For the past few weeks, life as we know it has taken a different form: our daily routines have become disturbed, we have been bound to the confines of our homes, for some of us social media has become a way of coping with the social distancing, for some of us this is the closest we’ve ever been with our families and for some of us we dread even leaving the safety of our rooms. We can’t lie to ourselves and say this hasn’t shook us; we had plans to make 2020 our year, to become the best versions of ourselves, to conquer obstacles which we always told ourselves we would but never got the opportunity to and many other things. I for one told myself that this year I am going to be the best version of myself so when the lock down was implemented I was very disappointed because all I could see was a major setback to what I wanted to do. I couldn’t see the bigger picture, I couldn’t see the opportunity that has gracefully presented itself to me and we’ve all fallen into that trap: we fail to see the beauty that adversities can bring us and some of us are lucky to have the realization dawn onto us whilst some of us are still in the dark. What I’m trying to say is that we are in the best of times to maximize our potential, we are in the best of times to reflect upon what we want and if what we want is what we truly need. So I’ve been doing a bit of reflection myself, shifting the puzzle pieces and trying to make sense of it all and I won’t lie to you, it is not easy. It is not easy to call yourself out for the toxicity that exists in you, it is not easy to forgive those who have hurt you and it is not easy to accept closed doors for what they are and move on. I’d like to share the things that I’ve been learning throughout this lock down and I hope it will be beneficial to you, even in the smallest of ways.
Self Reflection
Sometimes, I look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person I see looking back at me. Like the reflection is distorted, dust on the corner of the frame stretches and blurs the image. Sometimes, I stare and stare, hoping the image will shift and change to reflect back how I feel on the inside. When we meet new people, we are often presenting a side of ourselves that is far from the original. We’ve spent time polishing and perfecting both our outward and inward selves to put an image out there that we want the world to see. We want them to see the version that’s been photographed, painted over and airbrushed. But this is not a conscious decision, it’s a subconscious decision that we take within ourselves. We exist as versions of ourselves that we truly want to be but these versions are intercepted by versions which the people we associate with expect us to be, this creates inner conflict within us because who do we truly want to be? Self reflection helps us answer that question. Self-reflection is defined as self-examination. It is the careful thought about our own behavior and beliefs. The opposite of self-reflection? Distraction. These days, we are in a constant state of busy, directing our minds toward anything but our own thoughts. We’ve become so uncomfortable with our own thoughts that we always try to find things to do and we call it being busy, but what are we busy with? Are we busy for the sake of being productive or are we busy to distract ourselves, right now with this lock down, its even more challenging because we are limited to what we can be busy with so what is really stopping you from having a self reflective process? Self reflection is not about looking at ourselves in the mirror. But it is about taking the time in our day for introspection so that the image we see looking back is a better reflection of who we are. It’s important to ask: what is our reflection trying to tell us when we don’t recognize the person looking back? Is it telling us that something in our lives is not aligned? Maybe we’re in a relationship that’s not right. Maybe we’re in a group of friends who don’t allow us to be ourselves. Whatever it is, feelings of asynchrony are a sign that something needs to change. The question is: Are you ready for that change? Change is different, change can seem menacing that’s why we avoid it so much because it’s not a comfortable process to go through but when has growth ever taken place when you are in a state of comfortability? When you comfortable, its easy for you to settle; don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with settling but the question is: Is what you settling for worthy of you?
TAKE CONTROL
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it
Charles R. Swindoll
Be mindful towards yourself by training yourself to be able to identify situations which you can control and those you cannot. Accept what you cannot change and take control of what you can. In this confusion of whats to come since the world is on a standstill; you need to accept that the situation is not within your capabilities to control but what you can control is your experience of it. One thing we can always control is our experiences with things; we get to determine the outcome of our relationships by taking heed of the purpose we want to build them on, we get to determine the outcome of our academic success by the effort that we put into and we get to determine the outcome of our growth by the effort we put into understanding ourselves but this is a journey, a journey worth being on and you have time. If there is one thing you have now more than anything else is time; you have time to take control of your experiences but the question is: what are you doing with the time that you have? In the words of Lao Tzu: “Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’ ”
PACE YOURSELF
When you pace yourself, you ensure that you running your own race and not someone else’s. When you pace yourself, you do not need constant reminders to do things that are beneficial to you because the focus is on you and not on others. When you pace yourself you avoid finding yourself on a path you had no interest in. When you’re frantically trying to get ahead of the pack, sometimes you forget to check in and see if the pack is actually headed in the right direction or if you are headed in the right direction. Sometimes we get so caught up in getting ahead that we forget ourselves in the scramble. I am a firm believer in the pursuit of growth and development, I believe it’s important to push yourself but it is equally important to pace yourself. When you pace yourself, you allow yourself to make mistakes that allow you to grow; you teach yourself patience, you teach yourself that success isn’t something you wake up someday and go on a scavenger hunt to find. You teach yourself not to compare your successes with others. Losses can be wins too. It just depends on how you look at the glass: is it half full or is it half empty? We often want something so badly that we ruin it before it begins. Over – thinking, fantasizing, imagining, worrying, doubting, expecting just let it naturally evolve; enjoy the experience of being present. “One reason we are so harried and hurried is that we make yesterday and tomorrow our business, when all that legitimately concerns us is today.” ~ Elisabeth Elliot. If you don’t really understand the art of pacing yourself, ask yourself this: Why are you rushing and will it really make a difference if you slow down a bit?
