I have made the transition!

One of the most difficult things must be the transition from University to the working world. In 2012, I happily completed my degree. Before I actually made it to 2013, I could not believe how far I had come. My life seemed to stretch in front of me and the single thing I saw was a path that would lead only to Greatness.

 Fast- forward to October 2013.  Almost the whole year had gone by, and I STILL DID NOT HAVE A JOB. This must have been the most depressing period in my life, I felt like my parents had wasted their hard earned money schooling me, trying to mould me into the success it seemed I was made for, but life had a lesson to teach me.   

I have never hustled so much in my life. I made the decision early that I would not work in Lesotho. It is my country, and my very first love. But for the kind of career I have in mind, it will not suffice. So I packed up and headed to Johannesburg, the City of Lights. Although I had frequented the area, this time felt completely different. I felt ALONE. Johannesburg is filled with a crazy amount of family and friends, but for the first time I felt alone. I did not have my own flat (the way I had envisioned it) so it meant I had to live with different people, friends or family at different times.

Time moved at a snail's pace. I went to a few interviews, but nothing materialized. I couldn’t be happy staying with other people because honestly, there is no place like home, especially when you’re not in a good space. October 2013 marks a time in my life when everything felt broken. I felt rejected by employers, rejected by friends and most of all, I felt like a disappointment to my family. With an increasing loss of faith, I packed all my bags and journeyed home to Lesotho – FOR GOOD! My saving grace came at the perfect time. Two weeks after my therapeutic stay with mom, I GOT THE JOB!!

I’ve never felt such gratitude in my life. At the very moment when I was ready to give up on my dreams, God handed me a life-line and gave me a job. He gave me another reason to wake up in the morning, and nothing will ever compare to this. Finding employment happens to be one of the biggest hardships graduates face. It is so soul drenching, one could be driven to imagine death is better. I am so greatful I got this opportunity to plunge into the working world; it is 8 months since I started working. Life continues to have its hardships, but the most important thing is to hold on to that vision of what you want your life to be. Try and remember the things that make you happy and appreciate the people who support you. The battle is a long one, so gear up and get things MOVING!!

I am not even close to where I want to be, but I know I have taken another step in that direction.

My biggest THANK YOU goes to my mom, my dad, aunt, my brother and a special guardian angel. When times get dark, they are always right here. May god bless you all. I love you. 

This Is High Fashion

This is something that has sprung up from my sociology lectures. We are looking into popular culture, and one of the things that has drawn me out of my boredom and fully engaged me is - HIGH FASION. 

This is a world filled with #runwaymodels, stick figures that breach the very laws of health and physical existence, yet they live, and worst yet, WE strive to be like them...

So I went and looked into the definition of this bizarre word that had us starving ourselves, mutilating our bodies and worst of all, drove us to feel so inadequate as human beings, as WOMEN that we would go to any lengths to BECOME the word - - - > HIGH FASHION`

 

I looked through the most simplest of sources, Wikipedia, but it redirected me to ""haute couture" which I still believe embodies what I am interested in.

Haute couture: (French for "high sewing" or "high dressmaking") refers to the creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haute_couture)

The meaning, first of all shocked me. The models we see on TV are young women, women who have had to suffer in order to look almost skeletal, so as to fit the demands of high fashion. This led me to this question, if high fashion or Haute Couture is designed to fit the consumer, why then, does the consumer find himself/herself bending precariously to fit the needs of high fashion. High fashion is not a person, it is not an entity, it is pieces of material that are put together in order to complement individual bodies.  In the way that it has been used today, high fashion has become an unreachable standard we all pursue, we see skinny models, who have been photo shopped to look the impossible, and in our acts of desperation, we refute the facts, we strive for the unattainable.

The facts are :

Ø  It is physically impossible to look some of the way that these girls look, the masses of them are unhealthy, and as certain reports show, some models have died due to anorexia – in their efforts to suit the demands of high fashion.

   

Ø  It is biologically impossible to have    identical bodies; even twins do not have the same features. How then does this fit in with our perverse   need to look like other people? I.e. #runwaymodels?

Ø  The models we see in high fashion magazines have been photo-shopped, because they themselves are still imperfect enough to meet the needs of high fashion

Ø  Beauty is a changing word, it is not constant nor is it universal. These models are our epitomes of beauty, and in our acceptance of them as ‘the beautiful’ we refute our own beauty, subordinating ourselves to an entity that does not really exist

This is all general knowledge that we choose to over look. “What is this inherent feeling we have inside ourselves to feel inadequate” – that is the question we should strive to answer. High Fashion should be a word in our vocabulary, something we SEE but are not hassled by, something we can simply shake our heads at and move on.

FINAL THOUGHTS.... We are made differently for a reason, lets rather strive for the attainable: happiness, love, health and peace

RELATIONSHIPS

This weekend some friends and i got together. Before the meeting, we had all been feeling pretty depressed. I had been alone in my room for the past week with twitter and calls from home as company. Of course my friends and I try to see each other as much as possible, but we live poles apart and sometimes it is hard to even set up a lunch date we are just so 'busy.'

So this weekend, Friday to be exact, i get a call from my girl, its about 2pm and already i'm in bed :(. she comes down to 'save' me and before i can even say anything, she calls this our 'cheer up session.' she too needed 'saving.' within a few hours, our other friend joins us, and the mission for junk food begins:) 

We spent the whole weekend together, being loud and girly, stupid and crazy and singing along to some of our favourite jams ---> To cut a long story short, we had a great time --> WITH EACH OTHER!!

