“Oh, it was real, all right,” she says. “We lived it; we were there. If you go through something and put up with it even if you want to get away from it more than anything in the whole world, then it was definitely bloody real.”
Page 227, More Than This by Patrick Ness
On 23 December, I read More Than This by Patrick Ness for the second time in my life. After reading it in Grade 6, it was my favourite novel for years, but I had only read it once, and I borrowed it from my school. I don’t know what it was about it, but I felt that novel. It resonated somewhere deep into my soul in a way that I could not articulate. And now, reading it years later, a year after buying it for myself, I can speculate at what Grade 6 Vuyo saw reflected in that novel. And my heart breaks.
But, we’re not here to talk about heartbreak, are we? It’s a new year; “new year, new me” is what we like to say, in the hope that we can shrug off that person who’s been dragged down and beaten up by life and find the beauty underneath them, so that the real you might come out. Isn’t that the dream? That everything here isn’t real: the real us is somewhere ahead, and if we work hard, we can reach them.
While reading More Than This, I started questioning if anything is real: not in the way the novel questioned it, like are we living in a simulation; that’s beside the point. I started questioning if what I was doing was real. Was it my real thoughts and wishes, or simply, the most convenient and painfully numbing path?
In finishing the novel, I realised: I don’t know the answer. But for all intents and purposes, I am real. Despite the giants who control this world, despite everything that makes it difficult to be alive, the impossibility of surviving this far, I am alive and I am real.
When things grow dark and when things fall apart, that is what I hope to remember this year. That the odds of us existing are laughably small, but we are alive and we are real.
Change your name, cut off your hair, tell the truth. Everything is difficult and everything hurts, but what if, what if, it’s all going somewhere.
Make yourself.
Create yourself.
Revolt against yourself.
If there is one thing humans know how to do, it is revolt, even against ourselves. Revolt against everything we have ever known if it means we can see the universe for what it is and make it our own.
“It’s not anything, really, good or bad. It just is.”
Page 108, More Than This by Patrick Ness
In this new year, I don’t want to be a new me, I want to revolt against the idea that I can remake myself. There are no second chances, so I can only continue to make myself. If you’re ‘remaking’ yourself by dropping whatever vice you found comfort in, you’re making the real person.
It’s like you are an artwork, and sometimes when you should have chosen a dark soothing colour, you chose white, that blinded everything. Your resolution is you finding ways to even things out again and make that artwork what you want it to be.
Continue working on that artwork in 2020.