Prologue: The YOU Turn
One Friday evening at university, I was hanging out with my friend in her room at res. We were unwinding after a long week, the kind of week that felt like it was designed to break a person’s spirit.
A presentation I’d prepared for days fell apart. I completely blanked, words evaporated, palms sweated. The lecturer raised an eyebrow that felt like a verdict.
So, when the week finally came to an end, I sat with my friend, and we did what any twenty-somethings trying to survive would do: poured ourselves a drink and vented. We sat cross-legged on the floor, glasses of cheap rosé between us, the warm light from the single desk lamp casting uneven shadows on the walls. Outside, soft rain tapped against the window as if applauding our misery. We spiralled for hours, looping through every complaint we could think of.
‘I swear this degree is trying to assassinate us,’ she groaned.
‘For real!’ I responded. ‘At this point, I’m convinced my life has been cursed by someone who is no longer alive.’
The more we complained, the more dramatic we became, layering sarcasm over lamentation. Then one of us said it: ‘Life is just unfair.’
‘Wait,’ my friend said breathlessly, wiping tears from her eyes, ‘who told us life was supposed to be fair?’
That sentence landed like a dropped glass. We went quiet, each of us staring at our glasses as though the rosé had suddenly revealed the meaning of existence. I took a long, deliberate sip; slow enough to taste the bitterness beneath the sweetness and feel the tension in my chest loosen for just a moment.
Then, we burst out laughing – laughter that cracked through the heaviness and made our stomachs hurt. We laughed until the laughter finally dissolved into new stories, new topics, new noise. Weeks became years. Life, as always, went on.
We stepped into adulthood, and the challenges didn’t stop; they simply changed shape. Around that time, the rise of the positive-thinking culture was everywhere. People said things like: ‘Be grateful. Stay positive. Attract good energy.’ Influencers made gratitude sound like a cure. Motivational speakers insisted that pain was a mindset. Books preached that you could manifest anything if you believed hard enough.
Positivity became a kind of moral performance. The more convincingly I smiled, the more worthy I felt of my own life. Sadness wasn’t just uncomfortable; it felt irresponsible.
I learnt to translate pain into palatable language. I’m fine. I’m learning. Everything happens for a reason. Those were my go-to phrases in moments of distress. But none of those phrases asked me how I actually felt. They asked me to move on before I had even arrived.
To be fair, by most standards, my life was good. I had family, friends, a stable career, and I never went to bed hungry. But even with a comfortable life, I wasn’t immune to struggle. I still faced setbacks that left me feeling lonely, anxious, and sad because being human meant going through difficult things.
Yet no matter how heavy things got, I didn’t allow myself to complain, nor to feel sad. I told myself I had no right. Every time the ache surfaced, I smothered it with a positivity mantra.
I remember sitting at my desk with a pastel-coloured journal, forcing myself to write gratitude lists. Some days, I stared at the blank page for so long that panic crept in, not because I had nothing to be grateful for, but because I couldn’t feel it. I felt guilty for the disconnect, ashamed that my gratitude felt like performance rather than truth.
I buried every ache under those layers of forced optimism until I couldn’t tell whether I was healing or simply hiding behind hope. I called it resilience. My body called it survival.
But pain does not disappear just because we refuse to look at it. It waits.
My feelings sank quietly into my body. My body became the place where honesty lived after my mind abandoned it. Long before I admitted I was overwhelmed, my nervous system knew. Long before I named my sadness, my chest tightened around it like a clenched fist.
I didn’t listen. I medicated discomfort with productivity, with gratitude lists, with endurance. But the body is patient. It waits until you are ready, or until it forces you to be.
Unprocessed emotions always find a way out. Mine leaked through irritability, emotional numbness, overreaction, and sudden waves of sadness I couldn’t explain.
At first, it was subtle: a knot in my stomach that tightened whenever my phone rang; a cold, iron shackle fixed around my gut, even on days when nothing was wrong. Then came the tension in my chest, sharp enough to steal my breath in the middle of meetings. Sleep slipped away, leaving me tired and wired at the same time.
The symptoms weren’t abstract; they were daily disruptions. I once snapped at a cashier because she asked if I wanted a plastic bag. Another time, I cried for a minute in a grocery aisle because they were out of my favourite lemon-flavoured green tea. It wasn’t about the tea, of course.
The more I denied the existence of the symptoms, the more disconnected I became from myself, my needs, my intuition, my joy. The weight of all those buried feelings became almost unbearable. I would look at my life and wonder how much more I could take. No matter how hard I tried to keep moving forwards, it felt as though some invisible force kept pushing back – stronger, heavier … relentless.