A new mantra:
Self reflection: You are worthy. Do not auction your worth for acceptance or dilute your authenticity for validation.
Take control: Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control of what you don’t.
Pace yourself: Allow yourself to unfold at your own pace.
This blog post contains sensitive language and content.
So I have almost touched base with mostly everything but one thing to complete the whole picture that I haven’t touched base on is Me. Who am I when I am not behind the screen? To be honest I have been delaying this post as it is the most personal; it exposes me; that could be good or bad depending on how you look at it.
Vulnerability: the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.
Oxford
Vulnerability is a feeling that is not acceptable to me because when I am vulnerable, that is when you can break me. I am Christian so currently we are in the Lenten season, a season of self retrospection. I have never really sat down and fought with my demons because I couldn’t bear the though of them. So what I’d do is push the thoughts far back in my mind and try not to think about them and continue with my daily life but ever since I came back home, the question always pops up: “Who am I when I am not behind the screen?” I am Lesedi Itumeleng Mashego and I am 18. Above all else I am hurt and I haven’t forgiven those who hurt me because I cannot comprehend why would someone do that to another human being so every year when I think about forgiveness, I never get past that barrier so I enter another year with the burden from the previous year and it gets heavier – I’ve been holding onto a load for 4 years now and it subconsciously affects me in a way that I can’t move on no matter how hard I try and I take it out on people who actually wanna care for me, who want to be there for me. I moved to the Western Cape in search of redemption but being back home brought me right back where I started and I just realized that running away done no one any good because what you running away from will come back to find you and you give it this power over you and you end up not being able to be in control of your own emotions and decisions which contradicts the very essence of mindfulness. I believe that a story is never truly yours until you take full ownership of it. It will still lie with the oppressor until you reclaim it. Reclaiming it is simply a process of taking the version portrayed by the oppressor and redefining it. There comes a certain power with finally taking something and affirming that it is yours. So that’s exactly what I am going to do: I am going to tell a story which has 3 parts: Acceptance, Release and Forgiveness.
Acceptance
I suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Syndrome) from the 5 years that I have been in high school. I feel like we all have those scary experiences in high school, difference is some of us recover from it whilst some of don’t, it just remains a permanent scar. It all started in 2016, my gr 9 year now for you to understand this part of my life; let me give you more insight about where I come from: I spent all of my developing years in the midst of a suburban town whereby the dominant race was white, I had white friends, from kindergarten till primary, that was pretty much all I was exposed to so of course one develops traits of the social group that they are exposed to; with that being said the high school part of my life was my first experience with an environment that was dominantly black, now you can already start imagining the details of the story: black kid raised among whites put into a school where black people was the dominant race: I was bullied because no one understood what a coconut was doing in their school, no one understood a black person who couldn’t communicate in a language other than English. My bullying experiences were different though, I could handle being made fun off and being called a coconut but for these 4 years of my life, I was bullied by the authorities of the school. So it’s first break and a teacher called me out from my friends and she said she wanted to talk to me; long story short: she believed that my own father was my blesser, lets try and imagine this scene: a middle aged black woman talking to a 15 year old girl, explaining to her that her father is seen an entity of sex and money. Imagine trying to convince a stranger about the parent who raised you, watched you grow, took care of you for 15 years is not a blesser. Her reasoning behind her allegation was the fact that I regularly got dropped off by different cars and my dad used to hug me before I got out the car. I see two underlying problems here: 1. Is it not an ordinary thing to have multiple cars within a household? Why is it such a cause for concern to see someone being dropped off at school with different cars? Or lemme rather put it like this: to some black people it is not an ordinary thing to see a black child coming from a family who owns multiple cars, which goes without saying that we still have black people amongst us that don’t want to see other black people succeed: they look down on you and you feel as though it is your fault for trying to make something out of life. 2. A simple gesture of affection was mistook. Don’t you get hugs from your parents? A good luck hug for an exam, a goodbye hug because you don’t know if you are going to see them again. A simple gesture of affection: can we as a black society not comprehend that? Now this was an adult, probably she also has her own kids; so what are you doing making someone else’s child a target? Did it not occur to her that maybe something like that could occur to her child? And when it does, what would she as a parent do about it? We lack empathy towards others and this lack of empathy makes us do questionable things, things which hurt us and scar us. 2017 was the year that really destroyed me. I was rebelling against my parents because I didn’t understand why keep me in the same school that thought my dad was my blesser, the year of my first suicidal attempt and my first confrontation with Anxiety.
Anxiety: Intense, excessive and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations.
