A commitment to trying.

 Just after midnight at the start of this year, I stood on the rooftop of an apartment building watching the fireworks splattered all over the Joburg sky with friends. It was a sight to see and at some point, our conversation drifted to us talking about what we wanted to pursue or commit to being in the new year. Each of them stated out loud what they wanted to commit to and I committed to trying. And so, we stood, champagne glasses in hand and toasted to our three individual missions for the new year.

In May 2023 I booked a ticket to watch a show at the Joburg Theatre that was set to come out on Mothers’ Day. The motivation really was wanting to go back to the things I love and support someone I knew albeit not personally. Sihle Nontshokweni was showcasing her award-winning documentary titled “uNobuntu.” The documentary was essentially a love letter to her mother. A remarkable account of how her mother, after suffering the abrupt loss of her first child, uNobuntu, unearthed the writer and specifically the poet in her. In what was an attempt to counsel and soothe herself through debilitating grief, she began writing poems 40 years ago. Today, those poems are an anthology and the most beautiful realisation of a dream she had not even known existed.

I am not sure if it was growth or an awakening of sorts, but I had bordered on nihilistic for a very long time. I had my reasons of course, but I was also growing curious about other possibilities regarding the human experience and more specifically, the meaning and purpose behind my life. I must admit, I was amused that these were the kind of things that I had begun to think so deeply about. But there are moments in life that feel too special, too important and too confronting to my internal turmoil to simply be a coincidence. Going to that show felt like one of those in every way possible.

On the drive home that evening, I admitted to myself for the first time that I wanted to write. I wanted to write often and truthfully. I did not care for the commercial viability of the said writing, but I wanted it to exist. I wanted to rub my humanity against that of others through my words and I wanted to do it in spite of my fear. I had been an ardent reader from childhood and my fear was informed by a profound respect for literature and the art of writing in its entirety. I had been writing for a few years already at that point, but it was something I did for myself and had not yet imagined was decent enough to be shared with other people.

Some months after my little epiphany, I began to doubt the clarity that seemed to have washed over me that evening. I remembered that I was neither trained in writing nor much of a creative person. I convinced myself that my real calling was to consume and support art, not to create it. This remained my position until my spirit persuaded me to share something I had written about a perfectly normal hangout with a friend, with her. Naturally, she was supportive and encouraged me to pursue this more seriously. A few texts later, my secret desire was no longer a secret, and the desire to have it exist outside of my personal archive certainly no longer mine alone.

Trying is both difficult and terrifying. We are primed to attempt one significant and “sure” thing in our lives in order to secure a livelihood even if we find it joyless or insufficient. At least that was the case in my experience. In the now smaller corners of social media that I occupy, there is ongoing discourse about how some of our misery stems from existing only as consumers instead of creators in the world. This discourse is backed by the academic-scientific literature I am reading too. This is not to say all of us will be creators of art of course, but it is so say that there is something in all of us that either comes naturally or with some degree of effort that wants to exist and can only do so through us. As someone who is no stranger to abundant grief, I am obsessively aware of how limited our time here is. It has become important to me that I honour that which my soul demands even if it takes time and especially if it terrifies me.

One of my foremost literary heroes and most gifted black writers of all time Toni Morrison said: “But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”