Category: Writing

A category for the thought police to patrol.

Sunday Scribble #11: It’s the art of loving fr fr

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

When weeks of having Olivia Dean on repeat, collided with immersion in the words of bell hooks and Kennedy Ryan.

Working towards a ‘love ethic’ in a reality riddled with genocide, seemingly unchecked evil of all shades and material and spiritual poverty, can seem almost impossible. But rereading bell hooks’ all about love, provided the grounding I needed after being swept up in Kennedy Ryan’s steamy romance,This Could Be Us and all the while being serenaded daily by Olivia Dean’s affirming album, The Art of Loving since October 2025. They texts were connected and timely in a way that went beyond coincidence for me. I will attempt to synthesise some of the overlaps across the three projects that have left an indelible mark in my spirit.

Love yourself

To me, self-love is at the root of all three works, not the magical thinking kind that instructs: ‘love yourself before anyone else can’, but the kind that posits that an awareness of self and directly addressing patterns and behaviours that have informed past relationships. An exercise which then allows us to communicate more honestly and choose partners based not on our traumatic inferences and wounds, but our shared commitment to mutual growth.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.

bell hooks, all about love, pg. 6

Of all the illuminating things hooks writes about love and loving, the thing that continues to stay with me is the idea that love is essentially rooted in care, choice, justice and nurturing one another’s growth, that the feelings it brings, the act of ‘falling’ in it, and any abusive betrayals simply stand in contradiction to living a life founded on a true love ethic. As intimate relationships often mirror or are informed by their immediate environment, a love ethic needs to underpin the broader society’s workings – a society moved by love rather than greed, violence and other injustices. But that is not the society and culture we live in.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

bell hooks, all about love, pg. 140

In Ryan’s novel, the protagonist, Soledad, is forced into a journey of self-discovery by tumultuous circumstances, but quickly realises that her self-love or ‘self-partnering’ journey may require growing in love with another rather than practicing strict solitude rooted in denial of desire and care. It helps that Judah Cross (oh Judah Cross) is similarly trying to engage in a practice of prioritising self, through increased accountability, patience and intentional communication. And, the cherry on top, they both use all about love as a guide to work through this season and towards the other. Ryan is undoubtedly an incredible author, who manages to deftly marry romantic escapism with serious issues.

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I’ll be my own pair of safe hands, it’s not the end it’s the making of.

Olivia Dean, So Easy (To Fall in Love), track 5 on The Art of Loving

The Art of Loving as a whole, feels like a warm hug, reassurance that you are more than enough and worthy of effort (internally and externally). That the mistakes and missteps of your past aren’t defining, they are lessons that will help you communicate your wants and hurts with clarity. Dean’s self-love is rooted in radical honesty and staying true to oneself; a kind of reflexivity that allows one to honour whichever version of ‘love’ they are after. The yearning and care she speaks of are not rooted in melancholy, ownership but consideration.

Platonic love as vital anchorage

There aren’t enough sonnets for friendships. Note enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the one we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each others constants.

Kennedy Ryan, This Could Be Us, pg. 95

We all know, or maybe have been, the friend who drops everyone and everything the minute they find themselves in a new relationship. Spending less and less time with their core support system, to maintain the newer, shinier connection that has entered their lives. There’s nothing wrong with making time to genuinely get to know someone and nurture what may be a more fragile connection. In our context, maintaining any relationship, romantic or otherwise, is made all the more difficult by demanding jobs, staying sane, fed and fit. But friendship isn’t an optional extra, a nice to have, it’s essential to living and loving well. Studies suggest that women’s friendships help us live longer, make us healthier and are most cases the only place we receive reciprocity and considered care. Obviously this isn’t a blanket fact or experience, some friendships (like relationships) are toxic or operate in misalignment, which would then bear very different results. So let’s healthy friendships are lifesaving for clarity’s sake. In This Could Be Us, this is evidenced by the way Soledad’s friends jump in to help her without question in moments of distress, in how they encourage her professionally and personally, and in how they hold her accountable. This accountability should, but doesn’t always translate in romantic relationships. hooks points out that for most women the stringent, unforgiving standards we have for friends, falls away when we encounter romantic partners because we are socialised to idealise the codependency of ‘other halves’ and put romantic love on a pedestal.