Mayo clinic
Have you ever had to go to school, a place where you supposedly supposed to feel safe and feel nothing but danger and foreboding? I was afraid of being in that space. I was anxious because I didn’t want to be a target anymore. I just wanted to have positive experiences just like everyone else. So in 2017, someone started a rumor about me: I was giving head in the basketball changing rooms. This rumor got to my boyfriend’s friends who told my boyfriend and he believed it, imagine being called a slut, a hoe a bitch by someone who said he loved you. The 5th period, before second break, I was in physics; I got called over the intercom and got told to go to the school psychologist’s office, so I went there and I found her sitting by her desk waiting for me and she tells me to sit down. She looks at me and she asks: “Am I okay?” and I answered: “Besides coming down with the cold I am good thank you.” Then she looks at me and asks: “Is your father sexually abusing you?” and in my mind, it didn’t quite register to me what she was saying so she asked me again: “I have been told by the staff and students that you conduct yourself in a very sexual manner, given that you gave head in the basketball changing rooms and this is a cause for concern so is your father sexually abusing you?” Once again I was confronted with a situation where I had to convince strangers that my dad, who was pure and just, didn’t occasionally rape me. What shocked me was the fact that they assumed I didn’t have a mother and that made it possible for my dad to sexually abuse me. She looks at me and she says: “I have already called a social worker to come and investigate the case, she is going to come to your house and have a conversation with your dad.” I looked at her and told her that no social worker will be coming to my home and I left her office. I ran to the bathrooms in a very hysterical state and I called my dad, sobbing.
I remember this period of my life like it was yesterday. On the 12th July 2017, I tried to commit suicide by drugging myself with medication and I slit my wrists and ran into the night to die; I don’t remember what happened afterwards, I just remember waking up in a hospital, my mom looking at me with tears in her eyes and my dad sitting in the corner chair looking at me with disappointment. The reason why I did it was because I couldn’t take it anymore, going to a school I was afraid of, having an anxiety attack each time I walked through those gates. I was afraid and I didn’t want to be afraid anymore.
My dad ordered that an investigation be conducted in order to try and clear up the allegations. My psychologist, the school psychologist, my parents, some teachers and different people who were the root of the problem were involved. Now imagine this scene: It’s the end of the year exams and every day a different male gets called over the intercom, to an office and those people are asked: “Has Lesedi Mashego offered to have sex with you or displayed any sexual behavior next to you?” I remember staring at my maths final paper and not being able to pick up a pen, I remember crying during an exam and people staring at me with cold eyes, I remember how all the teachers that stood by me couldn’t even look at me anymore, I remember losing out on a bursary because they refused to associate themselves with someone who had a bad reputation at school. The investigation ended and the conclusion was that it was just rumors started by students and teachers and none of it was true. That’s all they said and did. No apology, no suspensions and no written warning, they just continued with their normal lives and left me to pick up the pieces that was my life in the same school – my parents never let me leave. In 2018 and 2019, I had this resentment in me, I hated everyone and I hated myself for it, I was angry, I was bitter and it consumed me to the point where I became my own detriment.
Release
I could never talk about what happened to me because every time I tried, it would hurt me so much. It was sensitive to me and I would hear people including the teachers making occasional banter about it as if it was funny at that time it occurred or as if in any way the story is humorous. I remember being in class and one of my teachers said “it wouldn’t be the first time that you popular, remember that story in the basketball changing rooms?” and I sat there having a recollection of the memories with the whole class laughing or I overhear conversations in the corridors and someone would whisper: “Remember when this girl……” and I hated myself for it. I wanted to hurt myself so badly that every time I got back home, I’d take a razor and start cutting myself and put a wall around me to protect myself from people when I should’ve been protecting myself from me. I sunk deeper into this hole and until this very day I am still affected by it. It affects my perception of life, the way I relate to others but you’ll never understand it no matter how hard you try because you weren’t there, you never experienced it. I could never talk about what happened to me until this year, until 2 – 3 years later and yesterday someone made me realize that it is time to let go and this time to let go of it forever.
Forgiveness
I forgive them for everything they have put me through. I forgive them for violating my right to safety and security in a learning environment. I forgive them for not being able to be there for me as a student in need. I forgive them for the hurt and resentment I’ve accumulated for these past 4 years. I forgive them for not helping me reach my full potential as a person. I forgive them for the neglect. I forgive my parents for trying to decide what’s best for me but not considering what it means for my future. I forgive my parents for not believing my cry for help. I forgive myself for the self hurt. I forgive myself for not being able to be strong enough to look past the hurt and resentment and letting it consume me. I forgive myself for not giving those a chance who wanted to do right by my side and I hope they forgive me too.
Mindfulness: the practice of maintaining a non-judgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.
Merriam-Webster
I define mindfulness as being aware of and controlling your experience. You are in the moment of acting, not reacting to life. When we are not mindful; we speak without thinking, we allow our emotions to get out of control, we are either worrying about the future or regretting the past and we feel the victim of circumstances and events. Without mindfulness we are like two year old children; we cry when our needs are not met, we don’t understand cause and effect, we expect others to take care of us, we can’t see past obstacles and we are powerless and overly emotional. Mindfulness is being aware in each and every moment of our lives. How often do you go about your day without being present? Have you ever driven to the grocery store and not realized how you got there? Have you found words coming out of your mouth without realizing it? When you are mindful each action, word and thought is conscious. Being mindful means taking responsibility for what we are thinking, saying and doing and if it is not the experience we want; we change it. The end goal is to be self-aware but this is a journey that we all should be determined to take no matter how long it takes. We went from being aware of our callings and purposes, now its time to be mindful.
Question: How do we become mindful?
