Читать книгу Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World - Kagiso Msimango - Страница 5

Tomorrow I’m headed for an Airbnb I’ve checked myself into, with the hope that I can get this book out of me. I committed to writing it a disturbingly long time ago and to describe my progress as snail-paced would be generous. I’ve been meaning to start writing “tomorrow” for months now. Procrastination is a result of fear, I know that. What has me stumped is that I wrote my Goddess Bootcamp books with almost offensive ease. So why all the trepidation with this one?

As I write this confession, my deadline is so uncomfortably close I can feel its rancid breath warming my neck. So I am forced to look at what it is about writing this particular book that scares me so much. Obviously, it’s something I do not want to do, because, as Piglet once wisely said to his friend Winnie the Pooh, “I don’t want to face my fears, Pooh. I am scared of them.” Like Piglet, I remain unmotivated because my fears may well be as scary as I imagine. I often remind my kids that brave people are not fearless, they simply don’t let fear stop them from doing whatever needs to be done. “So,” I told Piglet, “I am going to face my fear and get on this damn book.” Off I went to get my laptop, but still I did not write. Instead I booked a week’s stay at an Airbnb where, I convinced myself, I would write for hours on end … tomorrow.

Ah, procrastination, you cunning fiend.

Piglet pointed and laughed at me. As I was having this imaginary intervention with Pooh and Piglet, I came across a meme with a quote from one of my favourite ancestors, Dr Maya Angelou, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practise any other virtue consistently. You can practise any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” With that little nudge from the ancestral realm, I said a Change Me prayer – I’ll tell you more about those at the end of our journey – asking to change into someone who can get past this fear. The response was swift.

I have a daughter who is nearly 12 years old and another half her age. Lebone is going through puberty and has freshly budding breasts, which Naima is terribly envious of. As a result, Naima and I spend a shocking amount of time talking about breasts in general, and her future breasts specifically. During our most recent breast conversation, after I had said the Change Me prayer, a distant memory came flooding back into my awareness. When I was just a few years older than Lebone is now, I was hanging out at home with two girlfriends. We were lazily flipping through the pages of a copy of National Geographic. This was in the nineties, before National Geographic knew to temper its penchant for half-naked “natives”. We arrived at a page with a photo spread of bare-breasted, brown-skinned maidens from various cultures. One image was of Swati girls at a reed dance. One of the girls in the entourage had inverted nipples. My friend Hope pointed them out in horror, exclaiming that they were deformed. But I had one inverted nipple, which my mother had assured me was quite normal. Indignant, I asserted that there was nothing wrong with her nipples, parroting what my mother had said to me, “There is more than one kind of normal.” Hope insisted that there was no such thing, that these nipples were weird and if she had such freaky breasts she wouldn’t bare them in public like this clueless girl. Our friend agreed. In that moment I discovered that (a) I am a freak, (b) I didn’t like that feeling, and (c) being a freak is something you do not parade around.

So, what does my inverted nipple have to do with my fear of writing this book? There is no way that I can write the book I agreed to write without coming out of the closet as a freak. I am a weirdo and not because I have an inverted nipple. In fact, I no longer have an inverted nipple. Breastfeeding for a total of eight years appears to have vacuumed it out permanently. (Breastfeeding two kids for that amount of time sounds infinitely weirder than having an inverted nipple, now that I think about it, but I digress …) I’d been a weirdo long before Hope inadvertently branded me as one. For instance, as a child, I could communicate with trees. I spoke to them, and they spoke back. Yes, you read that right – I talked to trees. In fact, I enjoyed the company of my tree friends a lot more than that of my human friends. As a result, I spent most of my afternoons appearing to be playing alone, rather than with other children, when in fact I was having playdates with my tree friends. My cousin Tiny used to hate walking from school with me, because we had to make several stops so I could catch up with my tree pals along our route.

In my youth I was also able to heal people’s minor aches by placing my right hand on the ailing spot. This skill was mostly taken advantage of by my aunt in her attempt to shake her hangovers. As I got older, I unlocked new levels of weirdness, but I learned not to parade them. During my last foray into the respectable, normal realm of corporate employment, I acquired a subordinate who, after working with me for a few months, confessed, “You know, you are very disconcerting, because you are weird but you don’t wear the uniform.”

