My Birthday – My moment of fear

We live at an age obsessed with youthfulness, so a birthday ‘celebration’ can become a moment of trepidation if your age is in the “no longer young” category. That was the case for me last Sunday when I turned 42. Ageing may be a natural process for all of us, and may seem self-defeating for anyone to emphasize youthfulness as the ultimate value, but it’s the character of the age we live in. 

Yet a birthday celebration provides opportunity to reflect on the experiences of life and what these experiences teach us going forward. I have experienced 3 main epochs in my adult life. Each of these epochs has had its own highs and lows providing opportunity to learn quite a lot. I think as people get older sharing these lessons of life should become the focus of celebrating birth-days. It is this perspective that I share my 3 epochal moments of my adult life.

Epoch One:

This epoch started in the late 1990s when I got my first job to work for a research and poverty reduction program. Our work focused mainly on youth and women groups. This job I must say was quite fulfilling; observing communities and groups progressively transform their income status can be very gratifying. At a personal level however, I felt very disconnected. There was this “thing – the private self” that I felt I had to hide. 

I had monologues in my head, often wondering, what if the people got to know “the real me” what would happen, how would they treat me? But not knowing better, I often brushed these mental questions aside. Unfortunately these monologues only increased with time – it was as if I was constantly having real eerie “can see us…” moment in a real life ghost movie. 

One time my boss sent me to represent him at an inauguration of a large farming project our program had initiated with the support of the German Government in Kisumu. Almost everyone from the village was there, and since they expected my boss, there was this high-table that I sat at. I recall very vividly, as the women were singing and dancing (as is often the character of these kinds of events), I completely spaced-out. I was wondering, if only they knew, who in the crowd I fancied, would they continue singing? Would they continue treating like this celebrity from NAIROBI? 

Even though I was and remain committed to poverty alleviation initiatives, my secret was fighting ever so strenuously to break loose. It is as if I had secretly murdered someone and the investigators were getting ever so close to the final clue.  

Second Epoch

As you can imagine, after sometime, life just becomes too much. So with the advent of the broadened democratic space after the 2002 general elections, together with some friends, we formed advocacy groups that culminated with the formation of GALCK. I was lucky to become its founding director. Yet this came with its own set of challenges. 

We made some modest advocacy gains that were quite gratifying both at a personal and professional level. But the laser-sharp stigma that came with gay rights advocacy was particularly frightening. Initially, I felt we had to soldier on, that people did not really understand gay and lesbian people; that with time not only would they understand, they would also be more welcoming and accepting. That if we made a very convincing case, the government and general society would see the need to remove the punitive laws and create a social order that respects equity and equality needs for all of us. 

Of course we now know that did not happen. Instead, sharp and insulting words   calculated to emasculate and dehumanize were thrown at the Kenyan gay community and being the community’s public representative, I received them on their behalf. With time, as it always happens with these negative messages, I got to internalize them, and the once high confidence levels plummeted to their lowest. 

The young boy, who once revelled at public speaking, and public adulation, could no longer speak even within closed door meetings. The person who once drew energy from the crowd was no more – I became like a rained-on old lion, who just wished to be left alone to mourn his shame in private. In the end, the thing I miss the most during this second epoch of my adult life is loss of self-confidence and the belief in self-worth.

Third Epoch

The third epoch started last year – thanks to a friend(s), who I have yet to thank sufficiently. After working for GALCK, there were precious few organizations willing to hire a person with my advocacy background. Being positioned as a gay-rights inhibited many from recognizing any other skills I had, so you can imagine how much I appreciate the current opportunity to “rehabilitate” into the mainstream society. As I now work in the mainstream settings, I hope to provide evidence that current gay rights activist, do have skills beneficial in the mainstream settings – I owe them that.

Indeed in this third epoch, I hope to work with others to deliver to the Kenyan and global societies bold and provocative social and political messages that challenge the public’s conventional understanding of the social order. That we cannot and should not be satisfied with a social order that excludes and discriminates on account of ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, gender or any other such non-essential human differentiator. 

At a private/personal level this calls for re-building my personal confidence and healing the wounds so deeply inflicted by stigma. Yet on a social level, I remain committed to the comedy of the commons. We can and should believe in a social order where all members of the society, are provided opportunity to become better persons and to realize their inherent potential to the fullest. I do this during the day-to-day professional obligations, but also privately through the Kuria Foundation for Social Enterprise – www.kuriafoundation.or.ke