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My time in Cape Town two years ago brought out some of the worst in me. I am often taken aback by what I did or encountered in that period. I don’t endorse that girl or the environment that brought her out, but I have no animosity towards her or the experience. She was brave—going through it without armour, not because she thought she didn’t need armour, but because she didn’t have the armour and wasn’t going to wait around for anyone to one day come and bestow armour on her.
One day last year, my plug brought a delivery for me, only to find there was something wrong in my order because he hadn’t asked a question and I hadn’t specified that because the last time it came with my order without me asking. I watched him see the rage in his own eyes, as though he had just walked past a mirror and caught a glimpse of the rage that could have taken over him. But he walked away from the reflection almost as quickly as it appeared. He looked at me for just a little more than a second and said “In this life, it’s important to hold your anger”, or something like that. And we both laughed. As we were laughing, he said, “This business has taught me to decline fight, you don’t know when it’s something bigger than you.” That’s what Cape Town taught me. and not because of whatever happened to me there, but because of who I saw in myself there, and the eyes my environment gave me to look at myself through.
During this my 2021–2025 side quest period (which was just the wider landscape made of the same material of the Cape Town experience; CT was just a pinnacle and vantage point), the thing I struggled most with was estimating what I was doing. It was a real Gulliver’s Travels tumble. Big, small, food, top of food chain, inconvenience, unable to receive love, love tank, a good match (but only because all parties are masked), etc etc. Hoping that on the other side, I would find a woman whose skin I could be at peace in. This process, I had read and learned and watched from others and elders, was not going to be pretty. It was going to entail cringe of intense magnitude to melt off the part of me that cringes. The cost of meeting that woman apparently was all the shame that had been deposited in me, all the shame I grew in my creative engine brain, and all the shame I had borrowed, from the church, my family, my school and career networks. I had to become someone who was as bold as I needed to be. In my case, becoming her entailed a lot of fucking up and a lot of being fucked over. An excessive amount of letting people project all sorts on me and me considering each projection with seriousness, partly because I like to be sure before I say yes or no. But more importantly, so that I’d find the line at which I could not afford to go beyond. To operate in any space at my very best, the first thing I need to do is let my body trace its design, which is to say, to know what its limits feel like in my body. I’ll never need a formula after that. or even to think about it. Body me knows the terrain. and all of this—gesticulates at the side quest—what it cost to start to feel inhabitable to yourself.
I believe, with all other co-believers, that the making of yourself is a very important project of your life. Probably only secondary to finding God for yourself.
