Capitalists have created my goals
I'm trying to find new ones
From the time I was a child I knew love and respect were tied to pleasing authority figures. I knew this because growing up in Kenya I was a star student and I saw the difference between how I was treated compared to the children who were deemed not to be as “smart”. In Kenya we had three “final” exams every year. Each student was ranked based on how many points they accumulated on the exams. Kind of like a GPA except your points don’t carry over from year to year, just like Project Runway, you could be in one term and be out the next term. I was usually ranked first and my teachers fawned over me. They said I was special and gave me extra responsibilities like being a prefect. For those of you who haven’t read Harry Potter (best decision you’ve made) and have only studied in the so-called United States of America, a prefect is a child who snitches on other children. Yes, I was a cop in elementary school and I’m not proud of it.
Nonetheless, I digress. I knew I was lucky to be good at school because the kids who weren’t were treated so poorly that they probably wished school could be Project Runway. In Project Runway you are sent home when you are deemed not worthy, but in my elementary school in Nairobi you were punished more often and called “stupid”. The only times I was a recipient of negative treatment from my teachers was when I was ranked number two instead of one. It happened twice in my private school and my teachers told me they were disappointed. I remember the first time this happened I was too scared to go home and decided to go to my aunt’s place instead. I knew my parents would be disappointed too.
When I moved to the United States my eighth-grade teacher recommended me to be placed in “Gifted and Talented” (GT) classes because she saw “something” in me. GT classes are just a mechanism for segregating schools, but that’s a story for another time. This recognition from a teacher who barely knew me further reinforced in me the notion that to be deemed as being worthy one must receive validation from an authority figure. I took this lesson to my adulthood and to this day I still find that I measure my “success” based only on external validation.
It wasn’t until I got really high recently that I realized viewing success as validation from authority figures can be very dangerous because authority figures who determine our measures of success are capitalists who want to exploit us. Yes, most of my breakthroughs happen when I’m high, and I’m not ashamed. I realized when I view success as a stand-up comedian being on Comedy Central, I’m creating a goal that is not only completely out of my control, but is also dependent on what capitalists want me to do. That could be commodifying relationships and only associating with people who I think will get me to Comedy Central, telling only certain types of jokes, grinding myself to the bone to be noticed.
I understand the reason why I have sought this validation is because at the end of the day validation from capitalists will lead to receiving love and respect like my teachers gave me as a child. We are all worthy of love and respect, but we live in a world that only gives it to “accomplished” people. Accomplished people are the people who capitalists, aka the authority figures, say are. To get this love I lurched on to capitalists’ goals that were inherently meant to exploit us and will never make me happy.