Cracks began to show in the life I had built to keep myself together: the fractured pieces of my confidence, the dreams I had quietly abandoned, the disappointments I’d rationalised away, the unanswered questions that lingered no matter how much I tried to avoid them.
For a long time, I believed the problem was outside of me. I searched for the source of that invisible weight – naming it, studying it, trying to decode it.
• Is it because I am Black? I asked myself. In South Africa, being Black often means carrying not only personal struggles, but also history. The legacy of apartheid still lingers in uneven opportunities, limited networks, and economic ceilings; invisible yet solid. Doors don’t open at the same pace for everyone. It was reasonable to believe that race was stalling some of my dreams.
• Is it because I am a woman? Gender imposed its own quiet limits. Expectations of endurance. Of selflessness. Of shrinking. Even when I was ambitious, the world often asked me to stay small. The resistance came from partners, family members, and workplaces: not overt, but persistent. Over time, I internalised those limits, believing they determined how much space I could take up.
• Is it because of my upbringing? I was raised by parents who loved deeply but did not speak the language of emotions. They gave everything they had, but emotional literacy was a luxury they could never afford. Survival shaped them. Their silence became a quiet force shaping me too, a whisper that questioned my desire for more.
None of these questions were wrong. But they were incomplete. They explained my context, but not my exhaustion.
Eventually, I realised the ‘forces’ I was fighting weren’t just outside of me. They had taken root inside. They lived in my thoughts and reactions, shaping how I interpreted setbacks and how quickly I doubted myself before anyone else had the chance. These forces also lived in the stories I told myself about what I deserved. I had begun interpreting every experience through the lens of old ones, unconsciously recreating what I most wanted to escape.
I had spent years making external turns: career moves, relationship changes, self-improvement plans – believing the next adjustment would finally make things lighter. But each turn led me back to the exhaustion.
What I had never tried was the hardest turn of all: the internal turn towards myself. Not my curated self. Not my resilient self. But the one quietly asking for attention, not correction.
This body of work details what happened when I sat in silence, turned inwards, and listened to truths I did not know existed.
Each essay in this collection is a pause. A reckoning. A discovery of the treasures hidden beyond the uncomfortable noise within.
As you may expect, the journey inward is rarely gentle. But it is always real.
Why I am the Shebeen Princess
I was ten years old, sitting quietly in the living room of our secondary home, far from my primary home (which was in the close-knit rural village of Ga-Ntata), when I first sensed that something was different.
From the window, I watched the gate, and I noticed that it was never still. People drifted in and out like smoke; ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who laughed too loudly, drank too quickly, and carried a freedom I didn’t yet understand. Beneath the laughter and the clatter of bottles, there was a quiet intrigue, an invisible line that made our home feel unlike those of my friends.
I learnt early that this difference was not something to explain; it was something to manage.
At my Model C boarding school, lunch breaks were a parade of pride. My classmates traded their parents’ titles like trophies: ‘My mom’s a doctor,’ ‘my dad’s a lawyer,’ ‘my parents are teachers.’ When it came to my turn, my chest would tighten, my words would stumble. How could I explain that my dad’s work had no title that anyone would respect? He ran a shebeen in the heart of Thembisa. I already knew, even before I spoke, that saying that out loud would earn me either silence or raised eyebrows. So, I would simply say, ‘my dad works in a big factory,’ and leave it there; thin, vague, like a secret hanging in the air.
By that age, I was already mastering the art of self-editing: learning how to sand down the sharp edges of the truth until it could pass inspection. The lie didn’t feel like dishonesty; it felt like protection.
Only later did I understand that the discomfort I carried had little to do with the shebeen itself. It was about respectability, about which kinds of work are granted dignity, and which are merely tolerated as long as they remain unseen.
The irony is that my dad once had a title that would have fitted neatly into that respectable world, something like ‘accounts clerk’. But he had lived through the brutality of the job colour bar: years of loyal service and then the ladder stopped halfway up; not because of ability, but because of skin colour. He tolerated the cruelty and stifling limitations because, for a Black man in that era, there was no other choice. Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the workplace hierarchies it created remained intact. Still, the promise of freedom had changed what endurance meant for him. So, in 1996, he walked away from that job, no longer compelled to tolerate the unbearable. Instead, he took a leap of faith into the unknown and built something of his own.
