I sometimes return to the first essays I published at the beginning of the year—pieces written in the seriousness of January while the rest of the world was still celebrating the arrival of a new calendar. They were essays about homosexuality, race, and poverty, written with the careful tone of someone trying to behave like a sociologist rather than an artist. I am grateful for them. They were the first things I allowed the public to read. Yet when I look at them now, I feel a certain distance, as if the person who wrote them belongs to another profession entirely. They read like sociology.
This is not an insult to sociology. It is a discipline that asks important questions about how people live and how societies organise themselves. But reading those essays today, I feel as if I have stepped into a lecture hall filled with European theorists from another century. Serious men with long beards and receding hairlines, speaking in sentences that carry the weight of systems and theories but little sense of atmosphere. The writing is correct, perhaps even responsible, but it lacks a certain oxygen.
When I read the essays of Joan Didion, the experience is entirely different. She does not merely present an argument; she invites you into a world. Suddenly, you are in Los Angeles, seeing the Pacific Ocean stretch across the horizon. You hear the guitars drifting from studios along Sunset Boulevard. Women are walking through the afternoon without bras in a hippie cult, musicians talking too loudly about their latest recordings, someone somewhere opening a bottle or perhaps a line of cocaine on a mirrored table. Later, she is back in New York, preparing dinner in a small apartment after work. It is all there—the places, the weather, the tone of the time. That, to me, is art.
Art allows a voice to exist inside the sentence. Sociology, by contrast, demands a certain restraint. It encourages you to be systematic, careful, and even genetic in the way ideas are organised. Everything must follow a structure. Everything must be serious.
I am thinking about this difference while sitting on a veranda in Howick, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal. The house is built from red bricks, with aluminium window frames that catch the afternoon light. Around me, plants are bending slightly in the breeze, birds move through the trees, producing the kind of soft sound that feels almost like background music. The air is warm. The humidity, as anyone who has spent time in this part of the country knows, is always high. The sky is pale blue now, but later it will turn pink as the sun lowers behind the hills.
This seems like the right place to speak about a subject people rarely discuss openly: pornography. It is one of those topics that immediately produces discomfort. The word itself feels as if it has removed a layer of clothing from the conversation. Yet the truth is that many people—men and women alike, encounter pornography at some point in their lives. For gay teenagers, it can function as something else entirely: a secret mirror.
When a young gay boy grows up in a place where nobody around him speaks openly about sexuality, he begins to search secretly for signs that people like him exist. Pornography becomes, in a strange way, the first evidence. Here are bodies that resemble his own desires. Here are gestures that suggest a possibility he has never seen acknowledged in the real world.
In the digital era, this discovery happens earlier and more frequently than it did when I was growing up. Screens provide immediate access to images that once required secrecy and effort to obtain. Without parents or mentors who can explain what these images mean or what they do not mean. Young men often explore their sexuality alone.
Sometimes that exploration becomes addiction. Society’s response is usually simple: pornography is evil. It is corrupting. Those who consume it excessively are labelled weak, immoral, or perverted. Yet the same society that delivers these judgments often offers very little guidance to the people it criticises. When you grow up without instruction, you improvise. And improvisation sometimes becomes dependency.
Letting go of an addiction requires a form of honesty that many people misunderstand. They believe liberation begins with condemnation, that you must first declare the object of your attachment wicked or destructive. But that approach ignores a complicated truth: sometimes the thing we are trying to leave behind once served a purpose.
For many young men, pornography was present during moments when nobody else was. It helped them recognise something about themselves. It gave them language for desires they did not yet know how to describe. Of course, it can become unhealthy when hours disappear into endless consumption. Of course, it can distort expectations and relationships. But acknowledging those harms does not require pretending that the experience never offered comfort or understanding.
Addiction eventually teaches us that what once sustained us may, at another stage, begin to work against us. This does not make it evil. It only means its role in our journey has ended. And sometimes the healthiest farewell begins with gratitude. Thank you for accompanying me this far. I understand now what I needed from you. From here, I will continue alone.
My coffee cup beside me is empty now. The pink light has faded from the sky. Night arrives, the lights of military-green-roofed homes in Howick fading as the birds settle into their final sounds before darkness. And somewhere between the last of the daylight and the beginning of evening, I realise that growing into responsibility often means learning to let go of the very things that once helped us survive.
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