“What uniform?”

“You know, most weird people dress funny or have weird hairstyles or face tattoos. That at least warns you about what’s coming. You look all corporate until someone gets to know you and they are, like, ‘Wooaaah, did she just say that?’”

So, this book is me coming out of the closet in full freak regalia, and I am terrified. I haven’t been too successful at passing as normal, but I have managed to appear less weird than I really am. I tend to give off an Erykah Badu level of weirdness, just cool enough to attract people rather than repel them. As I write this, Erykah had just launched a premium brand of incense that smells like her vagina, and it sold out within hours. As bizarre as that is, that is the level of weird that I am happy to own. Alas, unlike Erykah, I am neither rich nor famous enough for my weirdness to be reframed as profitable eccentricity. The problem is that a significant majority of what has enabled me to unfuck myself falls firmly in the “WTF?” realm.

I have found and even created safe spaces where freaks gather in peace without fearing that normal people – or muggles, as us magical folk refer to them – will point and laugh or, even worse, eject us from the human tribe.

Did you know that rejection literally hurts?

Early in 2010, various research studies found that our brain registers and processes rejection just as it does physical pain. When we are rejected we experience that as life-threatening. This is not an overreaction, but a survival hangover from childhood. When you are a child, your survival literally depends on other people. You cannot feed, clothe or protect yourself. If a child is rejected by her tribe, she will die. As we get older and more independent, we seldom outgrow the association between acceptance and survival. The first rule of tribal acceptance is conformity. Tribes, both big and small, require rules and norms to function. We make tacit and explicit agreements about how to behave as members of any tribe – be they based on gender, race, status, nationality, profession, religion, identity or ideology. Even tribes of rebels conform to rules on what acceptable rebellion looks like. When you stray from the norm you risk excommunication. Every single tribe you belong to has its unique definition of normal, and that normal is what keeps you safe.

A relative was looking forward to being accepted into a new tribe, that of potential in-laws. They were coming over to meet our family. She called me in advance and politely asked that I act normal, fearing that my unconventional ways may cast her in a bad light with her new tribe. We are warm in the approving arms of a tribe, but the price is that the true, natural, unique self is suppressed and an artificial, constructed self emerges. In the game of tribal survival, how you behave is more valuable than who you are. It doesn’t seem to matter whether your actions make you happy or do you harm. Conformity is everything.

So, yes, this is a big deal for me, yet I am driven to do it because I believe that there is value in sharing the fuckery I’ve been through and how I continue to unfuck myself. This book reveals some of my darkest, weirdest and even shameful experiences, and the idea that they may now be in the hands of a stranger is utterly terrifying. Which brings me to the whole point of this angsty confession. I’d like you to do me a “What a baby!” favour.

A poker face I do not have. My face broadcasts all my thoughts and emotions for everyone to see. For this reason I avoid meeting newborns. Nobody likes ugly babies, but we are not supposed to admit this. In fact, we are supposed to pretend that there is no such thing as an ugly baby. The thing is, most newborns generally look like internal organs, probably because that’s technically what they were not so long ago. As you happily scroll through your Facebook timeline, you are confronted by an image of what looks like a bruised, wrinkly spleen. It is dressed in a onesie, so you conclude that it must be a baby. You click “Like”, and may even comment, “Aaah man, he’s so beautiful. I could just eat him with a spoon!” Then mommy replies, “Thank you, it’s a girl.”

By custom many Black South Africans are encouraged not to expose a baby to people outside the immediate family before the baby is three months old. I suspect that it may, in part, be to save the public from being subjected to a baby before the cute kicks in. But many flout this cultural practice. I say bring back the embargo. The reason ugly babies are unnerving is because they go against nature. Cuteness is the primary survival mechanism for all infant mammals. Since they cannot fend for themselves, babies rely on their cuteness to evoke nurturing and protective instincts from older, more capable mammals in their environment. Even baby hyenas are cute. This is why, on giving birth and for many months afterwards, the mother is flooded with the hormone oxytocin that leads her to believe that she has just birthed the most beautiful being to ever grace the planet. This hormonal deception allows her to care for this constantly wet, very loud, utterly non-productive addition to the household. It is literally to ensure the survival of the species. It is why it always comes as a shock to discover that one’s children do not appear attractive to others, or when many years later you look at your children’s baby pictures and realise that they were not nearly as beautiful to behold as you had thought. Now, you never want to be the inglorious bastard who inadvertently disabuses the parents of the belief that gazing at their lovelet is not as transcendent as their hormones have led them to believe. So, with my overly expressive snitch face, I try to avoid baby reveals as much as possible.