When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.

bell hooks, all about love, pg. 136

Which is why the line, “who would do that to a friend, let alone the one you love” in Dean’s Let Alone The One You Love, is the one of the saddest for me on the album, it gives into that acceptance of elevated difference. In its solemn lament, it’s an illustration of the devaluation of friendship.

Love is in the doing

The desire to love is not love itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act oof will—namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

bell hooks, all about love, pg. 172

Something I have had to remind myself of, quite sternly at that, int the last few months, is that love is a verb, it’s a doing word. To say it is easy, to mean it requires more than the eight letters it takes to type it out. It’s the people who keep their promises, who show up, who consider you and who take any opportunity to demonstrate it in whatever way they can. I have also worked on being a better friend myself, it was one of my goals for the year, to prioritise my friendships and be intentional about their maintenance.

When conversing with the heart, expect it to talk back, to revisit the pains and disappointments that left the deepest dents and scratches.

Kennedy Ryan, This Could Be Us, pg. 216

The doing also extends to self responsibility and accountability – keeping the promises you make to yourself, committing to the routines you know you need, and truthfully engaging in introspection. The vulnerability on The Art of Loving acted as quiet confirmation that I was in the ‘right’ path insofar as my personal ‘doing’ was going. It more closely spoke to who I was becoming than who I was. It was a also a good reminded that you don’t ever really lose the love you have shared, especially if you shared it freely, and that helped me process a lingering hurt.

Love is never wasted when it’s shared.

Olivia Dean, A Couple of Minutes, track 11 on The Art of Loving

Sunday Scribble #10: Is timing everything?

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

Some literature arrests us no matter who we are when we first read it.

We recently had a short discussion in our book club’s WhatsApp group about a local author with a new release. The reactions to the new work were mixed – a variation of “could never get into it”, “recall not enjoying X’s writing” and “enjoyed it at the time”. The last bit of last response stuck with me. It was mine, so I reflected on my own internal process of elimination when picking a new read, which sometimes includes being too old now, not being ready or not being the person I need to be yet.

I had this selfsame experience earlier this year, reading One Day by David Nicholls. I had just watched the Netflix series for a fourth time (to say I was obsessed is an understatement), so I figured the book must be better and it was February, the month Love™, so I dove in gleefully. It was an easy and quick read, but I only read on because of my now ripe love for the on-screen characters (actors more than the characters), not because I was drawn to the slightly annoying people I was meeting between its pages. The Dex in the book deserved a couple of right hooks if you know what I mean. The chasm between the relatability of the on-screen Emma and the Emma in the book was stark. But I knew that this had to do with 34-year-old me reading this work 16 years on, and not the book itself. If I had read it when it first came out in 2009, I would have been so taken and so seen by the literary iteration. Many parts of it would have mirrored my own experiences and possibly acted as timely foreshadowing. Now, it was just a confirmation of lessons already learned and squared away.

But the inverse was true when I finished a reread of All About Love by bell hooks just a few days ago. The 24-year-old teachings felt more relevant and timely to me now than they did when I first read it four years ago. Admittedly, I was a different person at the time. My reading was informed by the preoccupations, anxieties and vanities of that moment. Coloured by the somewhat small-minded motivations of the time, which were geared towards finding fault and fixing, rather than open-minded inquiry. I got to experience these two selves in the recent rereading through what I highlighted and wrote in the margins then, versus now. There was only one place in which my former and current selves overlapped in what they thought was important enough to highlight back then and again in this rereading.

