Frankly Put: With The Audacity of…
“You know the thing about you is that you carry this air of “I don’t care about what anyone says” about you. Or do you?” I do, at least a little bit since that comment was made.
I’ve been having this revolving conversation with a friend of mine about how every so often I find myself between trying something emotionally and being in my default. It is received with the same energy every time. Like a predictable pattern. Almost as if asking why deviate from the norm if you will keep coming back to the default. The default here is a nonchalant and indifferent approach to life. Coming back to self.
But who is self? (He asks as if this is a TED talk) I think there is a caricature of ourselves that we see when we look in our minds and hearts. This almost coulda-woulda-shoulda version of ourselves that we try to superimpose on what we think we know about ourselves. We coat the image in the mirror with the things we think will make us more appealing to people and sometimes, to our own selves because we don’t think we are all that appealing.
There is this mass movement of self-improvement in this generation that I too am guilty of. This is not a bad thing really, I just sometimes come up for air and realise that I am tittering over the edge of an unhealthy obsession with picking myself apart. I’m no longer just looking at myself with the goal of seeing what just is but the unsettled eye of a detective, scrutinizing every bump and dent as if I am about to place some value on the vessel that is this body. On the mind that controls it. Or on the heart that moves it.
I sometimes scroll down my contacts list and imagine the image of me stored in the minds of people whose numbers have become havens for cobwebs. These perspectives of self that have been stored frozen in time, undisturbed by the ill raking-ins of life. The traumatic experiences, the personality-shifting epiphanies or the emancipation efforts of my naive mentalities. Some of them knew me only when I was young and we lost contact and never have gotten the chance to catch up. Others have managed to steal snippets of me here and there when we would meet by chance at this that or the other social gathering.
Those chance encounters make you realise the parts of you that have long laid dormant and some say that it is where your true nature resides. In the things that you no longer have time for. True, priority lists change and if they didn’t you’d be a stunted adult but it is also important to refind the things that set your childish soul on fire. Make you feel like you are living again. To take back these part of you and that…. demands audacity.
Audacity the likes of matatu conductors. The ones who see you getting into an uber and call out to you confident that your wallet can convince you of the cheaper option. The ones who see you walking in the completely opposite direction and try to pull you physically into the car that is going to take you further away from the place you are going. The ones who see you dropping off your friend at their bus stop and try to convince you to go with your friend to their place… yet it is home time.
I would like to regain this audacity again. To look at my ambitions and dreams and try to cram them together in this bus that already looks overloaded. To carry with me these things to wherever life is taking me. They can get off when they want but I would like the confidence back to persuade them to stay until the very end.
I demand the audacity of hawkers. These businessmen and women whose marketing skills make you doubt yourself in ways you didn’t know. How can you speak into existence a car for me to sell me accessories? Command my physical evidence of lack into hopeful manifestation. You don’t even need that phone holder, or charger cable with three plugs but for a split second, they can make you believe it. They will appeal to a need you never knew you had, albeit sometimes quite rude.
They say that you must market yourself and I do believe that closed mouths don’t get fed. Maybe I have gotten too comfortable in this belief that “if you are good at something, you will be noticed for it.” Not always the case. There is some level of pride in self that one should have. This belief that just because I can do it I should do it. It is the same thing played upon when as a child they would say “If you come dance you win a prize” then you go because you can. Whether good or bad, doesn’t matter. You can dance.
I want the audacity of a V8 driver. Command the road as if I own it and believe that I am above whatever rules others must follow to get to their goals. Reaccess the audacity that I’ve been told men have. That corrupt politicians have.
Pace the ego enough to walk with the audacity of a dollar and a dream… to put it Frankly.
