This year has been dubbed the year of the dragon. If ever there was a year to reach for the stars, to dream wildly and pursue your greatest passions, 2012 was it!
2012 has been for me one of the most difficult years of my life. Until this year, I always thought the hardest year of my life was 2002. Ten years later, I was proven wrong. In this year I faced the reality of putting my money where my mouth is, and the funny part was that I had no money. I spent the last 7 months of my year without a job, 4 of them without even a car. The job part was a conscious decision I made to leave corporate, the car was just the universe playing a funny joke on me. I remember taking taxis to KZN during Easter (still employed and the proud owner of a German vehicle). The thrill of daring to be on a taxi, updating about the adventure on Facebook. It was all a whole lot less funny when it became the reality of my life, month after month.
This year I learnt to make friends with this emotion called: Fear. I cannot remember a time in my life when I was more terrified, all day, every day. I was afraid of where my next meal would come from, when my life would finally turn around and worst of all, what people would think. I’m supposed to be an intelligent, creative over-achiever, but this year, with each morning that I woke up, I learnt to accept fear as a permanent part of my life.
Most teachings on wisdom are related to self mastery. If you can conquer yourself, you can conquer anything. Some of the things I had to conquer this year were: My pride, my arrogance, my fears, my self-doubt and my shyness. I’m a writer, on paper I can be very impressive, but most people who know me know, I don’t often say a lot and I’m very self critical. But this year, I had to find the inner dragon in me, learn to stand up for myself and say: No matter what the consequences are, I know this is not the life I want to live, so I’m going for gold (As they used to say at SAB, Good is the enemy of Great). When I resigned from my job a lot of people asked me what was so bad about it, my response: I’m not walking away, I’m walking towards. There’s a big difference between leaving something that’s hurting you, compared to walking towards something that was calling you.
In the last 7 months I’ve done a lot. Wrote a book, travelled West Africa, started a company, a partnership, a newspaper, a co-op and most recently, Hustlers of Mzansi. I've also joined BMF and been nominated by CEO magazine as a future leader. But those are just a few impressive Facebook updates, which meant very little when there was little to eat and no one to turn to. But I must admit, the richest part of my year was the connection. I had the time and opportunity to connect. Connect with myself, my family, my friends and most importantly with my God. God and I had a lot of fights in 2012. The biggest one being: When will things get better? I’ve been faithful, I’ve been praying, I’ve been fasting and I’ve been reading your word. When are you going to turn this nightmare around? But through it all, I appreciated the deeper connections I created in this year.
With all the challenges and the freedom I got to enjoy, I learnt a few lessons. I thought that after leaving SAB I’d learnt that not everyone who’s in your life is there for you. But this year, when I had to call in favours for lifts, for my projects for my business. I learnt that even those who are there for you are not always going to be there for you. In my life there are two things that I always promised myself I’d never do, those are: I’ll never go to my mother for money and I’ll never get a sugar-daddy. This year I did both. I feel the need to explain the sugar-daddy part, he wasn’t my lover but he became my crutch. When I needed help, he was there and when he asked me for things, I couldn’t say no, because I needed him. Going to my mother was even more difficult because I come from a family where nobody ever makes mistakes. I’ve subscribed to the rules because I got my degree at 20, have had solid employment since then, own my own house and at 27, I still don’t have children. So for me, it felt like I was finally revealing my cracks as the weakest link in the perfect family.
But I want to go back to why I took the leap. In 2011 I was part of Leading Women, a GIBS course. One of the biggest lessons they taught us that year was that to lead authentically, you need to
live
your values. We then did many exercises where each of us learnt what our individual values are. On my birthday weekend I got a tattoo of an eagle and my three biggest values on my back. They are Excellence, Freedom and Honesty. After I was raped in 2007 I wrote a poem titled: I Rise. In it there’s a line that states: ‘Just like this beautiful black eagle on my back, I’ve always risen, and I will continue to rise.’ 5 years later, I decided to finally get the beautiful black eagle tattoo on my back, and to commit to rising, no matter what.
The other reason for the leap was because I wanted my mom to come home. She’s been working and living in the UK since I was 18 and each time I heard about how tough things were for her that side, I felt powerless. Looking at the salary I earned, I realised that at this rate I could never ask her to return home and promise her she’d be taken care of. It was time to take drastic measures. The third reason was my medical condition. I’ve decided that I’ll do all that’s within my power to find money so I can get a cure, I want to live and I want to be okay.
Back to my job, I could no longer continue to pretend that the constraints of a job in a corporate setting, which paid me enough to be broke and allowed me a title was enough. I needed to start living from an honest place, to have my freedom and above all, to pursue excellence. At first, it all seemed very noble, and I thought that the universe would definitely conspire in my favour. But with barely a month out of work, my car broke down and the cost to fix it was R100k, almost exactly the amount I’d saved up to live on whilst I figured out what to do with my life after leaving my job. The series of events that followed sometimes take on the resemblance of a horror story so I won’t go into detail. The truth is, I dived into this with nothing but a deep passion to excel, and a voice deep within me that said: Jump, you’ll be okay.
I guess the reason for this note is to state that there’s Life and then there’s what we project on social media platforms. I made a conscious decision to never have negative updates on my FB/Twitter, but when people start seeing your life as some sort of fairytale, it’s important to set the record straight. We all go through hard times, everyone is fighting a personal (and often private) battle, and there will be better days. I see myself a year from today, having overcome most of what I’m going through, this phase of my life will be a distant memory. For those who will see that brighter day and think ‘Wow’ I need to always remember that there were times like this. Times where everything was going wrong, where nothing I did seemed to be taking me where I thought I was meant to be going, times where each and every day was an uphill battle.
This is in no way a pessimistic note about how much life sucks, but it’s actually a testimony by someone who knows and believes in a real God who is saying, ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days of my life.’
In the last month I decided to concentrate my efforts into 3 things: My company, this refugee initiative I’m working on in Ghana and my latest book. Each day I wake up and I re-commit myself to spending all my love, time, energy, creativity and passion into those 3 things.
Life is funny in the sense that it lets you live vicariously through other people. I see friends dragging themselves to jobs they hate daily, and I feel grateful. I see people staying in hurtful relationships and I realise how blessed I am. I see people existing and not really living and I realise, of all the things I could say about 2012, if nothing else I’ve lived
. I’ve gone through the depths of myself, discovered the truth about who I really am, have committed to living straight from my heart and have pursued my greatest values: Excellence, Freedom and Honesty.
The cover page on one of my friends FB pages is: I’m Dead-Set on Living
. That one line perfectly sums it all up.
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