A Dissertation is worth 25,000 words

Hello my darlings, and I’m sorry for my silence of late. I know how disconcerting this can be for a woman of my decibel levels to fall quiet J There has been a lot going on for me on this side of the world over the past 8 months.

As you all know, I left my country nearly three-quarters of a year ago with very little certainty of coming back to it. I felt a pull toward my future version of myself, and came to South Africa with an open heart and a will to learn and the fire in my soul alight with possibility. My only companion on this journey into the unknown was my trusty old friend, that small voice within my heart that speaks up when I am quiet enough to listen to it guiding me onward. That voice that whispers of my own yearning and desire to be of service, and to connect with those who live to make the lives of others more empowered.

Yes, I came here to Cape Town to further my own education, but each day I also carried with me the spirit of those who called me to this experience. Every young woman, and farmer, and rural villager and persistent and tenacious African colleague who through the strength of their efforts, on their own behalf and on behalf of those less fortunate simultaneously implored me to become better. For myself, for them, for all of our futures, to take up this precious opportunity given to me in the hopes that it would enable me to continue to give back all that I have been given a hundred fold.  

And my darlings, I want you to know that it has been hard. This year has thus far surpassed every challenge I had ever previously set for myself. And you’ll recall that I did two damn years in a rural village in the Eastern Okavango Delta in the #hardcorps. I have a massive tattoo on the tender back of my skull. I have run a marathon. And yet, this MBA has been the hardest thing I have set my mind to. A damn business degree for someone truly terrified of maths! I didn’t say this endeavour made sense. But the prospect of it thrilled and excited and terrified me and so here we now are, over halfway to the finish.

This MBA experience has broken me apart and allowed me to slowly put myself back together with more gold than I knew I had in me. There has been panic, and failure, and so many long dark nights of the soul, with rivers of tears and sobs of self-doubt echoing into the darkness. I have triumphed, I have been vanquished, and the punches have literally kept on coming.  As it does whenever we challenge ourselves, in brilliant streaks and faint hazy twilights, the light has crept back in, and that pale glow marking the path at the end of the tunnel is beginning to glimmer more strongly ahead of me.

But, for better or worse, as the fog clears, the path ahead of me has changed. Although when I crossed this ocean this most recent time it was with a permanency in my heart, the current immigration policies of this great nation in which I reside do not allow me to stay. I will be leaving South Africa on or before the expiry of my visa on January 5 of 2017. After a long and exhausting fight, I have arrived at a quiet peace with these facts. I feel no regret in being wrong about my vision of my future, but I feel tremendous regret at not being allowed to be of service within this country. I am humbly crushed by my disappointment in my inability to reinvest the investment which this school has made in me, to reap dividends for those South African people who are so desperately in need investment. This failure of fate continues to weigh heavily on my heart.

And so I ask myself, if not my professional skills, what can I give? How can I begin to repay this cosmic debt of gratitude I owe for all that I’ve learned here, to all those I had hoped to help help themselves in this country? What can I leave behind to make this place better than I found it? What can my small legacy be?

Within the curriculum of the Graduate School of Business Program, there is a requirement to complete a dissertation, a mammoth undertaking which will result in the largest single body of writing I myself have ever put together. My choice of topic was driven by an observation I made of my class, which is that there is not one black South African woman in my full time program. Throughout the year, I’ve felt this absence keenly in our class discussions. I gaze upon the faces of my colleagues as we speculate how to create businesses and social initiatives to benefit those most in need, and I struggle to find the faces of those whom we should be asking. Because of course the black women who are most disenfranchised population in a country only 22 years post-Apartheid are not present in our classes. They are not here to give us their perspective on how to include them in the economic growth stories we hope to write with our newly minted MBAs next year. It is difficult for those with means to come up with the funds to attend this most prestigious and expensive of South African business schools. For those who are economically disadvantaged, it is an impossibility.

As you can imagine, I find this utterly unacceptable. And as you can imagine, I am driven to do something about it.

As I undertake the audacious task of trying to contribute something bold and meaningful to the (currently silent) academic conversation surrounding black South African business women and mentorship, I invite you on this next leg of my MBA journey. I invite you to support this cause that is very near and dear to my heart, and to contribute what you are able to help me fulfil my dream of coming back to the GSB as an alumnus to see a full-time MBA class filled with faces that better reflect the demographics of this fine country. I shall be “selling” my dissertation to raise funds for the Graduate School of Business Scholarship endowment, and I have pledged to raise 2,500 dollars for this cause, or ten cents per word for the final product, which will be in the neighbourhood of 25,000 words.

