A small life
Reading “We Meant Well” by Canadian author Erum Shazia Hasan. There is this passage in this marvelous book where the protagonist, an intellectual, successful, early 30-something, female, aid worker in a fictitious African state is being dumped.
I often vilify the male that dares to dump the female
..because she’s successful but in this case, I’m disarmed. I see the roles reversed sometimes but for different reasons. In the lives of female friends, they are often the ones leaving because they choose to not lead a small life. And the partner wishes to stay. To have a comfortable life in a home that’s filled with children in a suburban home. The passage starts,
Couldn’t we be human and super human at the same time? Why did one have to be severed for the other?”
Her leaving-boyfriend says with a stone cold face,
This love, I don’t want to hold you back. But I don’t want to be held back either. This love, it will take us to a small place, a small flat, in a small city with a small child. I don’t want to live a small life.
As I messaged my some very successful female friends who are younger and currently single. I asked them whether they have experienced this tension between choosing love and being self-actualized in not wanting a small life.
The sacrifices have been deep.
However, they were not rejecting love. They simply recognized that love requires two people to make different sacrifices and a willingness to make them.
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The comparison and use of ‘small’ is a frightening concept for me. To say that anyone would be living less than their potential would be
a life less fulfilling.
I’ve recently embarked on a journey to write my first book: an illustrated children’s book. This has been an ambitious new adventure and this passage flies in the face of being labelled living less than my potential.*
The beautiful writing of the author repeats small. Small as a house. Small as a life. Would my life be one predestined or confined? Perhaps simply un-small.
