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Fadzai Maposah Correspondent

I read recently that women on average speak about 7 000 words per day as compared to men who speak about 3 000 words.

Women mainly talk about people, relationships and their feelings while men generally talk about facts.

Some people like me who love celebrating the gift of speech can speak for one man and one woman each day! I am not sure whether talking about people is the same as gossip though…I shall pursue the issue further.

Then there are people who are good at observing what others are doing and then want to explain what it is happening and why.

In expressing these explanations at times the responses have not been good resulting in strained relationships.

This is especially the case where the one being analysed is not assertive and cannot as it were defend what is happening or has happened.

Then those who are said to be talkative, the moment that they choose to be quiet, they receive many questions, being asked why they are angry or upset. It seems that they cannot have quiet moments in peace without upsetting or getting those around them worried.

The “it” experience is based on the work of hormones. If there is one thing no actually two things that many people in our society do not seem to understand, these are hormones and temperaments.

I do not know how many times I have heard the statement – anozviitisa. The statement is not easy to translate, maybe the closest to its meaning could be he or she is spoilt?

People do not seem to understand that there are different temperaments. The sanguine is an outgoing, exuberant conversationalist who can dominate conversations.

The sanguine explodes easily and rarely carries a grudge. The choleric is an extrovert who speaks freely but is more deliberate as compared to the sanguine.

The other temperament is the phlegmatic – introvert, who is quiet, slower and because of the calmness in the temperament tries their best to avoid any confrontation that could end up being nasty.

The fourth temperament is the melancholic who is great at analytical thinking allowing themselves to take apart situations and examine why they are the way that they are.

There are some people that believe that when one is on the “it” experience one just has to be moody. Bad moods, mood swings are closely linked to the “it” experience.

So sitting in a room full of women at some training workshop, it appeared that one of the participants was having a bad day.

She was not her usual self. When she went out of the room, one who was sitting next to me asked me what her problem was. I quickly responded that I had no idea.

At the back of my mind, I was thinking of nasty experiences back in high school when gossip was discovered and the ones who had been involved were “hunted” and brought before discussion groups. It was messy.

During one church service, the priest leading the service had given an illustration of how bad gossip is.

A woman had confessed that she had a weakness of talking about others and as a result she was alone, no one wanted to associate with her.

So the woman was asked to get a feather pillow, go on top of a hill on a windy day, open the pillow, let the feathers out while keeping the case in which the feathers were in. She was to report back to the priest when the task was done.

After a few days the woman was back and joyfully told the priest that the task had been accomplished. She got shocked when the priest told her to go back with the case she had kept and get all the feathers back inside.

The woman close to tears said it was an impossible task.

The priest agreed that even if she managed to get some feathers back, she would never fill the pillow to its original size.

That was to be a lesson to her that she could never take back the words that she would have said about an individual.

I did not get the chance to explain this story to my colleague who was beginning to tell me that there was only one way to explain our other colleague’s behaviour for not being herself. She said very confidently that it had to be an “it” experience.

The experience was responsible for many women’s bad days she went on. I asked if any other issues could not affect women but she put her foot down that it had to be an “it” experience.

I asked her if her statement could be validated by research and all she could do was laugh as she took sips of her tea, years and time had taught her she said with a wink.

She even went on further to suggest that as the workshop went on, we could make it our business to analyse the participants’ behaviour and actually we would be able to pick out how many who were on the “it” experience.

As one who has been haunted by the beginning of the “it” experience, I was not even willing to try and join her evaluation team.

She even said that if it was not for the Covid-19 pandemic, she would shake hands with her “suspects” and would confirm by handshaking the “suspects” and a slightly warm temperature would mean they were on the `it` experience.

Women need a lot of support when they are on the “it” experience because low levels of serotonin are linked to feelings of sadness and irritability in addition to trouble sleeping and food cravings which are part of what happens before and during the “it” experience.

Talking about them or “analysing” them is of no benefit. Maybe it is not even the “it” experience, it could be anything else. Women, girls, let us be a sister’s keeper!