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.
The Trap of Being Right
When did “I don’t know” become a problem? Early. Maybe at four, the first time I was struck for lying. The adults punished me until I knew: to be without an answer was dangerous, and a made-up one was worse. The lesson took. Always be right. Always be in the know. Knowledge will keep you from pain, from illness, from death, from humiliation, from nightmares, from ever peeing your pants again.
It kept me from none of it. At ten I sat on a straining bladder, too afraid to ask the teacher to leave the room, and wet myself in class. Being the smart one did not save me from tiptoeing the schoolyard afterwards, hunting for dry trousers.
I grew glib, and good at fooling myself into doing the right things. There were so many rooms I didn’t fit, where I wanted to sink through the floor — but I could learn. I could be better. I could pretend I knew what was going on, and if I found the right words, someone might say it: you’re smart. When the other children called me a walking encyclopedia, I took it for a compliment.
Growing Up to Wait
When you’re an adult, the grown-ups said, and so I waited. I am supposed to be that now: adult, free, independent. Growing up was a decoy. It hasn’t quite happened.
By the usual markers I haven’t arrived: no long-term relationship, no nuclear family, no nine-to-five, and some things kinder left unsaid. I have a rare illness, classed as a disability, that I could hang all of it on. Yet I wanted freedom, not better excuses.
Three postgraduate degrees later, I have spent most of my life outrunning one fear: that I was not enough. The rage and the over-compensation, the sadness of going unseen, all of it across seven cities and two continents. The drive made some good things. It also made it unbearable to be alive with myself on the days I couldn’t prove who I was.
Unlearning the Right Way
After almost forty years on the African continent, through a run of biographical accidents, my globe-trotting art-career ego had been crushed as small as the cap in my hand. The clever kid landed in Munich, on a childhood friend’s couch, with the skin on his back, his rage, his disappointment, and a stinking hangover of self-pity.
I had relocated again, failed again, lost almost everything, my health and my sanity included. Yet I had done one new thing: set myself free of knowledge and struck out, alone, into another gorgeous fresh potential shitstorm.
Before I left South Africa, there was one thing I could do: have nothing left to answer for.
For years I had collected books against the day knowledge would finally set me free. Most went unread, shelved in a room with a bed and a desk, in a house whose owner never let me forget I owed it all to him. My one-time sanctuary, and my prison. A phone call confirmed my father was out. I arrived with boxes and a five-minute timer. It felt like holding a knife to my own throat — but I was cutting myself free. Shelf after shelf, I emptied out my most prized possessions. The day I would need them had never come; the home I’d dreamed of keeping them in might never exist. I kept two subjects, contemporary art and poetry. I digitised my journals. The rest I gave to a school for unlearning. Then I got on a plane.
The purge didn’t stop me making mistakes. It let me risk new ones. That was worth it.
Growing up was a decoy. … No human being is ever done.
The Walking Encyclopedia Unlearns
No one calls me a walking encyclopedia now. In my forties the memory takes its time; it’s harder to shut up and listen, easier to assume. That is the trap set for anyone who thinks they have arrived. The only books I finish are fiction. I’ll walk the city a whole weekend with one story in my ears until it ends. Long-form fiction reaches something the blurb, or the AI summary, never can.
What I couldn’t see — looking to the adults to notice me, to solve it for me, to stand in front of — is the long path running ahead of all of us at once. When they told me when you grow up, I think they misheard the question. I was asking about something far larger. No one leads us down that path. We make the mistake of looking at others and deciding one day I will be. No human being is ever done.
I mistook learning for growth, when what I needed was unlearning: to grow in a direction that was actually mine. How do I know something is mine? It fits, I can use it, and I know why I’m holding it. I am not collecting tools any more. I am using them.
Perhaps the willingness not to know, to stay in dialogue with your own stupidity, is the small opening through which the unknown gets in, where possibility and change still live. I am convinced that thinking, never nowhere for anyone, led to the kind of answers that doing almost always results in.
