This column documents Celine Njoki’s healing journey. If you haven’t read her story, we encourage you read it here. Her story is remarkable. You can also read the previous entries she has made to this column.
This week, Celine discusses how stigma affected her as a child and as an adult.
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Stigma has been the worst thing that I’ve had to fight with all of my life. It is the worst place for human being to be. Stigma is broad, and I know what it can do to a person.
When I was young, I kept to myself. My friends knew that I was a bed-wetter, and I also wasn’t doing well in class. I just didn’t know how to associate with people. So, nobody wanted to be my friend. It was not healthy for me not to have friends but people kept their distance.
I was usually very dirty in school because nobody in my life was there to clean my uniforms, and most of the time, I went to school in tattered clothes. I envied the other kids whose uniforms were always clean. They had nice shoes and they seem to be doing well.
I always thought that everybody hated me. I was discriminated against by my teachers, and that tortured me mentally. And when I went home, nobody wanted to listen to me, they always said I was a bad child. Sometimes I overheard my uncles talking and saying bad things about me. I felt so discriminated against because I didn’t have parents.
I would cry over everything and it affected my image. I began to ask myself why I was even born. Mentally, I think I was sick. When teenage years approached, I really needed to escape from the stigma where by no one wanted to have anything to do with me, not even my cousins. I remember they used to bully me and laugh at me because of the way I was treated at home by my auntie’s.
I remember food would be cooked in the evening, but my brother and I would be made to eat spoiled food before we could eat the fresh food.
It affected my self-esteem and made me feel so bad that I became a disturbed child. The more those things were happening, the more I kept to myself. It affected me so much that I fell for a man who said he loved me. I had never heard someone tell me that.
It was a big deal. It was such a big deal because now I felt like I belonged and he was somebody who was offering me love. I felt so good.
I fell for this man deeply, but I was still a baby. I shouldn’t have been in love. I should still have been in school, I shouldn’t have been having babies. I should have been at home being protected and loved. But here I was with that man, I was only 15 when I met him, and that’s the age I was when I got pregnant.
Social stigma affected me in such a way that even when I sat for my final exams, I didn’t pass well because I didn’t care. I thought I had a man who cared for me, so taking the exam was just something I needed to do before I could get on with life. That was my worst mistake.
I didn’t know how to handle my husband. I began to think he was discriminating against me, too.
Whenever I tried to talk to friends or to his parents, they said that I was bad. So, I had this mentality from my childhood and now a teenage mom that nobody wanted to be associated with me.
And then, after the gang rapes, I experienced the worst stigma from people who were so close to me at the time. These are people I thought would never leave – these are the people that talked behind my back and said unimaginable things.
They destroyed my image and they destroyed me. Sometimes I’d be in the hospital when those stories would come out, and my blood pressure would rise because I felt they were people who were supposed to be holding my hand. This has made me be very leery of people. I don’t go our for social gatherings now because I feel everyone knows what happened. It’s so hard for me to be in a place where people are. I love sharing my story on social media where nobody knows me, and even if they judge, they judge on their own and I won’t be there.
I’m on the road to healing and restoration, and I know that I’ll get there. I’m working on my self-esteem and on myself and I just hope that people will stop stigmatizing others based on what happened to them.
We should learn that these issues that happened to others do not define them. It does not change who they are. Although people are changed by what they go through – sometimes they are hardened – but I’m learning that I cannot let those things define me. They cannot change the Celine that I am.
Now, I tend to look on the positive side more and I have learned not to judge or stigmatize people. I know that God will bring people into my life, people who are hurting and I will hold their hands. Through my experiences I will talk to them, they will listen and they will feel welcome.
