I feel like all my cycles have been busted. In 2006 Ze Frank made a video¹ about busting your cycles. He said:

Busting your cycle is where you take one aspect of your life that’s more or less constant and you purposely bust it. By temporarily breaking a routine, you can often experience the world in a very different way. If you bust the right cycle, this shift in perspective can often lead to elation and a sense of possibility.

In a lot of ways, this whole traveling thing—you know, the whole leaving my job, putting my stuff in boxes, leaving my home of seven years, saying goodbye to friends I’ve seen practically daily—that I’ve been engaging in for the past three months has been all about busting cycles. I’ve broken all my routines: the routine of living in a constant home, the routine of going to the café to read every morning when I wake up, the routine of going to work for eight hours a day, the routine of traveling on weekends, &c. And mostly it has led to elation and a sense of possibility. But something else happened when I got to South Africa. I busted more cycles than I knew I had and it didn’t leave me feeling elated. It left me feeling lost and confused and with just a little less energy for engaging with the world than I usually feel.

There’s so much that I have wanted to say about being in South Africa that I don’t know where to start. When people ask me how I am finding South Africa, I tell them that Cape Town is great and fun, that living in Muizenburg, nestled between False Bay and the mountains, is gorgeous beyond belief. All of this is true.

Muizenberg Beach. Literally three blocks away from my house.

But I don’t generally tell them that I spent two weeks doing almost nothing—just staying indoors during the day, waiting for Julia (who I’m staying with) to come home in the evenings. That I am paralyzed and off-balance from a variety of cycle-busting discomforts:

It is uncomfortable to break my cycle of constant connection—to be forced to explore a foreign country without my iPhone on-hand to give me maps or café recommendations. In the U.S. with my phone, I am never lost. In South Africa, without one, unless I meticulously plan my route ahead of time, I am lost constantly.

It is scary to be in a country that is sometimes called one of the most violent countries outside of a war zone². Early in my first week, I told Julia I was going to run to the ATM to get cash and she said, “Be careful—I’ve seen people mugged at that ATM.” I decided not to go. We don’t go out much at night and we’re always careful not to drive through dangerous areas unless we have to, though Julia routinely drives her friends home who live in areas to dangerous to walk though, which requires her constant attentiveness to her surroundings. Being constantly vigilant, I’m told, is part of living in South Africa. It’s complicated reconciling this real fear with not wanting to reinforce the idea that violence’s source is Blackness. Julia says she doesn’t always tell folks back home about what she’s afraid of because she knows it will reinforce what they already believe about the continent of Africa and I completely understand that. There’s a lot of nuance to it that’s hard to capture.³

Another cycle I have broken: from being constantly surrounded by a pulsing social life to having only one friend for thousands of miles. It’s made me realize, very quickly, how much of my life revolves around my friends. I’m used to constantly seeing, calling, and doing things with them as my primary pastime. When that social part of my life is absent, I feel uninspired and leaden. Julia describes a fire in my eyes that she remembers seeing in the past, but doesn’t see right now. That’s hard to hear.⁴

It’s been difficult making new friends. I go out with Julia sometimes, but her friends are mostly black South Africans living in poverty. They’re people I’m interested in socializing with, people I’d love to be friends with, but after so many years of interacting with a fairly limited demographic of middle-class college-educated/bound Americans, interacting with people who fall outside of that group is a skill I am still developing. And it’s all tied up in my feeling uncomfortable about my relative privilege, level of wealth, and lack of life-experience. Mostly in these interactions I become very quiet. Being quiet turns out to be a very good way to listen—but not a very good way to make friends.

I’ve started to worry that this combination of factors means I will never get comfortable in South Africa. I am, after all, only here for two months and already two and a half weeks of that have gone by. But I think some level of discomfort is necessary and is good for my own personal growth. I went to a workshop at Oberlin recently and remember the facilitator started with a simple illustration that has proved useful to me. She marked one side of a chalkboard and said, “This is where you are comfortable.” On the other side of the board she said, “This is where you are so uncomfortable you totally shut down.” And in the middle she circled a space and said, “This is where you make the most progress.”

Whether or not I ever get comfortable in South Africa, I want to make the most of my limited remaining time here—make it productive for myself and others. I’m thinking of ways to meet people, things I want to see, places I can grow, and if at all feasible, ways I can help others too. It’s a work in progress.