Christine Wawira: People see the glamour, they do not know what I have gone through
Christine Wawira has lost count of the number of celebrities she has met and hanged out with. From Angelina Jolie, Oprah, Brad Pitt, Viola Davies, Tom Cruise, Ben Affleck, her list is endless. Her life, at least from what is seen on social media, is what many people dream of.
The Kenyan actress living in USA socializes freely with the who-is-who in Hollywood and has even been in some of the scenes in the popular series Modern Family.She pauses when she talks about the lows of diaspora, especially for someone pursuing a life that thrusts them to publicity.
She battled depression while in high school and was suicidal.“I self- harmed for five years and hated myself. I still have scars to this day,” she says.At 21, she made what looked like the greatest mistake at the time. She got pregnant with a man she had just met and contemplated having an abortion.“I changed my mind hours before the abortion, and my daughter is now eight. She is the best thing that happened to me,” she says.
She lived in a homeless shelter when she was 4 months pregnant after getting into a fight with her parents and looking back, she says she felt so scared and alone.“As much as people think I have a dream life, it has come at a cost. There is a lot of pain, sadness, heartbreak and rejection behind the scenes of Christine Wawira’s life. But I’ve turned it all into a positive experience because we must always learn how to dance in the rain,” she says.Other than acting, Wawira is a hypnotherapist. (A type of complementary and alternative medicine in which the mind is used to help with a variety of problems, such as breaking bad habits or coping with stress).
She developed the interest after having a pain free water birth with her youngest child using hypnotherapy.“I have decided to become a certified hypnotherapist so I can help other women have a comfortable and pain free time during birth. Hypnotherapy helps rewire and reprogram the mind to not accept pain and helps women achieve a comfortable time during birth,” she says.Her family is in Arizona, and even though she spends a lot of time in L.A, she has recently started shortening her stay in acting scenes and spending more time with her children.Her advice to anyone planning to relocate to diaspora is that they should be ready to work.“Life here is all about going to work to pay the bills.
That’s literally it. We slave our entire lives working for someone else. We have to worry about things like mass shootings, and racial injustice,” she says.Even though she was in Kenya for a short time of her childhood, she says she misses home. She last visited in 2004 when she was sixteen, but plans to relocate back home in future.