On work and making meaning

I got my first job in the year 1999. I was fourteen years old.

I began waitressing at a coffee shop on weekends and during holidays in the then-small coastal town that I grew up in. They made tramezzinis (exotic!) and upside-down-belly-dancing cappuccinos (more exotic) and sold them from 7.30 a.m. til 5 p.m. daily. The owner liked to play Enrique Iglesias on repeat. Sometimes I smell a particular brand of floor cleaner (the cleaner called it ‘Jelly Shine’), or a particular blend of coffee, and I’m transported back to the many hours I spent taking orders and walking fast but not too fast back to the kitchen to place them.

At the time I loved having this job. I survived the awkward experience of being paid to serve people that I recognized (in a small town you basically are serving your friends’ parents and sometimes your friends, or, even more awkward, former teachers) because it gave me a form of financial freedom. The only money I earned was tips – there was no minimum wage. Still, the transition from having absolutely no spending money to having some was overall positive. With my own money came the freedom to spend it how I wanted to. I bought things that any young teenager growing up on the KZN North Coast in the late nineties would buy – sweets from Sweets from Heaven, boardshorts from the local surf shop, and CDs. After that first waitressing job I waitressed for ten more years, all the way through high school and university.

When I left University, still shimmering in the glow of completing a Masters Degree, I was convinced it would be easy to find work that mattered. I sent out my admittedly short CV to companies and non-governmental organizations that I respected and waited. I picked up odd jobs – very odd, some of them, but that is another story – so that I could pay my bills. I moved cities and hoped that starting my adult life would be easy.

Spoiler alert. It wasn’t.

Struggling to find paid work, too much time on my hands, and full of the confidence of the young I turned to blogging, wanting to find a way to release some of the pent-up energy I had. Most of this writing was unpaid. I wrote because I needed to write to get things off my chest. To work things out. To play with language. To pass the time.

I wrote about things that were going on in our politics and in the world, about culture, and my life. I published on my own blog, in local newspapers’ online platforms, and in the online columns of the then Women 24. It was the era where the comments section was always open and I continued to write about feminism, gender equality, and women’s rights despite the trolls who seemed to take great pleasure in writing things antithetical to progress. They seemed harmless and inconsequential to the act of actually writing for the love of it.

There was something beautiful about writing without the expectation of an audience who agreed with you. I wrote about what interested me, what I saw and thought was important, and what I liked. I didn’t worry about what people thought about me, or whether they’d pigeonhole me. I wrote fast and from the heart. I wrote for writing’s sake. To make meaning.

I was speaking with someone recently about writing online during that time in history. She, like me, was a popular blogger back when blogs were the thing. We were talking about what it was that allowed us to write so much online, and to write with an openness and courage that we felt we’d lost somewhere along the way. We agreed that it was a few things (for instance, the older I get the less certain I feel about anything) but that mainly it was a combination of two things in particular.

The first was that the internet was a mostly friendlier place in the early 2000s – things felt less polarized and aggressive than they feel now. The second, which is linked to the first but is broader than it, was that it was okay to be wrong back then. It was okay to write something and then receive feedback, then learn from that feedback and write better. It was okay not to be sure, to be trying to work it out. To make mistakes and to apologize for them. It was okay then to change your mind. It was okay for your work to be a work in progress. It was easier to be brave when you didn’t have to be perfect.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the saying that you should ‘write what you know’ and whether it feels true to me in fiction or in non-fiction. I do think there is value and often more ease in writing about the things you’ve been through, the communities you grew up in, and the identities that are similar to your own. It’s easiest to write with authenticity this way. But I also think that there is value in writing to make sense of ideas that you might not be so sure about. To write as a question rather than an answer.

And so as someone who is no longer a waitress and is currently a writer, I’m hoping that I can find more space to use my writing to make sense, to make meaning, and to explore. I’m no longer certain about many things, but I am certain of this: it is better to be curious about the world and the people who live in it.