For him, freedom was never only political; it was deeply personal. It was the chance to claim agency, to create a livelihood on his own terms, and to carve out a better life for my siblings and me.
Still, as a child, I couldn’t see any of that. All I saw was the shame of having a dad who ran a shebeen. I would ask him, ‘Dad, why did you go the shebeen route?’ He would smile, amused by my worrying, and tell me he had tried other avenues like a spaza shop, but competition was tough. In the township, he said, the liquor business was fertile ground.
Long before my father entered the business, shebeens had existed as spaces of survival and resistance. Under apartheid, Black women brewed umqombothi (sorghum beer) and sold it from their homes. These informal taverns, known as shebeens, became vital communal spaces, fostering loyal, tightly knit social networks.
Although the Liquor Act that prohibited Black South Africans from possessing or selling so-called ‘European liquor’ had been abolished decades earlier, commercial trading remained a distant dream for many. In the years after 1994, with political freedom finally achieved, traders like my father seized the moment. Many began with illicit shebeens, hoping one day to become licensed, modern taverns.
Dad started small; just two crates of beer, no capital, no loans. To this day, some of his early customers, those who helped him push the crates in a trolley down dusty streets, still remind me, with teasing pride, that they funded my education. And they’re not wrong; their loyalty kept our family afloat and made that Model C education possible.
For years, I kept my distance from the shebeen, even though my dad often told me I needed to understand it. ‘If I suddenly die,’ he’d say, ‘this business must go on.’ At the time, I didn’t fully grasp it, but everything I needed to learn about dignity was already being taught there. One of the most important lessons came in the form of the Cold Beer Promise.
The rule was simple: serve every customer a crisp, cold beer; never lukewarm. From the day he opened in 1996 until the day he passed in 2024, that promise guided his every business decision. What changed over time were the obstacles he faced in keeping the promise.
In the ’90s, cold beer in our township was a luxury. We had no electricity, just dusty streets, tin shacks, and the hum of survival. But my dad was resourceful. He relied on izinyoka, illegal electric connections, to keep his beer cold. It was dangerous and unreliable. If stolen, they would leave his business in darkness with no warning. I remember the nights when the lights flickered, and the old fridge would go silent. The tension in the air was thick. Sometimes he’d grab a torch and disappear into the dark, tracing the cable through the dirt, hoping it hadn’t been cut. I’d stand by the door, heart pounding, afraid he might step on a live wire or get into a fight with neighbours. Other nights, I’d wake up to find him sitting outside in the dark, silent, heavy – part frustration, part exhaustion, part quiet defiance. I didn’t have words for it then, so I stayed quiet. I just knew it was part of our life, a harsh contrast to the orderly, polished world of my Model C boarding school.
By the 2000s, the squatter camp was formalised, and residents finally had registered plots. This gave my dad’s land official status. Electricity eventually came legally. But that was half the battle; the other half was getting a liquor licence. My dad had two choices: close the business and leave his family without income or continue selling illegally and risk police raids. He chose the latter.
Raids were ruthless, timed to catch him with maximum stock. He’d either pay a bribe, euphemistically called ‘money for a cooldrink’, or lose everything. Reporting it wasn’t an option; after all, he was already an outlaw. Later, I learnt that this wasn’t unique to my dad; township entrepreneurs often operate under constant threat of raids and corruption, where illegal status makes them vulnerable to police exploitation.
I remember some of those raids vividly, mostly during school holidays while I was back at our home in the village. The air was fresh, quieter than the township, but the struggle always found us. If my dad called just after 9 am, I knew it was bad news. The public phones he used opened at 9, and they probably found him there waiting when they opened. My chest would tighten, my stomach twist. I wouldn’t pick up, knowing he had limited airtime and needed my mother. She’d step outside, moving to the spot with the strongest network signal, her voice soft and measured over the crackle. Her eyes would drift beyond the trees, silent. When she returned, I’d exhale slowly, her frown draining me. She’d say little beyond ‘Dad sends his greetings,’ and we’d continue our tea in silence; a silence that filled the room.
Growing up, I was a solitary child who often retreated into my imagination. On stressful days like those, I always found myself drawn to Masekitlana, the traditional indigenous game of stone play and make-believe. The play was executed by assigning characters to small stones, tapping them to create conversations. The interesting thing is that the stories I made up never reflected my worries. Instead, they embodied fulfilment and peace, a small sanctuary from the chaos around me.
