Challenging 20s - Day 104

I am battling with a tug of war between my current reality and the vision of where I should be. The feeling of another year closing and not having done something 'BIG' is filling me with so much pressure.

Every time I think that my 26th year on this planet is nearing it's 27th, I stiffen up. I go into a panic and question everything that I stand for.
Am I proud at what I have become?
Have I done my best to progress into what I ultimately want out of life?
Is my definition of success on a higher platform than I can ultimately achieve?
And will climbing the ladder to get there be more stress than reward?

I know I chase change and challenge everything I do in fear of coasting. A friend once said to me after I had mentioned that I was leaving yet another job, "Oh that's right you've been there a year - must be time for you to move on." I hadn't really seen the pattern until I looked back on my last 3 years, yep there it was. A timeline of change.

Comfort has always filled me with uncertainty. I have lived on a constant "what's next?" for years. Challenging a change, whether it's a hair colour, a bedroom makeover, a city move or a break up. Maybe it's a commitment thing. A fear of getting too close, too attached to any said thing that it will result in disappointment.

Yes, I am in my 20s and as everyone has said, "you are still so young there is time for that". But why wait until I am "of age" before I become anything? Why are our 20s so jaded with "there is time" that by the time we are 32 we feel like we have run out? I don't agree. I think that whatever I am meant to be, be it now or when I am 32 is up to me to make that happen.

Our twenties are so full of pressure to get a degree, find a profession, move up that ladder, buckle down and SETTLE on that ever after. Do we forget about the now? That our time to travel is either when we take a gap year or when we earn enough to reward ourselves for that 'break'.

I don't want to be that thirty something that wakes up one day, packs a bag and heads for the furthest direction away from 'completion' possible. I want to wake up and know that what I have done, what I have accomplished is, enough.

Daily dears, for the sake of blaming, I blame Joburg. A city so forced in accomplishment, happiness becomes only a weekend thing. It's challenged my thoughts and challenged my goals.

So all I can say is, "Challenge Accepted."

A letter to me - Day 92

Dear Me, 

Sorry I have forgotten about you for so long. The thing is, I think about you everyday but the words I have to say to you are hard for me to admit, a space I've grown through that needs a final exhale. 

They never tell you that moving to a new city has very HIGH, highs and super duper lows. They also don't tell you that even though you are a super, independent woman you will dream about having a special someone to share your morning finds and afternoon affirmations with. They say things like, 

"He is out there somewhere, you just need to be patient."

But I don't quite know where to find this somewhere where this someone is waiting for me. I am patient. ish. But what about right now? Is he standing at that somewhere just waiting? Or has he given up and settled for that second best?

I recently found myself in a place with a human, that wasn't me. It definitely wasn't that somewhere, that they speak of. He was a second best. And he made me feel like second best. Easily attainable for the smell of settling. Under the covers it was a glimpse of happiness I haven't felt in a while but resurfacing it made me feel used and uncertain of me. Affection was only found at the bottom of a beer bottle. It wasn't normal, nor nice. It became an obligation. It was unfair to expect someone to fuel my happiness. As much as he wasn't able to fuel his own, I was the one who came out bruised and hurt. 

People are not what they seem. People will do whatever it takes to feed their own desires, including using people as play things. I am guilty of such things. People as play things, it's honestly a terrible thought. Puppeteering emotions to taunt your joy button. I think you can tell if someone is unhappy by the way they share a life. I feel so stupid for letting him in. 

He got the best of me and I was saving that for someone else. 

There is a line I hear him say over and over in my head, sometimes I have to say it out loud to know that it's real. And that someone who shared my life with me could even say these things about me, the exterior of me. It's selfish and unfair. 

" Jemma is not physically attractive." 

My rant could go on, but I am done with him. I am done with the dirt he made me feel. I guess the most horrible thought I could imagine saying to him would be that he doesn't deserve happiness. Not until he finds it in himself. The truth is he doesn't deserve to be told either. His projection of me is up to him, but the BUT is, that if you feel like that towards someone you are with, you shouldn't be with them. Whatever your intention. 

I look at the relationships around me and I see light. I see gentlemen behaving like gentle humans towards their other halves. This is how it is supposed to be. So, I will wait, I will wait in my own somewhere for that someone. Everyone deserves a version of their own fairytales. 

I said to a dear friend the other day that has found herself in an incompatible union, 

"We dream of unicorns, those are the highest values we want in our lives, but on earth there are ponies, and they're pretty much the same thing."

I know this is just another check point in my life to a better me. So with one final breath of yet another bad human experience, I breath it all out and finally let him go.

