Passages And Pages

This new era feels like a very different path.
A quiet, deeply reflective inward journey.

"Success" is a myth. Success to one person can be happiness, gardening or caring for their family. What we believe "success" to be is customised.

Success is not rooted in material things. It's rooted in freedom.

When approval becomes an addiction, we remain enmeshed in a constant need to prove ourselves, and it is never enough.

Never.

It becomes another self-fulfilling prophecy.

Significance lies somewhere deeper. It's raw and honest and deeply confronting.

Peace is the path I am choosing now. It requires a different form of courage.
It requires stepping away from the noise to really unpack my tender triggers, my desperate need to Belong.
To fit in, and that's why my message matters.

Not for the surface.

Not for the apparent accolades.

The short-lived hits of feeling whole and brave.

The brave journey I am navigating is how to keep going when you feel at your most unlovable, at your rawest vulnerability.

When you are naked and without armour. When the raw truth threatens to drive you back into shame... a shame I lived in for thirty years until I wrote my way through the shame.

When I surfaced after writing my book over four long years, I found other layers of shame begging to be spoken to.

The shame of visibility digs deep for me.

Two court cases that I allowed to ravage my life.

Shame was familiar.
That was my journey.

That was my learning.

What most people do not know is that I did not move to Johannesburg; I fled from Cape Town. From the shame I was drowning in.

Johannesburg was a second chance. Now I am living on many second chances.

Second chances at understanding layers of meaning, stripped of the masquerade of performance and perceptions. Of pressure. Of constant vigilance.

So I could come through the other side and understand on a deeper soul level how shame works.

The path to living authentically is not glossy or glamorous.

It's raw and painful.

It would have been easier to retreat into silence. But signposts from God keep appearing.

This morning, I received a beautiful message across the oceans in Australia from my dear friend Tokelo Mbhele, who reads every single blog I write.

And so I continue to write and to read.
Deeply challenging revelations.

In courage.

In contribution.

In Faith.

Because sometimes you don't think your message matters.

But God thinks otherwise.