What Kind of Child Are You?
If you grew up in an African household, you know this feeling.
You break a plate, and it is not "you made a mistake." It is "What kind of child are you?"
Our parents raised us the way they were raised, love expressed through high expectations. They gave us resilience, work ethic, and community.
But many of us learned a subtle lesson:
Mistakes don't just mean you did something wrong. They mean something is wrong with you.
There is a name for each of these:
Guilt says: "I did something bad."
Shame says: "I AM bad."
Guilt is a puzzle — "How do I fix this?" It pushes you to repair and grow.
Shame is a threat — "How do I hide?" It pushes you to shrink.
Here is the trap: many of us think we are feeling guilt when we are actually drowning in shame.
So we over-perform. Over-apologize. Over-sacrifice, trying to earn our way out of a feeling that achievement can't fix.
The way out is learning to convert one into the other:
❌ "I'm a disappointment."
✅ "I fell short on this one thing."
Same event. Different story. Completely different outcome.
And let's be honest, this isn't a switch you flip once.
Even now, the shame still shows up. In the over-preparing. In the apology nobody asked for.
Letting go of that voice isn't rejecting where we come from. We keep the resilience. We keep the community. We just put down the part that was never ours to carry.
These days, when I catch that "I'm not good enough" feeling creeping in, I try to stop and ask myself one question:
Is this about what I did, or about who I am?
It doesn't work every time. But it works more often than it used to. 💪🏿💚