This is not to say that what both readings did to and for me were not important, just different experiences of the same text because I was different, thus was my perspective. Which takes me back to one of the most instrumental and insightful quotes that echoes in the recesses of my mind years after my initial encounter with it as a second-year English literature student:

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anaïs Nin

As someone who used to reread books a lot growing up, mainly because my personal library was tiny, this disjuncture was quite new. There are books I reread specifically because they take me back to a version of myself buried within the pages and emotions the text was initially received in, to revisit familiar and comforting characters, like one of the literary loves of my life, Velutha, from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things or Tariq from Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. When it comes to nonfiction like George Orwell’s 1984, or Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like, or Eusebius Mckaiser’s Run Racist Run, it’s an academic endeavour, rooted in brushing up or recalling in a theoretical way, not testing my present value system against the old, a remembering more than an updating of entrenched inner beliefs.


The timing of a read can be random, sometimes you are drawn to something simply because it’s in your eyeline or the cover is alluring. Or a friend or family member says “you must read this, it will change your life,” and the temptation of a life changed influences you. Other times you are pushed by guilt, a read that has gathered dust while watching newer, shinier books make it to the elusive bedside table despite the pecking order of the growing stack. Or you’re driven by a need to revisit a more familiar world. Or a looming bookclub deadline.The reasons are varied, but what I always find to be true is the person I am at the moment will dictate how I recieve the work or even if am able to take it in at all. In his paper, Why how we read, trumps what we read, Gerald Graff notes that “no text tells us what to say about it, that what we say depends on the questions we bring to it”. There are books like Pumala Gqola’s Rape, which I didn’t have the courage and heart to read six years after I had initially bought it. Books that I have to put down are rarely ever about what’s in them, but what’s in me. And then there are some outliers that no matter when I pick them up, an immediate put down soon follows *cough cough The Heart of Darkness, cough cough White Teeth, cough cough War and Peace*.

Ultimately, that is the one of the joys of reading for me, the freedom to read what I like, when I like. To give a text licence to take over my life and mind for a few days or weeks. The choice is divorced from lists or the invisible place in the line dictated by when a book was purchased, but rather by the pull and capacity that lies in me at any given time. An acknowledgement of magnetic want and need.

SundayScribble #9: The purple shall govern

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

Maybe? Hopefully.

I remember going to a photo exhibition at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus some years back, which stayed with me for weeks and now years on. It was titled, Promises and Lies: The ANC in Exile. The part of the exhibition that stayed with me was the opening words from the Freedom Charter, “The people shall govern”. It was painted in big black letters on a white wall. Other parts of the charter were also visible on the gallery’s walls, but this bit, right at the beginning of the exhibit, remained etched in my head.

Flashbacks to that exhibition came rushing back in the last few two weeks, as purple profile pictures flooded our timelines in the build-up to the women’s shutdown on Friday, November 21. Discourse about the performative nature of the protest, the optics of the timing, the work already being done to fight gender based violence (GBV) at policy level, the classist nature of the ways people could show solidarity, the difference between a crisis and disaster and and and. What cut through the noise, ultimately, was that very deluge of performative profile pictures, which garnered enough international and national attention to force the South African government to first declare GBV a national crisis and then later a national disaster. A move, which will hopefully lead to the kind of accountability and urgent action this crisis demands.

An old tumblr post, speaking to the space the threat of violence occupies.

Living in this country requires being fuelled by immense amounts of hope, hope that you will make it through the day unscathed, that things will get better, that we might get better. This constant dose of delusion you have to down, coupled with the cognitive load of hyper vigilance, makes for a heady mix. The very threat of violence can alter the way our brains work. Violence is an unfortunate hallmark of our culture, one either has scars from being its victim or the precarity of becoming one.

Anyway, the reason this brought that exhibition back into my mind’s eye, was the realisation that messy but deliberate action can still bring that idealistic principle to life. Even and especially when we don’t have all the answers, but have something to say. That persistence is still viable. That different, better is possible.