What is  the moral of the story?

As women of this age, we get so 'busy.' It is so easy to wrap ourselves up in our own projects and forget what matters. We have goals, dreams and work, be it school work or work in the 'real' world. we fall into the new age 'Powerful Woman' pressure and try to be independent beyond our means. It is great to be independent, to feel like we need no one and can exist on our own. But far greater, is being with those who matter to us, having those people who will come running just because of the tone of your voice. It becomes so easy to forget about these people, but after this weekend, my advice to myself, is to as much as I nurture my books, to also nurture my relationships...

POETRY!!

ah, this is my formal apology, have a technical problem that's been keeping me from my baby (blog) so I have decided to apologise with a lil poetry, hope someone/anyone out there still enjoys poetry,lols. this I wrote myself... some time back, have not had time to write, so in the meantime - - - here goes.

Seasons Change...

Spring
In the spring of our love
The sky, so blue
Gave our love a chance
The flowers, bright and cheery
Forced us to take it all in our stride
The growth, so sturdy yet delicate
Convinced us that we would grow too
So we whimpered daily
Facing our separate ways...

Summer
In the summer of our love
The heat seemed to keep us together
The rains, strong and rapid
Forcing a calming union between our bodies
The days, so long
Permitting us time to be together
For every night
We had to go our separate ways...

Autumn
In the autumn of our love
The leaves seemed to fall about us
Like pieces of our souls diminishing, separately
The trees so bare
Forcing me to see this love for what it is
The grass, now colourless
Compelling me to deal with our now isolated worlds
As we set out, on our separate ways...

Winter
In the winter of our love
The cold seemed to suffocate us
Leaving us, each craving space to exhale
The snow, so arctic
Forced a coldness between us
The days, mingy with their hours
Left us little time together
And we welcomed the chance
To go our separate ways...

And so the seasons changed
With the birth of our love in the spring
The climax in the summer
Deterioration in the autumn

And in the unforgiving winter
Our love died...

Life as a 'THIRD-WORLDER'

Being a politics and sociology student, discourse and ideology are terms that keep springing up on me. To the lay man, discourse means simply language, while ideology refers to a set of ideas. So i sat down and looked up these terms, respective of my chosen fields.

discourse: according to Foucault: discourse would be the acceptable statements made by a certain type of discourse community.---> (which then) refers to people who share similar thoughts and ideas. (WHO says they are acceptable?)

Ideology: The term may be used to describe the shared beliefs of a group of people, for example a nation, a sect of a religion, or a group of theorists

(At a more analytical level, these definitions may prove unsuitable, but for the purposes of my views, they serve well.)

Growing up as an African, in a world rich with culture, i have come to ask myself many questions. This is my Africa, this is my home, yet day in and day out, i am forced to perceive my world in a lesser light. When we are young, the world we live in is limitless, and offers us ALL we could ever need. As you grow older, you are bombarded with Western discourse and ideologies. These ideologies come at you from all sides, at a personal, political, socioeconomical, and even global level. There seems to be no way of escaping them, in an increasingly globalized world.

At a global level, we are coined the THIRD WORLD, the LESS DEVELOPED WORLD (LDC). Immediately this suggests that there are others before us, who are far ‘greater.' Knowing this we begin to settle into this mentality, we become individuals of the Third World. This is also aided by the academic discourse we are exposed to; it teaches us our weaknesses and failures as a continent, as a people. Unknowingly we begin to adopt these weaknesses and before we know it, we ARE the Third World; we begin to embody what it means to be a ‘Third Worlder’. Our dreams and hopes fail to rise beyond the label of the Third World as we fall into pre-supposed roles and begin to lose our intellectual freedom together with our agency.

At a personal level, as a female of this century; I am amazed at the number of things which have come to influence me. I am exposed to western media with all its discourse and ideologies in all its forms. I watch CNN, read Vogue, dream about the Kardashians and all i see is the greatness of the Western World, and in turn i am forced to think of the supposed weakness of MY world. I see models with never-ending legs, girls with such flat stomachs it is hard to believe they even eat. Black girls with silky hair, red pouty lips and smooth spotless skin, and more and more, i am forced to look at myself as a lesser being ---> “why can’t my legs be long enough, why isn’t my stomach flat like hers, why do my lips need constant moisturizing when I use red lipstick?” these questions come at me so forcefully, each one of them begins to feel like a blow.

Knowing the dangers of ideology and discourse, what changes do I impart on my THIRD WORLD?? What changes do you?

#prayforJapan

So being a complete addict to twitter; i thought since Japan's current natural disaster is the latest trend, there is something to say about it --->

I come from a 3rd world country; our natural disasters mainly consist of famine and drought, which although does not appear newsworthy, is something people die from every day. I see a crazy amount of people praying for Japan, mostly from SOUTHERN AFRICA and i am shocked at how ready to help and so well informed they are about these disasters. When it comes to OUR disasters, we seem to turn a blind-eye. Whatever happened to the old saying 'Charity begins at home' (now used literally)??

Don't get me wrong, Japan needs all the prayers and all the AID it can get. With an 8.8 Earthquake, i can only imagine what other natural disasters this is likely to trigger, how many more people will die, the displacement and at a more personal level, the pain of starting over without loved ones.
On a more hopeful note - God keep Japan ----> and Africa :)