It Is Mentally Exhausting To Do What Others Want You To Do – Chimamanda Adichie

Chronic feminist, Chimamanda Adichie has advised women to wear whatever pleases them.

She revealed this in a recent interview with CNN’s special program on Africa, “African Voices.”

She shared that it is vital for women to not do anything to make others happy.

Her words, “Wear what you want to wear. I say that as kind of a joke. But in a larger sense, I think it would be, don’t think you have to do what people want you to do. Increasingly, in part of growing older for me, I’m 41, and when I was 30, when I was 27, I think I was a lot more invested in kind of thinking about what people expected and what people wanted. And I think it’s mentally exhausting to do that.

“And, you take away from yourself, the energy that you could have used to do things that are actually meaningful to you. Now, I feel old and wise and I would say to that younger version of myself, and actually, I’ll say also to young women all over the world to, it’s so important not to think that you have to perform for somebody else. It’s really important to, what I like to call own yourself,”

“Both men and women suffer from the illnesses that lead to suicide but it is men that have a much higher rate of dying by suicide. Why? Because men are socialized to suppress so many human parts of themselves, men are socialized not to ask for help, men are socialized to be afraid of fear, men are socialized not to show vulnerability. From the moment we tell a little boy that ‘boys don’t cry’ or we tell a hurting teenager to ‘man up’ we are creating an adult man who will be cheated of the full range of his emotions. So, while men benefit from patriarchy, they also suffer from it.”

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