I became obsessed with information and learning because I thought it would buy me independence. It never did.

Knowledge became my shield, my identity, my prison. It taught me to withdraw into study, to defend myself with words and books, to feel safe with the idea that know-how and my mind would protect me, that I would be ready for life. It turns out a lot more was required.

The Trap of Being Right

When did information become ‘a thing’? When “I don’t know” and “I was mistaken” became a “problem”. The adults punished me until I “knew”: it was dangerous to be without an answer, and a random alibi was the wrong answer. I identified with being a smart kid — at first because it got me attention, later because it seemed that being smart was a path to freeing myself.

When schoolmates called me “walking encyclopedia”, I mistook it for a compliment.

Romance is a warm book

When I wanted to shut out the noise, when I wanted to show my contempt, when I didn’t know how to cope, I just pulled out whatever book I had, and lived in between the lines. Fiction was my tranquiliser and my cure-all for the anxiety-provoking world — the only weapon I had, to become an object myself, as the silent hours passed behind the pages.

“I had not lived in my father’s house for years, but my books remained there — a debt that kept me tethered, a museum of who I was supposed to be.”

In the end I kept two topics, contemporary art and poetry. The rest had to go. I donated them to a school for unlearning, and I got on a plane.

The Courage to Not Know

That year destroyed me. After almost 40 years of living on the African continent, through a series of biographical accidents, my globe-trotting art career ego had been crushed small as the cap in my hand. Everything I had known and built had crumbled.

I had to accept not knowing. I was taught always to have an answer. It’s scary to admit you do not know. It is also real, and disarming. I prefer courage to fear. I had to unlearn my reliance on cleverness. I didn’t know I would have to lose my mind a few times in life for that lesson to sink in.

Perhaps the willingness to not know, to be in dialogue with your own stupidity, brings that glimpse of awareness that is the opening up to the unknown, where possibility and miracles reside, and where humans can change. No human being is ever done.