Sunday Scribble #8: Enough with the prettiness, give us good food Joburg

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The true cost of aesthetically pleasing establishments is our tastebuds.

Eating out in Johannesburg is often a 50/50 risk, which will still cost you an arm and a leg whether you are satiated or not. One thing about this city, is it’s ability to use its beautiful veneer to draw you in. Looking like one thing while being something else, usually something incongruent with what lurks behind the shiny procelin. It’s an art, really, one which I can respect in certain situations. Just not on my plate, please.

The day had started off pretty well, I drank a green juice and a flat white on the mini road trip that was my drive from Pretoria to Johannesburg. I had timed my drive to our book club meeting really well, and no traffic formed against me prospered. I drove under several purple canopies to boot, thanks to Jacaranda season, all seemed in alignment for more good things to unfold as the afternoon went on. But, “not on my watch”, said the uncooked food in the kitchen at Besos, waiting to ruin my day.

Walking in was an experience, naturally. They created a little walkway filled with greenery, which leads you into the restaurant. It was giving tropical oasis, I didn’t feel like I was in the little shopping complex I parked in just three minutes ago. Inside, the beige, cream, wood and soft lighting of it said, “welcome, relax”. The girls and I were dressed to the nines, ready to sip on some wine and yap about the book of the month.

Not one of us had a meal we could speak kindly of, even though our orders ranged from breakfast meals of eggs, salmon and sourdough, to heavier steak and chicken dishes. I had what they called a Gnocchi stack, which ended up being two very bland crumbed chicken schnitzels with equally unseasoned basil pesto plonked on top. Oh nkosi yam. I force-fed myself at least half of it before calling it. The best thing I ended up having was the Springfield wine we shared, a difficult one to mess up. The very average experience our palates then saw us swiftly settle our bill and head elsewhere for cake and coffee to wash down, or rather wash away our lunch.

Unfortunately, this is an all too familiar experience in Joburg: well-curated, photo-ready spaces and overpriced, basic food we all could have made at home. I say overpriced because I can’t tell you the last time I had a main meal that was under R200. It’s easier to swallow the pricetag when the food is worth it, but when it isn’t, oh, the penny pincher in me comes out. Which is why I have now come to adopt a system that distrusts any posts speaking of “new hidden gems” and simply frequenting tried and tested staples in the city.

The underwhelming encounter reminded me of a music event I really enjoy but have had to boycott for the past two years because they insist on hosting it at a restaurant (if we can call it that) infamous for terrible service and even worse food. This can’t be life. Only patronising vetted establishments and eating the same, safe meals over and over again as a trauma response to beautiful spaces masking bad food. Give us, us food Joburg.

Sunday Scribble #7: Nothing even matters at all

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

When the news broke that D’Angelo had passed earlier this week, one of the first reactions I came across online read: Mind you, I thought I would’ve had a first dance to “Nothing Even Matters” by now! (a post by @yasistatorrian). To which I replied, “Oh girl, same”. The deluge of grief and love for D’Angelo that filled my timeline and inboxes this week has felt like a communal catharsis. The sadness of the loss was overridden by the reminder of his deep love of self and the other.

Like millions across the world, my first encounter with D’Angelo and his work, was through Untitled (How Does it Feel). I was very young, too young to understand the lyrics, but seeing the music video on a late-night music show on SABC 1 stayed etched in my mind. Some months later, a performance of “Send it On” and “Sex Machine” with Tom Jones on VH1, prompted me to rip the below poster from the middle of a magazine, risking judgment from my Catholic parents, sticking it front and centre on my candy white bedroom wall. At just 9, turning 10, I still didn’t grasp what the man was saying, but my ears and eyes were in agreement about his sonorous and physical beauty.

So taken was I, that I even took a photo with my film camera of said poster. Unironically sandwiched between photos of my first holy communion, which took place in the same year Voodoo was released.

