Who Am I? Notes of a Wanton Child
by Epifania Amoo-Adare, Doha
1. I am still in the process of evolving, even though I could say that a certain core part of me is more or less set in stone. But if asked to say what that aspect of me is, I will be hard pressed. All I know is that I am often not what people see me as and I sometimes surprise even myself. I also find that as I have gotten older, certain parts of me have either died off or gone so deep out of sight that I am not quite sure how to excavate them. And one such piece of mine is the daring adventurer, alongside the abject fun-lover.
2. I believe I can fly. You know, soar above my current existence, which of late has very much felt like someone else's life, that ironically I have constructed. This is not right, especially for the woman who every night in her childhood dreamed of flying. Where is that free spirit? What has this staid imposter done with her? That is exactly what I very much would like to know.
3. I want to be me. Surely by now this fact is very clear to you. Most certainly, it is for me. I want to be the unruly child that I was, the one who aspired to models like Beryl the Peril. Not so much to be naughty, but rather to be free: free from unwanted burdens of good social behavior, free from prescriptions for appropriate female demeanour, free of the limitations of becoming a good student, free from the harsh boundaries of reality. You see, that is why I always flew at night, in my dreams,where no one could stop me. And it is those dreams that I need to resuscitate - giving them mouth to mouth in my mind's eye. After all, now that I know that thoughts form cells, just think of what I could manifest with the power of my own lucid dreaming.
4. I know what it is to not be quite me, but what I have yet to know is how I can achieve the fullness of being - the artless art of an existence that is free and wanton--not in the egotistical nature of that word but rather in the intangible form of the integral way: where my life energy cannot distinguish itself from that of other life forms, and where intellect is overwritten by the indescribable lightness of being. And now even I do not make any sense, because non-sense is what we truly are: the complete fullness of being nothing and no-body.
5. I think too much. Therefore I am not capable of being in this present without a weighted anxiety: anxious to be more than what I am, while recognising that I do not exist in reality. A conundrum one might say, but is that not what all life is? A puzzle of energy, manifesting in various forms and dimensions, and often cancelling itself out in a Big Bang of coming-into-being.
6. I wish--a loaded term, filled with so much potency and regret: this has been my current state of existence; fortunately, sans regret.
7. I hope...