All my love,

Me

Questions - Day 60 (about)

There is something out there.

I wake up every morning, stretch and slip into a wonder of something close but yet unattainable.
The first question I ask myself is never a surprise, "What's for breakfast?"
The second is a little scary, "How am I going to make today matter?"
The third, is a statement disguised as a question. "Get up, don't press snooze, go run(?), now."

Squished between the reality of my life is a niggling quest of a question. Often ignored and put aside in the "Post-it" section of my brain. To do's later, I'll get around to it tomorrow's.
Tomorrow was 365 days ago.
There is less than 10 hours to go in today and nope, nothing quite life changing has surfaced.

Do expectations drive our purpose? 
We get a job, we are expected to behave in a manner of conduct, we quit our job. We live without purpose until we give way to stability and arrive back at the register to sign ourselves back into expectation. Because living a life we want, is beyond what we are expected and that's just silly, right?

What defines happiness?
I recently got questioned for my ultra positive personality. What makes ME so happy ALL THE TIME? Life does. A shift that if I find that sparkle and write my name in the sky it will never dull. I can't explain it - it's just happened. Wiki says, "Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion."
Can't fault them there.

What drives a million dollar idea? 
I heard a statement once. "Everyone will have at least three million dollar ideas in their lifetime." The other morning I woke up with an euphoric emotion. I seriously had a million dollar idea. I was going to be rich, I was going to be famous, I was, I was, I was… and then the 3 F's appeared:
Faith, Fear and Failure.
I put down my pen and closed the door.
Don't wag your finger at me.
I believe a synonymous moment, injected with a spark of genius, and a clock on the right hand, is what generates a pipe dream into an employed vacation.
All actionable by determination. Obvies.

These challenging prods make up the russian roulette in my brain. Circling like a Sharknado, unable to synergise into my life map.

I know one day after spending all this time grabbing at the short straws, I'll get my hands on the long one.

"HAH! Got it!" and turn around and tell you guys, "I told you so."

But right now, today, I could just let it pass. This quest to awesomeness that I chase daily is getting a little exhausting.

Day 19 to Day 40

 Sometimes we need a push from an inspirational place.

Before you carry on with this post, I want you to take this link, let it load, patience now..

http://soundcloud.com/deadoceans/phosphorescent-song-for-zula

Are you ready..? Ok, go on, you may now press PLAY. 

The fear of having nothing good to say after so long is quite overwhelming.

What if we pretended that I didn't vanish, and what you are reading now was a simple add on to yesterday. Not 21 days ago, but earlier. That today, being day 40 is just another day.

Would you forgive me if I had a great story to tell?

21 Days is a lot of time to get up to all sorts of goodness. Being new to a city full of new things is a terribly, terrifying new experience. The newness of every corner is a new type of hype that I just can't wait to capture, like butterflies in a net.

Picture this:

It's a wintery day, but the sun is shining gloriously. There is a feeling of something different in the air, could it be spring? No surely not. But it's there - it's warm, it's a t-shirt type of day.
You decide that inside is not the place to be, so you get out, out into a field full other people, running a mock in this summery spring phenomenon.

There are dogs yapping and owners shouting. Kids are rolling down the hills and a soft breeze tangles your hair as if whispering past, "You can feel it can't you?"

As you flop to the ground, onto a soft comfort, pressing strawberries to your lips, you let your mind go. Why has it been so trapped?
You let it wonder, into the wonder it finds…

Friends of the past that have welcomed you back, mushy loves that keep you up at night and special discoveries of intellect you forgot you owned. Rewinding the past few weeks as if to relive them all over again, you really have never felt so happy.

Staring at your thoughts dancing above you, you lift your arms to remind yourself that it's all real. Look, you are touching every smile and intertwine every word passed between you, enveloped between your fingers. Suddenly you grab them, feel them absorb into your skin. Quick! Pull them tightly into your chest.

Embracing the past few weeks with responsibility and respect.

Opening your eyes,  can see those kites flying high above you? Watch them flit as your human gently unravels the string, the kites are dancing in the breeze, silly kites.

Could this be your life's metaphor?

Burnt from the rays of a summery spring type of sun, you feel alive again. Alive to write again.

And this song that's playing in your ears. It's given you hope to be again. Right?

Exactly right.

A great read, for a great day. - Day 19

Today I have been in Joburg for 3 weeks. Dudes! THREE WHOLE WEEKS! Where did the time fly to? I have been in a thoughtful wonder what to write all day, until this literate gem swooshed through the airwaves onto my iPhone screen.

It's romantic, without trying to be. Real, yet disturbing and catapults you to the wonder.

