Out of curiosity and also guilt over my own coffee intake. I wanna ask:
Now I'm not talking about when you're studying and so you drink 3x the usual amount or something like that. This isn't me asking what your record is. I'm talking about the most basic, average day, how many coffees you drink?
“I was very, very emotionally avoidant. I strictly emotionally avoided everything my whole twenties. I was catching up with my sister the other day, and I was like, ‘I think from the way that we were raised, I think we were taught that we have to earn love.’ Instead of it being an unconditional thing or that being an unconditional entity. I’m not saying it is that.
I don’t know whether that comes from that African upbringing, that strict upbringing: get your grades, get into a good uni, become a doctor, become a lawyer. Start overachieving. It was like you have to prove why you’re lovable. We’re trained to be like, ‘If I’m not exceptional, I won’t be loved.’ Certainly, I think that was my thing.
So, yeah, I think I’m just learning now like, ‘Oh, you are allowed to be loved.’ You don’t have to be excellent or aspire to that term, ‘Black excellence’. What the hell? There’s so much white mediocrity that gets celebrated, and Black people, we have to be absolutely flawless to get half of [that] anyway. So, I’m slowly training myself out of that and being like, ‘No shit. You deserve love just for existing.’ And that has taught me to be a lot more loving as well, in a weird way.”
NCUTI GATWA
photographed by Melanie Lehmann for Attitude Magazine (May/June 2024)
some people on tumblr are really like "of course i love female characters! which is why i ship this girlboss and malewife. men get pegged by powerful woman! i'm calling this m/f ship yuri. this canonically male character is a woman to me but not in a transfem way and i'm not exploring it further. yeah i love lesbians uhhh i'll headcanon background character #9 as a lesbian because she doesn't get in the way of my ship. lol ew why do you ship blorba and blorbette together when blorbette is canonically married to a man? no i don't actually have a favorite female character because all fictional women are poorly written!"