“If you are traveling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your mask first, and then help the other person.” The first time I heard this instruction on a plane, I thought it was extremely counterintuitive. As a pre-teen, the idea of prioritizing your own safety over helping a child made no…
“Maybe she was just having a really bad day,” Jude said as I grumbled about the unfriendly cashier at the supermarket. We’d run into her frosty attitude more than once, but on every occasion, Jude assumed she was ‘having a bad day’ and encouraged me to do the same. Instead of getting stuck on…
“Go home, Ni**a!” some guy yelled as he drove by us one afternoon. Jude and I were taking our daily fine-weather walks to finally explore the area we lived, almost two years after moving there. We were often couch potatoes, enjoying the comfort of our four white walls and the environment barely motivated us…
I used to be a serial overthinker. And in my bid to try to find solutions to as many problems as I could, I turned to Google. I spent hours digging into symptoms that didn‘t exist and more often than not, Mr Google rushed me straight to the emergency room. When I started doing…
“Didn’t you say you’d skip the next edition?” Nkechi asked. With my bloodshot eyes and grumbling stomach, I was racing to edit and publish an edition of the 'Thinking Out Loud' newsletter on LinkedIn before the end of the month. “I have a few minutes to spare,” I answered. “I might as well just…
“Do bad people ever admit that they are bad?” I spent a lot of time as a child asking myself questions like this. Now that I’m much older, I realise everyone has their perspectives on good and evil and the word “bad” is relative. Regardless of perspectives, do we ever take stock of our…
“I took some pictures when I was at the Aurlandsfjord in Norway last summer. But the pictures only captured a tiny piece of the beauty that the Aurlandsfjord is, and no one will ever truly understand the depth of beauty until they go there themselves.“ Murphy explained. We were talking about our last vacation…
“She has a skin like me” - these were the words of my three-year-old niece as she described a friend she made at her new school. Children her age make friends quite quickly but for some reason, she was overjoyed about this one.Her statement got me thinking a lot about how much impact inclusion…
"If I had the necessary requirements to carry and birth children myself, I would have probably done that too" - Mike said. This was over three years ago during an interview for my thesis on gender roles. But those words still live rent-free in my mind. This month, my family marked 12 years of my dad's…
“Now, it’s my turn to tell you stories,” Molly said as she settled into the empty train seat beside me. For over an hour, the seat was occupied by Fred, a tourist who shared more information about Dresden with me than I’ve learned in over three years of living there. “Fred tells me you’ve…