I didn’t fully understand the consequences of police raids then. Later, I learnt it meant that my dad would not be able to send money home for a while, and that we’d have to stretch what little we had. And that made me appreciate why my parents celebrated so deeply when the shebeen finally got its licence. I remember the smell of woodsmoke curling into the evening, women laughing as they stirred large pots of umqombothi, honouring ancestors and celebrating freedom long denied. My aunt whispered a prayer into a calabash on the ground. My dad stood beside her, quiet but proud, eyes glistening. That single piece of paper, a liquor licence, was about to change everything. He could now buy in bulk, on credit, get trade prices, and even get sponsored fridges from the brewery.
As I watched my family celebrate this milestone, I realised that the Cold Beer Promise wasn’t just about alcohol. It was about commitment. About keeping your word in a world that constantly breaks its promises.
Two crates grew to hundreds. A humble shebeen became a fully licensed tavern. And my dad, the outlaw hustler, became the Shebeen King.
What goes up sometimes comes down. Success, I’ve learnt, isn’t a straight line. It breathes. It grows, contracts, and tests our beliefs in what we have built. When the tavern started struggling years later, whispers began, ‘Will he still manage to pay her Model C school fees?’ My future hung in that question.
I remember retreating to my room one afternoon, sitting on the edge of my bed, and writing him a letter. I told him I’d understand if I had to leave the Model C school. When I handed him the letter, pain flickered across his face. He told me he regretted that I’d found out, that he had never wanted me to carry that kind of burden. Then he said, ‘Yes, things have been tough. But your education was never under threat.’
A few days later, he called me into his room. He was sitting on a mat beside a massive black plastic bag filled with R1 coins, his earnings from the jukebox and the snooker table – his side hustles within the hustle. That night, we sat together and counted every single coin, thousands of them, our fingers sticky with the smell of metal.
When we were done, he looked at me and said softly, ‘Tomorrow, I’m taking this to the bank to pay your school fees for the year ahead.’ And just like that, my education was saved by a jukebox and a snooker table. Those R1 coins, heavy, stubborn little pieces of metal, literally carried us through one of the hardest seasons of our lives.
Each coin felt like proof. Proof that survival can be logical. That love can be counted on. That good quality education in our family was not an abstract ideal but a physical weight we were willing to carry together.
That day, I finally let go of the shame of being from the shebeen. I felt pride. Pride, not only in my dad, but in every man and woman who, against all odds, rise with determination to push their hustle forward. They reminded me that greatness wasn’t handed down through titles or certificates. It was born from the courage to create something from nothing.
As I continued to study my roots, reflecting on the stories of the community that raised me, I came across research that highlighted a crucial factor, and I could not help but see my dad’s story reflected in it. The research noted that informal businesses provided the liquid cash necessary for families to pay for school fees and supplies, investing in human capital to ensure the next generation could enter the formal economy. This struck me deeply because it was like finding a piece of academic validation and a direct reflection of my life.
What also resonated with me was the mention by research of how families move up the social ladder by transitioning from survivalist activities to more stable small enterprises. This was the very essence of my dad’s journey. He wasn’t just hustling to get by; he was laying the foundation for our family to rise to self-realisation.
I continue to reflect on the rhythm of my home that once felt full of strangers. Today, when I call them ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles,’ it’s no longer just politeness; it is reverence. Their lives, their efforts, and their love have touched me in ways I carry with me always.
Our home was never empty then, and it isn’t now. It’s full of every lesson my dad left behind.
That said, I am ‘the Shebeen Princess’ – the proud daughter of a man who turned struggle into legacy. A product of the informal economy. A living testament to the Cold Beer Promise.
Doctor, Please Give My Dad Some Water!
He had been in the hospital for several weeks before his doctor finally gave a diagnosis, one that required further assessment at another facility. Because the referral process required a family member to be physically present for paperwork, the staff had been trying to reach us for days. But the phone lines were unreliable; each failed call, another missed opportunity. He missed the first available referral slot because of it.
When the hospital finally reached us, we promised we would not miss the next one. The new appointment was set for Thursday. We were ready. When I visited him the day before, he gripped my hand with quiet urgency. ‘Please come early,’ he said. ‘We can’t miss this one.’ His eyes carried fear and faith in equal measure: fear of another delay, and faith that this journey might finally bring healing.
I kept my promise. I arrived four hours early and waited at reception. He was anxious too: as soon as he woke up that morning, he asked his nurse, ‘Has my daughter arrived?’ She told him yes, but he kept asking until they finally called me in to see him. Only then did his face soften with relief. I rubbed his shoulder gently, ‘I’m here, Papa.’