Consider it an early birthday present, consider it an early graduation present, consider it a down payment on any of those drinks you might owe me, or the savings you’ve made on not having to buy me any drinks this past year. Know that the support you provide to this great cause will be the support I need to work long hours into the night, the support that will push me through the doubt, the uncertainty, and the monotony of writing a project of this magnitude. Your contribution will be what helps push me over the finish line of this most daunting of goals I’ve set for myself, to complete my MBA in a land far from home. I’ve missed you all so deeply, and cannot wait to tell you my stories when I come up for proper air in December. I love you all and thank you for your support. Please go to:

A Dissertation is worth 25,000 Words

A letter to our former selves

Dear girls,

Darling girls. You’re both about to embark on adventures that will profoundly change you, and change where you are in the next nine years. Jo is about to leave for Peace Corps and has given Jen the best advice Jen has received and has reused and redistributed several times, which is to be exactly where you are before you go off to the PC. “Be present as you exit the life you now know, as you will have plenty of time to be and learn and prepare when you get to where you are going, but you only get this goodbye once.” And in fact, when both of you leave this time neither of you will return to Minneapolis for more than a few months in the next decade. So this goodbye is important, and you both lived it wonderfully. It helped you learn a habit of saying goodbye beautifully, and you’ll both need to use that skill over and over in the next decade, to each other, to men, to jobs, to countries, more than a few times each. It’ll help wear away the fear of change, but never completely eliminate it, because that fear is the sign from within that you are actually both continuing to live your destinies, to continue to grow and change and learn and risk. This is the vow you may not have said in words, but that you made when you looked at each other, laughed, and realized you weren’t yet ready to go home. You still won’t be.

You’ll learn to slowly and gently peel the skins away from yourselves as you grow, too. It’s sometimes painful, and definitely confusing to gaze upon the familiar seeming but seriously different version of yourselves that emerges. But you’ll learn to be with that pain, to stand in the change as it pelts you as gently as a rain shower and as stinging as a sandstorm. You’ll offer your hearts up, again and again, to ideas, to people, to nations, to your work. Sometimes those hearts of yours will break a little, but their GPS never will. Resilient things, those hearts of yours, as each time you open them up and each time you bash them against the rocks of life, they seem to grow back a bit stronger. Sometimes they’re a little more difficult to pry open again, but the good ones will find the cracks and wiggle their way in. Let them. It’s worth it.

You’ll be completely gobsmacked to know right now the work you will do. Right now it seems out of reach, and bigger than either of you. And it is. To think of the lives you’ll touch and the calibre of the work you’ll do brings tears to my eyes right now. Ladies, you’re going to be a part of your very own worldwide movement, that in total Jen and Jo fashion is bigger than even the two of you. You’ll gain accolades but most importantly, you’ll teach, you’ll create, you’ll help move people closer to the best versions of themselves they can be. Just the way you live your lives will change the lives of others. My girls, you will inspire. People will know you.

And you’ll each be surprised to know that you’re single again at the end of this. But as with now, you are and shall never be alone. Because you’ll continue to collect more amazing women in your life, who will be more tenacious on the road trip of your lives than the men thus far. Not to knock the men, not at all! You’ll have some very special gentlemen come and go through your lives, and each of them teach you a bit more about yourselves. Each of them teaches you how wide your heart can stretch, the different ways it can be formed and how deeply you can care for someone. They also give you some clues as to the spaces you still have room to grow. They don’t need to be kept forever to do their job. Be grateful to those boys a blow them a kiss on the breezes.

And your Tribe! Oh my girls. You will learn the names and locations of your Tribe, you will inscribe their likelinesses on your hearts and in some cases on your bodies. They will teach you the fierceness of love, and how great your capacity for it is. Some of your best friends are still to be made, and that alone is worth the rough waters ahead because you will have such a talented and wonderful brave crew to help you steer the ship. They are sprinkled all over the world, in countries you may not have even considered traveling to yet.

I’m so excited for where you girls go with it. It may seem a bit like a hazy mystery right now, but let me assure you, it’s all good. There are moments of such profound beauty, and sorrow, and pain and joy, loneliness and connection that dot the roadmap to where you end up, on the path that was meant just for each of you. Be brave my dear girls, and keep living your dreams. You are unique in this way, and this is a gift. All of it is a gift, even if you don’t understand it. You continue to be together, (apart), steering your ships in the stars…

You’re doing it all right, my girls. Everything is all right.

