Different Sides, Same Coin
Hiii Beloved reader,
I have this thing where every little note stems from something repeatedly running through my mind, or from several completely different occurrences somehow leading me to one central theme, so to speak. This last week has been one of those, and the theme, for lack of a better word, was similarities and differences.
A show — okay, a micro-series, if I am being honest 😂 — first got me thinking about how, as humans, we are completely different and yet somehow remarkably similar. But as human nature would have it, we tend to discard the glaring similarities we share and instead nitpick the small differences.
Let me paint a picture for you.
There is no human experience that is as unique as we convince ourselves it is. It doesn’t matter whether your skin colour, gender, social status or finances are different from the person next to you. There are certain experiences that nobody really escapes, apart from the usual death, ofc 😑 — loss, celebration, heartbreak, joy, elevation, disappointment, longing, fear, love. You get the point I am trying to make.
And it isn’t just in the huge things. It’s in the small things too.
You may assume nobody else has peed in the shower 😂, or that nobody else has been promoted and absolutely loves it but secretly misses being present and available, or that nobody else has an unending loop of detrimental thoughts running through their head at 2 a.m. 😑.
We love to assume it is just us who have gone through what we have. And I don’t refute that our experiences are deeply personal because we all react and behave differently. But as sure as the sun will rise in the east, somebody else has gone through something remarkably similar.
I like to think of it as a story house.
Each phase of our life is a separate story, a different room almost. In each phase, there are people who belong to that particular era of your life — people who can relate deeply to you because they are living through a similar chapter. Then you move into the next room and, inevitably, someone else appears.
The house is completely specific to your life, but the architecture is strangely familiar.
And maybe that is the funny thing about us. We are all innately similar, going through some heavy good things and some heavy not-so-good things, and yet we have this tendency to focus almost exclusively on the differences.
Sometimes difference is even psychologically satisfying because difference gives us an “us” and a “them.”
And suddenly, gender wars make a little more sense.
Because underneath all the arguments about men and women, both male and female, we still want genuine connection. We want solid people in our corners. We want to be loved, understood, desired, chosen. We want someone to call when life is doing the absolute most.
Yet soko ni chafu so bad, and neither side — rightfully so 😂 — is willing to focus on the one inconvenient fact that it’s human nature kutaka mtu 😂.
We were genuinely not meant to move through this life alone. I mean, even animals, who have less intricate emotions than us, mate. Though, if we are being honest, hiyo yao is mainly for procreation, but you gerrit 😂.
Our stories are so intertwined, and yet we keep finding ways to separate ourselves.
Look at us as Kenyans. They will still run it down our throats that the Kikuyu, or that Turkana, or that Giriama is somehow not like you. Or that man’s 🤢 (derogatory) new idea of claiming Burundians are somehow immigrants, yet we share the same passport 🤷🏽♀️.
We do this everywhere.
We take the differences and make them so distinct that we forget that, at the end of the day, we are all one piece of a mega-scale puzzle.
And perhaps that is why loneliness has become such a strange epidemic among humans. We have never had more ways to connect, and yet we have become exceptionally good at convincing ourselves that nobody could possibly understand us.
But sometimes, all it takes is a story to remind you otherwise.
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Truly, one of the reasons I enjoy disappearing into the pages of books is because they keep reminding me that the walls we imagine between ourselves are often much thinner than we think.
- Before Your Memory Fades taught me that grief in Japan doesn’t vary that much from my own.
- Tomorrow Died Yesterday taught me that politics in Nigeria and Kenya differ only in time — tusipojiangalia 😭.
- The Attack taught me that the questions I have about religion are not mine alone; that somewhere, someone whose life looks completely different from mine can be wrestling with some of the exact same questions.
- The Year of Yes taught me that I am not the only ambitious woman who hates putting herself out there. Paradoxical, I know 😑😭😂.
And that, to me, is the beauty of stories.
They take someone you have been taught to categorise as “them” and quietly reveal the “you” in them.
You have been scared.
I have been scared.
You have wanted to be loved.
I have wanted to be loved.
You have wondered whether you’re doing enough.
I have wondered whether I’m doing enough.
The differences remain.But they stop being walls.
We each build this enormous, wildly specific house out of our experiences. The wallpaper is different. The furniture is different. The people who occupy each room change. Some rooms we never want to enter again.
But the architecture is strangely familiar.
Maybe that is the part we keep forgetting.
There is an individual uniqueness of course. Our particular lives are. Our circumstances are. Our stories are. But the emotions underneath them? The longing, the fear, the grief, the joy, the need to belong, the need to be loved?
Those are far less unique than we think.
And perhaps the whole us-versus-them argument, in whatever setting we find it, only does more harm than good. Because if we are constantly looking for the differences, how do we ever get close enough to see the similarities?
Maybe we need to question the walls before we start defending them.
Anyways, the entire point of this little ramble of mine — I say that a lot, huh 😂 — is simply this:
We are far more alike than we give ourselves permission to believe.
And maybe we should spend a little more time looking for the things that make us feel less alone, and a little less time accentuating the differences that make separation so easy.
As the year comes to an end, I hope we remember that the people around us are not as unknowable as we sometimes imagine. Beneath the different names, countries, beliefs, identities and circumstances, there is still so much that is familiar.
May the last part of your year be glorious. May we not let the vested interests of a few cloud our lens or distort our perspective on this floating rock we call home.
With love, gratitude and joy,
🌸Kat Kinoti🌸
