A good look at where I am

Its been quite a year , I shall not say a hectic one, but its quite challenging. Struggling to find a good place to stay, moving and working at my degree simultaneously. There is just so much going on, in my mind also. It would be a dream come true to complete my degree in one year, just started changing my plans to work on this new idea, now turning into a timely goal.

I cannot believe it is May already I feel like I have done so little, wooooh. I would love to  learn two languages this year, Arabic and another. Definitely not Afrikaans, I know hey...The books we read in high school do have a long term effect. If you would like to know why I intend not to learn Afrikaans please take a short journey through my high school read "Mine boy".

I think I  just wanna read Arabic properly, no interest in speaking it yet. The other language I wanna learn is only conversational. An acquaintance of  mine once said, " hey, you are always speaking in English it makes you appear as if you are foreigner among your people..."

I love to think she was mean but hey maybe its time I spend some time in Soweto and some townships when I go home, the people who stay here are sure multilingual. I bet ngi zo khuluma in no time, and simultaneously ndi zo thetha. Investing in my relationships with the Tsonga and Venda people will get me greeting with nda and vho macheroni in no time too.

These languages don't make the second language I wanna  learn,I would keep it a secret until I can speak it and in the mean time feel free to guess. 

Sometimes I wonder if I am ever gonna get  married, who am I gonna marry, hmm, the mind, it's keeping me enslaved at my permission. My life is not turning out the way I planned when I was under 18. I think some things have to be done, I can't afford to feel this way in my thirties lest  I get into a mid-life crisis. 

I wonder how everyone else is feeling about their lives...

To holding on and pressing harder and to living only the life we envisioned ...Lots of warm hugs to my SA readers, keep warm in this passing winter, it too shall pass. If you love winter, then whooop whoooop it's here!

A minor/Big Change

I guess I am too late to say it's a new year, but I will mention how the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 was stressful for me. I was not sure what I was gonna do this year and everything just looked blurry. I prayed, lost hope, prayed some more, tried everything else I  I could use to see how my life would be and to prevent it from being bad. It's not easy to leave university and establish an new path especially if you have not planned for it.

My worries and attempts were put to rest when I got acceptance for a postgraduate degree. Now my life developed a twist, this is post-apartheid South Africa. Now I am even more convinced that the segregation was really bad. Can you guess where I moved to? Stellenbosch! The atmosphere here is completely different, the segregation results are still here. It is very clear where the black people, the white and the colored live and finding a place is quite hard in the suburbs when you are my race, unless you go through an agent who might just speak in Afrikaans with her colleague about her doubts that you may not afford the place. How can I blame her when it is so clear where who stays and when the complex that I am moving into is 99% white and only the security guard is of my  race.

Its quite challenging for me to stay in a place like this, even in the university I am an extreme minority. I have two good supervisors for my MSc and that makes me happy, I could not have got such good support from my beloved and horribly missed former university. I am making new friends slowly, the ones I have made seem not to fit into my pockets, I think if I invite them to my flat, they will wait till I call to tell me that they won't make it, and yes I have been through that a lot this year already.

It is very clear that growing up is a milestone, you realise new things and how to only trust your own. I learnt that good friends are really hard to find, and the people that I sometimes take for granted are the ones that can actually  bend backward for me.Some people are really here for the taking, if you don't give what they want they move to where they can get what they want. So at the end its not a loss. It is just a mismatch of interests.

The good thing is I am more knowledgeable and stronger than I was before. Better days will follow as long as I stick to my new path. To a great time in Stellenbosch! A great miss to Cape Town:(

Charity

It is amazing how I have noticed that the working  class people, the ones who labor for their supper and drink tea for breakfast are the easiest to give, they know the pain and value of sacrifice and when they give all that they have left, they know they will be hungry like the beggar, but they still give. They don't give because they have plenty where that penny comes from, but they give because it is their due.

Our duty in life is to give, to give love, money,time and other things that may be required of us. When you were born, the air was just at the right pressure for your little lungs, the water was at the right temperature at all time, your  mother's milk was at the right consistency and the earth had so much  space for you.

Why is it that we are so inclined to feel  that others owe us this much, the world owe us such and such. The next time you wanna cry go outside because nobody owes you  nothing, and all that you have is for use.

That is selflessness, you need no religion for it, and you may not like it, but you are missing out on the bliss that you could have if you lived from motivation of simplicity.

Live with the spirit of "apres vous", after you.

Try giving things you love instead of the ones you have no use for if the need arises.

I always have a choice

Sometimes I feel kike giving up on my goals, Sometimes I feel like carrying on.  I can choose to follow  the instinctive feeling or to do something else.