In a world that is so haphazardly dynamic, the soul tends to get unsettled by the smallest of things. We living in a world that is not authentic; nothing is real anymore, a world where there are human beings walking around wishing to be other people’s saviors when they need to be their own saviors, a world where there is a fine line between reality and an image we have created for ourselves that we are comfortable with and this is where being mindful comes in. I challenge you to take part in an exercise called: “The Reason Why I” So basically you give yourself a week and in that week, everything you do, before you do it, ask yourself “the reason why I” and make a note of it, after a week or so, using those reasons, compile a poem of any length. The purpose of this exercise is to practice mindfulness, it serves as a form of reflection and you realize that sometimes you do things which if the circumstance was different you would have reacted differently. Now my question is: why do we need a change of circumstance to realize that we need to be mindful towards ourselves and each other? You can’t be mindful towards others if you aren’t mindful towards yourself. It all begins with you. You cannot demand it, if you simply don’t have it.
Bare minimum: the smallest possible quantity or the least fulfilling but still adequate condition that is required, acceptable or suitable for some purpose.
Dictionary.com
Now being mindful towards yourself is realizing that you deserve the bare minimum and more, and receiving the bare minimum is nothing to be grateful for because it is a necessity. The bare minimum is like a receipt of acknowledgement that someone is decent enough to realize that you are human just like they are. I can’t comprehend why we built a society where the bare minimum is so rare that we feel the need to be grateful for it. By definition it is the SMALLEST possible quantity. Are we not deserving of the GREATEST possible quantity? When you mindful towards yourself, you realize that the bare minimum is just the beginning and whoever gets in the way of that, should be removed from your life because they of no value to you. We all exist as these versions that people expect us to be and we get trapped in these versions because we also exist as a version that we want ourselves to be but for some reason we can’t get ourselves to be that version. In many cases we can’t be that version due to the relationships we have with people. These relationships we establish with people do, to some extent, shape the people we become. The concept of the bare minimum will never be understood because we are still asking for it instead of us simply understanding that it is a day to day acknowledgement of the fact that we are human. There is an urgent need to strive to be self aware, strive to be mindful and also to strive to know what your bare minimum is so that when these counterfeits show up, you are not befuddled.
Love thyself. Read that again. We cannot be wasting time on people who aren’t willing to give us the bare minimum, we cannot be wasting our time continuously having to ask for the bare minimum. Expect more for yourself and demand more. Never do the injustice of putting yourself in a position where you are afraid because you think you “too much” for someone. You are not “too much” you are good enough and more. And someone who is worthy of you will come. What’s for you will withstand the pressures of life and what’s not will wither away. Be your authentic self and never allow someone to force you to be anything less. Keep telling yourself that you deserve to fall in love with yourself as passionately as you’ve fallen in love with other people. You deserve to be surrounded by people who prove to you that they have earned the right to be in your life and don’t ever accept anything less. Now being mindful also eradicates the feeling of regret in your life because instead of just doing and acting impulsively – you think about it clear enough and you become more aware of the intentions behind what you doing. When you mindful, you always ask yourself the question: Why would I purposefully put myself in a position where I regret something I once wanted?”
If you ever find yourself in dismay, just ask yourself these three questions:
What is my bare minimum?
Should my bare minimum be dependent on others and what they can offer?
Am I willing to compromise my bare minimum for others and if so, will others do the same for me?
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social wellbeing. It affects how we think, feel and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others and make choices.
MentalHealth.gov
A discussion about Mental Health is very essential in our journey to become self aware. What is Mental Health? How does it affect us? Why is it a significant sphere of my life? Lets turn the focus to Mental Health in South Africa, did you know that the 10th October commemorates the day of World Mental Health Day? If you didn’t know, why is that so? If I had to ask you when Youth Day is, without hesitation you’d think of June 16th, or the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence from the 25th November to the 10th December. I have nothing against those causes, I am a full supporter of them; however, I do not think its okay how we subconsciously prioritize a cause over another because of the perception that it is not as important as the next. The same level of commitment and vigour we invest in Youth Day, World AIDS Day and 16 Days of Activism should be given to all causes because how can we strive to be better versions of ourselves if we selectively choose what we perceive as important? Or maybe the statistics will speak for themselves:
Mental Health in SA by SADAG.org
3rd biggest contributor to the burden of disease.
7.7% reduction in mental hospital beds across all provinces.
16.5% of South Africans suffer from common mental health problems.
43.7% of people with HIV/AIDS have a mental health condition.
South Africa is in the bottom 4 of countries for providing mental health treatment.
50% of health facilities do not meet quality standards.
I find these facts quite scary, I mean lets not forget the fact that we live in a country that is overcrowded, there’s already not enough of everything for everyone so where do we go when half of the health facilities in the country are not fit enough to deal with mental health conditions? Mental illness is not uncommon yet there is stigma around it and that prevents a lot of people from talking about it – and that’s a barrier to getting help. Mental health is a topic that people are afraid to talk about: you mention suicide and watch your circle of friends disappear because according to them contemplating your existence makes you unworthy of being a human being or they just purposefully stop hanging around you because you kill the vibe or maybe it’s the fact that EVERYONE on Soundcloud is either suffering from a mental disorder or rapping about a mental disorder so what’s real and what’s not? I see two underlying problems here: Ignorance and Pretence.
