My time in Cape Town two years ago brought me to my knees. I am still often taken aback by memories of that period. Tight corners I found myself in and how I found myself responding. People thought they were the ones meeting that girl but she was just as foreign to me, I too was watching her for the first time. The previous year had marked the sharp start of a kind of dissolution of self. For months, it felt as though everything I touched broke—friendships, the walls of [my] life/world as I had known it, my innocence. Well, almost everything. And a new small thing, a fragile-looking but perhaps the only indestructible thing was found beneath the rubble. It was a period of intense isolation and loss. Social contact terrified me. It was in this state that I sold what I couldn’t return to my father’s house, packed two suitcases and moved to South Africa, hoping to start life afresh and settle there. Only to return to Nigeria 2 months later, in what felt like a lucky escape. She was brave… going through it as a new small thing unknown to herself.
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One day last year, my plug brought a delivery for me. It was my second time getting from him, the first time, he had asked if I wanted him to roll for me. This time, he hadn’t asked and I didn’t think to specify, assuming he would remember my preference or that he usually rolled for people. He handed it to me and I was like oh no, I have nothing to roll with, I thought you rolled usually. 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. Then he looked at me plainly for 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… it’s not every invitation to fight that you honour, the things I’ve seen... you can’t tell what’s bigger than you…” The encounter reminded me of what my CT experience taught me: eat, you hungry child, but it’s not every meat you chew that you have to swallow; you get to choose what eyes you want to live your day through.
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During this my 2021–2025 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 and what it cost. It was a real Gulliver’s Travels tumble. 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, all the shame I had borrowed, from the church, my family, my school and career networks… which I always just dumped on—and used to bully—the part of me I kept in a dungeon like Caliban.
There’s just a bunch of things I never learnt how to do before now.
What a lovely price to pay: give up all that shame and bullying and you get someone who is as bold as you need to be. But everyone knows giving up a vice comes with thrashing. No going gently into that good night. A lot of learning and being terrified at the feeling of how will I survive without the survival mechanisms that brought me this far? The road to relinquishing those particular vices entailed a lot of fucking up and a lot of being fucked over. An excessive amount of taking shit because there was a dog in me I had given a bad name and so I felt free to kill with shit. Recognise you keep falling when you try to stand. Then you’ll fall some more in your effort to learn to stand, even more painfully so this time around, because now you know what’s happening and what it’s costing you. But one day, you’ll stand.
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.
Added on 16 Sept:
I’m finding that if you believe knowledge is relational, you become a particular kind of person in relation to yourself and other people. If your space is built on the idea that education should produce sovereignty, you’d have to build the capacity and intuition to build spaces that don't reproduce dependence. If you believe institutions shape what kinds of selves can emerge, you have to examine the institutions that shaped you to underestand the kind of selves you’ve been gifted, those you’d like to keep, those you’d like to walk away from and those you may want to stay in antagonistic relationship with. And if you believe in an education that frees you to listen to yourself, believe her and act in integrity—knowledge for freedom, social healing, and self-sovereignty—, you have to learn the consequences of actually doing that, and how to live with that. Knowing fully well that freedom is not a destination but a practice of becoming.
*The next Studio Styles YouTube ‘Freq Notes’ video will be a stream of video and audio clips with more where this note came from.
