As a child I never really knew what I wanted to be, not because I wasn’t good at anything or didn’t have hopes and dreams, but more because I couldn’t decide. To me, in my six-year-old mind there was a great big bowl with opportunities that was available and they all had my name on it. I simply have always believed that I could be anything I wanted, and that wasn’t something my parents taught me, on the contrary the dreams and goals they had for me was far from what I grew attracted to as I got older and what I was attracted to, wasn’t a dream many people shared with their kids, but I knew it… I was attracted to the Arts.
Anything was possible… Now what was the anything I wanted to be? A singer!
I fell deeply in love with music. From a young age music was a part of me, a part of my life. My grandpa from my mom’s side played the guitar and so did her brothers, my dad was a DJ and loved music and my grandma from dad’s side, well, there was a never a day that gone by without her singing. I loved her singing, she loved singing. So, it was quite obvious that music affected me and some of my other family members as well, but music took me deep and I know it would never leave me, music was is like a second skin to me and so was singing. Now… that is my first love… Music…
Something I didn’t see coming was this… Writing. It kind of just happened, well to be honest there are many things that kind of just happened to me, but writing hasn’t been the kindest to me, but when I finally accepted it as being a part of me, it allowed me a freedom I never thought possible and it really has showed me a world I never thought I would experience.
When I was growing up, I had an idea of what I would like my life to be like, but I knew however at around eight or nine years old I was different. My imaginary friends never left me, and I was oddly more awake than my peers and even my siblings and parents and extremely comfortable in my own skin, rebelling to me felt weird because I couldn’t believe it. I could never give in to peer pressure or do anything out of spite or anger because that felt unnatural to me, which is probably why my attempt at taking drugs and living recklessly failed, because honestly that just wasn’t me, but who was I? I was many things, as my English Teacher in my grade 12 year told me, but you’re not shy (meaning I wasn’t afraid to be me) … I didn’t get that until I just typed it now? But was the me she was referring to, the me I saw in the mirror or was it someone I was showing unconsciously to others that I somehow thought was pretend?
Another thing my English teacher said to me on a different occasion, the day she found my journal in class after I forgot it, was and started haunting me years later is that, some people learn to be writers and others are born to be writers and then she gave me that look… That you’re the second part of the statement i just gave you look… And what was my response to her that day? I don’t want to be a writer Miss. I don’t want what I love to become my bread and butter and end up hating it because my survival depended on it… How those words nearly came to take me out a few years ago. At that time most of my insecurities stemmed from my English teacher of the previous grade 11, who gave me an embarrassing mark and accused me plagiarism. I was like what the fuck? No like really because I spent an entire Math period writing that essay not doing my math so that I could hand in that paper because I forgot about it and knew she would shit on me, and still she gives me 10/30 and accuses me of plagiarism? Really? Yes, she did… Because in her words; it’s impossible for a child like me (a brown child from the shit side of Cape Town) to write the way I write, and I should come and show her the book I had copied it out of. Now I would have been less offended if she had just said I didn’t write it, but to say… It’s IMPOSSIBLE? Now that pissed me off. Coz what she said contradicted everything my teacher of grade 12 told me a year later when she read my writing was my genius. So… For all long time after those incidents, I struggled to fall in love with Priscilla the writer. I was deeply in love with Priscilla the singer and dancer and actress, but the writer, she was a lesser important part of me.
So, my life didn’t turn out the way I had dreamt iT would, in fact it went south in more ways that I would like to go into detail for, but nonetheless, its been a journey. Somehow, I always knew that this would happen, that the person who I truly was, was going to come out and she would not take no for an answer when it came to her chance to shine. The other versions of me, well they started to fade and all that is now left is me. Broken and sewed together again me, lost but now using a map me, the single but not lonely me, the weak but enormously brave me, the I don’t think I want to write but I love telling stories me, the closet singer, slowly mustering up the courage to kick her stage freight me, the I can’t have sex without love me, the I love PDA but maybe my partner doesn’t me… All the dimensions of me in this one getting fit body…
I’m so many things ya’ll… But my English teacher was right… I’m not shy to be me…. So follow me on this journey as I pull back the layers and invite you into my world and share with you all that I am and still becoming and who knows… you might get a little something out of it too…
TheRealPriscillaM 