Diriye Osman Quotes

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There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you're a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it's about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful.
Diriye Osman Quotes: There may not be any
Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it's all about forward motion. It's all about change. It's all about that elusive state.
Freedom.
Diriye Osman Quotes: Home is in my hair,
I want you to know that life will try to crack you like an egg and your silence will eventually break. Someday you will spill some of those painful secrets and taste a modicum of much-needed freedom. You will lose a great deal as a result but the gains will outweigh every loss. You will love and be loved by a beautiful man in a place where your mutual passion won't be a marker of shame but pride. You will be awkward and alone and alien for a long time but you will transform these qualities, which is to say yourself, into a work of art. You will wear your awkwardness, your aloneness and your alienness in your hair like gold thread. You will adorn your wonkiness on your wrist like a charm bracelet studded with stars.
Diriye Osman Quotes: I want you to know
i have been told many times by family, friends, colleagues and strangers that I, a black African Muslim lesbian, am not included in this vision; that my dreams are a reflection of my upbringing in a decadent, amoral Western society that has corrupted who I really am. But who am I, really? Am I allowed to speak for myself or must my desires form the battleground for causes I do not care about? My answer to that is simple: 'no one allows anyone anything.' By rejecting that notion you discover that only you can give yourself permission on how to lead your life, naysayers be damned. In the end something gives way. The earth doesn't move but something shifts. That shift is change and change is the layman's lingo for that elusive state that lovers, dreamers, prophets and politicians call 'freedom'.
Diriye Osman Quotes: i have been told many
The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.
Diriye Osman Quotes: The God of Imagination lived
If dislocation is a permanent state, I want to try and explore the possibility of temporary impermanence. If dislocation is a tatty dress from the thrift store, perhaps the solution is not to cast it aside. If dislocation is a tatty dress, perhaps the only solution is to mend it, scent it, and wear it until everything about it signifies newness, something close to the perpetual promise of a fresh start.
Diriye Osman Quotes: If dislocation is a permanent
Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you're facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It's a lesson I've carried with me to this day.
Diriye Osman Quotes: Who do I write for?
In the Somali culture many things go unsaid: how we love, who we love and why we love that way. I don't know why Suldana loves the way she does. I don't know why she loves who she does. But I do know that by respecting her privacy I am letting her dream in a way that my generation was not capable of. I'm letting her reach for something neither one of us can articulate.
Diriye Osman Quotes: In the Somali culture many
I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.
Diriye Osman Quotes: I was a reader before
Manic depression - or bipolar disorder - is like racing up to a clifftop before diving headfirst into a cavity. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the psychic equivalent of an extreme sport. The manic highs - that exhilarating rush to the top of the cliff - make you feel bionic in your hyper-energized capacity for generosity, sexiness and soulfulness. You feel like you have ingested stars and are now glowing from within. It's unearned confidence-in-extremis - with an emphasis on the con, because you feel cheated once you inevitably crash into that cavity. I sometimes joke that mania is the worst kind of pyramid scheme, one that the bipolar individual doesn't even know they're building, only to find out, too late, that they're also its biggest casualty.
Diriye Osman Quotes: Manic depression - or bipolar
There was once a house built out of memories and inside this house lived a woman called The Memory Snatcher. This woman was my Aunt Beydan. She was a sorceress and as a child I feared she would stalk me in my sleep and steal all my memories until I could no longer remember who I was.
Diriye Osman Quotes: There was once a house
In Somali culture hyper-masculinity is the most desired attribute in men. Femininity signifies softness, a lightness of touch: qualities that are aggressively pressed onto young girls and women. When a woman does not possess feminine traits, it is considered an act of mild social resistance. This applies equally to men who are not overtly masculine but the stakes are considerably amplified. If a Somali man is considered feminine he is deemed weak, helpless, pitiful: The underlying message being that femininity is inherently inferior to masculinity.