IGNORANCE
As seen in my previous posts, Ignorance is a serious manifestation which we tend to overlook but it’s killing off people in our society. I can imagine that talking about suicide is something that we are not comfortable with mainly because we do not understand how does someone’s state of mind can get to a place where they question their own existence on earth. Aren’t there psychologists for these types of conversations? Our parents? Our friends? Suicidal thoughts has been stigmatized and for this reason we end up not going to look for help. I know how it feels like to: contemplate my existence, stand at the edge of a roof and beg myself to jump, be inside this hole that sinks deeper each and every time I try to get out. I know how it feels like to go to a place where you supposedly supposed to feel safe and feel like I’m dying on the inside and pull a front because I am supposed to lead by example and be strong. I know how it feels like to leave my home at 00:00 AM, Thursday 13th July 2017, with slit wrists and trying to walk to the middle of nowhere in a stupor. We are afraid to ask for help because as much as people say they are here for you, they still leave a room for doubt because what do I do when someone calls me at 01:30 with the words “I want to kill myself.” Do I leave my home and attend to you? Do I call the cops? Do I call you and when I do, what must I say? What mustn’t I say? There’s just so much uncertainty as to what must happen when you are confronted by a situation like that. I don’t know why but there’s this vague norm that some people in the black society believe in that mental illnesses are for white people, that seeing counsellors and having psychologists are for people of another colour, they tell themselves it can never be them. I don’t know how many black kids have died at their own hands; having to attend funerals and the mother in a hysterical state exclaiming “I didn’t know, if I knew, my baby wouldn’t be dead, I’m sorry.” How could you have known if your help wasn’t readily available? When each time you’d see me come back from school with tears in my eyes, you’d ask “what did I do to them?” as if I wake up each morning and provokingly make myself a target. Dear Mom and Dad, I never made myself a target, society did. We can blame the advancement in technology, the peer pressure and socialization but we play a role in the suicide statistics and it is time we own up to it.
PRETENCE
Mental illness isn’t something you just self diagnose yourself with, its not something to make a mockery off, its not a weapon you use to pawn your partner into staying in a toxic relationship with you because that’s what its honestly become. We say “we depressed”, we fling these words around, thinking that’s what must be done to catch attention but can we step back and actually think? This is someone’s life. Someone out there right now is in this hole that they can’t get out of and they are on the brink of losing the fight against themselves. That’s why we confused: we too busy focused on people who are just making a mockery out of it that we turn a blind eye to the kid in the corner, who needs us to reach out. I cannot comprehend the fact that someone purposefully buys anti-depressants just to get high off them when to some of us, anti-depressants is a key normalcy.
Project Semicolon
We have beautiful initiatives, one of them called Project Semicolon which was founded by the late Amy Bleuel, that exist to guide us on our journey to nurturing our mental health.
Just don’t let them forget why I was here, because that’s what’s important.”
Amy Bleuel
Project Semicolon is one of many platforms of Mental Health Awareness where we can learn and share our stories; it is a cause which makes powerful statements. They describe themselves as a movement dedicated to presenting hope and love to those who are struggling with depression, suicide, addiction and self-injury. Project semicolon exists to encourage, love and inspire. But why a semicolon? “A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.” The semicolon tattoo represents mental health struggles and the importance of suicide prevention. We need more conversations that lead to less stigma. The process of normalization serves the purpose to eradicate the stigma that society has instilled in suicidal thoughts and mental illness. I AM NOT SAYING lets normalize suicide. I am saying lets talk about suicidal thoughts and stop treating it as a taboo. I would like to walk into a grocery store someday and hear someone say “My friend is struggling with suicidal thoughts and I have the responsibility to make sure she knows she’s not alone, she might not want me there, regardless of that I am not going anywhere.” I think the semicolon tattoo is a conversation starter. People ask what it is and you get to tell them the purpose. It’s not just about the conversation, it’s about providing tangible support and help too, so next time you see the semicolon tattoo, remember the words of Upworthy writer Parker Molloy:
I recently decided to get a semicolon tattoo. Not because it’s trendy (though, it certainly seems to be at the moment), but because it’s a reminder of the things I’ve overcome in my life. I’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria for the better part of my life, and at times, that led me down a path that included self-harm and suicide attempts.
But here I am, years later, finally fitting the pieces of my life together in a way I never thought they could before. The semicolon (and the message that goes along with it) is a reminder that I’ve faced dark times, but I’m still here.”
Parker Molloy
No matter how we get there, the end results are so important: help and support for more people to also be able to say: “I’m still here.”
Purpose: why you do something or why something exists.
Cambridge Dictionary
As people we are all different hence we realize why we are put on this earth at different stages of our lives. I don’t know why but there’s this word we keep throwing around like we know why we using it and that’s the word calling. About a year ago, I was sitting with a close friend of mine and we were talking about our journeys and mid conversation she said something like, she had a calling a few years back and now she realized that she does not have that calling anymore but that was okay because she realized that she didn’t even like the calling to begin with and the conversation carried on and as my life continued unfolding around me I realized that people keep flinging the word calling around with the assurance that they fully understand what they talking about and now the question is, do we actually know what a calling is?
Calling: a strong inner impulse toward a particular course of action especially when accompanied by conviction of divine influence.
