By Masingita Masunga
I’ve come to realise that sometimes we don’t love people for who they truly are; we love them for who we want them to be.
We create versions of people in our minds — versions that make sense to us, that fit our expectations, that affirm what we believe about them, and, sometimes, versions we can control.
Then they transform and grow beyond the identity we gave them. They begin to think differently, choose differently, speak differently, set boundaries, question things, and become more fully themselves.
Boom suddenly, we treat them as a problem.
We take it personally. We judge them differently. We become uncomfortable because the person standing before us no longer fits the version we created and, so they can no longer be controlled by our expectations or validated by our opinions of who they should be.
But people are not one-dimensional.
We are not meant to remain the same just to keep other people comfortable.
We are allowed to evolve, unlearn, heal, and change our minds to discover parts of ourselves we had never met before.
We have the right to become someone our past selves and even the people around us may not recognise.
There is no growth in being confined to one version of ourselves.
This makes me wonder: if we cannot handle individual transformation, how do we expect to create structural and institutional transformation?
Transformation begins with us.
You cannot give what you do not have.
We cannot demand freedom while needing others to remain who we want them to be. We cannot talk about liberation while punishing people for becoming free.
Our journeys are unique.
Just because mine looks different from yours does not make mine wrong. Just because my growth challenges your perception of me does not mean I have lost my way.
Maybe the real work is learning to love people without needing to possess their identity, witness their becoming without trying to manage it and let people be more than the version of them that made us comfortable.
Loving someone means having the courage to let them become who they are, not who we need them to be.
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