Diriye Osman Quotes: In Somali culture hyper-masculinity is
I've always loved being gay. Sure, Kenya was not exactly Queer Nation but my sexuality gave me joy. I was young, not so dumb and full of cum! There was no place for me in heaven but I was content munching devil's pie here on earth.
Diriye Osman Quotes: I've always loved being gay.
The only seed that needs regular watering is our imagination.
Diriye Osman Quotes: The only seed that needs
I wear makeup and I don dramatic attire because I like control. I'm not interested in controlling others but I'm invested in strict self-governance. This is why I don't do many face-to-face interviews. I don't like being caught off-guard. It all goes back to that attempt to create order amidst disorder. One of the most frightening things about losing your mind is that you feel like your body, your brain, every part of your essence is being invaded. There is such a palpable helplessness to that narrative and I hate the sense of victimhood that it implies. Certainly, this is how I felt during my moments of psychological disquiet. I felt like my personhood was under attack. Performativity is important to me because I'm the teller of my own stories. I have been performing these multiple roles for so long that they have bled into my identity. I have become the man that I always wanted to be.
Diriye Osman Quotes: I wear makeup and I
As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of cultural confusion that one had to recover from again and again: that accepting your sexual identity doesn't necessarily mean that the wider LGBT community, with its own preconceived notions of what constitutes a "valid" queer identity, will embrace you any more welcomingly than your own prejudiced kinsfolk do.
Diriye Osman Quotes: As a young gay African,
He carries home in the way he walks: an elegant, loose strut. He wears home on his skin in the form of attar, a delicious perfume that makes me dream of Somali coastlines, places where children play football amidst colonial ruins, and young men like Korfa flee in darkness on boats to Yemen and Kenya, determined never to look back.
Diriye Osman Quotes: He carries home in the
She was a spiky teenager rebelling against the soul-suck mirror reflected back at her in her mother's blank stare, her question mark of a spine. Determined to beat the odds, she completed high school with distinction. But there was a caveat. Beydan was allowed to roam and educate herself – up to a point. On her eighteenth birthday her Father sat her down and held out his Rolexed wrist. Studded with crystals and flecks of diamond, the watch dazzled in the light. All Beydan could hear, however, was tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tick - time to neatly fold all her hard work, to parcel up her progress, send it to the attic in her subconscious and let dust gather on her dreams. There was a lump in her throat and a stopwatch in her womb.
Diriye Osman Quotes: She was a spiky teenager
As her body expanded so did her interior landscape. She imagined minarets, skyscrapers, entire cities being constructed inside her. Thighs thickened, belly became basketball-sized, buttocks deepened with dimples. Even her taste-buds shifted, and she held her tongue out for crushed ice, chalk, charcoal.
Diriye Osman Quotes: As her body expanded so
Daughter, I want you to form the most intense, loving relationship with yourself. Only then will you realize your capacity for kindness and emotional expansiveness. Daughter, after you have formed this relationship with yourself, I want you to love others with the openness and humility that you always embodied as a child. Daughter, I want you to forgive easily, laugh loudly and never allow yourself to become the invisible, silent woman that your mother was. Daughter, this is how we soften our hearts and become better human beings.
Diriye Osman Quotes: Daughter, I want you to
You may feel like your future is slipping from your grasp, that if you don't rush now to greet your dreams you might lose out on them, but please wait. If you are coming from an unsupportive environment with regards to your sexual orientation, the best thing to do is to establish your independence. Make sure you have a support network of loving and loyal friends. Make sure you have somewhere to live. Make sure you have an income to sustain you. Place a premium on your life. Always, always place a premium on your life.

When all these elements have been configured and your psychic compass is at the ready, go forth in the knowledge that you've created a self-preserving future for yourself. Go forth in the knowledge that you have a safe space to call home. Go forth in the knowledge that not only are you kicking ass but you are kicking ass on a major scale. Go forth in the knowledge that not only are you winning at life but you have already won.
Diriye Osman Quotes: You may feel like your
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