Merriam Webster
In my opinion we all have one calling but we can identify that we have numerous purposes that come and go depending on where we are in our lives. The reason for my statement is the fact that a calling is something we continuously should be working towards achieving because when we take time to reflect on our journey, we should be able to visualize the milestones which we set up for ourselves in order to live our calling; your calling would be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but before you get there, all those milestones that you set up beside the road to mark the distance that you have traveled to live your calling should be marked down. With something like your purpose there’s a similar process but a totally different concept. You tend to realize your purpose depending on where you currently are in your life i.e I started this blog in 2017 but I only started posting in 2018, recently I removed all the posts which I had thus far and decided to revamp my website because the 2017/2018 me and the 2020 me are two different people who started writing for a different purpose. Back then I had a pseudonym but right now I freshly presented myself as Itumeleng Mashego. See what I am trying to get at here? Same person but different purposes which were fully dependent on what my state of mind was when I took these decisions. Another example: You could leave the house and see someone struggling on their way to their destination and you can take time and offer to help, at that moment you feel good because you just made someone else’s day better but just a year ago the idea of helping someone in need could’ve been a foreign thought to you because you could’ve been conceited and this what I mean by identifying that we have numerous purposes; with the example above you cannot be fully assured that your calling is now to help people because of one act of selflessness because if that is the case then by definition of a calling, this divine influence forces you to help each and every person you see who is in need no matter how small the situation is.
The purpose for me trying to explain the difference between purpose and calling leads me to the conversation of self awareness.
Self awareness: conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings.
Oxford Dictionary
I believe that being self aware is something we should be constantly striving for but just like all things worth having, it takes understanding, it takes time and it takes effort.
UNDERSTANDING
The process of understanding can be initiated with 2 questions: 1. Which box do you fit in?2. Why do you believe in this box that you are currently occupying? Now understanding should honestly be something you engage in for personal growth; not to try clear up another person’s confusion about a particular issue i.e The LGBTQ+ community is constantly trying to fight the battle of being misunderstood. Actually how do you even start explaining this to someone who has no clue about the Queer community? Now as humankind we are constantly trying to put a label on a lot of things, thinking that by labeling, we fully understand the matter at hand but all we doing is putting it in a box and expect the cause to conform to the standards which are acceptable to society but at the end of the day the person who really knows whats up is the person who is in the situation. A human being’s sense of entitlement is very scary to think of; we think just because of the color of our skin, the accent we share in our voices, the struggles that we can relate to, that we deserve clarity in everything that we decide to engage in. It is not your job to teach or make people understand who you are. We as a society need to learn to unlearn the notion of putting something in a box thinking that we are trying to understand it. You are able to exist without having to constantly explain your reasoning to someone. Every time you think you deserve an explanation to something think of this: Why should you explain in order to make me feel comfortable with something I have no interest in understanding?
TIME
Time is relative, ever heard that saying? To you it might seem like an eternity but in reality its honestly been a couple of months. Time goes hand in hand with effort. If you put in the effort and the time, you will reap the rewards. It took me a while to even grasp the surface of self awareness. It took courage, perseverance, tears, disappointment even self harm to even see the light but regardless I stayed on the path because self awareness is something you should be constantly striving towards, you don’t just wake up and decide to be self aware: it is a process, a process that won’t easily be recognized but you’ll see hints of it in the way you handle arguments and how you critically think before you say something. The reason why our journeys seem longer than the rest is because of distractions. We try to avoid pain through distractions. We transport our minds to some other dimension where it feels safe, we stare at our phones, we obsess about the past and the potential future, we make plans we’ll never keep and we simply try to forget. There is nothing wrong with distractions. We all need some sort of diversion to keep us sane and happy. The key is that we need to be aware of our distractions; meaning we need to make sure we are choosing our distractions instead of our distractions choosing us. One of the main aspects of self awareness is being aware of one’s subconscious actions, in that way you become fully aware of the reason why you do certain things. This is the first level of self awareness: understanding where you minds goes and when. You must be aware of the paths your mind likes to take before you can begin to question why it takes those paths and whether those paths are beneficial.
EFFORT
Effort is self explanatory: If you show effort towards a particular cause. They will most likely take you seriously but then again you can’t have varying levels of commitment because these are people’s morals and values that you dealing with; however I am not saying make a mockery of something, I am not saying be woke, I am not saying participate in critical engagement sessions to get high off the feeling of finally “being one” with the people, all I am saying is be well informed. There is absolutely no reason for you to be making statements having half the knowledge you need, that is simply making a mockery of something. If you don’t know, you just simply keep quiet. The art of silence is often frowned upon and I don’t understand why; choosing to be silent in a world full of unheard opinions is probably what we need more than anything. There’s no use in trying to explain something to people who aren’t even listening to you because they too busy being occupied in trying to be heard. There’s no use in trying to explain something to people who already have a mindset that is already made up. Lets do a quick exercise: stand in front of a wall and try to have a conversation with it and lets see what happens.
Now lets say in a perfect world, you know your purpose and calling, you are self aware what then? Two words:
Instant Gratification: the desire to experience pleasure or fulfillment without delay or deferment.
