For those unfamiliar, I am a writer from South Africa. Born here and raised here.
Over the course of 5 posts, potentially more, I’ll share about me behind the pages. I will discuss what influenced me as a writer. I will also share how being South African influenced my writing.
New environment, new writer
Under our young democracy, we’ve had a lot more freedom and affluence to grow as people. There are also a lot more opportunities for people to live out their expressions as they choose. An artist can create their own art. Writers can write their own articles and books. Musicians can make their own music. Entrepreneurs can identify a need to fill and continue to make it happen. It obviously allowed for the darker opportunities to flourish as well with tenderpreneurship flourishing, illegal trading in whatever you can imagine flourishing, corruption and fraud blossoming and so on and so forth.
It’s very much like a small child being allowed to explore their environments. The only difference is that the parent figure in our democracy is as corrupt, greedy and dark as the crimes they are trying the convince the world they are banishing. At some stage, our democracy will mature. Every year our society matures and grows a little bit more. More and more people develop the skill to look at what’s happening and add their voice to the right channels that can make the difference or add their weight to the dark underbelly for the fortune they want to make. It’s a fascinating swinging of the pendulum.
I prefer to observe. I don’t agree with any of the sides in the power positions, it’s truly a matter of supporting the lesser of two evils and I just can’t.
As our democracy grew, my confidence as writer grew as well. The two have nothing to do with each other but it’s a great analogy of the growth I’ve undergone to get to this point where I can, at least in a blogpost, admit that I am a writer.
- I’ve struggled to let go of the shame of being outside the box.
- I’ve struggled to admit that I prefer to colour outside the lines.
- I’ve had one hell of a time to realise that my skill is weaving with words, not academics, though I tried, not corporate, though I love the power dynamics in corporate, not domestic life, though I threw myself into homeschooling my sons.
All in all, this has been my necessary journey to become the writer I am developing into.
Anne, the writer
I have so much to learn as a writer. You have no idea. Least of all is my actual writer’s voice, but that’s why I am here now. And that’s why you as the reader are here.
In the following post, I will get back to the purpose of this series.
**I promised myself to keep blog posts to no more than 500 words so I’ll end this post here.
Thanks for reading. Look out for the next post in this series where I’ll go into a little bit more detail about my writing
Cheers!
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