The first thing you should know about me is that I am a visual artist: my life is my workbook, my sketchbook and my preparatory canvas, approach me with that in mind and proceed from there. I emote, I wail, I rail, I analyse and study from a million different angles every experience and every emotion. I roll them on my tongue like golden honey: I bare myself to the morning sun, I walk in rainstorms and soak in the night, I cry and I laugh and I scream and I fight but you will rarely find me ambivalent. I live each experience as if it is my last, no matter what that is, be it what it may: spending 16hours in the Dubai airport (surreal experience when doing it after a couple of days of no sleep) or running at night on the streets of Hollywood to try and dull emotional pain or tracking with Bushmen on the South West African (Namibian) border or training for hours and hours at dance rehearsals for a stage show or instructing taebo classes. Or as is my condition at the moment, rebuilding a life in South Africa, as daunting and ultimately humiliating as that is for me. I consume the experience and allow it to do the same to me and from that bursts forth the most vivid of emotions, the most powerful, from within me. No, you will not find me luke-warm if you take the time to get to know me. People often confuse my initial silent, quiet manner as a lack of emotion or being tightly-wound or cold. Ha! Look closer I say! Do you want to know what it feels like to experience life? Hang around! Whatever I do I commit myself completely to it, there is no holding back, I am like a force of Nature that way.
An important thing that I always neglect to tell people about myself, possibly because it is just such an integral part of who I am that I no longer consciously think about it, is that I am a vegetarian. I do not eat anything with a face, no flesh: no chicken, no fish, no animals. Why? It is not for any health reason although in my mind it is a far healthier way to live. It is cruel and unnecessary and I knew that from the age of 10, for me it is a moral choice.
Something I have recently learned about myself, which I although I understand why I am like this, is disturbing to me. I really don’t like this about myself and I am certainly going to make every effort to change it. In relationships I take on the role of the person who is acted upon and thus in my recent relationship, the victim. In truth this is a result of a lifetime of being beaten down; from being bullied in junior school to abusive relationships I have been in. You don’t get beaten until your shoulder is dislocated and then urinated upon by the boys as a child and come away without some emotional, psychological damage being done. Or stabbed in high school for that matter, I grew up in a neighbourhood and school of bullies, and then was conscripted into an army where the government enforced all sorts of brutalities upon the soldiers and thus engendered a mindset of a violent society of men… or boys, as most of us were only eighteen. Later in life, the emotional abuse of an unstable partner. Please I am really not looking for sympathy or pity, perhaps just a little understanding, I am merely working through this myself, admitting to myself and clarifying why I act the way I do, as I said, for myself more than anyone else, and I really don’t like that I do that. So the solution? Do I hold back, not give my all, build walls around myself? That’s just not me, I have never been afraid to fail, and in defeat or loss I have always learned more about myself then in success and joy. Perhaps I just need to be a little more fortunate with my choices but you can’t win if you are not in the game. So I am a person that does not hold back! I know this about myself, and it is overwhelming to people. There is an unrestrained, wildness about it, a force and a weight, and perhaps this is why I am still alone after all these years. Who knows? But I am what I am and it is what will make me a great, great artist one day!
But I need to believe more in myself! Instead of saying: “Wow there is something wrong with me and you were so right to break up with me”, I should be saying, ” Do you know what? You are making a huge mistake, one that you will inevitably end up regretting.But you go have your boring life. I am the most romantic, loving, honest and loyal person you will ever know and if you had let me, I would have made your life magical”. I am fairly good looking and what I lack in that department I make up in an exotic sensuality that a lot of women find appealing. I move well and am a natural dancer,I have a good body and am strong when I have to be but without being obnoxious about it. I am a generous, patient and unselfish lover. I’m intelligent and sensitive and in touch with my feelings and I am very, very unique. I kid you not! I may not be wealthy but I will be one day, I am an artist who is going to make it, no doubt about it. OK, yes I am self-promoting here but to postulate is to make real, so I reject the “victim” postulate and adopt the “I am fantastic” one, he he he!