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About
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Welcome to my World




In real life, I'm your typical 'Girl Next Door' type. I love white roses, mangoes, playing Chess or Scrabble, creating in the kitchen, artistically crafting using mixed media, spending time with my near and dear ones, or talking to the birds and stray cats out in the garden. But I'm also an INFP: quiet, reclusive, somewhat shy, and needing loads of self pep talk to put myself under the spotlight. I prefer being 'Lost in a Quatrain' behind the scenes rather than in the limelight.

I have always loved quiet contemplation and writing down my thoughts, but never once considered writing as a career choice. Then, decades later, at a fateful school reunion, a former English teacher urged me to consider publishing a book. I already had tons of material I had been writing over the years - there's always poetry going on in my head, often at the most inopportune times. (If only there was a way to automatically record it all).

At that point, I had published a handful of poems in a few local literary magazines but had not considered publishing a full collection. It took two years before the idea took root. But once I had decided to go ahead, it literally took me a week to compile my debut book, Lost in a Quatrain. It was then that a friend said to me: 'If you're not on social media, you may as well not exist!'

And so began the daunting task of being under the spotlight, along with futile attempts to please the algorithm that I always see in my mind's eye as a difficult circus ringmaster, constantly cracking a whip to force us to fervently 'perform' - not at all conducive to creativity born of quiet contemplation... and not at all healthy for an INFP... So know, that I will 'disappear' from time to time, to reclaim myself...

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Oh, and about those lists of achievements, I know it's not the Nobel Prize (yet? lol). And it's not about ego. Marketing certainly. Perhaps even that need to over achieve that stems from 'absent daddy' issues. But mostly, it's a personal aid for when the 'Imposter Syndrome' hits. And it does! Often!

With being born on the wrong side of the track; and to a Christian father and a Muslim mother - who couldn't work it out, despite loving each other; being raised in the old South Africa as a person of colour; and everything in between, that 'Imposter Syndrome' sometimes hits very hard.

This is when those lists serve as a gentle reminder that I CAN, and most importantly, that someone out there finds benefit from what I do...

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