When the Storm Passed Through Me

I looked at the time. It was 03h30. I had not slept at all. I had a decision to make. By 12h00, on that fateful day, 6 October 2020, I had sent my letter to my direct manager. I was resigning. I was not running away, as many people said. I was simply too exhausted.

I had faced similar stress before. In 2014, I fought on. In 2018, I fought and stayed on. But this time felt different. Perhaps it was simply the end of the innings. I needed to choose myself. I had given it everything.

Even in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I remained hopeful that I would be alright. After all, I had started in private practice before venturing into public service. Still, it was not until 28 December 2020 that my resignation was formally accepted. When it finally was, I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders. Yet I was also saddened that I could not complete some of the most important projects I had set out to do.

Deep down, I had always known that I needed to return to my roots, to entrepreneurship. Even so, it was a very hard decision.

The months that followed were difficult. I had no income, yet I still had to support my family. I was also dealing with spiritual turbulence. It was, in every sense, a Dark Night of the Soul. I tried to preserve some semblance of my old life. I was still travelling to Johannesburg and Cape Town. I restarted my businesses and, ultimately, founded Bukelani Institute.

At the same time, another path was opening, the spiritual path. But I had much to learn. I had to relearn how to work from home. Relearn how to live without a cushy salary. Relearn solitude. Relearn trust. Trust in the universe. Trust in timing. Trust in my own becoming.

My family was supportive during this period. They were sensitive to what I was going through. In the darkness, I crucially began to see light. I believed I would get back on my feet.

I had, after all, been here before.

When our very first business folded in 2007, the hardship was far worse than what I experienced in 2020 and 2021. Back then, I was young, naïve, and had no clientele to speak of. I had no stable accommodation. By grace, I met a mutual friend while visiting a friend we went with at Nyandezulu Primary School. A friend I had only recently reconnected with, almost by fate. He offered me a place to stay.

Some days there was no proper food. I learnt to eat plenty of dry beans because those were in abundance. I would take a bus into town with no money for the return trip to Ntuzuma. It was my first time living in a township since arriving in Durban five years earlier as a student at the then Natal Technikon. Ntuzuma proved too far from the church I had just joined, so I moved to Umlazi. The accommodation there was dreadful. I felt I could smell poverty. It was one of the hardest periods of my life. I did not know the people. The place was so different from the countryside where I had grown up. I felt like an outcast, down and out.

I would play Don Williams’ Where Do We Go From Here over and over again. It spoke to me with painful precision.

An elderly couple from the church later offered me accommodation. That was an upgrade. Then the host of the church did the same. I hid my poverty and my struggles from my parents. I felt it would be too much for them to carry. The thought of going back home having failed was unbearable. So I stayed on. I fought another day.

Things began to improve in 2008. By 2009, I was back in the game. The worst had passed. I started another business and secured the Public Works contract. I travelled across the country. I helped renovate and upgrade the family home in Port Shepstone.

Then, in 2013, I joined the Sharks Board.

It was not an easy place to be. I was an enigma there. There were huge highs and deep lows, but I fought and stayed. Mistakes were made. Errors of judgement were made. I was young. I had no real formal corporate background. There were moments when I suffered deeply, and sometimes quietly. There were periods of great inner turmoil. The highs were very high. The lows were very low.

Today, I am grateful for both.

I did not know then that I was such a survivor.

The year 2020 tested me severely, almost in equal measure to 2007 and 2014. What I now see about the hardest periods of my life is this: those were the times that helped me find myself spiritually. Pain introduced me to myself. I got to know who I was beneath ambition, beneath position, beneath performance.

I also noticed a pattern. In each dark time, the turning point came when I stopped blaming others, and even stopped blaming myself. I accepted the challenge. I accepted reality. Then I found a way to move forward.

I cannot say I would choose such pain if given another option. But I also cannot say those painful years were wasted.

Healing is not easy. And healing is delayed when you are still blaming others.

Acknowledging my own errors of judgement, my poor decisions, and the ways I made some situations worse by not confronting them head-on, helped me draw a line in the sand. It helped me say: I have been here before. I have survived before. And I will survive again.

The common thread in all my suffering is that it often arrived when I was becoming too comfortable, when there was a lingering feeling that I was growing complacent and avoiding necessary change. It came when I relied too heavily on advice from other people, when I outsourced my decisions to those who could never fully feel what I was feeling inside.

In all my hard times, I took refuge in books. I still find it remarkable that, in every season of extreme turbulence, the right book would somehow find its way into my hands. My dream life, too, always seemed to intensify during those periods. Some battles I would fight first in dreams, and sometimes even win there before I could win them in waking life. My departed loved ones would visit me in dreams and give me a sense of the terrain ahead.

The turbulence of 2020 and 2021 demanded extraordinary patience with myself as I navigated stormy seas. I remember once seeing the words inscribed on a sculpture of Vasco da Gama in the Durban CBD: “O stormy seas, how much of your salt are the tears of Portugal.” Those words pierced me. They felt like a mirror.

I can say, categorically, that the turning point came towards the end of 2022.

By 2023, I was making ends meet again.

By 2024, I was fully back in the game, older, wiser, and more awake. I was more aware of the world. More assured of my place in it. More aware of my inherent ability to chart my way forward with flexibility and faith. I learnt to dance with the lows. I learnt to listen to instinct. I recovered my zest for life.

I learnt to pause and appreciate the smaller things: the smell of freshly cut grass, the scent of the ocean, the beauty of daydreaming, the journeys of the dream world, the quiet encounters with my soul and my spiritual team.

I do not claim that I no longer suffer. But I now appreciate the balance between dark and light, sadness and joy. All things require balance.

I am more assured now that I can dream the world into being.

I am more able to summon wisdom from the winds of the south, west, north, and east. I am more appreciative of Pachamama, of the moon and the sun, of rivers and their remembering. Things that once triggered me no longer hold the same power, unless, of course, the old habits of the ego creep back in.

But even then, I know this much:

I have crossed dark waters before.

And I know how to find my way back to shore.

Author’s Note

This memoir essay is written from memory, but also from feeling.

Some moments have softened at the edges, others remain as sharp as the day they were lived. What matters most is not the exact sequence of events, but the truth they carry.

The years between 2007 and 2024 were not simply years of hardship. They were years of becoming.

If there is anything I have learnt, it is this: the storms we endure are not punishments, but initiations. They strip away what is not essential and return us, sometimes painfully, to ourselves.

I do not write this as someone who has mastered life. I write this as someone who has been broken, rebuilt, and is still learning how to stand with grace in both sunlight and shadow.

If you find yourself in your own storm, may you remember:

You are not lost. You are being remade.

And somewhere ahead of you, even now, the shore is waiting