Make Another Choice

Yesterday was my beginners’ attempt at self-mastery. A friend who knew me even before I knew myself told me that I am one of the most self aware people he knows (in that I knew who and what I am; as well as what my flaws are) but my greatest challenge is to master myself. I’m still struggling with what that exactly means but I think it’s about self-acceptance; self-love and the realization that at any given point, if something is not working for you any longer (even if it’s part of you), you CAN make another choice. And in making another choice, that is how unfold the person God created you to be and master that self. So yesterday, and this week in fact, has been my beginner’s attempt at this. In the other book I’m reading, Eat, Pray, Love, the author says that prayer is half the work done, the rest is up to you to act on. So if I pray to God to be healed and to let go and all the other fervent prayers I send to him on a daily basis, it is also up to me to actively be involved in the process by doing the things that bring me healing and joy and letting go of those things that no longer work for me. For me, one of the things that bring me joy is Bikram Yoga. It is one of the most grueling and fulfilling physical, mental and spiritual exercises I’ve ever done. It is held in a 45-degree hot studio and each pose (there are 26) is done twice, with many of them requiring you to stay in them for a minute. The instructors, unlike other forms of ‘kind yoga’ are usually tough and strict…do one thing wrong and they call you in front of everyone. So it’s kind of like the Auschwitz of all the yogas but perhaps because of this, it is also the most healing – physically, spiritually and mentally. Yesterday, running late for my yoga class, I forgot my water bottle, which is essential if you are going to make it through that scorching 90 minutes. As I entered the room, I decided to challenge myself to go through the practice without any water AND try to stay in ALL the poses for their full duration. It was hard. I was at the back of the class, falling over, throat-dry and head dizzy, not knowing how I was going to make it through but knowing I needed to. Until my instructor said to me: ‘Lelethu, don’t suffer and the back all on your own, come to the front so we can all suffer together…and please rest, when you need to.’ I think she could see how hard I was pushing myself and she was reminding me that in whatever quest I am on, I should remember to be kind to myself. That too, is a form of self-mastery as it eradicates the ego’s need to always be the best, right, first. It turns the journey inward and allows you to listen to yourself; hone your personal best; accept where you are at that moment and master that. She was also reminding me that in the vastness of life, you are never alone. There is always someone, who is willing to suffer with you, so don’t treat yourself in isolation. I honestly now believe that everything in life has its opposite. The measure with which you feel pain is also the measure, with which you are given joy. The measure with which you are wounded, is also the measure with which you have the potential to heal. So I’m making another choice to use my pain and woundedness to discover my joy and healing. It makes my heart leap in bounds.

Be Obedient

This refers to listening to the voice inside your head because it’s a higher calling. Listening to that truth that won’t let you go and writhes you every waking hour. There are so many voices inside my head that sometimes I struggle to hear the voice and tone of God. I’ve spent so many nights praying to hear the tone of God – waiting anxiously and fearfully to hear his supposed wrath of his will come over me – surely nothing good or nothing like I want. Torturing myself with many voices in my head all because I’m too afraid to listen to the one voice that is. I kind of feel like that kid whose parents don’t get her what she wants for her birthday and she sulks and doesn’t see that maybe the other gift they’ve gotten her may be even better than the one she wanted. That’s what my life feels like right now – God is giving me a tremendous gift but because I’m so fixated on what it needed to look, feel and act like when it arrived, I can’t see that it has in fact arrived – just in a different experience but still the same thing I spent months praying for. Receiving a gift is the hardest thing to do. The times when I’ve heard God is when he tells me: ‘I have a bigger plan for you.’ ‘Let go’ ‘Yes’ ‘Be With Him.’ The other constant thoughts are that I need to travel Africa, I need to write about her to the world and I need to let go and have faith that I can do all these things without losing the love of my life or that if we do lose each other, then God will find a way for us to find each other. (What God ordains, God sustains – this was the other thought, which appeared to us on a billboard while driving home one day).
Those are the constant thoughts that run through my head in the midst of all my fear about his bigger plan. My greatest prayer right now is the courage to listen to God as well as the humility and courage to surrender to him and his will. That is my greatest struggle and prayer.

Yourself vs. Yourself

I am about to finish reading One Day My Soul Just Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant. After this book (and Eat Pray Love), I've promised myself that I'm going to take a hiatus from self-help books and help myself by just living life. Reading ODMSJOP, I instinctively knew that although it is very cleansing because it allows you to write about each experience/chapter/lesson as you read it, the real work really starts once you've finished the book because that's when you have to live the truths that you've read and stated in your own words while reading the book. So this has been my challenge - actually doing the work that I've read and making it work in my life - I think that is the challenge with most self-help books...making it work for you.