All my love and admiration,

Jen

View from the rabbit hole

I slither down the rabbit hole. I stumble into it, I jump, I fall. With no warning I break the time/space barrier and find myself inside. A shadowy premonition of what’s down there, I try to claw my way out, I give in, a prisoner on the gangplank. exhausted. It’s dark, always dark, too bright, blinding. I observe passively, I thrash and struggle. Remain calm. Freak out. No one knows I’m in there, no one saw me go in, no one will save me, they can’t hear my silence. I’m alone. Invisible as I stand before them. Everything's fine on the outside. I feel the smooth walls, they’re mossy, and when I want something hard to pound on my fist sinks into a loamy rotten mess. I want to dig my nails in and claw until they’re bleeding but through this looking glass whatever you want is unreachable, once you settle in the walls fall away and the hell is new and fresh. Hall of mirrors.

Memories are hazy until they become unexpectedly sharp, and the fuzzy thing stabs like a knife. Once kind they bring nothing but a wave of pain. I drown while I burn while I live while I die. But it’s nothing. Not the real thing. Which is what again? The contradictions are endless, as one becomes apparent it shape shifts into another. Science fiction. Everything is the same, on repeat. Beat Box.

Former pleasures elude. The release valve is broken. The pressure builds up, and flows out at a drip, the rushing becomes pulsing and then throbs, and yet the dam holds strong. And the desert grows, my lips crack the sand is salty. The withered veins harden. A landscape of crowded desolation, trembling dissonance. And despite the numbness, it hurts terrifically.

Obligation?

It descends like an unwanted houseguest who turned away would be homeless, and thus due to cruel laws of humanity and hospitality, its here to stay. It’s chaffing, obligatory, unavoidable and felt so deeply inside as to be inevitable. Its shape shifting and guileless, fascinating and exhausting. It takes up all the air in the room and space in the house threatening to burst the seams. It leaves nothing but a vast and endless emptiness. 

It flutters through the body, tampering with the mind and soul, gilding all it touches with a ribbon of numbness until piercing bright white patches of pain into unsuspecting parts of the body, causing one to gasp out loud, startled, disoriented and already plunging into a free fall over the precipice of a sudden dissolution into the same tears which are alternatively housed in one’s heart, one’s stomach and one’s throat, despite the drought it is always present in endless supply.

And I alternate between wanting to chase it away and stroke it, to sit down next to it and move myself into its good graces, offer it a cup of tea, to kill it with kindness in the attempt to know it. To seduce it? To be fascinated by it. To interrogate it, why are you here, how long will you stay, when will you go? I long to understand it, as if by thoroughly understanding it, by mastering it, by being able to dissect it  and take it apart I will be able to find an epoxy somewhere among it’s fractured pieces to slather on myself and become once again whole. 

Lost.

The paper thin skin on her forehead, like mine, is translucent, and it suddenly furrows. She gazes into a distance that isn’t there and for a moment she’s lost from me. It passes quickly, it would be a shadow if I didn’t know by now to expect it, and suddenly she’s back. But there’s something new in her face, or rather if not new there is at least the absence of something that was there a moment ago.

She’s confused.

She looks at me for answers, suddenly like a small child rather than my grandmother. She’s hesitant, but committed as she gazes into a distance that’s not there.

“There’s something here,” she says gesturing with her tiny hand towards something as though it’s just past her physical reach. “There’s something here, there’s some sadness.” Again she meets my eyes, slightly frightened but committed. “What is it?”

I take a deep breath. I have found hell on Earth.

I kneel down next to her chair and take hold of the little hand that appears to be straying from her ever shrinking body and I hold it gently.

“It’s Debbie, Grandma.” I tell her, hoping this will be enough, that I won’t have to repeat the words that bear the facts that I myself am struggling to avoid. Her stare remains blank. I wonder whether to ease into it somehow or just go straight for the jugular. “Debbie died on Monday.” How much detail can she handle, and how much does she need? “We’re going to the funeral tomorrow.”

Her face crumples and my heart breaks. Again.

There is a sharp intake of breath; I can’t tell if it’s hers or mine.

“Oh that’s right,” she says, resigned. “Isn’t that just terrible?”

……………………………………………………………………….