A colleague had just had a baby and invited us to come bask in the glory of the beauty that had sprung from his loins. I expressed my trepidation to our boss, who then shared his fool-proof two-step strategy for this very dilemma:

 Step 1: Always refer to the baby as “she”. If it is a girl, you are good. If it is a boy, you will be corrected but no one will be offended. They’ll simply assume that he’s so unbelievably pretty he must be a girl.

 Step 2: When confronted with a pre-cute baby, simply exclaim, “What a baby!” It’s not a lie. It is open to interpretation, and the parents – thanks to the oxytocin – will interpret it positively. Everyone wins.

Now you may be wondering why I am giving you a Ted Talk on navigating the perilous waters of pre-cute babies. There is a point. Not all babies are a result of doing the dirty. We birth them all the time, in the form of products, services, meals, hand-knitted blankets, songs, paintings, crafts and books. We are creative beings driven to constantly birth the fruits of our being. Creating makes us happy – and social media has ruined it for all of us. People are vicious on the streets of social media. They point, laugh, judge and condemn other people’s babies. I was recently coaching a brilliant young woman, Zandile, who is writing her first book and believed that she was suffering from writer’s block. During the course of our conversation it became apparent that she knew exactly what she wanted to write. What was paralysing her was not a lack of material or an inability to express her thoughts; it was the anticipated dragging she expected her book to be subjected to once it was published. So she hates what she’s written because it is a poor, diluted, second-rate version of what she wants to express, in the hope of minimising the anticipated future ridicule. Social media is nascent in our evolution, and I think to some extent we still haven’t internalised that there are actual human beings behind those social media handles. Humans who have nurtured and deeply cared for these babies we are blithely tearing apart with our opinions, from behind our screens. I remember being tagged on an opinion piece by a stranger who criticised me because my previous book The Goddess Mojo Bootcamp was not inclusive of the LGBTQ community. It is a book on attracting healthy relationships, which I wrote based on personal experience and working with clients. I am heterosexual and, for whatever reason, so were all the clients I had dealt with on this particular issue, so I wrote what I knew. Which makes complete sense and yet, reading that woman’s post, even I didn’t like myself.

After my session with Zandile, I came back to this manuscript and reread what I had written so far. I realised that, just like Zandile, I had modified some of my stories to be as palatable as possible to those they may possibly offend – and that sucks. I do not want to distort my experiences just to avoid falling short of a stranger’s subjective quality assurance standards.

So let’s make a deal. I am going to pretend that I am sharing these stories with a dear friend, enabling me to be open, honest and vulnerable. Your end of the bargain is to be kind. Remember that there is a mother full of oxytocin behind this baby you are holding.

That part is for my benefit. I have a couple of suggestions for yours:

 Be open: The majority of stories I share in this memoir are way off the beaten path. I suspect that sooner or later you will come across something you are tempted to dismiss as deluded ramblings. That would be a pity because this rabbit hole I am taking you down is littered with gems.

 Be comfortably lost: I go off on various tangents, in life and in conversation, but I promise you there is always a moral. Hang in there and just go with the flow.

 I am like one of those borderline senile characters they love so much in animated movies who share with the protagonist weird, seemingly irrelevant tales while the protagonist rolls his eyes. Ten minutes before the movie ends, during the final showdown, in a flash, the crazy tales coalesce to make perfect sense, unlocking a wisdom within our hero that allows him to defeat the enemy. At least that’s how I like to think of my ramblings.

If you don’t emerge from this adventure with at least one of these nuggets that bestow on you the power to vanquish your enemies, you have already learned the most important lesson when it comes to unfucking the world: the “What a baby!” concept, also known as “Be kind”.

So come along, friend. Come check my baby out.