Revelation of Patience — Reminding Myself of an Important Truth
My blogging has been a bit sporadic of late. I started this blog not really knowing what to write, not sure if you know this but coming up with something to write every week is really difficult, part of why I don’t write every week anymore. I realised what I should write about, so I am going to start with this; why my blogging has been less frequent.
Firstly, I picked up freelancing a bit with Between 10and5 as a content producer. Writing for them is great because it gets me paid and I have the opportunity to work on articles about some of South Africa’s best artists. I am privy to some incredible things. Here is one of my favourite posts that I worked on recently: Activist and Creative Director is Rebranding Sharpeville. I got to chat to Romeo Malepe for almost two hours in order to write the story.
We chatted about a collection of things from his come-up hustling with his Dad to hustling to get his degree. To his passion to improve the lives of others through his experience in branding. Right now he is working with branding to improve the historic community of Sharpeville. He is looking for sponsorships and funding to get the project to grow even further.
Over and above that I have been working on a whole bunch of other articles for 10and5. So if you do want to see some of what I am working on you can catch me there. The other project I am currently putting most of my time and energy in to is my podcast.
The podcast is called Not Really Radio and you can find it on Apple and Spotify. I started the podcast with a friend of mine who I used to do campus radio with by the name of Hlumelo Miv Maqubela. The radio thing hasn’t been happening for me of late, so I needed to find a way to flex that muscle and Hlumelo came to me with the idea of a podcast so we got it going.
It has been amazing doing that, seeing friends come through to help us with it from one of Cape Town’s top voice over artists, to my brother (Fair Game) an incredibly talented music producer, to a friend of mine who studied sound engineering mastering every episode for us.
I have seen people come together to help us make this podcast into something and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. To everyone that has helped with the podcast thank you so much, if you’ve listened or shared it, thank you!
The idea behind Not Really Radio is that Miv and I want to do something different to what we see in Radio. We want to be more honest, more raw and more real than you will experience in commercial radio. We basically pick a topic and see where the conversation goes from there. With just three episodes out, we have actually had some incredible conversations that have genuinely changed some of the ways I view the world.
I know that I have created the podcast with Miv, but I would listen to it even if I wasn’t apart of it. So with that being said it is a product I am really proud of, and what’s great we just discovered how to increase the recording quality. So the sound is about to come through incredibly crisp next week on Episode 4. I am excited for that!
There are a few things in life that when you do them, you genuinely feel like this is something you’re meant to be doing. When I record the podcast and edit it, that is how I feel. The other things that make me feel like that are writing, being behind a microphone in almost any shape or form and being apart of making videos and photos is pretty great too. Basically I just want to have cool conversations and make stuff. While I am not getting paid to do that right now, I am at least actually doing those things.
I have also been spending some time finding ways to make money with those passions. So I have joined a casting agency and a V/O agency. The V/O Agency is called Biblo Voice, it’s the same agency as South African comedian Rob Van Vuuren. Which for me is really cool. I haven’t gotten any work through it yet, but it is still great to be recognized and at least be putting myself out there in the field that I do want to be in.
While I am doing all of that, I am still working in SEO full-time at the moment. This is what takes me to what I ultimately need to write about and something that I was reminded of this week, patience.
As I got to this point, I stopped and read a blog post I wrote last year about what working in SEO taught me and wow I needed to read that today. I am going to repeat what I wrote there to a certain degree with a few more mistakes made and few more months of life lived.
Here is the truth, I have been struggling with anxiety quite badly over the last few months. I have been working incredibly hard, while fighting just to survive and it has been really hard. While at the same time, I have felt like a failure because many of my friends are succeeding in the industry that I want to be in right now and I am, well, in digital marketing.
There are a few things that I forget though. In the blog post I wrote last year, I spoke about how pursuing one’s dream takes years of hardwork and will not happen over night. My dreams are not happening over night and that is good!
I was reminded the other night, that throughout my whole life, one of my biggest struggles has always been impatience. I don’t like waiting. It has caused me a lot of hurt and it has hurt people I really care about. Sadly, being impatient has deeper implications than getting angry when you’re in a line. Which is a part of why my dreams should not happen over night. I need to learn to persist when times are hard, I need to learn to wait in peace, I need to learn that life takes time, I need to learn that it is okay not to have everything I want right now. Delayed gratification is good.
What I want to achieve in this life requires resillience, patience, bravery and commitment. Working hard and that hard work not paying off for a while teaches one that and I need it. Don’t get me wrong, it sucks but its needed.
I also have this revelation often (I forget it just as often), I am not getting paid for my blogging, I am not getting paid for my podcasting and I am not getting paid for the videos I make on Instagram. Guess what though? I do have an audience, and almost every time I see someone I haven’t seen in a while they will either tell me that I make them laugh on Instagram, they enjoyed my blog or they’re liking what I’m doing with the podcast.
Ultimately why do I create what I create? It is this; for it to have an impact on the readers, listeners or viewers. If I am impacting them then that is what matters, not if I am getting paid for it. I am going to tell the stories I want to tell because I need to tell them.
If one day I can transform to doing that full-time that would be amazing but for now I am going to reject the anxiety of thinking I am not doing enough. For now I am going to look at the meaning of what I am doing and not the financial reward for it. I am going to work at being happy at my full-time job while I am here.
I am going to wait on God’s timing and do what I feel I need to do without trying to force everything to work out in my favour. I have been doing that and in doing so I have hurt myself and people around me. I am not going to do it anymore.
I will be secure in God’s timing, I will be secure in creating what I create because of it’s impact and I will be secure in myself. I fully believe that will help me with the anxiety that I have been dealing with and I hope what I am learning helps you to learn too.
Thanks for reading….
