In the movie “The Matrix,” it talks about the choice between taking the red pill and the blue pill. Well, I took both pills.

At the first book launch of Belonging in Johannesburg I wore red.

The theme was red, the styling was red, the flowers were red, the lighting was red.

My remarkable book campaign manager, Kim Vermaak, wore a red coat, as did I.

It was a night of warm red celebration. It was the colour of love. Love had got me here. The love of global storytellers who had unlocked my courage to tell my story. The love of my speaker community in South Africa had fueled the faith that my voice mattered, the community that had unfurled my butterfly wings.

I wrote a piece about the Johannesburg launch called “Coming Out”. It symbolised my transition from beige invisibility and hiding behind baggy cardigans to being brave enough to be seen in bold brave red, unhiding.

My Cape Town book launch, hosted by Exclusive Books at its iconic and symbolic Waterfront Store was very different.

I had taken the red pill. I had come out from hiding.

Now I had to swallow a different pill. I had to swallow the pill of truth.

In Cape Town, against the backdrop of the ocean, I wore a bright blue dress.

The flowers we got as gifts were blue. Kim wore a blue dress for a very different interview.

I was trembling before I went on stage, literally. I was trembling to confront my past, trembling to confront the shame that had threatened to drown me 35 years ago.

It had taken me 30 years to claim the courage to start to tell my story.

The first version of my book, which came out three years ago, was anecdotal and far more superficial. I only ever gave out copies of that first version at speaker events where I felt safe and known. It was my first tentative version of coming out, but I was not proud of it.

I knew there was a missing piece in my journey to wholeness, in my journey to finding my belonging.

Now I was sitting on the stage in Cape Town. The true version of “Belonging” had already been globally acknowledged as an important message of this time in the world and particularly in the US, not just in South Africa.

There was no turning back.

I sat there “naked” before the audience. It was as if I had been given a truth serum.

As Kim asked me question after question, I leaned forward in my chair, my voice sometimes breaking with emotion. There was no bravado. It went deep fast, blue ocean deep.

I was confronting the shame that I had carried with me for over 30 years. Five of the people whose noble organization I had tarnished all those years ago were in the room.

I had not seen them for 35 years.

I did not have the courage to face them, except with the message of my book, a message of forgiveness for who I used to be.

35 years ago, I had felt like Monica Lewinsky, the stain of my shame so visible for all to see.

(For a profound conversation on shame see link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_8y0WLm78U)

My annihilation in the courtroom, representing thousands of workers who had become my family, made the second page of the Cape Times. I had been exposed.

Their prime witness had buried them in the mass grave of shame. After that, my life seemed so meaningless.

Their love had given me a belonging I had never known. Now I had stained their name with shame.

I fled to Johannesburg to start a new life. For years, I dreaded coming back to Cape Town.

Now in Cape Town, all those years later, I was finally confronting the magnitude of my messing up. The message of my mess.

In this version of Belonging, I had written “naked”.

As Brené Brown so magnificently said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the absence of armour.”

Playing tribute to the role my father and my mother had played in my unfolding journey was the easier part.

Confronting my messy past as a political activist became a mirror for a deeper message.

My book draws parallels on the unfolding journey of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to greater democracy and some of the messiness that has unfolded in the last 30 years.

Not all triumphant. Endemic corruption had claimed much of “the struggle” for a better South Africa.

The slogans we had chanted, “Freedom for all,” had not happened on the ground, merely in the ballot box. As I write in “Belonging” so poignantly, “A liberation movement had become a captured state”.

And so the shame of our country’s diverted struggle to personal enrichment had become a mirror of my own shame.

And that is when I knew my truth mattered in a way that I had never anticipated.

At the end of the book launch,

I stood up and my legs buckled under me, literally. I had no feeling at all from my knees downwards. I crashed against the table where the blue flowers gifts were standing. It had never happened before.

It was as if I had finally buckled under the emotion and the adrenaline coursing through my body.

Others held me up while I gave out the flowers to those who were so symbolic of my journey.

In the blue eyes of my own truth- telling, I had found the oceans of my healing. Finally confronting the sea of my memories buried deep in the ocean floor for so long. And so I surfaced from the ocean and I stepped into the light of the shore. Looking up at the majesty of Table Mountain – an iconic symbol of the world.

Just as Madiba had done stepping onto the shore after 18 long years on the island.

My words stumbled out.

In humility.

In Grace.

In Truth.

The struggle was not over.

But truth had prevailed.

And Grace was guiding us forward.

In the words of the young poet Amanda Gormen:

“There will always be light.

If only we can see it.

If only we can be it.”

And so, I stepped into the light.

In Truth.

Alison Weihe

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