Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World. Kagiso Msimango
The organisation was later bought by a bigger one with a different set of values, and the line on the branding was quietly changed to “Against animal testing”. Spot the difference? If you were not paying attention, you wouldn’t think you needed to pay that much attention, you wouldn’t notice that a company that carries the first line can be sued for false advertising if it does test their products on animals, but one that carries the second line cannot. They don’t claim that they do not do any testing on animals, just that they are offended by it.
Sing with me, friend: “It’s a jungle out there.”
How often do you rely on second-hand information to make decisions? I bet you do it a lot – we all do. No one human has enough time or mental processing ability to do enough research to verify every single bit of data before making a decision. It’s like the time my obstetrician-gynaecologist recommended that I abort my daughter because, according to the tests he’d sent me for, she had a very high risk of Down Syndrome. I did not have 12 years to go study obstetrics and gynaecology, nor to understand what goes into those tests. I had only a few weeks to make my decision, and a highly consequential one at that.
This is our reality.
As Daniel Schmachtenberger, co-founder of the Neurohacker Collective laments, “We are making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense-making to inform those choices. Like running increasingly fast through the woods, increasingly blind.”
A classic example that comes to mind is the HPV vaccine. There are tomes on its devastating side effects, including death and disability, and an equal amount of information on its safety, efficacy and necessity. Honestly, as laymen, you and I have no way of knowing what is true and what isn’t. Do you allow your child to get the HPV vaccination or not? You will probably use your pre-existing bias to decide the validity of the varied and opposing data on the vaccine. However, this is a highly consequential decision that should probably not be left to your confirmation bias alone. Do you gamble with your child’s life, leaving the possibility of her contracting cervical cancer to chance, despite the availability of a vaccine that may reduce that chance? Do you let your child get jabbed with a cocktail of God-knows-what and hope that all those people, who include medical professionals and industry insiders, who claim that the side effects aren’t worth the risk, are wrong?
I did not abort my child. Despite my lack of understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology when I made my decision, I didn’t at all feel like I was running through the woods blind. If you go on YouTube you will find a very enlightening and crucial conversation titled The War on Sense Making on how to make sense of a world that is constantly waging a narrative warfare. It’s about five hours of conversation between very smart people who will often make you feel like your IQ is probably in the single digits, but it’s worthwhile. I, however, used an entirely different approach to decide whether the data that my ob-gyn had presented to me was truthful and would enhance my wellbeing. Later I share those tools with you, because it’s rough out here, friend.
However, first I want to tell you about my cluster fuck.
4. The cluster fuck
As I buckled down to solve my Adrenal Fatigue problem, I came across what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge. I discovered that there was nothing the medical fraternity could offer me as a cure. There were all sorts of pills and potions on offer to manage the symptoms, but apparently only my adrenals were in charge of deciding when to “switch” back on.
Adrenal Fatigue has various stages. In the beginning, your adrenal glands overproduce adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones. If this goes on for too long then they do the opposite and cut off production. I am not entirely sure if that is why it is called Adrenal Fatigue, but that helped me understand it. I imagined that my adrenal glands were fatigued, basically sick and tired of my constant demands, and so now, lacking the energy-boosting adrenaline, I was fatigued. So I was sick and tired, because my adrenals were sick and tired of me. Imagine that you had a dealer with a conscience – I am sure they exist – and you go to him to buy crack on special occasions. After a while you start showing up once a week, then you start coming every other day, and eventually you are knocking at his door several times a day. He realises that, based on your rate of consumption, you are liable to kill yourself so he cuts you off. Similar principle.
I have always fancied myself as a problem-solver and I was determined to get back on good terms with my adrenal dealer. So I asked Dr Dax and my other specialist, Dr Google, how I could get my adrenals to “switch” back on. The answer I gleaned from all sources did not please me. I needed to go through an extended period – described as anything between six months to two years – of low to moderate stress and then my adrenaline dealer would once again trust me to treat the crack with some respect and thus resume my supply. Now this was not the answer I wanted because how in the hell was I supposed to ensure that I only felt low to moderate stress for perhaps up to two years? I live on Planet Earth, where we are in the throes of global warming, and Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have the codes to nuclear weapons. I live in a country with supposedly five times the global rate of femicides, which is also the most unequal country in the world, where people are murdered for a cellphone. I live in a city teeming with homicidal drivers, one of whom wrote off my car last week while we were driving the kids to school. Oh, and the kids. I have kids I must keep alive and help with improper fractions and Afrikaans homework. At the time of my diagnosis I still worked in media, everyone’s favourite target for projecting their unowned rage. Then there are the other unpredictable everyday stressors such as deadlines, burst geysers, illnesses and so on.
I was screwed, I tell ya. Screwed.
Thank Goddess the Covid-19 adventure came after I’d gotten a handle on this issue! Friend, that would have ended me.
Around this time, my friend Gilda introduced me to the author Tosha Silver, who’d written a book by the name of Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead. Tosha’s whole thing was about offering absolutely everything that bothers you to God, or what she refers to as the Divine Beloved. The concept made sense. If I had access to an all-powerful, loving Being, who was the boss of everything, I really wouldn’t need to stress about half of what had turned me into a cortisol junkie. Except there was one problem … I didn’t trust God for shit.
It all started in 1984. An annus horribilis for my family. My cousin, who was also my best friend, died in a horrific accident. My four-year-old BFF, her mother – my heavily pregnant aunt – and her husband were all involved in a multiple car crash. My aunt survived, her husband died on the scene, and my cousin was admitted to ICU in critical condition. Two other events had occurred in the preceding weeks, and these three incidents together were to affect me profoundly. Two weekends before the accident, my cousin Thami had come over for a playdate as usual. He had been watching some superhero movie on TV. Like all boys between the ages of two and 82, when he watched superhero movies, he caught the Spirit. You know, the Spirit that has them thinking they are invincible. We were now in the kitchen. I was frying eggs, a skill I had recently acquired and was keen to employ at every opportunity. Thami was bouncing around all over the place like a deranged superhero, announcing his supernatural strength, rattling off all the things he was stronger than. I, like all girls between the ages of two and 82, was getting irritated with his imagined invincibility, and decided to burst his bubble. So I dared him: “I bet if I put this hot pan on your head you are going to burn. You are not that strong.” He let me place the still relatively hot pan – the one in which I had just fried the eggs – on his head. The heat didn’t seem to bother him much. So I decided to up the ante and said, “Well, if I poured this butter on your head you are definitely going to burn.” Crappy move, I know, but I was eight years old. It was like a scene from Dumb and Dumber because he actually agreed to it. So I poured the used butter from the pan onto his head. Predictably, he burned. He screamed. I panicked, picked him up and dunked him head first in dishwater. For the most part, I forgot about the incident, and apparently so did he, because I never got into trouble for it.
The following weekend I attended Sunday School. In this particular lesson we were taught about God’s potency. The teacher told us authoritatively that there is nothing that God cannot do. If you need anything,