Entrepreneur.com
Instant gratification is the opposite of what we’ve been taught and try too hard to practice: delayed gratification. Waiting is too hard and there is an innate desire to have what we want and when we want it, which is usually without any delay. The ability to delay instant gratification brings success. It is more fulfilling to work for something rather than having it given to you on a silver platter. One might argue with me though and say: they would rather use Google for an assignment than go to a good old library to browse through an encyclopedia. My theory is that the more we take shortcuts to knowledge, the less informed we become, the less interested we become and the more ignorant we become. I took a little experiment before I wrote this piece: I simply wanted to know the date the Cold War started, so I decided to take two routes, the first one was going to the library, upon taking this route, I found out that the Cold War lasted 40 years, the official end of the Cold War was in 1989 and the then U.S President George H.W Bush and then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev declared it at the Malta Summit and I was amazed, still am amazed because before now I did not know. I think it took me a good hour to find the answer to the question I initially wanted but I know for a fact that I left an educated person. Upon taking the internet route, I found the result in 0.52 seconds as Google pointed out and I even had time to spend on purchasing an item at Netflorist (what a bargain). What am I trying to get at? Instant Gratification. The easier and simpler things are, the more time we have for things that don’t necessarily better our living circumstance, the more time we have to think of excuses for our ignorance, the less we become informed about things and the more we become customers to providers who only care about supply and demand. Remember when I said we exist as a thing, a quantity? An amount? Well Netflorist just proved it because now I exist as a statistic of fair monopoly. As a society, we are losing the ability to delay instant gratification because we are constantly being stimulated by and have the ability to receive gratification more than we were capable a decade ago i.e how many times has your phone beeped whilst reading this post? See? You couldn’t even give me the time of day to just focus on one task without being distracted. We never realize how this affects us until we realize that to get a date all we need to do is swipe to find our correct match, when we really should be asking ourselves why do we need an app to determine our capability to find love? Why can’t you just go out and start a conversation? I know why REJECTION. According to you and the universe energy you believe in, a Tinder account offers less chances of rejection than actually going out to talk to someone face to face and what do we call that? The after effects of Instant Gratification; a nice list of course: anxiety, depression, suicide should I carry on? I hope we do know that constantly being used to just sitting and eating without having to work for the meal has certain effects on the psychology of the human mind because when a human being finally realizes that the food has to be prepared first before being eaten everything spirals out of control, for those who didn’t get my analogy: when we come from humble homes of continuous praise and glowing rainbows and we finally step into the real world and we don’t have daddy to make it happen, those anxiety attacks start kicking in, that voice of uncertainty starts to creep in and we become another motivational speaker’s statistics and we wonder why are we shook by our own results.
With all of this brewing, we can’t be argumentative to why we oblivious and ignorant to things. There is a really fine line between people who consider themselves as woke and people who are actually woke. To some extent (and you are in control of that extent) you are ignorant and let us not do the injustice of trying to find an excuse as to why we are ignorant. Ignorance is not a character trait, it is merely just a choice. A choice that you subconsciously make hence we get so touched when people consider us as ignorant because we do not realize that we doing it to ourselves. This all comes together with being self aware and being aware of these decisions that you subconsciously make so that you can control them. I can’t seem to stress this anymore but self awareness is something we should continuously be striving towards, it all really begins here. You cannot identify your numerous purposes when you still question your existence here on earth similarly you cannot work towards your calling when you still trying to acclimatize yourself to a dynamic world. Three important facts you need to be aware of: 1. We don’t ride the wave, we catch it and make it ours. 2. If my self awareness makes me seem intimidating, then you and I have no business at all. 3. You always have to look out for number one and that is no one but yourself.
Question: Is it possible that as a society we are trying to find ways to make instant gratification more prominent among young adults to ensure a steady generation of people who are oblivious to what is happening around them?
Conformity: behaviour that follows the usual standards that are expected by a group or society.
Cambridge Dictionary
Everything around us is governed, to some extent, by rules i.e like charges repel unlike charges attract. We establish these rules to try make sense of what is happening around us. There are rules which are accepted because they define law and order i.e when the red light on the robot goes on, you stop because if you do not stop there would be chaos but then there are ‘unknown’ rules which we have subconsciously accepted and adapted to govern our daily lives and the question is where do they all come from?
I grew up in a functional home with both parents present and I was raised a certain way and expected to behave in a certain way. My mother’s childhood fascinates me because she told me that when they grew up the word “why” was forbidden. So basically we still surrounded by a generation of people who still believe questionable statements but they can’t ask why; first red flag. So I was expected to also accept this ‘forbidden’ word but I couldn’t; everything had a why to it, everything still has a why to it. So I became that one cousin that everyone avoided because I would challenge you to think about why do you believe in the things you do. Again we are surrounded by people who believe in certain things but they do not know why they believe in those certain things; second red flag which brings me to the point of discussion: conformity. My definition of conformity is accepting something just is because something just is. As cliché as this sounds but we are subjected to conformity rules every day of our lives and we struggle to differentiate between what is and what really is and all of this comes down to our environment and what the people in our environment are subjecting us too.
Question: We are told that everything we have learnt has been passed down from generation to generation; is it possible that our whole lives might be based on a continuous game of broken telephone?
