I had watched the JIK clothing bleach advert a few times, it was a new product to the market, as opposed the regular “blue” clothing bleach. My eight year old mind did not understand that JIK was supposed to be used on only white clothes. So one day, my mum was out and I had soiled my very beautiful red polo with stew that I had been eating. I remember hearing the woman on the JIK TV advert whispering to me, as she normally says in the advert “just JIK it!”I was a child that liked to be neat and the soiled dress really got me sad.
I went down to the lobby where we kept our laundry tools and I picked up the JIK bottle and poured its content straight on the stain I had. Few seconds later, I added detergent and water and I washed the stained spot… As I scrubbed, I discovered that my very red polo was turning white, I picked up the packet of detergent and tried to read its content…nothing seemed weird. When my mum came I rushed to tell her that she had gotten a fake detergent or JIK, that I had washed my polo with them and the spot had turned white. My mum was furious, she asked in a very stern voice, “Do you not know that JIK is used for bleaching clothes? White clothes?”
It dawned on me that I had misplaced the use of detergent for JIK… That was my first lesson of misuse…
I had to write that short story because you see, both JIK and the detergent I had used are laundry applications but, I had used the JIK wrongly. This story relates to us, we are all humans, and while some of us are JIKs, others are detergent, but so many times JIKs try to take the personality of detergent and when it doesn’t work right, we try to blame other things for it than the actual problem that caused it.
When you try to fit into a life that is not meant for you, you dive into another person’s lane and you end up getting disqualified in the race of life. Just because someone seems successful at something doesn’t mean it is ‘your thing’. Find your thing and you will not be misplaced like JIK in washing my red polo.