Fitting In: Survival Of The Coolest

A question that I asked myself after few weeks in UCT was whether I was in the right place or not. I had great grades( just like anyone here) but I could feel that the life here would need something more than that. I could feel that the space was suffocating me, I couldn't breathe. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was going through( I read the UCT Prospectus every night in my matric year), I was just all alone in this big world. I had to be strong and be a big boy( big boys don't cry).

I was made to believe that education is all that mattered. Not that I come from an educated family. I was never good in anything that my peers engaged in, be it soccer, music( Venrap is big in my 'hood), girls, marble games etc. I am not the most streetwise person you'll ever meet. The only thing I was good in was academics. Initially I was not exceptionally good but just because it was the only thing I focused my energy on, I ended up being one of the best learners to have ever come out of the schools I went to. That was good and it put me in the best university on the Continent. Yeah I said it was good but it was not enough. The life in  UCT needed much more than what the textbooks had taught me, it needed someone who had developed wholistically. In high school and before that, I could hide behind my books and shy away from the world. Teachers' and parents' compliments made me believe I was something I was really not( it took UCT to burst the bubble). It is not like it is a bad thing to focus on one's schoolwork. It only becomes problematic where it hinders one from living the life now, thinking that they are preparing for the future that they will never be ready for.

The experience of difficulty with adapting to a university environment is this one thing that one cannot understand unless they have gone through it firsthand. Being the first one( hopefully I won't be the last) from my family to have gone to university, it means that my family could not understand what I was going through. It's very good to have as many people as possible being proud of you and believing in you but if what they think about you isn't really how you see yourself, it just becomes this heavy burden on one's shoulders. You cannot be honest with those kind of people even when the going gets tough, they know you as someone who can always pull through and you want to be that person to them. I now have a problem with expectations, for it's only without them that we won't have disappointments. They have played a huge role in the decisions I had made in the past, and in so doing I've let other people live their lives through me. It is only when you are sure of what you want that you do not conform to the expectations, you follow your heart though that can lead you to a road less traveled.

Turns out that Accounting is not the only thing I had to learn. Nothing was familiar to me. Conversations would now have to be in English, laundry would have to be with a washing machine, now I will have to do some shopping on my own, I would have to make new friends etc. I had to learn to manage my life, not just my schoolwork as I used to. For anything to happen in my life, I had to make it happen. This is supposed to be fun for most people but not for me, I love comfort zones and I stay in them for as long as I can. This means that I take long to adjust to a change in my life and this one was overwhelmingly big. Fortunately I was placed in a catering residence hall, so I didn't have to cook( I still haven't learnt how to cook). In the meantime, I am supposed to keep up with my schoolwork and to do well( that had been my life story). You can only imagine how I felt when I found out that I wasn't doing as well as I've always expected myself to. It is never a pleasant feeling when you see that everything in your life is out of control, when you try to fix this, that is getting worse on the other side. It's in situations like those that you start to cry out like Jesus 'Eloi eloi lama sabachthani', with heavy burdens on your shoulders and no one to help you cope.

Even with platforms like social media, people do not talk and they suffer in silence. We always want the world to see the best of us in these platforms, that way they can like us( pun intended). I just wanted someone to tell me that I wasn't the only one feeling lost, I wanted them to tell me that it's a normal passing phase. Just that the environment in UCT is too individualistic, in a way that everyone has locked themselves in a corner and deal with their issues on their own. This is a very different setting to the one I grew up in, where people live in communities and share their burdens.

In all these, I learnt to love myself unconditionally. That's radical self-love, as some call it. I learnt to love and accept myself for who I am before I expect the world to do the same. They say if you face the world with a smile(  don't fake it), it smiles back at you. You cannot expect to get from the world what you cannot give yourself. I learnt that there's nothing inherently wrong with me, maybe there was just something wrong with my approach to life. There was no need to fit in, or to try to. If there are people who are meant to be in my life, it would eventually end up there without me having to change who I am. I never had to be hard on myself, because that way I turned a blind eye to my good qualities and focused on those things I couldn't immediately obtain.

Loving myself didn't mean that I didn't have to see my mistakes, I just meant that I was able to see myself beyond those mistakes. Loving myself meant that I can be better than what I was. It was only after that I even fear the potential that I have, I learnt that I didn't have to try to hard, that I can take it easy and just be smart in everything I do. As I continue to love myself and appreciate those I have in my life, I hope reach greater heights than I have ever imagined. By being myself, I not only do favour to myself, but also to the world with which I interact.

"Accepting myself for who I really am is the best favour I have done for myself, it makes me be at peace with reality"- Khangwelo Matodzi