Introduction

Broken, scarred by abuse, extremely tired, hurt and damaged, I needed to start a new life after the death of my spouse. I was weighed down by my past and facing a future that required healing. With debt and ruin all around me, the only prospect of relief I had was tickets for an overseas holiday my husband had purchased on his credit card. The tickets, including one for him, represented his last goal, set as self-encouragement to outlive doctors’ predictions for him.   

Before leaving South Africa I contacted my friend Leon, who had immigrated to Australia in 1980. We were high school friends and had not heard from or seen each other in twenty-seven years. I could never ignore the very special bond I felt we had. I did not want to regret not making an effort to contact or see him, since I was going to be in his country.

Remembering me as a fresh young girl, he was astounded by the neglected person I had become. Overweight, my eyes dull and lifeless, and very defensive of my life obviously attached to falsehoods, I presented myself believing I was present and together. Falsehood does not include lying to ourselves or others only. It includes pretending and faking and I found that I had become good at it. As long as I could remember I pretended that my life was on track and happy. I remember how unhappy I was but how I could put on my ‘happy’ face even though I felt like curling up in a bundle and rolling away. Curling up my body, closing my eyes and pretending to be asleep had for many years been my escape to a happy place. It was in these hours I used to lay awake and wonder what happened to Leon, what he was doing, and how he had turned out. It was also in these moments that I sincerely wished for the opportunity to meet with him again. Although I was only sixteen when we met and although we spent only a few hours together, I felt that deep within a very special connection existed. A connection that time apart could never destroy.

Naturally I pretended that I was well balanced when I met him but he could see further and offered to help me to improve my life attached to truth. He taught me that truth exists only in reality, that everything I could access with my five senses in and around me is truth. I became more aware of reality, as it is, and understood truth for the first time in my life. It felt as if I woke up from a deep sleep. In that sleep I dreamed, I lived, worked, even had children but my body was in a stagnated position while everything I had done for forty-five years happened in my mind. At that moment I realised how physically out of touch my senses really were, how far removed from the present moment I physically was. It suddenly felt like life had passed me by and that I had been in another place while it did. The place I lived in was not a physical place, nobody could access it, and it could not be seen with the naked eye or touched by hand. It was created for me by my belief systems and it all existed in my mind only. Reality presents itself every moment, accessing it physically with my senses made me understand for the first time in my life that truth is not abstract. It took me awhile to accept truth though; I was not immediately ready to replace my existence in falsehood with a life in truth. When Leon drew my attention to his surprise about my negligence, I retaliated in the worst possible way. As our backgrounds were identical, he immediately identified the cause of my problem, as he had found himself in the same position ten years earlier.

A profound moment of truth at the deathbed of his brother, Deon, had shifted him towards consciousness.

He offered to assist me in making the necessary improvements. With unwavering love and support he directed me towards truth, the only ingredient needed for improvement. With my physical senses shut down by intimidating influences diverted from truth, I had no idea that truth was physical and available as the only measuring tool with which to regain my self-control. My whole existence till then was built on ideas, ideals, and dreams of others. I firmly believed in a doctrine that started out based on a dream of a young woman many decades ago. The history of the church based on what was in a young woman’s subconscious mind and not reality obviously then could exist only in my subconscious mind too. Using my senses and measuring this fact with truth explained why the church had to keep my thoughts and my focus as far away from reality as possible. In a dreamlike frenzy it was easy to see ‘the day of the Lord’, ‘the unlocking of the realms of the departed’, or my ‘sins washed away’. What I could not see was that God is truth and not a punishing human I had to fear or be afraid of. I also believed myself to be the insecure person I was moulded to be according to the ideals of the leaders of my country who ruled even before I was born.

I could not deny truth in the example Leon set for me, and so I had no choice but to accept it. Truth exposed all the falsehoods in me and helped me to discover that I had never known love or how to love; that I was totally controlled by fear. My belief in a doctrine and how far detached from God or truth I was, how this doctrine flourished amongst my people during the years that we had no classification as a people and offered us our much-needed identity became so clear to me. Using my senses, I now could see truth as I drove through the poorest areas of communities who were neither ‘white’ nor ‘black’, a people who desperately wanted to belong to a group but had no pure identity due to our mixed blood.

The doctrine I belonged to gave us that identity in the form of the most beautifully designed church buildings, an emblem, and black and white uniform for choristers, and a close bond of camaraderie understood only by its followers. Instead of joining other denominations in speaking out against apartheid, my church remained dead quiet at the time and grew its membership. It taught me to accept my circumstances the segregation brought about and focus on God while it aligned itself on the same principles of separation as the law.

In my early childhood my church building was a dark wood and iron building with one toilet situated far from the building itself, while just across the railway track  on the ‘white’ side of my town was a neat brick church of the same doctrine. I was taught that God is truth but when truth like my circumstances presented itself then God became a man, a father figure, detached from what reality made me see and that is how my mind was formed to know truth or God.

Making the improvements Leon suggested ensured that I would transform physically, mentally, and spiritually. The decision—the first I ever made without being influenced or manipulated—produced instantaneous improvement, rather than change. Improvement required courage to face the burns of purification and betterment, while change would have been an aesthetic shift, I learnt. Every step I encountered required me to feel, acknowledge, and go through the pain until I emerged victorious. I learnt how to love myself, take ownership of my past and take full control of a physical, mental, and spiritually unified self.

Above all I learnt to value the special friendship I have with a man who taught and proved to me what love is. A friendship built on truth means a bond that will exist through sunshine and rain, an openness and understanding of each other. We have learnt that love does not mean owning or possessing, demanding or expecting from each other. Love to us means being truthful to ourselves, giving each other room to safely express our thoughts and feelings, and knowing that the only way to nurture our connection is to grow and improve. Our bond far surpasses romantic love and it bears the guarantee of ‘friends forever’.

I share my triumph now as the owner of the consequences apartheid produced in my life, free from the clutches of a religious doctrine based on fear, and—one of my greatest victories—having reached my perfect body weight without a diet or a scale.