For some reason, I wasn't able to measure out my life before, possibly because my brain was still clarifying and resolving some of the issues to do with my PhD thesis. Now I am more focused on what it means to be middle-aged. I was never comfortable being a younger person. I always felt like I had to make excuses for it. Somehow I was never up to being what I needed to be, due to missing gaps in my knowledge, which made me feel like I was not yet the whole package of what I needed to be. I had parts missing from my self-awareness that had to be made up by prolonged study -- tackling philosophy books and books on psychology. I also had to spend time alone, looking inward. To be clear, I didn't feel like empty or bereft so much as that my stew had only partially been cooked. I could feel the depth and richness of the hot pot starting to develop, but every small event took me away from gathering the heat to speed along the process. I particularly despised forced socialization, as it made it necessary for me to break away from my obsessive formulation of ideas.
Being young was wasted on me, because what I really wanted to be was knowledgeable, about myself and my world. It wasn't that I had to communicate this knowledge or prove anything by it. I just had to move beyond the uncomfortable stage of being half done. Youth was a stage of incompleteness, a condition of waiting and searching and combining different elements to complete a whole.
The goal of all of this was, what? A spiritually abundant middle age. I feel like I have come in just under the deadline, to be assured a very happy and knowledgeable middle life. Had I not been so successful on my own terms, I would still have had that unsettled and discontented feeling as if something had only been half done.
There are some things different about me, I suppose, in that it has taken me until my early forties to mature. I've had so much interesting intellectual and psychological material to work through, that I wanted to get right. I've fought off other, externally imposed agendas, along the way. One of the major ones has been the female gender role. I found it threatening and offensive that people should attempt to take me off my path and put me on another one, half-way through my maturation project.
I had to bring myself up and play adult to the child within myself, so it would have been disastrous if I had to try to take care of others as well. My migration at the age of 15 had given me two sets of cultural narratives to work from and I wasn't sure which elements were ethical, or even possible for me to embrace. My father was enraged at any sign of departure from the original cultural narrative, as he had sacrificed a great deal of his life for it. Others were upset at me for seeming not to know my way around and for my quality of being slightly schizoid -- a feature of post-migratory trauma.
It's clear I was emotionally detached because I couldn't understand what was being asked of me. The demands on me were contradictory and disturbing. I had to change, yet would be punished for any changes. I had to educate my parents about the new cultural reality and yet could barely understand it myself.
I was aware, too, that to be in this half-cooked stage caused others to view me as unreliable. It wasn't anything I did, but sometimes I would emote in ways that belonged to the African past and other times I was more fully Western. You could never be sure what you were getting.
I wasn't even sure I could cross the bridge between Africanisation and being a Westerner. It meant re-arranging a lot of aspects of my identity and trying to change the contents and the density of the parts. I had parts that were very permissive and parts that were extremely authoritarian, both of which related to my African upbringing. Aesthetically and ethically, these were inconsistent features, even from the start. The right-wing or conservative aspect came from my Rhodesian heritage and the very relaxed component of my psyche was from African tribalism and its spirited irreverence.
And now I'm at an age where parents are moving toward death. I've finally arrived in adulthood, and am prepared to take care of those important, familial obligations. I've crossed the bridge that took me way beyond youthful confusion. I, too, am in the process of moving toward my inevitable demise, but not without knowledge.
I have decided to return to Africa. I don't mean this literally, but in my head. I've figured out I don't like modernity. I know it's petulant of me to say so, after all there are some advantages, but if I am to continue on my march to a more consolidated adulthood, this is not the way. Modernity makes people childish. That insight fell on me just a few days ago, but I have no doubt at all about it. You don't communicate in modernity, you lean on others. You lean hard and they are supposed to bend and accommodate your wishes, just through the leaning. Due to their dependency on pressure tactics, most people don't learn to communicate in a civil way, as one person might communicate to another.
This is childish and it is the aspect of modernity I explicitly denounce. I renounce it here and now, too. I'm not going to function in that way, of leaning on others to get a result. If they can't understand what I am saying, I will count my losses and move on. Psychological manipulation is debasing.
So here I am in Africa, where I've returned to do my dying. The slope up to the age of 45 is toward life and the living. The slope down again is toward death and where one meets one's origins. I'm up for it.
Being young was wasted on me, because what I really wanted to be was knowledgeable, about myself and my world. It wasn't that I had to communicate this knowledge or prove anything by it. I just had to move beyond the uncomfortable stage of being half done. Youth was a stage of incompleteness, a condition of waiting and searching and combining different elements to complete a whole.
The goal of all of this was, what? A spiritually abundant middle age. I feel like I have come in just under the deadline, to be assured a very happy and knowledgeable middle life. Had I not been so successful on my own terms, I would still have had that unsettled and discontented feeling as if something had only been half done.
There are some things different about me, I suppose, in that it has taken me until my early forties to mature. I've had so much interesting intellectual and psychological material to work through, that I wanted to get right. I've fought off other, externally imposed agendas, along the way. One of the major ones has been the female gender role. I found it threatening and offensive that people should attempt to take me off my path and put me on another one, half-way through my maturation project.
I had to bring myself up and play adult to the child within myself, so it would have been disastrous if I had to try to take care of others as well. My migration at the age of 15 had given me two sets of cultural narratives to work from and I wasn't sure which elements were ethical, or even possible for me to embrace. My father was enraged at any sign of departure from the original cultural narrative, as he had sacrificed a great deal of his life for it. Others were upset at me for seeming not to know my way around and for my quality of being slightly schizoid -- a feature of post-migratory trauma.
It's clear I was emotionally detached because I couldn't understand what was being asked of me. The demands on me were contradictory and disturbing. I had to change, yet would be punished for any changes. I had to educate my parents about the new cultural reality and yet could barely understand it myself.
I was aware, too, that to be in this half-cooked stage caused others to view me as unreliable. It wasn't anything I did, but sometimes I would emote in ways that belonged to the African past and other times I was more fully Western. You could never be sure what you were getting.
I wasn't even sure I could cross the bridge between Africanisation and being a Westerner. It meant re-arranging a lot of aspects of my identity and trying to change the contents and the density of the parts. I had parts that were very permissive and parts that were extremely authoritarian, both of which related to my African upbringing. Aesthetically and ethically, these were inconsistent features, even from the start. The right-wing or conservative aspect came from my Rhodesian heritage and the very relaxed component of my psyche was from African tribalism and its spirited irreverence.
And now I'm at an age where parents are moving toward death. I've finally arrived in adulthood, and am prepared to take care of those important, familial obligations. I've crossed the bridge that took me way beyond youthful confusion. I, too, am in the process of moving toward my inevitable demise, but not without knowledge.
I have decided to return to Africa. I don't mean this literally, but in my head. I've figured out I don't like modernity. I know it's petulant of me to say so, after all there are some advantages, but if I am to continue on my march to a more consolidated adulthood, this is not the way. Modernity makes people childish. That insight fell on me just a few days ago, but I have no doubt at all about it. You don't communicate in modernity, you lean on others. You lean hard and they are supposed to bend and accommodate your wishes, just through the leaning. Due to their dependency on pressure tactics, most people don't learn to communicate in a civil way, as one person might communicate to another.
This is childish and it is the aspect of modernity I explicitly denounce. I renounce it here and now, too. I'm not going to function in that way, of leaning on others to get a result. If they can't understand what I am saying, I will count my losses and move on. Psychological manipulation is debasing.
So here I am in Africa, where I've returned to do my dying. The slope up to the age of 45 is toward life and the living. The slope down again is toward death and where one meets one's origins. I'm up for it.
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