What do you want to be when you grow up?

I have always been envious of people who know exactly what they want. The first time I realized that I was not one of those people, I was twelve years old. I had been invited to a birthday party – a dress up. I remember ripping open the little purple envelope, in sync with the four others sitting at my lunch table, my fingers were sticky from my peanut butter sandwich and there was excited babble in my ears.

Date: Friday the 8th May Theme: When I grow up...

Instantaneously my friends began to reveal their ideas in loud, confident voices.

“I’m going as a doctor.” Mark said, stating the obvious.

“I think I’ll borrow my dad’s briefcase and go as a lawyer.” Alexa had always wanted to follow in her father's footsteps.

Daniel was going as a movie star – no surprises there – and Cali was going to borrow her sister’s fishnet stockings and go as a stripper, for a laugh. At least I think it was for a laugh. I remember smiling and nodding in support of their ambitions, as they each spewed them proudly onto the tabletop in front of me, but my mind had gone blank.

“What are you going as Gee?” Alexa asked, and all eyes turned to me expectantly.

My thoughts raced, as I flicked through my options. Dancer? No… Singer? Mm…Maybe a lawyer like Alexa? No, I can’t work in an office every day. Doctor? What am I thinking – I faint when I see blood. What do I want? What do I enjoy?

“Ahh, a dancer, duh, what else?” I exclaimed with a nonchalant shrug, and everybody nodded like that made perfect sense. They all knew I loved dancing, they all thought I was talented enough – they could envision me turning it into a career. So, it started to make sense to me too, and I never gave it another thought. It wasn’t until Friday the eighth, when my hair was gelled back and my leotard was on, that I realized something was missing. Now, my boyfriend Kevin would say that what was missing, was my sunny-side-up moment – or the moment when something finally clicks into place in your brain – just like when he first realized that the reason soft, fried eggs with wobbly, yellow yolks were called “sunny-side-up eggs” is because they resembled a sun. Where was my sunny-side-up-moment?

Fast forward five years, to my final year of high school, and the writing of my university application letters. A degree in Language and Culture, majoring in Mandarin Chinese. Why? It will open doors into almost any industry, I love languages, and speaking Chinese is the future. Or maybe it’s just because it was the only degree that even remotely spoke to me and the fact that I still had absolutely no idea what I saw myself doing.

Three years, thousands of rands, a hundred thousand tears and a few distinctions later, I had my degree – and still no clue what I wanted to do with it. It wasn’t fair. My friend Alexa from primary school (remember her?) was in her last year of a law degree and was excited to start her Articles. Daniel had studied film and was that much closer to actualizing his dream – I had no doubt that one day, a movie would be made by him, starring him. How were they so close to achieving their dreams, when I hadn’t even figured out what mine was yet?

I felt lost and confused. The future was rushing towards me faster than I could handle and I needed a plan. I needed a pause button. And that is when my parents were offered the opportunity of a lifetime. A year-long contract, managing and renovating a lodge in the middle of Mozambique, surrounded by wildlife and living closer to family than we would have been in the last ten years. Kevin and I were invited too. So there it was, the escape I needed to figure out once and for all what career would fulfill me – I couldn’t escape the rat-race, but I knew I needed to make it work for me somehow.

So, it was decided – we were all going, and our lives became a flurry of hurried preparation. We finished the renovations on our house and put it up for rent. We fixed up one of the cars and put it up for sale. We gave away our things and packed the rest into boxes. There were rumors of a strange new virus ravaging China. The car sold. The virus spread. We made our travel plans and my dad quit his job. People started to panic buy – COVID was in Africa. We found tenants for the house and a lease was signed. The stores ran out of hand sanitizer. We set a date, we were to leave for Mozambique on the 27th of March, that gave us a week to the day. Then Cyril addressed the nation, instating a national lockdown – effective from midnight on the 26th of March 2020, the day before we were planning to start our journey.

So, we did the only thing we could do upon finding out that we were effectively homeless and jobless, with no way to get across the border in order to attain either. We got extremely drunk. The next day however, we ignored our pounding heads, and made a new plan. Thankfully once again we were saved by family, and by 10 pm on the 26th of March, we were in KZN at my grandmother’s guest house, after 27 hours of driving, and at least four breakdowns - and that's just counting the Land Rover's.

Then the world stopped for a while – not the kind of pause I had in mind, but a pause, nonetheless. The year that I had set aside to find myself whilst living and working in Mozambique, was quickly turning into a worldwide social experiment aimed at curbing a pandemic. I was one of the lucky ones. During those first few months, I had the luxury of a warm bed, a roof over my head, savings to fall back on and my immediate family with me, rather than trapped across borders. The whole world had begun searching for work online, and so, unable to secure a job, I ended up with copious amounts of something that is extremely rare in the 21st century – time. Now truth be told, I wasted a lot of it, but these are unprecedented times, and when I wasn’t anxiously watching the news or taking unhealthily long naps, I was writing.

Journal entries, poems, short stories, my first attempt at a novel. It wasn’t serious, I didn’t have to do any of it, it was just for me, for fun. Until it wasn’t.

Slowly as my work grew and my characters developed, as I learnt the true meaning of writer’s block and how it felt to push past it, a concept unfurled. I had always thought that “knowing” would be something definite – something ingrained, given and as natural as breathing. But like most things in this life, finding my calling was something I had to work for. I thought that when I finally had an answer to the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” I would feel relieved – but I didn’t – instead I felt utterly terrified.

A writer. Following a path less traveled. It was a risk. It was going to be so, so hard. There would be nobody to blame but myself if I failed. But then I grasped it. It was a slippery thought, slick with doubt and fear, but for one second I held it in my hands, and I understood, that it would all be worth it someday, when my works lined bookshelves, bookcases and bed-stands. How ridiculously unreliable this dream of mine was. How entirely exhilarating.

Georgia Rae