When the time came, the senior nurse introduced me to the assistant nurse who would accompany us to help with the process at the other hospital. She handed over my dad’s file and the few things he might need for the day; then we settled in the ambulance. My dad, despite his frailty, was in good spirits, chatting about everything and nothing. His body was weak, but his spirit refused to bend. Sitting beside him, I felt a quiet joy from the privilege of witnessing courage wrapped in fragility.
When we arrived at the hospital to which my dad had been referred, the sheer volume of people in the reception area hit me like a physical blow. The air smelt of exhaustion. A baby cried somewhere, a thin, piercing sound. A man in a wheelchair shifted his bandaged leg, grimacing with each adjustment. Nurses moved like ghosts, faces blank from too many long shifts.
It struck me then how easily suffering becomes routine in places like this. Each anxious face in that crowded room carried a silent story: of delayed care, long journeys, and fragile hope.
Minutes stretched into hours. My palms were slick, my legs aching, every sound scraping at my nerves. I watched my dad lie on the stretcher, shifting occasionally, flinching as he tried to ease the pressure on his back. When our eyes met, he said nothing. He never did. That silence hurt more than a complaint would.
As the sun began to dip, I felt the full weight of what I had only read about before. In South Africa’s public hospitals, especially in low-income areas, overcrowding, staff shortages, equipment gaps, and endless waiting were not anomalies – they were daily realities. I realised then that what was referred to as ‘the burden of access’ was not shared equally. Here, waiting functioned as an unspoken tax paid by the uninsured. My dad’s quiet endurance was not just a personality trait; it was the only option available in a system where socio-economic status often determined whether you encountered timely care or long, agonising queues.
Later, I would learn that what I was witnessing had a name in public health: ‘availability barriers’. A study described this as a structural failure in which the timing of the system no longer aligned with the urgency of patients’ needs. In this reality, the ‘distance to care’ was not measured in kilometres, but in hours lost to unanswered phone calls, missed referrals, and ambulances that never arrived. Looking at my dad, I wondered how many families had learnt this lesson the same way, through waiting, loss, and quiet endurance.
Yet even within that uncertainty, we waited patiently, filling the silence with small conversations. His memory had been slipping in recent days. At one point, he asked softly, ‘Remind me again, where are we?’
‘Polokwane,’ I answered softly.
He smiled faintly. ‘Ah, yes. I used to come here regularly when you were still in school.’
I nodded, forcing a smile. The memory rushed back: the long drives, his steady presence, the bag of small goods, the big lessons. Whenever I complained about hardship at school, he listened quietly and said in his firm, stoic way, ‘You need to learn to embrace hardships. If you are not hard on yourself, life will be hard on you.’
Back then, I took those moments for granted. In that moment, watching him struggle to recall where he was, I realised how sacred those visits had been.
As we waited for our turn, time seemed to move slowly. My instinct in high-pressure moments like this was always to withdraw. Standing there beside my dad, I felt that instinct rise: the urge to shrink, to accept what was being offered, to disappear politely into the machinery of the system.
I had learnt early that survival in places like this often required quietness. That speaking up risked being labelled difficult, ungrateful, dramatic. Silence had become my default language in moments of uncertainty. I held his hand, whispering reassurances neither of us fully believed but both needed to hear. I closed my eyes and whispered the only prayer I could manage: Dear God, please give me strength.
I whispered strength into myself: You are resilient. You are stronger than you think.
Finally, after navigating chaotic admin queues, I felt some relief – only to be redirected to yet another area to wait. Still, I held my dad’s hand, promising him the doctor would see us soon.
The staff were already packing up when we finally reached the neurosurgeon. I explained the situation myself; a task the accompanying nurse should have overseen, but she had shown little engagement all day. Her indifference unsettled me.
Later, I came to understand that this kind of detachment was often a casualty of an overburdened public sector. When resources are stretched thin, relational care is usually the first thing to collapse. The nurses were not necessarily cruel; they were most likely exhausted, hardened by repetition, forced to turn people into files just to survive the relentless volume of need.
Then came the blow from the neurosurgeon.
‘Without the scan report, there’s not much I can do,’ he said with a voice heavy with regret. ‘I’m sorry. I have to send the patient back.’
His words landed like a punch to the chest. I felt myself shrinking. The ground seemed to give way beneath me. I couldn’t breathe. How could a missing report matter more than the suffering he was seeing before his own eyes? My voice lodged in my throat.
