Zikusanze If You So, Zikusanze If You Don’t
A young woman hesitates before leaving home. If she wears the bright, body-hugging dress, she risks a whisper campaign. If she opts for the long one, someone else will scoff that she’s trying too hard to be seen as modest.
A father reports his brother for stealing. He's applauded by the system and shunned by his kin. Another keeps silent, and the village murmurs that corruption begins with the family.
Say too little — and you're called evasive.
Act quickly, and you're reckless.
Take your time, and you're indifferent.
We don’t need to live in small villages to witness it. See politics, art, and especially digital public square: the spectacle of judgment is constant.
As the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk wrote, “They demand truth from you and then despise you for telling it.” In English, we often say “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” In Spanish: “Hagas lo que hagas, siempre habrá quien se queje.”
In The Queue, a novel by Egyptian writer Basma Abdel Aziz, the state broadcasts contradictory orders and waits for citizens to stumble. A character remarks, “Obedience has many forms. So does rebellion. But either way, someone is watching.” The punishment is not necessarily for disobedience, but for moving where every direction is mined.
No matter what you do, someone will complain. More. You will experience the injustice of being cornered by every option. You are the one “whom blame finds.” The judgment doesn’t come because of what was done, but simply because you were the one who dared to choose.
You will be disliked, ridiculed and even hated. It is inevitable.
In “There Are Rivers in The Sky” Elif Shafak writes:
Why so much hatred towards us?'
Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire - because they want to have them in their possession. It's all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It's all out of fear! Then there is the third kind - when people hate those they have hurt.
'But why?'
'Because the tree remembers what the axe forgets.'
‘What does that mean?'
‘It means it's not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed.’
People may long for your freedom, your confidence, your visibility. But instead of celebrating or emulating it, they try to own the right to tell you what to do. What they cannot absorb into their own identity, they erase.
Loathing what we do not understand — the unknown becomes a threat to stability. People lash out because your difference exposes their limits. They are not attacking you so much as what you represent: another way of thinking, being, or loving.
Shafak slices cleanly through the moral fog going into the third cup: the axe forgets, but the tree remembers. In societies where trauma is inherited, the scars are often dismissed precisely because they are not visible to the perpetrator. The wounded are scorned for not “moving on”. When the harmed speak, when they act — they are resented not for what they say, but for refusing to let the collective amnesia settle.
So yes, you will be disliked. The attempt to live authentically, to speak truthfully, to take up space, will provoke discomfort. People will question your motives, misinterpret your choices, and sometimes resent your presence. But the alternative — living with permission, forever shape-shifting to accommodate others — erodes the self far more than judgment ever could.
To drink from none of the cups handed to us — neither hatred outwards nor shame inwards… So the question isn’t how to be liked, but how to live without permission.
No action will be pure enough to escape judgment. So then, why not weigh decisions not through the eyes of others, but through our own; to trust that your serving: your reasoning, your empathy, your conscience, are not lesser truths simply because they are your own?
Artwork by Benjamin Niyomugabo