I was always drawn to art. Drawing, painting, sculpting — a language I could hone without the risk of being heard or the expectation of being listened to. But it was not that type of art that was to become my primary medium. My true medium was yet to be revealed to me.

I came upon the written word first as a reader, learning early that it could give me escape. I didn't know and couldn't have known this, but being an avid reader was shaping me as a writer. That competence showed up clearly in high school. It was then as a teenager that I took writing beyond the classroom, into my bedroom — to commune with myself.

Music has always been alluring. Songs create worlds — and those worlds were always a welcome interruption to my real world. From them I received the gift of harmony, rhythm and beats — the language of my voice when my world demanded my silence. As I internalised the practice of writing my musings, I discovered my writing could be contorted into verse and combined with music, giving my inner world outer expression without the burden of explanation.

I loved the song and loved the verse and believed it was my destiny to be an artist. But the dream was contained by parental authority and familial expectation. I succumbed — but defied the prospect of becoming an engineer or doctor. I had excelled in English beyond mathematics and science and this gave room to my agency. I entered university as a prospective psychologist and threw off that coat when I discovered sociology and politics — for the first time my mind felt at home. That didn't mean I had found a reprieve from constraint.

I left university to join a think tank. Yet again it was my writing that got me chosen — a junior researcher position offered on the spot after completing an analytical written exercise impeccably. The first three years of my career I was reared in the art of civil society advocacy. As a side pursuit I transported my writing into the world of opining, carving for myself a place as one of the country's public intellectuals.

Little did I know that my advocacy in the public world was preparation for advocacy in the private.

The intellectual freedom of the political sociologist clashed with the orthodoxy of a strict Seventh-Day Adventist. The questioning practised in lecture halls, in advocacy, in speaking truth to power resisted bridling. I contained my mind as far as I could — but when I could no longer present an argument for my acceptance of my living conditions, the chains broke off. Religious fundamentalism could not stand up to my intellectual rigour. It could not be used to substantiate the curtailing of my personal agency, the silencing of my voice, the dimming of my light. In my thirties my spirit could not accept the pen as the only place for soul aeration. It demanded full emergence.

The memoir was the first product of that birth. The story I now use as the classroom of the Subsoil — an example of the philosophy enacted, the framework applied, the practice in motion.

I have been away for some time, retreated in my private, grappling once more with the weight of personal agency and systemic constraint. I am a mother now. I am walking a tightrope — holding space for her while finding space for the child in me. But there is no competition. I can feed them both. I am not just parenting the child without — I am parenting the child within. I am spirit in body, not body holding spirit. I reach back and forward; inward and outward.

The eight births are not a catalogue of identities. They are the evidence of one thing — that the self, when honestly reckoned with, produces everything it needs. The fingerprint of thinking is identical across all of them.

The self is the root. Not the work.

The quality of your rooting determines the nature of your emergence. Everything else is merely the world observing the height of the tree.