Three surgeons walked past on their way out. One paused, then the others followed. They asked what was happening, I couldn’t speak. I simply handed them the file. In that moment, a woman surgeon stepped forward. Warm and commanding. Fierce in a quiet way.
Her face tightened with disbelief. She wasn’t loud, but when she spoke, the room stilled. There was something magnetic about her: authority without arrogance, empathy without pity.
‘No! You can’t send the patient back like this,’ she said. Her conviction breathed life into the air.
As she spoke, something inside me unclenched. Her refusal gave language to the protest I had swallowed. She said aloud what I had been holding in my body all day: that this was not right, that suffering should not be processed bureaucratically.
Watching her, I realised how rarely I had seen authority exercised with tenderness. How often power appeared loud, rushed or indifferent. Her firmness did not humiliate; it protected. It did not dominate; it clarified.
In that moment, I understood that advocacy did not require aggression. It required presence. Attention. The courage to interrupt.
Within minutes, she mobilised the team for my dad to be admitted. I was relieved that my dad would get the care he desperately needed.
She turned to him, her voice gentle. ‘Don’t worry, Papa. It’s going to be okay.’
I wanted to grab the surgeon’s hand, drop to my knees in gratitude. But all I could do was stand there, numb.
I glanced at my dad. His lips were pale and cracked. His tongue moved weakly as if tasting his own dryness. Before I realised, my voice broke free.
‘Doctor,’ I whispered, ‘please give my dad some water. It has been over 10 hours of waiting.’
The surgeon’s eyes softened. In that instant, the chaos faded. It was just one human asking another for kindness.
Water was such a small request. Not treatment. Not a cure. Just relief. Just acknowledgement of a body that had been waiting, aching, drying out under fluorescent lights.
In asking for water, I was not challenging the system. I was reminding it, and myself that care begins with noticing.
When they wheeled him away, I stumbled into a quiet corridor and leant against the wall. Ten hours of being strong. Ten hours of holding it together. My shoulders shook as the tears came.
When I left the hospital, I was drained but grounded in something deeper.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. The surgeons’ faces replayed in my mind: their calm, their focus, their compassion. I kept returning to that moment, trying to understand why it had shaken me so profoundly. I then realised that what the woman surgeon gave my dad was not just medical intervention, but re-humanisation. By advocating on his behalf despite the missing paperwork, she bridged the acceptability gap that so often leaves patients feeling invisible and powerless.
In a system that frequently forgets our humanity, one woman remembered. And in that single act of remembering, I learnt that care does not always begin with resources or technology, but with recognition. It begins the moment someone looks at you and decides: your life matters.
The Social Contracts I am Quietly Burning
One evening, after dinner, I sat alone and felt a particular kind of tiredness. Not the kind sleep could fix, but the kind that settles deep in the bones, in which the body refuses to move while the mind keeps spinning, trapped in a loop of quiet survival. I kept asking myself why I felt so drained. It hadn’t been a busy week. If anything, work had been slow. But as I sat there, staring at the wall, the truth came quietly.
That week had been my dad’s birthday, and it landed in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The day carried a weight I couldn’t immediately name. Instead of letting myself feel it and grieve, I did what I had always done: I kept moving. I filled the silence with other people’s needs.
I listened to my cousin’s frustrations about her job and helped her think through a way forward. I held space for a friend unravelling under the strain of co-parenting. I helped an associate catch up on work after weeks of caring for her ailing mother.
I was everywhere, except with myself.
Somewhere between comforting and fixing, I had stepped away from the quiet parts of me that were asking to be held. And now my body was responding – too weary to work, too restless to sleep. I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to my breath hitch in and out as though something unfinished was pressing against my ribs.
That was when it became clear that the exhaustion wasn’t coming from what I had done that week, but from what I had refused to feel. Grief didn’t always arrive with ceremony or collapse. Sometimes it waits patiently, settling into the body while we continue to function.
That night, as I began tracing the origin of my fatigue, I noticed a quiet conflict between my inner state and the version of myself I was presenting to the world. It wasn’t deception; it was estrangement, a subtle distancing from my own emotional reality.
I could then see how, even while moving through the ache of what would have been my dad’s birthday, I remained fully available to others. I showed up as a steady presence, a rescuer, like a lifeguard trained to scan the water for signs of distress while stepping past a collapsed bather on the sand.
Only later did I pause to ask why I kept stretching myself to meet others when I could barely hold my own grief. The answer arrived without hesitation: connection.