Anyway, as part of my quest to help heal and heal myself, I'm going to be posting some of the key learnings of the book from the last five pages. Below is the first one:

Tell The Truth…

What is my truth right now? The truth is I don’t know where I’m going or who I am at times. I seem to be a contradiction at best. On good days I’m a lovely young woman who is on her journey of life, love and joy – and that is enough(Lelethu). On other days, I am a monster who is sabotaging the very efforts she is making to attain the things she wants in life; the very things she’s too afraid to have(Leza). On good days, I am so connected to God, he breathes my breath and I can feel him next to me as if he was whispering in my ear. On other days, I shun him and don’t want to hear him or his Will for fear that it will not be what I want, not knowing that it will be better than what I want. My truth right now is that fear is wrecking me. I am afraid of EVERYTHING – letting go – of my past, myself, love; building my dreams – sometimes I wonder if they even are my dreams – what I should really be doing or are they something I do to give my directionless life some direction? I’ve never been this confused in my life! I’m usually the girl who knows where she’s headed and just goes for it – fear or not (Matric, AAA, Instant Grass, TL) but now I’ve lost my chutzpah. Somewhere along the line, I lost that zing, that absolute arrogant faith that I am the future. I think that it’s a lesson of humility, or at least a lesson of placing my greatness in God, rather than myself or other people. Sometimes, I think that the reason I’ve lost my chutzpah, is Leza’s way of punishing me. She knows that she is the one with the magic and chutzpah but she also knows that her days in me are numbered because there are things about her that don’t work for me anymore – so she withholds it within me while emphasizing it in others, just so I can see how much I need her. The truth is I do – she is the personality, the face and the person who sells us; the person with the power to make things happen but she needs me to. She needs me because in her heart, she knows it’s time to heal but she’s holding on to what she knows (even though it is damaging her and me) because that’s all she knows. Everything else is the unknown…and that means she has no control. And she’s too proud to surrender to God’s control. She needs me because, getting drunk, falling over and embarrassing herself and others around her, literally and figuratively is no longer fun…and she knows it’s time to end it. The truth is I am on a journey of healing and being put back together. Leza vs. Lelethu is a most puzzling piece but I will get it right.

Don't Wait 'Till Its Too Late

I'm listening to one of my favourite tracks by Alicia Keys - Tell You Something. This song reminds me of all the times we spend as people wasting energy, love and time on things that don't matter. And how truly for granted we take the blessing of being able to be loved and love someone. Have you ever been in a situation where you waited till it was too late? You waited till it was too late to tell someone that you care about them; how you really feel instead of fronting; you shrunk in the face of fear instead of loving boldly and fearlessly without focusing on how long that would last.

'Just a simple Conversation. Just a moment is all it takes. I want to be there just to listen. And I don't want to hesitate...' Alicia Keys

There are things in my life I don't know. I don't know how long I'm going to be here for. I don't know how long I'm going to be in your life for but I know that in this moment that God has given us, I am blessed. I've made it my adage to do everything 'like its' the last time' - I don't know if it's God hinting at my life's span or just making me appreciate this moment right here. It doesn't matter. I want to live and love to the fullest; with an open heart and hungry mind and an observant soul. This is just a short one to say: Take the time to right the wrong; say that all you have to say...don't wait until the storm or something is wrong and you can't find the one you love.'

Mwah!

I Am My Hair Phase Three: Braid My Hair

Braids. My favourite of all time – braids are my self-preservation hairstyle. Self preservation of my hair against the windy winters; self-preservation of my humility and having new conversations because the best braids I’ve ever done, have been at the dodgiest hair salons – the tin containers on the side of the streets in Mdantsane; the living room at Svig’s house up the road from my house, the taxi rank in Cape Town, the Swazi owned hair salon opposite the Nigerian restaurant where I would wolf down Naija cuisine in downtown Joburg. These are the places where I would have the most insightful conversations about people and their lives. There’s something about being at a hair salon that gets tongues wagging and after an entire day spent listening to dramatic tale after dramatic tale, I would go home fully sated – with my hair and the knowledge (or gossip) I’d gained. My most recent braided hairstyle is the one I have now – a wild and big Afro-ish mess of hair which, everytime I have down, brings out my inner diva…makes me wanna put on a pair of skinnies, wifebeater and heels and strut down to the hottest party to get down with my girls; or do like Lil’ Wayne (there he is again) and tell you off like he does Al Sharpton in ‘Don’t Get it.’ My wild braids bring out my inner B…the chutzpah I’d toned down to earth with my small twist locks that were my in-between hairstyles hairstyle.

