Mind Your Mind

I'm sitting on the floor, surrounded by his life. Dust and detritus everywhere costume fragments, etching plates, drawings, photographs, paintings. The birds are loud outside, and so is the sea. It's quiet otherwise. Just me and the accumulated weight of it all. There’s a sign he used to make and stick up on the building site of our childhood home, where I grew up: “Mind Your Mind.” A warning about bumping your head. I feel mine bumping against something heavier now—the architecture of our relationship, its impossible geometry.

Words: Tara Boraine 

They don't tell you what it's like to lose someone like this. It doesn't matter if they were a difficult man or an emotionally absent father. Everything hurts in its own, complex, bittersweet way. As my dad retreats further into the fog of dementia, it’s recently felt like I was handed a baton. Well, perhaps not a baton. A brush. I look over at the mountain of cobwebbed brushes and sigh, almost irritated at his compulsive need to hoard. So many things to sort through. 

I feel he has left me clues—breadcrumbs scattered across decades, readable only to someone who shared his neurological language. As I attempt to tackle his abandoned piles of artwork, a recurrent motif begins to play in my mind. It haunts me like a neurological carnival—a chaotic polyrhythm of bittersweet glitches.

My father, Hardy, was born Gerhardus Petrus Botha in Kroonstad in 1948. There were no words for autism or ADHD back then—only Afrikaans ones like simpel and onnosel. He was the stationmaster’s only son and greatest disappointment. His mother tried to shield her sensitive boy, but she, too, was delicate—often a victim herself of the Free State’s stubborn cruelty.

The first time my father saw the circus, a particularly colourful train rolled into his father’s station. The spectacle—tents, caged animals, freak shows, performers, the sheer simultaneity of sensory information—would forever haunt his work. In many ways, I think, it offered his first notion of a parallel universe: a place where his carnival of differences wasn’t a liability, and where eccentricity was witnessed and liberated. From an early age, my father intuited an ancient survival tactic: play the fool. Make your difference visible before the world can weaponise it. Seize narrative control through self-deprecation and spectacle.

At first, it worked brilliantly. After all, it got him out of Kroonstad. It got him out of national service to the dreaded apartheid state. It enabled him to go to university, make friends, travel through Europe, hold solo exhibitions, represent the country at the São Paulo Bienal, and lecture for years at UCT and Stellenbosch.

Fools, jesters, clowns… throughout history, they’ve been simultaneously celebrated and enslaved, visible and invisible, powerful and utterly constrained. After all, they were often people existing outside the normal social order—frequently neurodivergent or disabled—whose particular way of perceiving the world made them dangerous to systems built on conformity.

One day, it was no longer a game. The fool’s identity became inescapable. The mask had fused to his face. His eccentricity was no longer performance—it was simply who he was, forged in the difficult apprenticeship of being different.

He was a brilliant artist, but a tragically flawed human being—restless, anxious, and captive to his demons. His passion was infectious, but he had little capacity to think beyond his immediate needs. I think of my own impulsive youth and wince at our neurological similarities.

I, too, lived like a fool. I worked hard at it. I performed for crowds; I drank like a fish, danced like a monkey, sang like a bird. But before long, I found myself at the mercy of my impulses, my vices, and a desperate need to be adored. That was when I realised that foolishness would only get me so far. Like my father, I had found solace in forgetting myself. But I’m witnessing now how that story ends—often to the detriment of those closest to us. And I don’t want that. I want to create the conditions for a different ending—for myself, for my beloveds, and for the world at large.

When I was a child, my father painted in the lounge, late into the night. Sometimes he'd let us mix his oils—the smell of moerkoffie and linseed oil and turpentine settling into everything around him. 

Despite growing up in galleries, I looked at paintings and felt little to nothing. Colours seemed almost inconsequential. For years, I found it hard to access the visual world. I could do it—but not like he could. In retrospect, I think I’d always associated fine art with my father’s territory: obscure, out of reach, something I couldn’t quite tune in to, something I wasn’t really allowed to.

I’ve always known I was different. But so was my family, and so at first it didn’t seem to matter much. Still, I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand my mind.