The music itself was dripfed to me in the years that followed during our weekly Saturday morning and afternoon spring cleans. My brother hogged the CD player, blasting Brown Sugar and Voodoo back to back. The VH1 live performance would also join the loop, it had been recorded via our VHS machine. We actually watched a lot of live music that way, as a family over the years, now that I recall. It was only when I got my own CD player in high school, that I could start listening to and reading through lyrics on the album sleeve of Voodoo that I began to hear beyond the melodies I had grown an affinity for over the years. Finally, stretching my understanding past just “di D’Angelo” (the South African reference for his undeniable Adonis belt), into the depths of his music. For the first time, I heard what yearning sounded like from the mouth of a black man and not the page of a Jane Austen novel. I heard what sounded like the celebration and reverence of black love, a welcome intervention for a black girl who was one of only 6 in her grade, listening to Avril Lavigne and reading Saltwater Girl (quite seriously at that).

“[He] made a kind of sound that made a house for black folks to live in. Under the sound of D’Angelo’s music, our bodies would wake up to who we have been… He made the ancestral close and intimate and sexy.”

Michael J. Ivory, Jr.

By the time the masterpiece that is Black Messiah came out, I was a long-skirt-All-Star-wearing-Africa-tattooed-dreadlocked-girl, in no need of saving. When it came out, I promptly bought two CD’s, one for myself and one for my brother, so we would need not fight for or ration out our repeated listenings. Three short months after it came out, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly came out, and that perfect pairing of love, politics, history and torment would be the soundtrack to my long car rides between Johannesburg and Pretoria that year.

We are bereft but blessed to have lived in the same time as him, to still have access to his work and thus pieces of his heart and mind.

Sunday Scribble #6: Silence as a salve

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Silence can feel like a sensory bath.

It started out of pure frustration. A day that had tested me to what felt like my limit, a mind reeling with all the things left undone, difficult conversations to be had, dreams deferred, the torment of uncertainty, and and and. As I stepped into my car and turned on the ignition, the afternoon drive show’s host sounded like the shrill screech of a drill bit being forced into an impenetrable surface. Her words jumbled into the sonic equivalent of being suffocated by the overwhelming and cacophonous voices already fighting for space in my head. In that moment, I had to switch off the car radio to stop the drilling. The sounds coming at me from the car radio were not a nifty distraction in this moment, but a loud chorus from a loudhailer that threatened the fragile state I was in.

The 30 minutes and 40 kilometres along the M1 and N1 highways that followed slowly ushered in calm, lowering the voices that had been fighting for their moment at the podium of my mind, to a whisper at first and then to nothing. Suddenly, a moment of panic was de-escalated by tuning out further distractions. Surrendering to complete silence had allowed me to turn down the volume without even trying. That single drive changed the way I commute. Now, silent drives are an essential part of my daily and weekly routine, not just in times of high stress or overwhelm, but as a key ingredient I need to stay sane. Initially, I did think of the exercise as ‘serial killer stuff’. Who can actively avoid distraction for that long and not succumb to the internal chaos they are trying to evade? Me is who.

Getting rid of music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. can also be a meditative experience, which is ideal if you’re heading to a stressful event, or if you just need to quickly reconnect with yourself. As you drive, you can take in the scenery, enjoy a few deep breaths, or play grounding games to feel fully present — all things that are tough to do with Top 40 Hits blaring in the background.

Carolyn Steber

I didn’t even consider it a mindfulness hack until I saw a creator I follow on TikTok talk about it a few months ago. She said we are wearing our minds thin with constant stimulation, much of which we cannot process at all because of the sheer volume of inputs coming at us all day. Being silent for even 10 minutes can help you step away from the noise of the day, reduce stress and improve overall creativity. Trying to decompress with other people’s thoughts and feelings coming at you isn’t conducive to stillness and/or calming your nervous system. Even something as innocuous as listening to your favourite musician belt out their latest songs can work against this practice. Our brains don’t really know the difference between lyrics, our internalised thoughts and reality, so singing along to narratives that contradict who we are or want to be, can in fact, assist in creating an unintended reality. This has been the most difficult part of practising stillness for me, because I quite exclusively listen to ‘sad girl’ music. And don’t get me wrong, I still do, I just don’t belt out the parts that I used to identify with and say out loud that I am not the “I” being referred to. Silly, maybe, but necessary for me.

