A place to be honest

The reason I am here is a young woman from Ghana. I've never been to Ghana. Lately the weather where I live in the UK has been about 24 degrees Celsius, which I regard as oppressively hot, so I am unlikely to ever go.

I came across the poem of a Ghanaian woman saying that she had taken another lover, speaking of her longing, regret and neediness. It struck me as beautiful for one reason above all others -- this woman was being honest. You don't see that often on the internet these days. Everybody is curating an image. We are all one man marketing agencies. We have lost the freedom to be ourselves and most of the time we don't even realise it.

There is a good reason for this. The internet has become a collection of all-seeing eyes. Our employers, our relatives, facebook, amazon, potential dates, an online angry mob, advertising agencies nobody has ever heard of, even the unborn may give our words attention in due time.

I am here for freedom. Freedom to put my thoughts out there without them being snooped over by a small-minded HR manager in twenty years, or a vindictive co-worker. Freedom from the advertisers who will scan it a thousand times for keywords -- boil my thoughts down to residue then add water and force-feed the product back to me in a thousand ways. Freedom from any who would take my feelings now out of cold storage in a decade hence to use as a blade to cut me down. Freedom to empty my mind here and for all then fill it back up again with poetry from many climates, and leave what I felt and what I thought in the moment. Freedom to forget myself.

Inside all of us is a creative fire. Your boss, teacher, cleric and relatives are just as likely to kick it into the mud as admire it. People have been trying that your whole life. And what we need for that fire is a little air. A little encouragement. A little room to experiment, to grow, to make mistakes. We have that last thing less than ever.

Let us learn from each other. Let us speak our minds. And let us pay respect only to our own creativity and to each other. That is what I hope to do with your help.