The next day I push her chair through the funeral home, walking her through the boards of photos put together to document her eldest daughter’s life. We look at the flowers; I read her the cards and  we speculate about how much Debbie would have loved this. I mostly try to hold back my tears. I’m grateful for someone besides myself to tend to, for when left to my own devices I dissolve completely. On occasion I’m called away to be introduced to someone, instinctual manners guide me through, I perform the act of niece or daughter when necessary and politely excuse myself after the appropriate amount of time.

I return to where I’ve left my grandmother’s chair, parked in front of the television, which plays an endless stream of photos of Debbie. She sits next to her ex husband’s wheelchair, they greet each other cordially, despite their current close proximity the span of the years of hurt and anger and distance prevent them from together mourning the loss of their firstborn child. They each stare forward solemnly at the television, appearing almost to be trying to memorize the plot of a TV show, but really looking through it to some memory deep in the recesses of their minds.

The service is about to begin so I wheel my grandmother’s chair into the chapel. I place her in front of a photo of Debbie next to the urn so there can be no mistake, and we sit down in the chairs provided. People file in and awkwardly gage their relational closeness to the deceased by how closely they sit toward the front. The rest of my relatives enter, the grieving family, and I’m grateful to have missed the show. There aren’t enough chairs left for them and people move to make room. Kind words are spoken, prayers are murmured, and I hold tight to my grandmother’s bird-like shoulders, not knowing if I am comforting her or holding myself upright, and taking my hand from her knee only to hold my mother’s hand to my left.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and I feel my insides follow suit, my bones feel hallow, my blood runs dry. Amidst this drought my tears flow still, threatening to choke me, to drown me, and I wish they would but for this frail body next to me, this one who needs me to remind her of the tragedy that has befallen her. She shakes in my arms in a fresh wave of grief, and I hold her, for it’s all I can do. 

Pulse.

n. A rhythmical throbbing of the arteries as blood if propelled through them, typically felt in the wrist or neck.

The rate of this throbbing, used to ascertain the rate of someone’s heartbeat and so their state of health or emotions.

--The New Oxford American Dictionary

Pulse. A tiny, repetitive mechanical action. A miniscule flutter occurring with anticipated consistency in beings everywhere, generally unworthy of note. Automatic.

Except when it stops.

Taken for granted.

Until it is absent.

It’s the lack thereof where the real shit begins.

She’s gone. A painting made of honey, I look for the sweetness that must be somewhere in these swirls of pain. She’s at peace. But will I ever be, ever again? A sudden space I had no idea was there envelopes me, and I’m drowning. Escape. While I long to, the pain follows me, hunting me, haunting me, up until the moment I think I’ve eluded it and it springs upon me, taking me down again.

Impulse (n.)

1. a sudden strong and unreflective urge or desire to act.

2. a driving or motivating force, an impetus

[PHYSICS] a force acting briefly on a body and producing a finite change in momentum.

Busy. A body in motion cannot feel sadness. Or at least that’s the way I’m acting. For the first few days I would wake up, remember, want to fall back to sleep again and fail. I would go about my day in an odd haze of sadness, grief weighing me down like boulders tied to my ankles as I struggled to surface for air. Movements come slowly, and occur solely from habit and instinct; anything new or deviant from the routine would likely be forgotten. Time begins shape shifting, with minutes lasting hours and hours lost suddenly with no recollection of their contents. I run myself to the edges, hoping to exhaust myself to sleep before my mind gets a chance to wander.

While a part of me craves stillness, I fear it, afraid of what might happen in the space.

Compel (v.) force or oblige someone to do something, a sense of duty.

“How are you?” The small talk and the long tight hugs might be what will do me in. I am aware that the etiquette dictates that I graciously accept condolences and make those around me comfortable. And yet I want to scream and thrash around, I want to writhe on the floor in a physical manifestation of what I feel inside. And yet I smile and attempt to give the right answers. When I can take it no longer I sit down and let the tears fall freely, people avoid looking at me, or look away quickly as though to give me privacy. It doesn’t matter, my insides are on the outside and things.are.not.well.

Compulsion (n.)

1. The action or state of farcing or being forced to do something, constraint. An irresistible urge to behave a certain way, esp against one’s conscious wishes.

Sick. I often feel sick to my stomach, as though the black sadness has become the bile in my gut and is poisoning me. I want to vomit, to puke out this terrible sadness and feel light again. It’s all so heavy I want to do anything to get it out. My body shudders, shivers, trembles, what is this movement, I will run any distance or go to any length to make it stop. Anxiety. I find myself laughing at the oddest times and for no reason, knowing it doesn’t fit with the setting and not caring because although not impossible, it is difficult to laugh and cry simultaneously.