From birth, our survival depends on connection. Long before we have language, we learn the unspoken rules that govern belonging. I came to understand these invisible rules as social contracts; not formal agreements but lived patterns that shape how to relate to others, how we love and give to remain included. Unlike contracts written in ink, these are fluid. They are reinforced through repetition. They are sustained by what we offer, what we tolerate, and what we quietly withhold from ourselves.
I didn’t sign these contracts consciously. I inherited them. I learnt early which versions of myself were welcomed and which ones caused discomfort. Over time, I adjusted; not because anyone explicitly asked me to, but because belonging is a powerful teacher.
There is a familiar saying: ‘You teach people how to treat you’. The way we are treated is not always what we deserve, but often what we have permitted: out of love, fear, or the need to belong. That saying captured the quiet authority of these unspoken contracts. Through my actions and inactions, my boundaries and concessions, I had been communicating what was acceptable and what was not. Over time, these patterns hardened into expectations. And whether I was aware of it or not, I was participating in maintaining them.
In healthy relationships, these unspoken contracts move with a natural rhythm of reciprocity. Support functions like breath: sometimes you exhale; sometimes you inhale. Both are necessary. Human connection depends on this exchange: moments when one person leans in while another holds steady, and later, the roles reverse.
But relationships begin to unravel when that rhythm collapses. When one person gives endlessly, and the other only receives, care quietly turns into depletion. For a long time, I lived inside patterns like these. My loved ones were drawn to my strength and competence, but uncomfortable with my fragility. To them, I was the doctor: the one people came to for fixing, soothing, holding things together. But when the doctor showed signs of sickness, it unsettled them. Not because they didn’t care, but because vulnerability threatened the stability they depended on.
For these imbalanced relationships to survive, I abandoned parts of myself, all in service of keeping the bond intact. I learnt to take up less space, shaped by the belief that needing nothing made me easier to love.
Over time, the armour grew heavy. And that evening, when the grief over my dad’s passing resurfaced, my body finally revealed what my mind had worked so hard to contain. As I lay there, struggling to breathe, it became clear that I wasn’t just mourning my dad; I was confronting the accumulated weight of a lifetime spent giving without believing I could ask for anything in return.
In sociology, there is a name for this pattern: ‘emotional labour’. It is the work of managing one’s own emotions in order to regulate the emotional state of others. Over the years, I had become fluent in it. I learnt how to suppress what I felt so that I could sustain the outward steadiness that made others feel safe, soothed, and understood. Moving my own emotions out of the way became second nature, so familiar that for a long time I didn’t even recognise it as effort.
That blindness made sense. For as long as I can remember, being an emotional sanctuary has been treated as a natural part of my character. If you asked the people closest to me to describe me, ‘always there’ would probably surface without hesitation. I was the one who knew how to stay present when things fell apart.
My selflessness was often met with admiration and genuine gratitude. Friends would tell me they didn’t know how they would have survived certain seasons without me. Their words warmed me. They made me feel seen, valued, and irreplaceable.
But looking back, I can see how each expression of gratitude quietly functioned like a performance review of my social contract. Every thank you confirmed that I was fulfilling the role expected of me. The reward was simple: I was appreciated as long as I remained the one who carried everyone else’s weight. Gratitude became the glue that kept the pattern intact.
My loved ones weren’t being cruel. They were participating, unknowingly, in a lopsided contract where my worth was tied to my usefulness. To change that contract, I would have had to stop being a managed heart and start being an honest one.
But I had built my identity around the belief that if I met everyone’s needs before they even named them, I would be seen as good, as worthy. And I was afraid of what would happen to our bonds if I became less available, less resourceful than expected.
So, I chose to soldier on. I continued showing up the way I believed I was supposed to. Of course, my human limits would eventually surface. Long stretches of quiet exhaustion would accumulate until my body forced a pause. When depletion grew too loud to ignore, I would retreat into solitude, telling myself I only needed rest, a brief hibernation before returning to my role.
Even then, I never questioned the pattern itself. My only aim was recovery, not revision. I rested so that I could resume.
Eventually, the phone would ring. A loved one checking in. ‘It’s been a minute!’
There would be laughter, small talk, the familiar ease of reconnection. And then, almost inevitably: ‘Let me update you on everything you’ve missed.’
Just like that, I would slide back into place: listener, anchor, container.
After the call ended, guilt would arrive sharply, like a practised ache. My inner voice would take over: You disappear on the people you claim to love and still call yourself a friend. Really? That guilt alone was enough to pull me back into the performance. I would recommit to my unspoken duties – checking in, following up, offering support until my energy collapsed again.
