Need…

The ghost flourishes amongst the living. I am invisible in the worlds I live in; trivial and pedately belligerent. I shared a million more opinions than I should have – the self-righteous expediently label me a hoodwink and the free-spirited have an array of designations for me that range from cold-stone to rebel. If any one of them would have bothered to ask me what I am, considering that I am the one person who has lived with me the longest, I would have settled for ‘human’. The only challenge being that my definition of human is vastly different to theirs (probably yours too).

Nature versus nurture…

I suppose God designs each being to be unique to themselves in comparison to anyone else in the universe in more ways than we are aware of (yes, he is that versatile). I believe that if He could make an effort to design your fingerprints to be the only type, not only in the present world, but in the entire existence of the  human race, then  he would have followed suit with everything else that makes you, YOU.

You’ve never met your truest self…

You  are born different to anybody else, with inimitable intuitions and callings. But from the instant you arrive into this world, you get dragged into organisms that are already at work waiting to program you into similarity (I feel the same about academia, but we will have that conversation on another day). Before you could muster up the valour to construct your first blink, you are already named by people who have their own agendas for you; already planting seeds of their dreams in you that they were too cowardly to evidence with their own lives. You get dragged into cultural and religious customs that were designed by thousand year old corpses, mostly as protective armours from the then unknowns. Once that process commences, there is no off-ramping back to genesis. By the time you discover vocabulary, you are already like everyone else or working very hard at it. You speak, dress, walk, laugh, cry and, scarily enough, think like everyone else.

Belonging…

Humanity straightforwardly acknowledges you because they can relate to you – this means you are not a threat. You belong. Governments get formed and laws are made to police us into being the same. Books are written, schools are built, and churches are erupted all in an effort to keep us being the same. The same messages that prison us, keep being reiterated in diverse ways. We are told that being alone is the worst thing that could happen to you and the only way to connect to ‘your’ people is by having commonalities. What you don’t realise is that everything you say has been said before, every thought has been thought before, every feeling has been felt before – they just got wrapped in pretty packages and shoved into the twisted crevices of your mind, ready to appear at dinner tables as original – this is how we belong.

Freaks…

There is a lily in the valley, there is a blessing in being part of the ‘uneducated’. Every now and then you find a minority people who are mulish and delinquently valiant to be who they are meant to be. These people are never very well-liked because they aggravate the rest of the world – they don’t fit in. These daring people can’t be fitted in boxes that were fashioned to pigeonhole us (the anecdote of how ill-bred divisions were bred to shock us into capitulation is a conversation for another day). They make their own rules as they go along. They wear colours that don’t match. They are loud. They walk on off-beat rhythms. The world calls them animals, uncivilised, unruly, menaces – freaks.

Envy…

Envy is the heartbreaking state when you are so blind to your own alchemy that you crave what your neighbour has. What you don’t realise is that what you were meant to be is far superior, far more valuable than what anybody else has. You would also be surprised that if by some bizarre chance you would get to live your neighbour’s life, that you would hate it. Not because it is a terrible life, but because it doesn’t fit you. When the king gave David his warfare armour that included a big shield and sword to fight Goliath, it did not work. The armour was too heavy for little David, thus it was ineffective. David didn’t need all that fancy shit; he just needed a sling shot and five stones to get the job done. Instead of desiring the fancy things of the next person, start appreciating the simple things in your own life. If you can strip yourself of everything you were told you are supposed to be, you will discover your true self. Remove all the class trappings that force you to live a life you can’t afford. Strip yourself off societal trappings that say individualism is a path to sin. Get in touch with your inner freak, that’s where your freedom has always been.

Writer: Kabomo Vilakazi         Photographer: Judd van Rensberg