Growing The Garden Of The Self

She’s those index 1s who people think of when they say ‘we all have 24 hours.’ Wendy lives like she has 46 instead: she’s a self-care coach, an entrepreneur, and a farmer. She and her sister and dad run Yumborghini (I mean!!), which supplies homemade, artisanal gourmet condiments. But what I am more interested in is her self-love, self-care journey. Surprisingly, Wendy used to be a people pleaser, to the point that she lost herself somewhere along the way.

“In the movies, self-love looks like people just wake up and do it. In real life, it isn’t that simple. There aren’t tools readily available.” And she sees this in her work as well, where in a hyper-religious country like ours, people tell you to pray and keep drowning instead of telling you how to heal. Or in the way that women’s pleasure during sex – also self-care – isn’t prioritized, because most men don’t even think women can orgasm. Spoiler alert: they can…

because she feels like she speaks best to this experience, and she feels like she’ll do her best for them, seeing as she’s walked the journey of watering her own grass to self-love. “I think I am at the forefront of this self-care wave. It feels like there’s no one else in this particular space. There aren’t a lot of people telling us to choose yourself, to buy yourself a gift, to take yourself out, to put boundaries up. People think this makes you selfish. And rude.”

In a world where people pleasing and performance is the go-to, it’s important to have the one madman in the market to show you something different, something alternate. Who doesn’t love the expansiveness of the ‘abnormal’ – that which gives us a parallel to compare the lengths and breadth to which the human imagination can travel, absorb, and re-create?

Wendy’s distinct lack of ordinary is a refreshing addition to the wave that’s taking over the world – that of an Afropunk entity, which she describes herself as a part of. “Afropunk is the rawest expression of Afrofuturism, of who we are now, without being defined by the labels of our ancestors. It means making our own rules. It means saying Africa is ours, and we’re taking it back in whatever way makes sense. We’re here and we’re going to do what we want with our colours, our fashion, our art, our sexualities, in our radical self-care. We’ve decided it’s our time, and we’ve taken it. Let’s run.”

it’s important to have the one madman in the market to show you something different, something alternate. Who doesn’t love the expansiveness of the ‘abnormal’ – that which gives us a parallel to compare the lengths and breadth to which the human imagination can travel, absorb, and re-create? Wendy’s distinct lack of ordinary is a refreshing addition to the wave that’s taking over the world – that of an Afropunk entity, which she describes herself as a part of.

“Afropunk is the rawest expression of Afrofuturism, of who we are now, without being defined by the labels of our ancestors. It means making our own rules. It means saying Africa is ours, and we’re taking it back in whatever way makes sense. We’re here and we’re going to do what we want with our colours, our fashion, our art, our sexualities, in our radical self-care. We’ve decided it’s our time, and we’ve taken it. Let’s run.”