Growth is…uncomfortable. And beautiful. Cape Town Chronicles.

View from Table Mountain. Cape Town, South Africa.

I just returned from a trip I took with my boyfriend a few weeks ago. We traveled back to South Africa, and the significance of that trip is still something I’m mulling over. It’s something I will dive into in a different post, trust me it deserves it. No, the thing that really struck me on this trip, was the constant, unwavering feeling that I was in a space that was too small. Definitely familiar, and certainly one that I was fond of, but just slightly offish in the way that it fit.

I spent my entire trip in either Joburg or Cape Town, and I felt this ‘out-of-place’ way distinctly in Cape Town, and not so much in Joburg. This bothered me a great deal, and I spent time trying to figure out why that was. Had I not  outgrown Joburg, but had definitely outgrown Cape Town? I think that which is closest to the truth that I can come up with right now is that Cape Town always represented freedom for me. It’s where I discovered everything I think was worth discovering to a young woman. It’s where I learnt the freedom to experiment, create, demolish, revise and construct myself as who I wanted to be. I thus always held that place in such high regard, because of what it represented to me.

I lived in Cape Town for a straight five years of my life, on my own for the first time. I relished in it, and I fell in love with it. In all that time, the longest I had ever been away from it was two months, and I would start missing it after only a few weeks of separation. I was a a Cape Townian, proudly. Coming to the States and living here for a straight six months marked the first time that I was away from my beloved city for that long. It was long enough to go through withdrawals, and then to get over them. Without realising it, I was slowly getting over the city that had meant so much to me for so long.

I had tied my growth to a place, foolishly, and in my new setting I continued to do what people should. Grow. Bombarded with new surroundings, people, cultures ideologies and experiences…there was truly no way I could have not grown and stretched. Add to that the joys and complexities of a new, real love and everything I knew about everything was changing. I was changing. I just forgot to take stock. I foolishly went back to Cape Town and expected everything to be the same. And it was. But I wasn’t. It felt in a sense like going back to your primary school as an adult and not understanding why the once giant playground was suddenly so small.

I didn’t have this issue with Joburg because I had left that city behind long ago. When I moved to Cape Town, I went back to Joburg to find that it was home to an older version of me. Yet that transition was without pain or consequence because I was too busy falling in love with the new me that I was creating. Cape Town however hurt a little, in that way that parting with your first love will always sting. But our first loves were never meant to last. They were meant to introduce us to ourselves, have us make stupid mistakes from which we learn and lead us on a path to even greater things. In light of that, to look back would be foolish. I’m happy I no longer fit in that space, because it marks my growth. I’ll always love Cape Town, it’s a beautiful city. But when I go back there now, it will always be as a visitor. I am no longer a Cape Townian.

I’m blessed to be where I am, and I love it so. Discomfort isn’t always a bad thing. Keep growing, keep loving and keep moving forward.

Love,

Noni