We were being asked by the teachers
what you wanted to be when you grow up.
And I was so confident
I stood up said, ‘When I grow up I want to be a lion.’
And the whole class was just laughing like you wouldn’t believe.
I didn’t understand why they didn’t give me time
to be the lion that I’m going to be when I grow up.
There’s a saying that I once heard,
‘The most important thing that a young lion has ever learnt’
‘was knowing when to be scared.’
Being a human and mostly being scared of a lot of things
and not sure about a lot of things...
lions... lions know.
I enjoy animals because
I think they’re a simplified version of what people are.
When an animal is nervous, it has a reason to be nervous.
There’s something that is bothering it
and it can pinpoint it.
When people are nervous
they don’t always know why or where it comes from.
A lot of people don’t interrogate themselves or these emotions enough
to know where they come from.
Emotions are what our world is made of.
All of these emotions are for us.
They are about us.
They tell us so much about who we are.
So when pain comes and certain emotions arise,
you then understand so much more about who you are.
And then you can do so much more about what you are.
My dad left when I was seven.
I knew that they were having their own problems as parents.
But for myself, it wasn’t really a personal loss.
He wasn’t emotionally available a lot of the time.
But I now had to
deal with a mother that felt unloved, unwanted, rejected,
by a person whom I looked like or whom I represented.
She used to channel a lot of the pain she felt for him, to me.
I used to get the brunt of her frustrations,
the brunt of her fears.
I was angry at the whole world.
How my anger played itself out was
I was very aggressive and I was very quick to get into a fight.
Mainly because, at home I wasn’t recognised.
I was just a kid... I wasn’t who I am.
Kahlil Gibran, there is a verse in a poem that he has that goes,
‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell’
‘that encloses your understanding.’
‘It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you’
‘heals your sick self.’
‘Therefore, drink his remedy’
‘in silence and tranquility.’
That resonates because in my understanding
pain is emotions that have not yet settled down.
It’s emotions that haven’t found a place within my beingness.
For as long as something hurts, it needs attention.
What pain represents is that door that no one opens up.
You shut it off, you put it away and you don’t speak about it.
For as long as there are those things in our lives
those sneaky emotions will always be hiding from us.
Pain is a helper.
It’s one of our best teachers in this life.
By embracing it
we take down the stigma
of there being something wrong with it.
Pain is a remedy.
The breaking of that shell is painful.
But that pain accesses,
brings with it, so much more.
The uncomfortable, depressing places,
they teach me so much more about myself
than any good time has ever revealed to me.
I allow myself to feel all of the pain.
I allow myself to sit in the darkness.
Having pain be
residue of something good that is happening
is a hopeful thing that I take into every unknown.
In Xhosa there is a saying, ‘ngokuzazi’
meaning, ‘You are a king for knowing yourself.’
The best gift I have for the world is myself.
That’s the best gift I can give the world.
The only thing that I can do is live my life
the best way that I can.
I feel like I’ve achieved that.
I feel like I became
my proudest version of the lion that I can be.
I embody that lion in more ways than one.
The joyous, wholehearted laughing
and accepting of joy and serenity when it is.
The courage in front of trials or tribulations when they arise.
Keeping fear at bay when my heart asks for something else
was proof to me that
if I say I want to be a lion... I’m going to be a lion.