Tag Archives: work

September 10, 2012 · 8:42 am

My First Crush

Telling and listening to “coming out” stories are always fun.  Lesbian 101 tells me it’s one of the most important stories I own. Yet there is one story that beats my out-of-closet experience hands down. My first proper “straight-girl” crush. It, or rather the thought of her, still move my lips into a self-indulgent side smirk.

She was well… beautiful. I laid eyes on her dark short hair, her tiny but bigger-than-mine frame.  Her confidence and arrogance killing any SMS (short man syndrome) she was hiding. I’ll call her “Mine”, for the purpose of my fantasy and her anonymity.

“Mine” was a more senior colleague. I’m not sure where I first set eyes on her, but I remember I required a double breath to get air back into my lungs so as to continue breathing. There may have been an involuntary sigh that escaped. I was introduced, and the yearning was born…

From that moment I noticed everything about “Mine”.  Her skin, her frame, her curves.  How her lips were filled with organic lip liner and shine.  How she was strong without the testosterone feel. How her walk reminded me of figure-skating, Olympic style.

“Mine” had to figure-skate passed my office to get to hers. Each time she did, I lost all sense of reality.  As a usually talkative and high energy level individual, I was accustomed to being friendly with all colleagues, but when she entered, I turned into a fumbling fool waiting for someone to put a gun to the side of my head and relieve me of this high school crush state.  I specifically recall a day she walked into the office; the first time we were alone… she had come to ask a question.  All I could do was stand, gawk like I was seeing aliens for the first time, and feel the colour creep up my face.  In my mind, I ran, like a scared bokkie across the green veld of the Kruger trying to save itself from the hungry lioness.  In reality I stood there, big eyes staring and transfixed, mumbling an “I don’t know” because I had not really heard the question.  In her usual “I-rule-the-world-swag” she turned and left.  Mortified, I asked the earth to swallow me whole.

This one-side unrequited yearning became the reason I woke up, the reason I hated weekends when I couldn’t see her, my soul purpose, and a realisation that liking girls was about more than just me having an open mind.  I was never really able to overcome the stupidity and foolishness “Mine” had led me to.  In her presence I barely uttered a word, her energy filled the room and I was reduced to 16 again.  I could imagine white doves carrying “Ode-to-Mine” scrolls to her window sill whilst I stood below, strumming away on my instrument.

I could never really step to “Mine”.  In my eyes, she was a beautiful Egyptian queen.  All I wanted to do was wave palm tree leaves over her light bronzed clear skin, and fetch milk to bathe her in. Dark pools of brown eyes pierced me every time she turned in my direction, and I was acutely aware of African drums beating in my nether regions. My legs (fortunately) would automatically lead me in an opposite direction.  She was to be revered, idolised, but never embraced.

At the time, I was new in the conscious lesbian emotion department, my only reference was fondling with my high school crush.  “Mine’s” effect on my heart was so consuming that I swore I heard church bells ring.  Albeit this love affair only ever saw the light in my dreams, the feelings she let loose in me changed the way I saw the world.  She was and still is, straight.  I didn’t believe it then, how could the universe be so unkind? I had always hoped that via tortured passion and yearning, she would fall into my arms * blame corny movies*. “Mine” was too much for a young fresh lesbian heart.

12 years later and Facebook returns the fantasy via a “poke”. “Mine” is escorted from past, to right here.  My heart still skips a beat when I see her name pop up on my screen.  Like any tortured wish-I-was-her-lover, I wonder whether there was ever even a slight possibility. I wonder whether she ever knew she turned my life upside down. And now, when she inbox’s me on how sweet she thought I was, I wonder whether she realises that once upon a time she was the object of my unrequited affections? I wonder if she knows that through her presence I discovered a different me?

And as I “come out” to my longest standing friends.  As I try and make them understand how these feelings are the same as theirs for their husbands, “Mine” is my most favourite story to tell.  How I found awakening in her eyes, how I knew the story of me would not see me following the hetero norm. That first time you know in your gut that this story was the beginning.  My first same-sex, lovesick, heartfelt, want.  My most beautiful and silent crush.

