I was having a conversation with a friend when he flinched at the word submission. Not at the idea itself, exactly, but at the possibility that I might believe it. Or not.
He paused, then laughed awkwardly and said he wasn’t sure whether I was a feminist or not.
Take cover! The taboo word has been mentioned.
So I asked him, calmly, whether he thought it was possible for a woman to be a feminist and still value submission in marriage.
He thought for a moment, then said yes.
Then added, “When it comes to you.”
Hold on.
Before you toss your phone on the bed and kiss your teeth at another article you assume will spiral into a tired argument about feminism or submission, let me be clear: this is not that essay.
I’m not here to litigate or exalt feminism.
I’m not here to rehabilitate or condemn submission.
I have my beliefs about both, and perhaps in a future article I’ll share them. But that is not the work of this piece.
What stayed with me from that conversation was not his answer, though, but the reason behind it. He didn’t arrive at yes because the idea suddenly made sense. He arrived at yes because he had come to accept the complexity of my thinking and how that complexity disrupted his mental filing system.
I didn’t always fit neatly into the boxes he had prepared.
And that discomfort – that brief mental tightening – is what I want to talk about.
Because beneath many of our loud cultural arguments is a quieter, more revealing question – one most of us deny asking ourselves, or each other:
Is a person ever just one thing?
We live in an age that rewards speed – fast opinions, fast alignment, fast categorisation. We want to know what someone is so we can decide how to treat them, how much to listen, and whether they are “safe” to engage. Labels sell because they are shortcuts to understanding the human. They save us time. They save us effort. They save us from the exhausting work of holding complexity.
But they also flatten people.
They silence people. I have been a perpetrator, and a victim of this existential laziness, sometimes even to self, unable to sit with inner chaos.
Amidst the laziness lies my almost obsessive curiosity, which has sometimes become detrimental. Another article.
Nevertheless, my own thinking is deeply shaped by my faith – not as a weapon, not as a demand, but as a lens. I don’t force it down anyone’s throat, but I also don’t pretend it doesn’t shape how I reason. And within that faith is an idea I return to often: that God is not singular in expression. Father. Son. Spirit. One being. God the protector; God the raging fire; God the lover; God the judge. I Am. Multiple manifestations, same God.
If humanity is said to be made in that image, why are we so disturbed by multiplicity in each other?
Why do we tense up when a person refuses to be ideologically tidy?
Somewhere along the way, we started mistaking coherence for purity – believing that to be credible, a person must be consistent in the narrowest sense. No contradictions. No tensions. No apparent opposites. But real humans are not essays written to prove a point. We are lived, layered, unfinished.
Walt Whitman once wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” Chimamanda’s warning about the danger of a single story wasn’t just about misrepresentation – it was about intellectual laziness.
Because categorising people quickly allows us to move on to more self-absorbed pursuits. Once I’ve decided what you are, I no longer have to stay curious. I no longer have to sit with the discomfort of not knowing. I can dismiss, applaud, or argue with a version of you that fits neatly into my worldview.
And maybe that’s the real problem.
Not that people hold opposing ideas – but that we’ve grown impatient with the effort it takes to understand a whole person. Little wonder, then, that people are unsettled by curiosity. It feels invasive, almost indecent – as though they’ve forgotten that the Creator’s greatest masterpiece is the human being: physical, physiological, psychological, even spiritual. To explore oneself – and another – is a lifelong undertaking, one worth waking up for every morning.
So, I keep returning to that moment in the conversation. Not to correct my friend. Not to defend myself. Not to revel in some sense of superiority or acknowledgement, but to sit with the unease beneath it.
Why did my being “an exception” feel safer than questioning the box itself?
And how many people do we misunderstand, not because they are unclear, but because we demand clarity too cheaply, too quickly?
Meestique
The Empathic Social Observer.
The Empathic Social Observer 