Why is it that virtually everything I do or say is misinterpreted, and even termed weird? Why do I have to go to bed every day asking why I'm repeatedly misunderstood? Why do I have to go through the stress of finding specific words, sentences to explain myself and my natural demeanour to people who apparently didn't understand what I said or why I did what I did, or even what I didn't do?
These, among hundreds, were the questions that popped in my teens and ushered me into adulthood. They left me bewildered. These questions disrupted my sleep, my mental calm and even aspirations. As I reflect on various stages of my childhood, teen years, and now navigating the world as a 27-year-old, I can safely say that, even though I wish to retain my childlikeness, my teenage innocence, both childhood and adulthood are overrated — and vice versa. I remember writing in an old notebook that, 'I wish I hadn't been born.'
As a child I was fascinated with disappearance. I fantasised having some supernatural power to disappear into space, disappear to another country, and even teleport to places I had read about. But no matter how often I daydreamed, I only disappeared into books, disappeared into playgrounds, into bushes. I didn't want to exist in constant misunderstanding. I don't want to exist. So aloneness mattered to me more than many things. Aloneness still matters to me.
Once a guy walked to me and threatened to deal with me if I don't stay out of his way. This happened right in my neighbourhood, a few yards from our house. He ordered me to stay out of his way and never try his patience. Beside the fact that his tall and broad figure gave him the look of someone whose day and night had been spent on enlarging their ego, his words were frightening.
Streets, geographies, people have their unique lingos. The words he uttered confused me. They weren't new or unpronounceable words, they weren't from a language I didn't understand; they were rather strange phrases in my cognitive map and overall way of life. I was about 12 or 13, and no one had ever walked to me in my neighbourhood to tell me what not to do or risk my life. His words came with such forcefulness. I felt attacked, because to deal with someone in our kind of slum is