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May 10, 2011 · 11:49 am

My First Time With Cancer

I have two daughters and since their birth I have been very very health conscious.

We ate veggies, stayed away from sugars and fats. We exercised and did everything right. So I thought. As young adults, they moved to Cape town.  I divorced and decided to move to Cape Town too. Very excited at the prospect of a new life I went all out to prove myself.

I bought a flat, a new car, and worked really hard at my job. I am a psychiatrist. One fine day, or windy day, or rainy day that Cape Town always experiences I got up and literally said aloud to no one in particular (as I was alone) “I hate what I am doing” I was 58 and successful and earning good money. I was independent.  I loved Cape Town. I loved the amazing dance workshops and programmes that I attended.

Yet I hated the work that I did. I was competent and excellent in what I did. But I hated getting up every morning, driving in the Cape Town traffic and getting to work.  I hated the concept of the  psychiatry that was the prevailing paradigm. My training and the prevailing paradigm was based on Newtonian mechanisms and biological treatments.

There was no soul or spirit in it. My soul and spirit yearned for the spirituality and soul that for me was the underlying process in many people who suffered from “psychiatric ” illnesses.

I felt trapped as I was unable to see a way out. I had spent money in training as a medical doctor and then specializing as a psychiatrist. I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. I had to still earn a living.  These thoughts kept going on and on in my head. I spoke to my children and they kept saying  “you are earning so well”, so why rock the boat. In my heart I kept feeling that I could not justify  the huge flaws that I saw in conventional psychiatric methodology. One of which was prescribing medications that inevitably caused side effects

Over the months I began having weird symptoms and tiredness. I chalked it down to stress.  Then the bleeding began. With it the rounds of tests, and investigations and Doctors. One doctor after doing his tests informed me that I had nothing to worry about.  The gyaenacologist however was a different matter. She phoned and said  “I am sorry to say…….”

So I being a doctor myself got my results.  I checked them, and my first thought was —– Yippee  I do not have to do psychiatry any more !!!!!    I have a very legitimate way out.  I knew that I had to take care of the cancer and sort it out. But I also knew that I would be ok. It’s as if my soul did the only thing it could, to get me out and protect me.

I went back to my home town, and had the surgery. I didn’t need any thing else. No medications, no chemotherapy. It is nearly a year now after the incident.  I am healthy, and very active. New vistas have opened for me, involving alternative healing modalities.  I have always been very alternative, and now it’s as if I have been given permission to revel in it without any censure.

Thus I believe that my cancer diagnosis was a friend and a wakeup call to “BE THE CHANGE I WANT TO SEE IN THIS WORLD”

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January 6, 2011 · 11:57 am

The First Time I Got a New Job

The traffic. It was always going to be the traffic that drove me off the edge. And one Tuesday morning, a month into an internship where I was doing a job that did not require much brain activity. It happened.

I was sitting in my sister’s car, in morning N1 traffic heading towards Johannesburg when I decided I could not do it anymore.

I would not waste my life spending four hours in traffic just to get to and from work (Pretoria to Joburg), only to do a job that did not really fascinate.

That morning in traffic was the first time I decided that I need to move to another city.

And I did. Three months later I was in the Western Cape living in a small conservative town, working with passionate people who loved what they did and every single day was challenging because I had no idea what I was doing half the time.

Every single day on my job was the first time. Every place I went was my first time there and every experience was unique. I did a 180 degree shift, left the city life for a small town and that was the best decision I ever made.

It got lonely at times, living in a place where you don’t speak the language well, people spoke Xhosa or Afrikaans and sometimes a lot got lost in translation as we were all not English speakers.

But I was still in a new town, with new people, in a challenging job and far far away from the N1 traffic. I had left my comfort zone (free food, accommodation, transport to work at home) and I had dived head first into a new environment and it changed my whole perspective on life. I now complain less about things like traffic, or people because I now know, I can always leave .

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