I had a maths lecture today and long story short more than half of my class flunked the test we wrote on the previous day and as you would guess, the lecturer was not happy. In her state of unhappiness she said some things which when processed can be processed differently because we are all different people. She said and I quote: “If you still cannot do maths as basic as fractions then you are in the wrong course, maybe you like reading or writing and a BA would much better suit you than a Bsc and changing courses should be something you really should be considering because scientists work with numbers and if numbers are not for you then you are in serious trouble.” So sitting there looking at my mark, knowing my dream is to become a scientist, knowing I did not fail the test, I wondered if doing a Bsc is something I really should be doing and just like that doubt was instilled in a person who had no reason to doubt and this is what I mean that we struggle to differentiate between what is and what really is; however, lets not think of the lecturer as an ogre. She comes from an innocent place; she does not get paid to babysit our emotions, she has one job only and that is to produce capable scientists. “Produce” I do not know about you but I am still frowning at my choice of words but unfortunately that is our reality. In people’s eyes we don’t exist as mere human beings trying to establish a sustainable world. Our existance is defined as a can of beans on a shelf that is about to be sold; difference is our purpose is different. Offensive but true. We exist as an amount, we exist as a quantity, we exist as a thing; now who is going to nurture our dreams and aspirations? Whose responsibility is it to process what we are subjected to, filter it in an appropriate way so that our dreams and aspirations are not on the verge of extinction? This is how conformity works: we have our own beliefs and systems and when we try to express ourselves, our actions are questioned, we start asking ourselves “are we doing the right thing?” and then we alter ourselves so that we do not get questioned. My question is, instead of quickly changing our “make up” instead of rethinking whether we are fit for our own dreams, why don’t we ask what the right thing is? why don’t we ask what the wrong thing is? Why don’t we ask why do we need to convince society that we are fit for our dreams? But that’s the thing – there is no tangible and qualified person to answer these questions, we answer these questions subconsciously and there onwards a decision is made. 99.9% of the time the decision is to alter ourselves so that we can form part of this society that we ourselves define.
Now lets go back to our red flags: we are still living amongst a generation of people who believe in questionable statements all due to the fact that they were forbidden to ask why. So my mother was forbidden to ask why because chances are the person didn’t know why and they were also told not to ask why and the generation before that was also subjected to this practice of ignorance and further down the line. My question is: did anyone actually know? This brings me down to the subject of parents: we often hear that parents mold their children but sometimes I wonder if parents are the best qualified to mold their children. Parents unknowingly subject their children to conformity. The idea that domestic work is more emphazised to the female instead of the importance being equally shared between the male and the female already paves a pathway to destruction but that’s how they were taught and the generations before that were taught the same way and now we are being taught the same exact thing; difference is we are now living in a society that is trying to uproot a deeply rooted patriarchy system but there is no progress because we are still surrounded by people who do not know why they believe in the things they do.
Question: Are our parents preparing us for a world that does not exist?
Now we have a system called Conformity Lite which does not stray away from the concept but we engage in it unknowingly. We associate certain things with certain characteristics and automatically we have categorized things; we fall into these categories and we are expected to act and look the part and when we don’t, society asks why. A general example would be skimpy clothes associated to prostitution. Well that originates from us seeing prostitutes with skimpy clothes but if you are just a regular person trying to wear a pair of normal clothes, because that is what they are at the end of the day, already we have labelled you as someone who is undeserving of respect. We have labelled you as someone we feel uncomfortable around because your clothes do not speak modesty. It has reached an extent that we have become targets for merely just wearing a pair of clothes. There is always a lingering danger to everything we subconsciously accept and what the process of normalization tries to do is to simply gather your subsconsciously made decisions and ask yourself why do they exist in the first place. I do not know about you but I am very curious to knowing why I have made certain decisions that I am not aware of. Since we are animals with two main focuses: survival and reproduction, we tend to want to survive the easier way in a harsh environment and that is to go for the option which needs less effort and that is adaptation; for merely just changing your lipstick colour which you really like to not come off as a “certain person”, you have stripped yourself of your identity. I believe in change. Change is gradual but the long term goal is mindblowing and evolution attests to that. So my proposal is 1 person. 1 person does, another person sees, that person begins to question the significance of the act and then the person adapts. Two important facts: 1. The act was questioned before it was adapted: let us not live life to accept things as they are, whether good or bad; accept things because you are aware that by merely accepting it, it alters you and everything that you do. 2. I did not say this is a spontaneous process. It is gradual; the process does get tedious, the process will seem meaningless, you will get ostracized from a society you played an effort in building but the thing is that nothing worth having has ever come easy, to have peace, you need to seek and pursue it, to be happy, you need to forgive, to start normalizing things, a conversation needs to start.
Now I want to challenge you by telling you a story: I had a friend who was an artsist and she had the most beautiful roses in her garden which she liked to sketch. She misplaced her sketch book and as a result she had to redo all her sketches. She redid them and the sketches were exactly identical to the one in her previous sketch book and I asked her why couldn’t she just sketch something else because she had a variety of flowers in her garden and she said and I quote: “I can’t sketch anything different from my roses, I have never tried it and I am not willing to.” Few weeks down the line she found her sketch book and guess what? Now she has two identical sketch books with the same sketches, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Moral of the story: In life we are given countless opportunities to try something new, to give some of the wondrous things on this earth a chance but instead we decide to go through extremes to stick to the same routine because we don’t know what lies ahead and we are not willing to find out.
Question: Is it possible that we conform because we don’t know what may lie ahead of us if we just decided to pave our own roads?
THE COMING OF A NEW GENERATION. 