Things We're Too Afraid To Say

I am sitting on the balcony of an intimate guesthouse in a remote part of the world. In this world, the only truths are the foamed blue-green sea whose waves I can just catch a glimpse of over the neighbour’s roof; the road that leads up and down, in and out of this town; the two restaurants that are closed on Monday nights and the Parisian-meets-Victorian décor of my room - a sweet duplicity that I could be in Provence, France right now. It’s pure bliss – my phone is off and the only connection I have to the world is when I switch my laptop and 3G on. And when I’m done with the outside world and Facebook, with one click, I can switch my solitude back on again.
‘This is the life I’ve always wanted,’ I think serenely as I walk down the beach. My mind empties of life’s troubles, and almost immediately, it is flooded by things I have been too busy or too tired or couldn’t care less to think about – thoughts I didn’t even know I had anymore! Suddenly, all of them are there, waiting, like irate patients at the doctor’s rooms, to be attended to. What?! At which point, did getting away from things secretly translate into coming face to face with them?
In tears beneath my oversized sunnies, (and looking very much like a ‘rehabbie’ to residents taking evening walks along the beach), I wonder, how I, the expert emotion manipulator (my own) get to this point, where those uncomfortable feelings couldn’t be airbrushed with a satisfyingly exhausting shopping spree or a gloriously inebriating night out with the girls? At this moment, I succumb to the fact that I am here to be. The lights are being switched off in my life and in doing this, my internal truth is about to be unearthed. So I spoke to other women, from New York to Jozi about their blackout moments and what it taught them.Check out these conversations in Studio 83 magazine's The Blackout Issue on www.studio83.co.za as well as in the following blogs.

The first one is titled: 'I am stronger than I give myself credit'
Lelethu