On the Thursday before I left, both my sons had two exams coming up the following week, my husband was away on business, my dissertation supervisor was expecting my fourth chapter in a few weeks, and I had a management committee session on the Monday that I’d been preparing for since the week before.

I looked at all of it laid out on the kitchen counter, next to my laptop and my calendar. Then I booked a flight to Cape Town anyway.

I didn’t ask anyone whether this was allowed. I told the people who needed telling, and then I went.

The reason was Professor Zanele Muholi. Prof, to everyone who has ever stood near them with a camera in hand.

Twenty-four years ago, they pulled me off a poetry stage and into journalism, told me to stop waiting for permission, and then spent every year since refusing to let me settle for less than what I actually am.

July marked 20 years of Faces and Phases, their 54th birthday, and the opening of their new body of work, Kanye Nawe (Nguni for “with you” or oneness).

What they’d asked for, as a birthday gift, was simple. They wanted to see me writing again. Something written by me.

So I went, exam timetable and manco deck and dissertation deadline notwithstanding.

At the opening, in the middle of a conversation that kept getting interrupted by other guests wanting a piece of them, they turned to me and said something I wrote down the moment I got back to where I was staying, because I didn’t trust myself to remember it accurately otherwise.

“I like your brain”, Muholi said. “You short-change yourself. You are way beyond MBAs.”

Twenty-four years on, the person I had flown across the country to interview was still mentoring me mid-sentence, still refusing to let me hide inside a job title.

The room was full of women doing the same refusing.

Boipelo Khunou, an engineer and visual artist who had stopped making the portraits she used to love, talked about work that goes to die in a hard drive versus work that gets to live on a wall.

Her self-doubt was also being called out by looking at the vastness of Prof’s work on the walls of the Southern Guild gallery.

Khanya Nosana Sondiyazi, a fellow cultural activist and participant photographed for Faces and Phases years earlier, described what it felt like to stand still in front of that camera.

“Not arrested”, she said. “Celebrated.” She noted the half of her face that grieves sitting right next to the half that has already moved past grieving.

Nobody in that room was performing likeability. Nobody needed to.

Muholi knows something about what that costs. In 2009, the then Arts and Culture minister walked out of an exhibition of their work before she was due to speak, called it immoral, and said it worked against the very social cohesion her department existed to build.

Muholi’s answer, at the time, wasn’t an apology. They said they didn’t need anyone to tell them that their work was nice. They needed the hate crimes against their community to be taken seriously.

Even when their “home” didn’t always see it that way, the rest of the world eventually did.

There’s a line from the poet Anyrah Shavéh that has been sitting with me since Cape Town, about not needing permission to be everything you’re made of: “My beauty ain’t no contradiction, I don’t need your permission to be all the fierce, stardust and moonlight I am made of.”

That’s the thread connecting all of it for me: Muholi’s refusal, the poet’s refusal, my own refusal that Thursday to ask permission for a flight I’d already decided to take.

I thought about that on the flight back home, somewhere over the Karoo, my phone full of unanswered messages in a group chat about exam logistics.

I hadn’t resolved anything by going. My sons’ exams still needed writing, without me in the room. The manco deck still needed presenting on the Monday, tired and unrehearsed. Nothing about the trip made the rest of my life easier.

Kanye Nawe. For 24 years, that has meant Muholi showing up for every version of me: the poet, the journalist, the operations manager, the MBA candidate who forgets she’s allowed to want things beyond the next deliverable.

That week, for once in a very long time, it meant showing up for myself. Not because it was the responsible choice. Because it was mine to make.

I made it.