So I think, ultimately I believe that I am my hair – not in the sense of ‘making me a better friend or person’ as Ms India.Arie challenges in her song, but in the sense of the things my hairstyles teach about me; the experiences I have when I adorn them (which are ALL very different) and the different shades of ME I discover with each style I choose to define (or find definition) by.

I Am My Hair Phase 2: Beweaving in the Weave

Like any other ‘deep’ sister, I struggled with bought hair, especially the weave. I spent years judging girls who wore weaves, not really understanding why I did – it just sounded like the deeply right thing to do. But I couldn’t help but always notice how much fun those girls always seemed to be having. How they always looked stylish, flicking their hair behind their ears in that carefree way that I- and them -had only seen blondes and brunettes do. So when one day, I started drowning in my own depth, I decided to go blonde the only way a black woman can, without actually going blonde. I got a weave. I remember guiltily and gleefully staring back at my reflection in the mirror, my complexion starkly contrasted by the strange texture of ‘human’ hair. Already, without even stepping out of the hair salon, the fun had found me. I knew I was going to have a ball having a weave. Unfortunately though, I didn’t get as much support from my soul sistah crew, who spent hours analyzing my hairstyle and what it said about my regression while I…flicked my weave my hair behind my ears, of course. The funniest thing about having a weave is how much reaction it causes – it’s the Lil’ Wayne (I’m still gonna blog about him!) of hairstyles – you love to hate it but you kinda like it. Especially guys…deep brothers front for it like it’s the worst thing in the world to have a receipt for hair but the ones I’ve spoken to have all admitted that whenever they see a chick with a weave, they get a little excited, like they wanna take her home, flip her over and have her from the back. (Yep, soul brothers have sex too!). The script I liked to flip on them though was actually knowing what I was talking about in a conversation (because the assumption is always that if you have a weave you must not be too bright). But I also realized, just like Ms Thandiswa Mazwai said about being thin, with a weave, I was only interested in being desirable, not interesting. I paid more attention to my characteristics than my character. So eventually, I knew that I wouldn’t spend my life in a weave (just like I wouldn’t spend my life in any one hairstyle) and moved on to find out what other hairstyles could tell me about myself.

I Am My Hair Phase 3: C'mon and braid my hair...

I Am My Hair Phase One: The Chiskop Chick

I love India.Arie. She speaks to me in ways which conversations with people I'm closest to, haven’t at times. Her wisdom and insights shows me truths that I’m sometimes to caught up in living in my own head to feel. When she sang: 'My mama told me a lady ain't what she wears but what she knows,' in Video Girl, I knew that, even though I wasn't the 'pantyhose-wearing type' of lady, I was a woman worth knowing. When she serenaded her Brown Skinned man in the park, asking him where his people are from, I traced the origins of my brown skinned man on the kinky hair that curled his chest. When she lamented being ready for love and it not being ready for her, I accepted that it’s OK for you to love someone who's not ready to love you…and let them go. Finally, most recently, when she flew in the Wings of Forgiveness for a man who had given her everything to her and then heart achingly tore it all away, it dawned me that just like she croons: 'If Nelson Mandela can forgive his oppressors then surely I can forgive you for your passions.'

But there's one song that I've always sung along to, 'inside knowing it wasn't true (for me). I Am Not My Hair. Having been brought up to believe that hair is a woman's crown, I spent years trying to live up to this ideal – relaxing my hair when I could finally tell my mom: ‘No, I would not like to do the perm and have gel dripping from my ears and forehead!’ In my early teens I sported the ‘Toni Braxton’ (relax, cut and tong) because I really wanted to look like her and the guy who was the master of the Toni Braxton cut at Le Curl hair salon was ultra-cute. Back then, I exuded what Ms India.Arie would sing about later - I wasn’t my hair, my hairstyles were just that – styles – they came and went.

But when I came back from a coming of age holiday in Cape Town in 1998, I cut off all my hair as a symbol of new beginnings. I’d finally plucked up the courage to get out of a relationship that had passed its’ sell-by date. In that year I was also to discover the rebel in me – signaled in school by promptly being sent to detention for my shocking and attention-grabbing hairstyle; signaled in my life by my showing norm and societal expectations the middle finger in every way; signaled in my growth by learning the other side of me – the exciting but dangerously destructive side that gets off on treading way too closely to the edge. Over the years, my chiskop has always been a metaphor for change in my life…. the thing I did to give me courage to do something new … or say goodbye to something old. For guys, the chiskopped me showed off my ghetto-ness – the girl you didn’t dare mess with but asked her friends for her number.

What happens when a deep sister sheds her fro for a weave? Find out in I Am My Hair Phase 2: Getting Beweaved