ night out", and we were discussing self-confidence, I didn’t get a chance to speak due to time however, and so I have decided to come share what I learnt; my insecurities and how I overcame them.
Growing up as a child, I was
always called 'Oh Mary Mary Kampala', usually in a sing song manner. This habit
actually started from my nursery two class teacher. It spread fast, and a lot of people
picked up the habit. I didn’t really understand what was wrong with me and why
people would seek to make fun of me, as I was 'daddy’s girl' and I got all the
love in the world from him. As I grew, I started seeing myself in the mirror, I
started realizing that I had different skin colours on me; some part of me was
yellow (which is my actual colour) and some part of me was dark, like really
dark. I had brown discolorations and I had dark, more like black patches on me.
I then understood that I was different. It actually didn’t bother me as such
because I had my family around me and they always made me feel better.
However, upon getting
into secondary school it became a big issue for me, as I was in a boarding
school. A roommate relocated from my room to another because she didn’t like
the way I looked. I tried every cure that was given to me, nothing worked;
rather, I started getting worse. I would have sudden discolorations on my face,
arms, legs, thorax that wasn’t there before and they wouldn’t leave. I started
to cry a lot and felt kind of depressed. When my parents asked me why I was
sad, I found it hard to tell them for reasons beyond me. I was angry. I was
angry at my dad; I was angry at myself for being ‘ugly’. I could see my parents putting effort to make
me feel and look better but it wasn’t helping matters, rather it depressed me
even more. I have had people call me a tiger, I have issues wearing certain
outfits or even rubbing white powder. I had issues with being comfortable
around girls because they would always ask questions that I couldn’t answer.
Basically, being
different hurt. Asides that, I was short and skinny. I kind of grew to become
average height, but I haven’t got fat. Everyone is always bugging me about my
size, either jokingly or intentionally. It always hurt. So, how did/do I cope? Sometimes
I like to feel like I have the solution locked down. Maybe I do, maybe not.