Some of the things I do in silence now include workouts at the gym, working, writing, walking, and sometimes instituting ‘no-talk time’ with loved ones. The latter is one of my favourite ways to use silence, just being near someone I love, in quiet contemplation is an act of intimacy I relish. The quiet I have embraced in my life allows me to look around more, take in my environment more fully and sometimes more meaningfully. It has also meant that I process thoughts and ideas more slowly and thoughtfully, and I am less hurried to arrive at decisions and subsequent action. I know it can be difficult to contend with having nothing but your thoughts staring back at you, but for me, this practice has meant that a once daunting task, which I actively wanted to drown out, is now something I crave and even need.

Sunday Scribble #5: What the vlog?

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I’m old enough to remember the very early iterations of vlogs which were exclusively on YouTube or natively uploaded to blog sites. These vlogs (videoblogs) were usually either shot strictly on a tripod (or atop a makeshift stand) in someone’s bedroom or a chaotic bunch of selfie-style clips shot in various locations, at random times, culminating in a video montage. The immediacy, editing perfection and commercial imperative of modern vlogs, entirely absent from their narrative. When they first became popular in the 2010s, I only went to YouTube to watch TedTalks, interviews, music videos, stand-up comedy and covers of my favourite songs. The allure of watching other ordinary, unknown people’s lives, escaped me. Now, that’s the entire foundation and popularity behind them.

Blogs at the time were places for online connection through documentation, commentary and engagement that went beyond what was possible in limited social media posts. Personal publishing online was still in its infancy and therefore novel to those of us dipping our toes into this ocean of possibility (now simply, content, yuck).

Five main blogging motivations were identified in Nardi et al. [2004]: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opinions; working out emotional issues; thinking by writing; and promoting conversation and community. Blogs have become an increasingly important way of learning about news and opinions not found in mainstream media, and blogging has become a popular social activity for establishing and maintaining online communities.

In Gao, Wen & Tian, Yonghong & Huang, Tiejun & Yang, Qiang. (2010). Vlogging: A survey of videoblogging technology on the web.. ACM Comput. Surv… 42.

So naturally, one would assume that vlogs would be the visual extension or interpretation of the above motivations and uses. While there weren’t set formulas on how to vlog technically and structurally, vlogs in the 2010s were efforts at brief glimpses into personal events, how-to do ABC or short clips from concerts, performances, in class etc. They were shaky and oft grainy testaments to the mundanity of being a high school or university student, or candid travelogues shot in another country on a handycam or small digital camera. To my memory, unlike video essays, vlogs were (and are) used for personal documentation more than outright analysis or commentary.

In the present, vlogs flood our timelines day in and out, and have been reduced to overly produced ‘get ready with me’ or ‘come with me to the grocery store’ slop that has no soul or capacity to engage with human life as it is. What I mean by this, is not that these aren’t activities that people are genuinely engaged on a daily basis, but the performance of them by creators whose lifestyles are monetised can reduce our very existence to one of imbibing the consumerist loop of buy, use, buy, use as natural, desirable and aspirational. The slow voiceovers, perfectly timed After Effects text and product placements – a sales pitch which makes products of people’s very lives. I suppose, like almost everything else, its a result of living in a capitalistic hellscape. Perfectly curated, nothing placates and numbs audiences in search of constant entertainment, no matter its substance.

Obviously, the above examples are limited and do not speak to the entire scope of diversification within the genre; for instance, there are professionals like chefs, athletes, teachers and more whose insights into their daily routines are eye-opening and illuminating. Their vlogs often are about ‘thinking out loud’ and opening up conversation with their audiences, more than they are a representation of living within the confines of certain aesthetics. Further, vlogs do not account for the countless video essays, explainers and straight-up rants that some people post as their online counter-mainstream outlet.

