“I lied when I said that I was retrenched,” I confessed to my mother, holding strong eye contact, curled up in a cosy corner. “I resigned in February.” Inhale.

She broke eye contact. “Hmm.” Pause. “Ngicabangile, but I just wasn’t sure.” Pause again. “Kodwa ngiyakuzwa.”

Exhale! A subtle sigh of relief settles my chest back into position. I can tell that she still has something on her chest but my defense mechanism at this moment is to speak only when spoken to.

The smell of curry prepared with succulent chicken and sweet corn with puffy rice filled the air and softened the blow for us both.

“But, I don’t understand. Why?” My mother interjected just as I thought I could lay my head to rest evading 21 questions.

-“I’m going to serve now?” my sister’s suggestion saved me. I unfurled from the couch accepting her offer yet still denying my own mother an explanation about a choice I’d made about MY life.

“Why did I lie or why did I resign? I replied, knowing better than that.

I’m not a child nor am I as young as I once was. I know this now, a few signs I’ve passed along the way have indicated to me the inclination of the journey ahead into the greater sphere of adulthood. I am in the thick of it right now, right here and in the moment above.

That moment was the most recent sign to journey past. It was big and bold, reading: “Live by your own rules-5km ahead”. Resigning from a seemingly perfectly fine job may have seemed like a pre-mid-life crisis to the outsider but it was the single best decision I had made as an adult. Up until that point I had lived at the mercy of love, loss and the lessons life loves to dish to those around me that I am forced to learn from as well. I’ve had a few to learn. Some I learned faster than others, considering the times these are to be alive.

Being alive in 2022 is a miracle. Being an adult in 2022 is a wonder. I, for one, wonder about what I’m doing wrong or right. I wonder about the ways God works. I wonder whether I even know what I’m doing, where I’m headed, and how I’m going to arrive. I used to blame this on my parents, both present and absent, and the social and cognitive dissonance it was to be a black child growing up in Johannesburg. The contrasts were striking then as they are now.

I was raised in the ‘Rainbow Nation’ era, and I’m essentially grateful. My mother, whom you have met briefly, did the best she knew with the best that she had and soon it became clear to me that she struggled and that’s when the difference between what I did and didn’t have, beyond the ‘Rainbow Nation’ began to crystalise. What I had was access, to do with it what the new world had promised my mother I could. What I didn’t have was role modeling all that the new world promised her I could achieve. While living, increasingly uncomfortably, between these two worlds, something transpired, that I don’t believe my mother or sister would ever understand.
My mother, sister, and I come from 3 generations, “worlds”. I’m in between gen X and Z. This makes me old enough to be someone’s mother and breadwinner yet, too young to have my ducks in a row or make my own life decisions. It must be true because the latter years of my adulthood have been a test of time. They were such a test that I found myself having an adult conversation with myself about the life and death of my purpose; though on the surface it was about resigning from my office job and taking a sabbatical from working.

My mother is born in 1967. She was born into the horrifying apartheid regime. For a boomer like her, one’s employment is both a badge of honour and a burden- to put it simply, you are lucky enough to have a stream of income, no matter how thin it spreads.

Why in the world would anyone volunteer to give that up? the millennial in me thought. The badge or the burden? I responded to myself…

“Well,” I broke out into reluctant words as a dinner plate settled on a tray landed on my lap.

“I don’t think it would be easy for you to understand but I am physically tired. I was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually drained and it had to stop. “

Her eyebrows carved inward into disturbing creases on her forehead. I could tell that she was bothered by the “tiredness” of it all. All that my mother knows is industrialisation. All she recognises is exchanging time for money, benefits, and up-to-date policies. I was raised to honor that system. But, I now understood that to be an unacceptable inheritance.

So, I continued to speak but it seemed I spoke in tongues as she gradually grew more averted to my words. But, she would never spoil a perfectly good meal. This meal made it all a better pill to swallow as she scooped into her portion and opted to be graveled by her thoughts, if just for a moment. As for me, a flashback to terrible burnout and gradual isolation made it hard to even chew.

February 2020, I realised that life is more than a 9-5 salary. With the delivery of a resignation letter the trajectory of the road, I would travel ahead changed. March 2020 I realised that I was intuitive in my choices because a pandemic shut down the world. For me, finally, a breakthrough in the sense that a sabbatical was in fact the right choice for me. The greatest affirmation of my single resignation would soon ensue. Dubbed ‘The great resignation’- a significant movement amongst a global millennial workforce towards actively resting, changing careers, starting businesses, or working remotely-I was neither alone nor lost, after all.

Truly, being a young adult in 2022 is having the rest button, though disguised as destruction and disaster, at your disposal. Those that used the button wisely are adults living in their autonomy and willpower to make the most of the rest of their lives. I have experienced my unfair share of life- social dissonance, loss of my childhood home, social anxiety, burn out, and more social anxiety. Nevertheless, my glass remains half full and the silver lining is a resilience I can never explain but feel intrinsically. Besides, “THERE IS MORE WHERE ALL OF THIS CHAOS COMES FROM 11km ahead”; that’s the latest sign I’ve read on my way to not getting any younger.