And so, the cycle continued, not because I didn’t see it, but because I hadn’t yet learnt how to imagine myself outside of it.
Grieving the loss of my dad had cracked the ground beneath my feet. For the first time, I reached a point where there was no more energy to offer. I was completely hollowed out and forced to confront what I had avoided for years: the necessity of showing up for myself. Not in the way self-improvement language frames it, but showing up to remain sane, to stay alive.
With trembling hands and a hesitant heart, I did something that felt foreign and urgent all at once: I chose myself. I put on my own oxygen mask first.
That choice became a bridge to understanding. To break the pattern, I had to learn to sit with discomfort: the fear of disappointing others, of not meeting expectations I had helped create. As I stayed with that discomfort, I traced it back to its origin: a fear rooted in childhood in which emotional distance taught me that love was conditional, that connection had to be earned through usefulness.
Grief dismantled that illusion.
As Nelson Mandela so eloquently put it, ‘There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered’.
I found myself in a place where I could no longer live under the old contracts, even though the people around me still operated by those terms. Breaking the pattern required courage to show up differently and, sometimes, not show up at all. When pressed for explanations, I gathered myself and told the truth: I could no longer operate under the old terms. The responses were mixed. Some scoffed. Some withdrew. Others became defensive. This time, I did not collapse inwards to preserve their comfort. I stayed true to myself. In releasing those contracts, I was not becoming less loving. I was becoming more honest about the cost of love that requires my disappearance.
I had made a promise to myself: I would never again live under conditions that denied me permission to show up fully.
Love that costs me my authenticity is too expensive to keep.
I am drafting new social contracts, ones grounded in reciprocity, presence, and truth.
Epilogue: I am More than My ID Card
Imagine picking up a card that reads:
Name: Shebeen Princess
Race: Black
Gender: Female
Nationality: South African
That card walks into the room long before I do.
It shakes hands, takes its seat, and begins the conversation before I’ve opened my mouth.
By the time I speak or laugh, most people have already met me in their minds. They are not looking at me; they are occupied by stories that fit the card. They assemble me from headlines, history, and half-told tales. The card speaks fluently. It explains. It predicts. It simplifies.
I spent years learning how to interrupt it.
The danger was never misunderstanding the card; it was reducing the human life attached to it.
No single story can hold a human being. This book began when I stopped trying to correct the card and started returning to myself. I still walk into rooms where the card arrives first. But I no longer rush to negotiate with it. It no longer speaks for me. I introduce myself.
This collection is not a map of suffering; it is a record of learning how not to vanish inside it. I have written about inheritance not to indict the past, but to interrupt its quiet repetitions. I have written about collapse not to glorify pain, but to tell the truth about what endurance costs. I have written about return not as redemption, but as a responsibility to live from within rather than from expectation.
Living from within changed how I relate to the world, and to my own sensitivity.
There was a time when feeling deeply made me porous. I absorbed the moods, tensions, and expectations of others, mistaking saturation for care. The return to self did not make me feel less; it made me more rooted. I stopped leaking energy. I stopped explaining myself to people who were not listening. I stopped over-giving as proof of goodness. I reclaimed parts of myself that were firm, parts that could say no without rehearsal or justification.
I did not become distant. I became intact.
These were not betrayals of who I was; they were returns to who I was before the world told me who I should be.
My relationship with pain changed, too.
I once believed that dismantling my survival strategies would deliver a better, pain-free version of me. What I know now is simpler and harder: there is no perfected self, waiting to be reached. There is only a return to the one who was always here, buried beneath necessity.
The inwards turn did not make me immune to hardship. Loss still arrives. Desire still destabilises. The body still remembers what the mind would rather forget. But I am no longer a container under pressure. I am a witness who chooses to stay with whatever arises within.
Staying looks like this: noticing when my chest tightens and not immediately trying to fix it. Letting grief change the pace of my days. Releasing the need to be legible to everyone.
The journey back to self did not make life fair. It made it honest.
The YOU turn is complete, not because I reached a destination, but because I am no longer a guest in my own life: waiting for permission to feel, to rest, or to speak. Silence is no longer a survival strategy; it is a choice. Strength is no longer a performance; it is alignment.
This turn was never a single moment. It was a daily homecoming. Something practised again and again; each time I told the truth without knowing what it would cost, or where it might lead.
If there is an offering here, it is not resolution, but permission. To live without disappearing. To remain unfinished. To belong to yourself.