Someone almost always has it harder than you

I sometimes look at the multitudes of young people complaining about everything that is wrong with their current state, and how that is directly attributable to anyone else but them. Now firstly let me just say that I’m definitely not the preachy type, so don’t think this will be a tirade about how inept and lazy today’s youth is because I assure you, they certainly are not.



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When I matriculated, I, like a lot of people had no solid plan and I was full of lofty dreams about how things would just sort themselves out. I wouldn’t say that I was waiting for an immaculately dressed man/women to burst open the door of the backroom I was renting and give me a serious and knowing look and then say ‘ hey you right there, you look like the hard working type, but I can tell that circumstances have blocked your way from day one’ and just like that the man/women would then proceed to give me an address to a nice cushy job  and tell me to come in that ‘following Monday’, no but I certainly had that sense of pity and entitlement  about me, as if the world owed me something and the problems of everyone around me paled in comparison to my mind numbing and ‘arg shame’ inducing trials and tribulations.

I lost my parents at age 14 and subsequently lived out that year and the following year alone. I then moved to Soweto to go live with my grandmother who couldn’t help herself and reminded us every week how much of a burden me and my two younger siblings were to her and that one mistake she’d send us packing back to KwaZulu-Natal from whence we came. That is the main reason why less than a week after the matric exams ended I left home and have been on my own ever since.

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 I had always intended to further my studies in varsity, and one of the main reasons why in I never set foot on the grounds of any university in the two years after matriculating, was that I knew that no matter what, they would somehow want some documents, an affidavit or something from my grandmother, and that meant going back to her place.

I fell in the trap of always being able to explain why I was nineteen and not in school. I quickly found that no matter how judgemental someone was, the response ‘my parents died years ago and I’m here in Joburg fending for myself, I’m all on my own’ was enough to quieten them up and illicit an ‘aahh shame poor thing stare’ from them.

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My desperation landed me in the company of individuals who were angry at everything and anyone all the time. Suddenly, the once unthinkable act of turning to crime was growing to be a reality day by day. I quickly found out that ‘izinyokanyoka’ (cable thieves) were not a bunch of undefinable societal menaces from god knows where, but that they could include me.

A chance meeting of a much older guy who like me, liked reading and would regale me with stories of his exploits in the then University of Natal, Finally made me realise that I should at all costs try my best to get an education. As soon as I got my attitude right, I knew that I had to do whatever I could to get out of the rut I was in.

 As I stood in a registration queue at the University of Johannesburg; a year later. It dawned on me that there was nothing special about my circumstances, and that there were literally thousands of young people who were taking initiative and getting themselves out of the varying situations of difficulty that they found themselves in, and like me they realised that education was the way to do it.