Feven Seifu

Here are my credentials, situated right below my name in the email I sent you. Go ahead and put me on a scale, and tell me how worthy I am.

For this month’s blog, I would like to share with you the transcript of the very first  commencement speech I gave at the graduation ceremony of our master’s students held at the University of Minnesota this past May.

My mother married my father when she was only 18, and if we were to go by their family members and neighbors’ hopes and expectations, their marriage was not only destined to be happy, but was also meant to last a lifetime. To begin with, they were neighbors. Their parents
had been friends long before my parents started dating each other. My mom had already been friends with her future brothers and sisters in law. So, when my parents announced their plan to wed, their news was met with nothing but joy and a celebratory spirit. What immediately
followed was a massive wedding celebration that lasted for days. But then.

At its worst, my perfectionistic tendencies serve as a major handicap manifesting itself in  the form of avoidance or procrastination and ironically, mediocrity. Because why bother striving  or trying when the standards feel too unreachable? This, of course, might then lead to confirming  my fear of not being good enough. Maybe that’s what lies at the bottom of my perfectionism…

On Valentine’s Day and the Feeling of Left Behind All of us walk through life harboring different kinds of fears; that seems to be part of the contract of being

Tell Me More I would like to start today’s writing with some questions. When was the last time you felt deeply seen and heard by another human being? Relatedly, when

I was a sensitive child or so I was told. And like most people I equated sensitivity with fragility and I grew up believing that I was weak — not fully equipped to maneuver the harshness of the world successfully and gracefully.

It Looks Like Success, but it Doesn’t Feel like Success The yardstick by which we measure someone else’s success is often shallow, exterior-focused, and almost never takes the person’s inner

Our Collective Sin In light of AWiB’s much-awaited season of recognizing and celebrating women of excellence, I decided to write about women who reside in almost every middle- and upper-class

The Paradox of Love Whenever I think of the people I’d loved and lost, for instance, my uncle who’d recently passed and the ones I will inevitably lose if I