What it means to give oneself time
Updated On: 09 February, 2024 06:52 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
For me, this practice includes befriending failure, acknowledging the presence of frequent bouts of loneliness and embracing the fact that making a home in a foreign land is a long-term process
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These days, giving myself time involves learning to relish my personhood and revel in my eccentricities. It translates to shifting the locus of my orientation away from how I might be perceived by others. Representation Pic
Every now and then, I keep returning to something a Nigerian refugee named Festus told me in the first year of my arrival in Tramin. ‘You have to give yourself time’. I haven’t seen Festus in months. He used to occasionally come to Tramin to peddle the street magazine Zebra outside the local supermarket. I often wonder how he is. I remember he was so surprised that Italy could make it difficult for me to be here despite being married to an Italian citizen. He picked up Italian on the streets and spoke fairly fluently, but he empathised with my predicament of having to master two very different languages. This was one of the many contexts that perhaps led him to reiterate to me, ‘You have to give yourself time.’
What a surreptitiously wise thing to say. It sounds so innocuous, even mundane and obvious. But each time I return to this pearl of advice, I unearth hidden nuances. He didn’t say, ‘You need time’ or ‘It’ll happen in time’ or ‘Take your time’. He emphasised that I needed to give myself time. Within his formulation was the insinuation of a certain permissiveness that only I could bequeath to myself.
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