Hey! It’s me. Well, it’s you, but from 2024.  I/We have turned 39. You, my dear 9-year-old self, are at a pivotal stage in life. You just won’t quite comprehend just how pivotal for a few more years. If I remember correctly, you’re somewhat bewildered, right?

There’s a lot going on: You moved away from Satafrika with the family 2 years ago, and became a foreigner in a foreign land. In the space of those 2 years, you’ve gone from a limited vocabulary of “Hello. How are you?”, to a speeding train of ideas and questions communicated in heavily-accented English. Now you’ve said farewell to that foreign place and its people. You’re back in your homeland, in 1994, and you feel like a foreigner once again. (Never mind that South Africa is itself in a state of long-awaited change).

Once upon a time, two years ago, you could have fluent conversations with your grandparents on both sides. Here you are now. Confused. Cut off. Constantly trying to retreat into a shell, because you cannot understand what any of your relatives are trying to say to you. Laughter and shared memories, the heartbeat of this warm family, float over your head. The words run together too fast for you to connect them into any kind of meaning, let alone be able to construct any intelligible response. You will be doing a looooot of smiling and nodding. More than one relative will fix you with a strange stare, but most will make space for the changeling in their midst.

Here’s the fun part: some strangers will feel free to insult you, a child, to your face, because ungathi uzenzangcono, uyatwanga njengeModel-C,[i] and in fact they need to have a word with your parents about this disrespectful child who doesn’t answer in her mother tongue. Little do they know that in a few years, their own children would have been enrolled in suburban schools, and they too will come face to face with the linguistic erasure that comes with English-medium immersive schooling. You will, sadly, hardly be an anomaly in post-1994 South Africa.

I wish you would stubbornly overcome the embarrassment of fumbling the grammar of isiZulu and Xitsonga, and persevere in relearning what locked in your brain somewhere. But you won’t. Not for a few more years.

Forming enduring connections with your agemates will be difficult for a while. You’ll have to go to boarding school, hundreds of kilometres away from Mom and Dad. And next year, you’ll change schools. Again. And the year after that. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of a lifetime of nomadic tendencies.

Even though you will eventually settle into one school until matric, you will remain that strange, nerdy bookworm. This will not be helped by the fact that you will choose to wear clothes from the middle-aged woman’s section of Foschini. Because to this day, I cannot explain why we thought the Rebecca Malope haircut was a good idea. At age 12? That tragedy lasts way too long. Until the end of high school. Yup. High school will be socially awkward and rough.

Hang in there, you will eventually find your tribe. And a better sense of fashion.

Thanks to those awkward high school years, your love for the written word will be ignited. It endures to this day, what with the joy of writing that you will discover soon. You will be parted from it by the pressures of university. It will pop up every now and then in the writing of poetry. You may or may not venture into spoken word, and rap on one occasion each. (That was…an experience.) Thankfully, it will not be captured on social media. The internet doesn’t yet exist in your time. Also, the fiction that you write in your teenage years must never see the light of day, okay? It was bad, girl. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Ourself?

Back to your nearer future.

You’ll get better at making friends, in due time. About friendships: as we get older, we will make friends, we will lose friends. Around the 19-year-old mark, you’ll be convinced that you need to cut people off, at the slightest relational wobble. The Laura and Jackie Incident of 1993[ii] lends some credence to this unhelpful line of thought. This was an ideology we could definitely have done without.  

People have their own paths. And so, those you may be close to at one time, must eventually go their own way. A lot of your friends will move to other cities for work, and that will be the reason you become less present in one another’s lives. Or. You’ll attend your friends’ weddings, and thus will begin The Drift. Or. If y’all survive new towns and marriages, then the pitter-patter of little feet will stomp on the tenuous bond of your adult friendships.

When that happens, don’t go back into the shell of 1994. Stay open. Stay curious. By God’s grace you will keep finding your community. Because the Lord sets the lonely in families, and He will bless you/us with deep friendships. So, as old friendships morph (or end), new friendships begin.

(Some friendships will survive the aforementioned cataclysmic events. In fact, you get a whole bag of bonus nieces and nephews because you and your friends find creative ways of staying connected. Also, you’ll figure out that length of friendship does not necessarily equal depth of friendship. Hello, somebody?)

Godly friends will hold you together in some dark days yet to come, and some friendships will have the saddest end on this earth, where we await our reunion one day in the Lord’s presence. What will sustain you in those times is the time and care invested during the times of ease.

Ah yes. You noticed that I wrote of our friends’ weddings, but said nothing about us. Yeeeeaaaaaahh, sooooooooo…about that… Contrary to the romantic script imagined by our 19- to 29-year-old selves, fed by Disney movies and way too many romance stories[iii], we do not have the ‘husband and 2.1 kids plus uSpottie, the dog’. That script has long since been thrown into the fire[iv].

Instead, we have the awesome privilege of working out what the single life looks like in joyful service to our Lord and Saviour. It turns out when you ask for the Lord to give you an extraordinary adventure, He’s always keen to answer that kind of prayer. And it has been an unusual adventure, I must say.

There are many benefits of the adventure. Peace. Peace is a big one. Also, I don’t reckon we would have had time to rediscover the joy of the particular creative talents the Lord gave you to steward, if we were otherwise occupied with little bundles of joy.

I certainly would not have the unhurried time to spend with the parentals, now that our relationship is not defined by the Rules of This Household. These years have been a God-send, because none of us knew we would be saying goodbye to Dad so suddenly or so soon.

You and the parents may not understand one another for a few years (refer back to the pain of puberty, particularly your ‘big’ emotions; kuzobarough. The fear of your mother will keep you on the straight and narrow). Despair not. When you’re closer to this my big age, you will find that you and The Big Sis enjoy spending time with the parentals, and getting to know them for themselves.

I may have sketched an occasionally unpalatable picture of what the next 30 years will bring across your path. This is definitely not where I expected us to be at this big age, quarter to forty. But this is beautiful.

There is joy in this place, once you learn to perceive the many ways the Lord keeps blessing you. You will be able to testify that you have see the goodness of God. Whatever has happened (or will happen, from where you are), God is good. And He knows what He is doing with our life. (I still don’t know 99% of the time here in 2024, but know that His will is good and perfect. Because you’ve stubbornly tried things your way, and it never works out how God can make it work out).

Take a deep breath. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will direct your path. Also: live .

Lots of love

Me/You from 2024

P.S. Stop starting fights with your Big Sister. Y’all are going to be disconcertingly close friends in your future anyway.

Copyright reserved Gugulethu Mhlanga 2024.

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[i] Ungathi uzenzangcono, uyatwanga njengeModel-C: Like you are elevating yourself above others; you’re speaking in a twang like you go to a Model C school.

[ii] What had happened is, these two friends of mine decided to play an April Fool’s prank on me, an uninitiated transplant from the southern tip of Africa, who had no knowledge of the significance of April 1. It was a dark time.

[iii] And in keeping with certain mathematical equations, the dismal ration of men:women in these streets.

[iv] Instead, we still have impossible crushes, that we rotate every 3 months or so. It’s fun. Thankfully you never embarrassed yourself by telling of your real-life crushes you liked them. It was better that way, because yeyi! In 30 years you will see why it was a good thing. You dodged some bullets. I’m proud of us.