I began piecing things together as a teenager. I’d chosen music as a refuge for my complex inner worlds. One day, after reading Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia, I discovered that not everyone experienced the world the way I did. Not everyone saw the scale of G minor as viridian, or D major as scarlet vermillion. Not everyone perceived letters, numbers, and days of the week as having colours or distinct personalities. Not everyone moved through a traversable, dreamlike topography of ideas, or held a geometric understanding of concepts and their connections. But I did. 

Synesthesia, it’s called - a lack of neural pruning leading to enhanced connectivity across the senses. The result? A mind that experiences the world so intensely that it feels vivid, electric, and frequently overwhelming. In retrospect, I have no doubt my father's mind had this kind of architecture too. 

Now, I had a name for this phenomenon, one facet of my restless cognition, but no framework for understanding what it meant, in the broader context of my neurology.  It wasn't until I was twenty-seven that I was diagnosed with AuDHD—the combined neurotype of autism and ADHD. 

It was a homecoming. Suddenly I had words for my chaotic inner world, and the two forces that pulled in opposition inside me, turning the wheel of my fortunes and misses. 

And suddenly, I had words for my father. There was a similarity to our differences: we shared difficulties in social communication, repetitive behaviours, restricted, often compulsive interests, and decidedly atypical sensory processing. He, like me, had dynamic capabilities and was often disabled by his own chaotic and traumatised mind. But now and again, from the cacophony of the nonsensical, there emerged an occasional melody: coherent and crystal clear. A brilliant joke. A pithy insight. A prophetic vision. As his mind fades into a timeless obscurity, I make a conscious choice to remember him this way. 

Heartbreakingly, by the time I had language, by the time I figured it out why our family struggled so, his capacity to comprehend was already dissolving. These days, I am learning to have compassion. For him, yes, but also for myself. I know what it's like to be wired this way; the cacophony of it all. The world doesn't look like something and sound like something. The world is the compound thing—image-sound-feeling-meaning all at once, inseparable, and deeply, indescribably complex. You don't just perceive the world; you become permeable to it. I know what it’s like to feel permeable. I think about my own prophetic artifacts: some of my earliest include graffiti on a school desk that read “where do I end? Where does the world begin?”. 

Art was his way of making sense—converting this overwhelming simultaneity into something coherent. I can relate. And this sensemaking work is lifegiving, but exhausting. Especially if you don’t have the right kinds of understanding and support. Over time, as his world grew more traumatic and complex and incomprehensible, my father withdrew from it. First from society, from friends, and finally even from himself. The noise of his mind and the chaos of the outside world fused into an unbearable din. His tragic optimism slowly morphed into a stubborn misanthropy. He stopped making art. And slowly, but surely, he stopped making sense. 

The circus packed up. The fool's ship began to sink. A sensitive lifetime of complex trauma cascaded into a years-long depression, which ended in a desperate desire to forget.He was not a man of many words or obvious affections. But he gave me my first music production setup a Scarlett Focusrite 2i2 and microphone, bought on a maxed-out credit card. He loved music. Still does blaring obnoxiously loud 60s rock n roll from the TV whenever my mum’s just laid herself down for a nap.

As my dad slips further into the fog, his continuity dissolves. His narrative collapses. His capacity to construct meaning evaporates. Ironically, as his past collapses into a featureless present, I find mine is crystallizing into something I can finally see. There's an arithmetic to this that feels both utterly unfair and cosmically precise. I feel that he would have laughed at these patterns. 

I’ve started archiving his work, and it’s started to influence mine in new ways. I don't know yet what the full shape of this will be. But I'm trying my best to pay attention. To really listen. Not just to his imaginary worlds, to the weight of all that complicated legacy, but to the sweet call of my own. Hearing, after all, isn't passive reception. It's the work of consciousness actively deciding, moment by moment. I might not be able to choose entirely what to listen for. But I can choose what to do with what I hear. I’m beginning to realise that I must choose differently. I can be the jester AND do the mindful work of a capable captain, steering my ship (and all the fools aboard her) to safe and better harbour. 

I’ll take the baton from him, be it brush, microphone, pen, or wand. I’ll never stop making music. I’ll never stop writing, never stop seeking to make sense. I’ll never stop trying to communicate my inner circus, because I truly believe that sharing our worlds can help midwife new ones – better ones, for all neurologies. I will heed my father's strange and subtle signs. I will mind my mind.