Find ten minutes of your day to be insulted, angry, and in agreement, as this truer than true piece of literature unfolds your fantasies.

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl.

Date a girl who doesn't read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you've unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn't fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn't, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn't read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.

- C. Warnke

Whoever you are C. Warnke, you deserve an applause. Thank you to my friend who knew that this would pull at my being-strings. It only makes me want to write better, and embrace being a reader.

A city that sleeps - Day 18

I woke up this morning to an unusual sense of quiet. The light filtering through my curtains was softer, grayer, silent. The sound of the traffic seemed to have been chased away by all the gray surrounding the suburbs. A soft mist had settled on the streets as if to stroke the city into obedience.

It was warm.  

Usually a gray day in Durban would mean pulling the duvet over ones head and faking some overcast sickness. But in Joburg, on my very first gray day, I needed to touch this quiet that felt so unusual. 

Salomons on and hood up I paced down the street. Big puffs of breath exhaled away from my body, as the sound of takkie on tar echoed in the street like an apocalyptic apology.

It was glorious. 

As I reached the park, the grass gave way to a soft push which was different from the frosty crunch I had been so used to. The trees lay almost petrified in their sleep, not daring to wake the airiness of the gray day. 

From the view of the park I can normally summon the city into my day, setting the tone of ambition I daily crave. But this was a different day, a Tuesday that refused to give me sight of anything five paces ahead. Tears of cold ran down my face, and my smile grew into an awkwardly, gallant giggle.

Who knew this sneaky city slept.  

Future steps - Day 17

A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about my future. Your future. 

As human beings, human livings, human doings, we have this constant refresh button in our minds that recalculate after every step. When we move forward, where are we moving to? What's the next BIG experience that we are about to discover? It's all such scarily unknown territory but we move forward, towards it anyway.

My friend is in constant recalculation of his future. Every step he takes is in a positive direction, but then his mind stalls for that split second to reassure himself that, "Is this really the right direction I am moving forward to?". 

I blame this type of thinking on the over ambitious lives we lead. The constant media that shows us flashy things, driving us to be more accomplished. Unfiltered adverts of you WANT this, but at the next corner its no, you NEED this. Our upscale of thought is also generated by the company and conversations we surround ourselves in. 

I have now been in Joburg for two weeks and already the here, now, be in the moment thinking is fast forwarding to the next big thing. Yeah, sure I am here. Two feet on the ground behind a desk groomed with Social Media. Creating copy for every brand imaginable. Selling lifestyles, putting the choices in your wallet for your next grocery shop. But distantly future altering moments pop into my head - that age old question of, "Where to next?"

As far as I am concerned, there are only two choices that we have control of in our life: To do or to don't. 

Our future is governed not by our capabilities but by our will. I look at my friend who has all the capabilities in the world an a will as strong as the wind. But with any will it's about filtering out all of life's grabbing hands and thinking clearly about the next steps. Blinkering out the screaming crowd and focusing on the finish line and having the will to do so. 

My mini goal solution is the only way to feel like we have control of our forward moving steps. Little stepping stones of experiences and analyzing them at each goal post. It's impossible to full speed ahead without becoming fatigued and overwhelmed, and often we lose sight of the here and now behind the big rush. 

You know, life is funny in the way that it will pop up these thought provoking experiences just to make you come back down to earth and breath. Listen to these moments of life insight, or what I like to call, Life In Sight. If you have a million things you see yourself doing in your life, do them. Map out a life path, give yourself flags to collect at every stop. Only by seeing a tangible future (no matter how big or how small) you will find yourself there. 

Ideas for life mapping:

Write it down. 

Mark down what you see yourself doing right now. Look for the gaps of mini posts that you can squeeze the WANTS into. Little by little a perfectly mapped mini future will rise in front of you, one thing I can guarantee is that as soon as you see this shopping list in full tangibility, it'll start to take shape. That's a sneaky subconscious for you. 

Vision boards.

Some of us are visual creatures. Not text planners, lists can give some of us that hyperventilation sensation. Start with a simple reassessing of goals, values and dig deep into "if I could live life anyway I could, without the monitory stress, how would I live?". Dig out those magazines and grab at pictures and words that make you feel like you, that give you that rush of an open window before a storm. Place them on a board and feel your subconscious respond to a life you have just created. Look at it everyday and soon enough, well, you'll see. 

I think that the bottom line is, stop being so frustrated with the thought of your future. It hasn't happened yet. And I bet, Future you is going to be pretty stoked how it all turned out. 

For more information about vision board classes go to: Heilahealth. co.za to book a class. It's really quite a fun way to spend a morning.