Recently, I attended an event about living your dream life, a topic that usually ignites my interest. But, that morning, my inner grinch was out in force. ‘Yeah, yeah, heard it all before. Life’s not that simple, is it?’ 2018 had felt like a long year, and I was frustrated about all the things I hadn’t got round to doing.
The speaker was Tererai Trent, a leading voice in women’s empowerment. Five minutes in, an unexpected emotion engulfed me; humility. Trent, who grew up in rural Zimbabwe, had yearned to go to school, but it was forbidden because of her gender. At 14, she was married off in exchange for a cow. ‘A frickin’ cow!’ By 21, now living with a violent husband and pregnant with her fifth child, an NGO worker asked: ‘What are your dreams?’ No one had ever posed this question to her before. ‘I want to go to America, get a degree, then a PhD.’ Given her lack of schooling and the fact that she’d never seen a plane, this sounded improbable. Yet, through sheer courage and perseverance, she achieved it all, and more.
“As humans, we’re wired for comfort, to stick with the familiar. We love certainty”