IN a room full of people, your head is running with ideas and opinions of everything that happens passes through a silent comment you make and sometimes even unknowingly.
Everyone around you is the same, moving through life as the main character and perceiving everything else to be merely a part of their story or passing through as mere objects or people.
The point I am driving towards is that everyone is the main character in their own story and everyone connected to them are the supporting cast. Ironically, in someone else’s story you are also just the supporting cast. You are an object fleeting past their mind with a comment following you.
Characters
If we are all living in our heads, as characters in a movie, this means we are also in a world full of opinions and ideas of what is and what should be. We are bound to be different on merely this accord and to also drown in a world of opinions of what is right and how we should behave and while we can stand against some opinions and change the way people think, especially the opinions that are gathered by the majority and marginalise us. Even then, we are still far from curbing the many impure and toxic opinions we hold against many. It is normal to have ideas, because they are a normal part of being a human. The uncomfortable and unconventional ideas that spawn tags on people are examples of this, and this is the same when it comes to the unmerited opinions of children that have grown up without their fathers.
Exist
It is true that psychological impacts do exist in children who grow up without a father or even with one parent overall and this is expected. However, the questions that arise from this are whether these impacts are a window for society to mar women? It shows that shamefulness can be selective, that despite the fact that these impacts can affect both a boy child and a girl child, society will make noise the most on how it affects the girl child and negatively so. The girl child becomes a stigma as soon as they grow up because of a father who was not present. This shows that even then we blame the girl and hold them responsible for choices made by men, and that in many circumstances we fail to change society and create healthier interrelationships because there is no balance in changing the ideas and opinions of people at large. Rather, the blame for everything is burdened on women and the consequences follow suit even when the choices are not made by women.
Although men that take care of their children exist in large numbers as well, the narrative focuses on the ones who don’t. The bright side in this is the awareness it raises towards grooming better and more responsible men, the negative however is the fact that it puts a spotlight on women and labels them.A good example is the notion that men should not settle down with woman who grew up without their fathers or a father figure, on the premises of traits that they lack as a result of this make them inadequate. It brings down the value of a woman as far as being a woman is being concerned to a measure of a present father which should not be a significant part of choosing a partner. This makes woman side characters in a patriarchal movie, where they are both the victims of a society where men have the freedom to choose to be responsible for them or not and become the main characters that also get to decide on the worthiness of the woman they have failed to take a part in raising.
This is to say that if we can do better in changing our thoughts and perceptions as people then we are one step closer in changing the mind-sets of many. If we are able and take responsibility in the role that we play main characters in our stories, by understanding people as main characters in their own stories as well rather than just side characters then you have mastered emotional intelligence and mastered how collective toxic ideas marginalise others and find ways not to be a part of the problem.
