When letting go just isn't an option

People say that women who enter into abusive relationships and remain in them
have no-one but themselves to blame. I think this is a very narrow minded way to look at a situation .Especially if you're looking in from the outside.

I can absolutely relate to someone who would stick to something that is harmful to them. I do it all the time. Like the love affair I had with my beloved alfa.
Everyone told me not to buy her. Alfas are notorious for being unreliable and they cost an arm and a leg in repairs, but she was just so pretty so I had to have her.
I wanted her and I went and bought her. Didn't even tell my father I was buying her. In fact, specifically didn't tell my father I was buying her because he'd ranted about
the unreliability of alfa's when I just mentioned the car to him.

Within a day of buying her the problems started. Firstly, no-one wanted to insure me. A 21 year old female with less than 2 years of driving experience,
was way too high risk and no-one would take the chance.
I phoned around everywhere, asked for help online, tried to insure through my mother with me as a principal driver, but none of this helped.
Eventually I managed to get first for women to give me third party cover. And then I was happy :) I could finally get to drive her.

I took out her manual and read all about caring for her. Went and bought the right kinda selespeed transmission fluid and the right kinda oil put them in the boot.
(I'm quite partial to taking personal care of my cars and doing my own services if possible.) I tried to learn as much about her inner workings as possible.


The first 3 weeks were glorious. I loved her and was so proud of my new car. She was a "driving weapon" to say the least. But then one day, she beeped and that dreaded message,
selespeed system failure flashed across the screen. I read up about it and decided to ignore it, because it had just happened once. About a week later, it happened again.

I phoned alfa and immediately took her in to see what's what. They said the actuator wasn't working properly and quoted me R21 000 to fix it. Next, the boot of the cv joint went. Then,
the gearbox selectors and some pipe in the gearbox. Then, the fuel injection pipe. One after one, parts of my alfa (or romaana as nooj named her) gave up. Each time a part of her broke,
I'd be left stranded on the side or in the middle of the road. I was very lucky to have found a guy who used to work for alfa breakdown as a mechanic. I'd phone
him and he'd give me instructions on what to do to get her moving again. I used to keep oil and water and spanners and tow rope and jumper cables in my car at all times.
Even so, I still needed to be towed much. And spend hours waiting, stranded in the middle of the road, with cars hooting all round, for the AA to come and tow me away. At one point I needed to be towed four times in a single week.

I had no car more than I had a car. Every time I used to drive her I was in fear of seeing the selespeed system failure. She beeped continuously, complaining about every single part of her.
Eventually I took to cringing at the beeps, but ignoring them and dealing with the problem once I'd broken down, because replacing parts each time she complained dind't seem to help in any case.

I had her for just about a year when the crash happened. It was raining and he was drunk and he smashed the whole left side and some of the front. My heart lurched and the selespeed system failure message came up.
I didn't think I would ever be able to fix her, and I was right. She was declared a write off.

I didn't want to write her off. I had her towed home. I wanted to make a plan and I wanted to see if I can fix her. She lay their in my garage. I made many plans to call the panelbeater to ahve a look at her, but I didn't ahve the heart.
I knew if a panelbeater came and looked at her he'd say she was irreparable and I dind't want to hear that.

Now, a year later, she's being sold for spares. Her heart was removed and put into another alfa. Her radio, her tyres, her bumper and badges, every little part of her is being ripped and stripped and taken to different cars.
It hurts me so much to see her like that. When I enter the garage and see the remains a I feel a sense of sadness, like she's broken into pieces and nothingness.

She was bad for me. Very bad. SOme months my entire salary went into paying for repairs on her, but I still just could not let go. The accident was a huge blessing, because had it not happened,
I would probably still have had her. I'd still be paying so much money all the time and getting stuck all the time. I wouldn't sell her. There simply can be no price on something you love.

Judge me not

As we grow, we learn to be what the people in our environment expect us to be. For someone who is shy in school to stand out and be an achiever is really, really difficult because everyone around him/ her is expecting nothing to come out of the person's mouth.
For someone, who through the pressures of high school, became the village idiot in order to entertain everyone around him adn become popular, or someone who was forced into, excuse the language, the title of "bitch", it's something that's really hard to shake. So instead of shaking it, you'd rather just play into it and cement that thought.

Social media--and i mean of the twitter kind, not the fb kind, where u link to people other than those who knew u before,
is cool because it allows u to be whoever u want to be. Not who you're expected to be by the society u live in.


I deleted my first two blogs because I didn't follow this online media rule and told all the people I knew in real life about them. But then I felt
so restrained because there were a limited number of things I could say when I knew which people would be reading it.

I listened to a tedtalk video today that really spoke to me. It says, we don't become more creative as we grow, but we are born creative and as we grow we lose more and more of that creativity. The reason, Ken Robinson gave in his tedtalk, was that we are too scared of judgement as we grow older.
We don't just try things to see how they turn out and when we stop doing that, we inhibit ourselves. Instead of failing, we choose not to try.
Ken Robinson believes this is something we learn at school.

He's right, but it's more than just a problem with the 'syllabus'. I think it's a problem with humankind. We're all quick to judge each other and to stop anyone who strays from the pack.

We want them back to what is "normal" because "normal" is good and "different" is bad.

It's even entrenched in religion. Like Hamza Yusuf says in his book "purification of the heart", religions that propogate ancestral worship, propogate a sense of shame before man. Don't do this or that, because the elders will look down on it.
In Islam we don't have this kind of ancestral propogation, but as muslims we practice it anyway. Many of the things we do don't come from the quran and hadith, but rather, from the opinions of other muslims.

Modern cultures hold each other together in much the same way. Even if it's not a 'religious' thing, there's always a set of invisible rules governing the way u live.


The old IBM slogan really spoke to me because it was so simple and unconstrained. Think. That was the motto. No guidelines on how or when or why.
No guidelines/restrictions on what age u need to be to think and what kind of thinking would be acceptable.

Think*