I often think about how for many, a first time viewing of The Truman Show (1998) would not in fact present as the psychological thriller it is, but as an unappreciated opportunity on his part (limitless camera angles, lighting and cooperative supporting cast members for the ‘main character’, come on, Truman). People’s ‘real’ lives are content, their misfortune and joy alike consumable and open for monetisation. But unlike Truman, they are both the creator and star of their own shows, willingly.

Sunday Scribble #4: Solo dolo

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Waiting for others can be a self-imposed prison sentence.

A much younger version of me once wrote that she did not want to get used to being alone on her tumblr blog.

I came across the frank plea in a recent archival exercise to transcribe text posts from that blog onto record cards (trying to have less of myself scattered across the internet, lol). Unfortunately, 24-year-old Pheladi, that’s exactly what we have had to do. Not just get used to it, but get good at it, really good at it.

At the time, it would be fair to describe my loneliness as nothing more than a dull ache, felt in short, sharp pangs months, sometimes years apart. The intensity of that ache has only grown over the years, its length and breadth sometimes overwhelming and suffocating its host. I have had to get used to being alone out of necessity, out of only having myself to lean on when needed. I deliberately don’t want to say ‘not out of choice’, because I recognise that much of my aloneness is a choice. A choice rooted in a mixture of avoidance, inflexibility, insecurity, poor communication skills, extreme self-love, some bad luck and obstinacy in the face of obvious misalignment (amongst other things).

As a yearner™, year after year of being companionless was initially a terrifying and alienating reality to step into. For context, I used to be the kind of person who left the house thinking ‘today might be the day I bump into the love the love of my life’ – legit, exhausting stuff. And the person who would happily ‘wait’ when some half-hearted lover had more urgent matters to see to than I. And the person who would save experiences and films to watch with this fictional other. But thankfully, somewhere along the way (maybe when my frontal lobe was fully developed), I realised that my life was happening anyway and that I should probably take part in it regardless of who was along for the ride. The realisation came about a year or two after that initial tumblr post, when I was living in a new city and, by virtue of not having my usual support structure of friends and family, had to learn to truly enjoy my own company.

I started with a small but important ritual on Sunday afternoons, a solo breakfast or brunch date with a book or the Sunday papers in tow as my only companions at the table. I recall the tinge of embarrassment that first crawled up my throat when I asked for a table for one. Heightened by the occasional look of pity offered by the waitstaff helping me that day. But those slow Sunday afternoons catalysed the courage needed to then go on solo theatre dates, to music shows, and even solo trips in the years that followed.

Following my own whims, without much consultation, is one of my greatest freedoms. One I do not take for granted because I can only imagine how many women before me, in my bloodline alone, never had the luxury of choice. The ability or space at any given moment to truly make decisions that served their greatest good or curiosity. I come from a long line of women who have always had to consider themselves last, to wait, and to serve at the behest of others. That I don’t have to do that at all is a privilege I carry with pride. I can book the thing, eat whatever my stomach calls to, buy whatever catches my wandering eye, go to the curated experience and chat to strangers, and come back to relative peace.

Like previous posts have alluded to, being in my 30s has allowed me to shed certain identities and ‘single’ is one of them. It’s not something I overexplain anymore, or something I care to dissect at length when I interact with the people I love. It’s a fact, sure, but not one that speaks to who I am as a person or what my life looks like. I still deeply yearn for companionship, but it no longer defines how I move or feel about myself.

Sunday Scribble #3: The sun is the girl she thinks she is

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

Who knew vitamin D could change your whole life?

