The morning I stopped performing straightness and what happened at breakfast
For twelve years I calibrated every gesture, every sentence, every laugh. Then one Tuesday I forgot. What followed was not what I expected — from my family or from myself.
What my mother's silence taught me about love
She didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She made tea. That, I eventually understood, was its own kind of answer.
I prayed to be different. Then I stopped.
There was a specific kind of prayer — earnest, desperate, nightly — that I kept up for three years. When it stopped working, I had to decide what to do with God.
On being called a phase by someone who has known me thirty years
The word "phase" does a lot of work. Let me unpack what it actually does — to the person saying it, and to the person hearing it.
Writing queer in a language that doesn't have the words
Kiswahili is precise about many things. It is not precise about this. I had to learn to write around the gaps — and eventually through them.
The first time I held hands in public and didn't let go
It was just a hand. It was everything. I want to tell you exactly what that felt like.
Learning to dress for myself after years of dressing for safety
Clothes are armour. Then one day you realise you don't want to be armoured anymore.
Why I started talking about this in public, and what I did not expect
I thought the hardest part would be saying it the first time. It wasn't. Here is what visibility actually costs — and why I keep paying it.
The colleague who guessed and what I said when he did
He didn't ask. He just said it matter-of-factly, over lunch. And I had to decide, in that moment, who I wanted to be.
My grandmother knew before I did — and she kept my secret for twelve years
She called it "the way you look at the sky." I never asked her to explain what she meant. I didn't need to.