Growing Pains

by Lauren Roodt
While being a responsible blogger by checking up on my peers blogs I found a letter written by Cimone which struck home (hard).

Cimone wrote in her letter exactly what I wished to write in mine but couldn’t find the words. I am pretty sure my parents know that I followed my ex-boyfriend to Rhodes. I thought I had convinced them that if I was going to do Journalism I wanted to go to the best Journalism school in SA, but like Cimone says- parents aren’t gullible. Rhodes has been a hellish night-mare because of him but also I wouldn’t have made it without him. He is my best friend (ironically). I am also highly strung like Cimone and I too am finding ways to settle down. I took this focus in my letter (see below) where I reminisced about the way I used to be liberated like a child. Cimone's story hit home, right on target and settled my worry that these growing pains only happened to me.

The Great Journey

Naive Fool,

Do you remember the day you decided to come to Rhodes and start studying to become a Politician and/or Journalist? Can you remember the feeling of elation and trepidation you got when you thought of being “free” from the bonds of parents and school, and finally making it in the world? The life you thought would be easier and more care-free is in reality the one that would push you to the brink of insanity.
Let me tell you, with all the wisdom acquired in hind-sight, you are in for a trial that will shake the very foundations of your life. You will be uprooted from the comfort of your family, pulled out from the midst of your friends, booted to the other side of the country and buried under a mountain of work that makes your matric seem like the easiest task in your life.
Shame, poor you, you still have to toil away and break through the metaphorical igneous rock that is education, whereas I have made it half-way through. Common sense would dictate that it will be all for the “greater good”, but common is not me, personally (and I know you will feel the same way, eventually) I think that there are other ways of viewing the world that make life a lot more interesting. That would put us in quite a paradoxical situation, because if common sense would have you go to Rhodes and study to become a proactive, sane member of society, and I, having done that, seem to be neither proactive or sane after having followed the “commonsense” route, would inadvertently make the norm insanity and otherwise not governed by commonsense, which seems quite contradictory to me.
I think this proves the theory that no matter how one might change the past, the future will always have the same outcome. Thus, my younger, innocent, naive, foolish self, enjoy your sanity while you still can because your destiny to become a ruler of the planet is inevitable. I know you will get this. It’s just some food for thought.

Till we speak again…
Your loving, insane future self.