It’s Winter in South Africa, and this one has been working hard to let us know just how cold it can get. It has been a wet and windy one, which we are not accustomed to up in Gauteng. Our Winters are usually a formality at best, a tick box exercise thrust upon us by the ticking of time and not necessarily by freezing temperatures. We are used to sunny mornings and afternoons, followed by occasionally chilly evenings, which necessitate light coats and jackets. Not this time. It is the end of July, and this post finds me bundled, gloved and beanied up while sitting indoors as we weather a weekend filled with rain and hail. Even though she (the sun) has been elusive this particular weekend, she has been the highlight of my life the past few weeks.

I have been experimenting with slow(er) mornings for a while now, but something clicked in July which made the whole attempt worthwhile. Up to that point, my version of slow only meant not exposing my brain and eyeballs to the digital scream that emanates from my phone screen first thing in the morning. No checking of notifications or scrolling until I had at the very least visited the bathroom, brushed my teeth, done my self-cav affirmations in the mirror and downed the chronic medication that keeps me normal. On most days, I am able to avoid looking at my phone until I reach campus and sit down to power on my PC. By which time I would have also stopped for a coffee along the way. Usually, enough time I told myself, to engage in human-ing before exposing my nervous system to the horrors of the day that lie in wait once I give the notifications centre the space to spread itself thick, overrunning the hour or two of calm maintained by my ignorance.

The Winter Break at work means I get to stop teaching for a bit, and usually I use it to travel, but this year I chose to sit still. To plan nothing, go nowhere and be moved only by the whims that popped up instinctively from one hour to the next. The added layer which proved to be a gamechanger, included a 10-minute meditation and sunning for hours, after my usual morning routine. And I am not exaggerating when I say hours, I averaged a minimum of two to four hours in the sun every day I practised this routine. Some days the sun was warm enough to necessitate a wardrobe change into shorts and lighter tops, which I did happily, returning to the same spot to absorb even more natural vitamin D. It’s probably prudent at this point to raise the fact that I do have a vitamin D deficiency. I have been medicating the issue for almost eight years now, but that little purple pill I take once a week has nothing on the feel of taking UV rays straight into my skin.

The ritual of direct sunlight and grounding on the faded grass in between helped usher in a kind of rest and restoration I have never achieved but desperately needed. `It helped me sleep better, maintain a balanced mood, and truly feel at ease. Not as pretence or reassurance of being ‘okay’ but actually being so. I would even go as far as saying that the last few weeks felt like living in the beloved Bobby Hebb song below. Sadly, this routine has already been disrupted by going back to work. I will try to hold on to as much of it as is possible but the machine requires less groundedness to grease its wheels.

Sunday Scribble #2: Handycam living

Pheladi SethusaLeave a comment

Smile, you’re on candid camera!

In a world now saturated with high-resolution visuals, which are often sharp but empty, visual imperfection has regained its allure for me. So a couple of months back, I went in search of a handycam, to complement the film camera bought for similar reasons.

A handycam isn’t quite as analogue as a film camera. Still, it is enough steps behind current video recording quality, for the look and feel to transport me back to the early 2000s at a minimum. And why would I want to go all the way back there? Well, I have always been a person obsessed with documentation, first with words in a diary as a child, then through scrapbooks and photo albums as a teen and then eventually through digital albums and videos on blogs and social media. Lately, that last method has been the least fulfilling of the lot. Thousands of photos and videos die in the graveyard of my phone’s camera roll if not posted/shared, and draft after draft lie dormant in my Notes app.

The slowness afforded to me by my new (old) toys allows me to be more selective in what I shoot, when, and why. I’m not thinking about captions or matching certain cuts to trending audio, I’m just freezing moments with my favourite people in a format that feels most intimate to me. Not so say I have stopped making reels and TikToks day to day, that brings a different kind of creative satisfaction, but it is fleeting and very ego-driven (I’m just a chronically online girl). Making these little home videos and waiting a few months in between printing rolls of film, has helped in my efforts to slow down the pace of my life as well. It has helped me tap into increased intentionality, presence and acceptance. Acceptance of the randomness of being and the tiny imperfections that tie us together.