I always have a choice in any situation and so do you. At the end of any decision are goodies, never do we make wrong decisions, they were meant to be there, embrace the goodies with grace ad move onto the next chapter.

I choose to study, obtain my degree and look forward to whatever unfolds after this. What are you facing now? What decisions do you have to make?

Ever forward and better!

Toxic Relationships

Lately I noticed a few things from and with people around me. Mostly it happens with the ladies.
One may find oneself with a friend who only talks about herself, "I got a new hairdo", I got this Prada pair for close to nothing", " I feel so fat" , "I did this lately" , "Oh no, Lemme tell you this" , " Oh my gosh I got my car polished blah blah" . Okay if we are so comfortable around each other and these kind of statements are made, half or for some time, that is cool. But if you do the listening 95% of the time you may be bending too much, or your friend is just super stuck up and this is no healthy for a relationship. I find it annoying, how about you?

I don't know why we keep this kind of people around us, sometimes after being around your friend you have to put your head in the fridge, oh no!or just throw yourself onto  bed with a tub of ice cream. Friends are the people we choose to have around, one  better choose wise and one should know that putting up with this kind of inconsideration from other people is a bad impact on one's self esteem, and self esteem is like a muscle, it is only good if it is active. One has a high self esteem when one can disengage from unhealthy associations and go for only gold, putting up with what does not work for you is like you are saying " I doubt I deserve any better", "no one will want to hang out with me, at least she does" and you will feel horrible- period!

There are all sorts of bad associations and signs of them, I got one sentence for all of our associations " If it's not building you up, It's breaking you down"

Check these out:
You feel drained.  A toxic friendship is emotionally draining because the relationship is essentially unequal: the person takes from you, but never gives back. They may be the unabashedly self-absorbed type who talks endlessly about how great their life is but never wastes two words to inquire about yours. Or, they might be the Debbie Downer sort of emotional vampire who you can count on to suck the fun out of every good time with their perpetual “woe is me” act.

They’re reliably unreliable. Toxic friends seem to make a habit of saying one thing and doing another. Whether they out-and-out lie or they just don’t respect commitments, the frenemy is chronically two-faced and flakey.

They undermine your other relationships. Since they’re scared to death that you’ll eventually dump them and stop giving them the one-sided attention they so desperately crave, a toxic friend will usually try to undermine your other relationship.

   Do you feel emotionally drained when you are with her?
  Do you come away from her feeling depressed?
  When you talk, does it feel like she isn't listening or just doesn't get it?
  Do you dread her phone calls?
  Do you hate when you see her screen name online when you look at your buddy list?
  Are her emails too long to read?
  Does she always choose to spend her time with men, over you, given the opportunity?

The people may have lovely qualities also, and one wouldn't wanna lose out on that. So it might be good to confront your friends about how you feel and if it does not work, I got a better way: RUN AWAY, DON'T WALK REALLY, RUN! The longer you linger the harder it is to break away. And if one keeps one person like this in one's life it is gonna be easy to let someone else do it also, then one ends up with a bunch of toxic friends, you may end up with a loser of a boyfriend too, because you are setting yourself up as a walkover.

Reclaim your power and be all for yourself,
if you don't support your own  party,
 how do you expect us to?

Sometimes you have to stick it out.

I have been very mean and uncaring to myself. After a few bad choices in my life and taking wrong turns I am back to my reality, I gotta face it head on. I  decided this  after a bad cold put me down to bed  and a bad medication kept me awake throughout the demise of a viral infection. I blamed God, my religion, my friends, and that guy also, every possible thing  that seemed to be in the way of my hedonistic pleasure. I guess if I keep going like this I am just gonna spiral into the same hole of self-pity.

Well now I better focus on completing all the projects I have launched  and getting more involved with my life, I have been a spectator long enough. I feel like crying, this life of moping and doing nothing but blaming circumstances has become my comfort zone, I think I need a support group or buddy to keep me focused. I think I should have put this in my journal, but hey, I am real and my life is made of valleys and hills, come face it with me.

"sometimes you gotta sit and face the terrible emptiness within that surfaces when you are not focused  on someone else. Sometimes the emptiness will be so deep, you will feel the wind blowing through the place  where  your heart should  be. Allow yourself to feel it, in all its intensity or else you may look for another way to distract yourself" a bit  modified from Robin Norwood., Women who love too much.

The power of prayer and solitude

Nothing can surpass the power of meditation, prayer and pondering. Don't get me wrong, asking for things in prayer is not gonna bring you peace. It will just shift your focus if you do it continuously.

That time you spend in solitude focusing on a higher being, affirming your inner power brings peace that surpasses human understanding. You walk away with revived energy, acceptance and a sense of focused energy. I urge you to take some time out and embrace the peace that you already have.