Get your name back.

I got lost in 2019. The beginning of that year was tumultuous and my energies went into all directions. I had a new job, but I was losing a marriage. I was happy and heartbroken.

I took occupation of a cottage in a place of isolation and I cried myself to sleep most times. I had lost it all, the love that I had tried to convince myself that I had. For a wife and kids and a home that I had spent a career creating.

My heart was hung out to dry and my head was doing backflips trying to figure it all out and time travelling back and forth to make it all ok again.

I started writing. I havent stopped. I wrote out my guilt, my pain, my emotions, my loneliness and sometimes my craziness and quirkiness. I wrote about everything that I aimed at pulling me up from the cliff, eweni, and from the ledge. I listened to a lot of Sjava.

At some point I decided to travel. I went home to my people. I went to all my schools. And I reconnected with my youth and my aspirations. I spoke to the elders.

Finding the older folk and discovering myself and them telling me who I was at the start and what promise they thought my potential was. I started getting my name back, it was the start of a long process that carries on to this day.

For some of my people, their lives had been stuck back in time and they had had no economic movement and they were carried on by hope and faith. They were happy just to see me. And it had been long since the last time, and I had been young then.

I started connecting with my Fathers, both of them. The one being of this earth, and the other being the one that I started recognising in the Scriptures. I went to church.

And then I started reflecting on how my life had turned out up to that point. The entire thing was a cog in my transformation and I developed an understanding that we hold ourselves back when we begin to be attached to the present realities that we had created in the relationships of marriage that we formed our lives around.

At your first, you are yourself, and your original family knew you before anyone else who found you along the way. Those original bonds dont break if we remain alive.

The bonds that do break are those that get created out of the pretence of courtship and dating, and acquaintances that you meet along the way. Because you all start with an idea and an ideal of each other which is fractious and scripted by the same idealism that mirrors Hollywood sitcoms and romance movies and the soapies that play on DStv and Netflix.

When the truth is that our people, who carry our name are our best advice and advisors. And they are there to offer guidance to us when things fall apart.

Identity is a remarkable thing. Your name is full of stories that transcend generations all the way back to the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, whom God created out of love.

All that love, across time, is what got you here. You are born into a community of lovers. Your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your cousins, your second and third cousins. All of them are love and they share the same name as you, from time.

God is amazing 💙💛