Unlearning to Learn:
I came across the quote on your left two years ago and before I stumbled across that quote, the concept of unlearning had never crossed my mind. However, the moment I read that quote, I understood what it meant, as life had thrust me into one of its many unexpected plot twists, and I found myself mentally challenging my long-held beliefs about life and (what I will term) culture, and going as far as asking the almighty question, ‘why?’
If you are anything like me, when life ‘happens to you’, you question things. I liken it to being in a boat and suddenly finding yourself in a stormy turbulence. Your boat is being rocked this way and that, on the verge of capsizing, what do you do? You look at the things in your boat and ask questions like, ‘do I need this?’, ‘is this helpful to me?’ and if you decide that you don’t need it or that it isn’t helpful to you, you toss it out for your safety and survival. And that it how it is with unlearning certain beliefs and behaviours you and I have picked up along the way, we get to a point in our lives where we query their usefulness and benefit to us.
One thing I am unlearning, is my identity as a woman, especially as an African woman steeped in religious culture. For the longest time I believed the what mattered for a woman was that she was beautiful, chaste and chosen (had a man), anything outside of this is a failure by cultural and religious standards. A woman was not expected to have an opinion, a voice, ambition, and she did not own her body. This was what I was told in subtle and not so subtle ways. This was the version of womanhood that was portrayed to me as the norm, the wallflower woman or even worse the wilted flower woman.
However, being swept into a stormy turbulence, I had to look this belief of mine in the eye, and not stopping there, I poked at it tirelessly and relentlessly with the frenzy of questions that buzzed in my mind. I walked down memory-lane and examined what being that type of woman had gotten me, what were the benefits of living as this restricted, mundane woman. The answer, nothing. Being the wilted or wallflower woman was never intended for my benefit, or protection but for the benefit and protection of the ones who would be threatened when I walk in the fullness of all I am and all I was created to be.
Another thing I am in the process of unlearning is fear, and by this I mean the fear of putting myself out there and trying new things. As motivational speaker, Les Brown succinctly put it, “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” I see fear as that fake friend that wants me to think she is protecting me but actually, what she is doing is hurting me with every ‘wise’ counsel she gives, and even though I suspect she is hurting me, I keep listening to her anyway!
I have been reading Jen Sincero’s YOU are a BADASS ® (I highly recommend it by the way) and somewhere in there she wrote on how we are all born fearless but we were taught fear as we got older, she writes, “When they were raising you, your parents in a genuine effort to protect you and educate you and love you with all their hearts (hopefully), passed on the beliefs they learned from their parents, who learned from their parents, who learned from their parents…”. So, since fear is something that is taught (learnt) therefore it can be unlearnt and that is the journey I have intentionally put myself on.
However, I know that fear’s putrid influence will not disappear in one magic whoosh, no, unlearning fear is a process; a one foot in front of the other sort-of thing.
This journey of unlearning is about separating the wheat from the chaff, and separating the superficial from the substance. As we continue to do this, our boats will get lighter, our focus will get sharper, and our true selves will shine brighter.
