- A lot of people see me through social media and reach their own conclusions. They look at my beautiful pictures and immediately assume that I had a great upbringing with everything working well for me. But my reality is the direct opposite of that.
From a very young age I suffered from depression. I
faced a lot of challenges. I was depressed so much that at some point I felt it
was better to die than continue that life of depression I was living.
My depression intensified especially in 2014. I had developed
a terrible skin problem. Because of my depression, whenever I had a problem,
the only thing I could think about was to keep myself away from the world, be
away from people, lock myself in the house. That’s what I would often do
whenever I was going through depression. Depression tended to make me feel like
I had no purpose in this world. I felt that all the problems in the world were
created specifically for me.
DROPPING OUT OF SCHOOL
When I had the skin problem in 2014, when I had to go
to Grade 11, I dropped out of school. Unlike previous problems related to depression,
I couldn’t hide my skin problem as it was on my face. It was impossible to
hide.
I didn’t want people to visit me. I kept imagining
that people would make fun of me and ridicule me when with their own friends
and colleagues. All I could imagine was people ridiculing me.
LOCKING MYSELF INDOORS FOR 3 FULL YEARS
My elder sister, Hlengiwe, took me in to stay with her
for a while. So, I moved away from home. I spent 3 years indoors, not moving
out of the house. That’s when I started gaining weight at a very high rate. The
only thing I could do all those 3 years was to eat and sleep, over and over.
The weight-gain also added to the depression. It got
even worse when people saw me after piling on some weight. Many kept gossiping
about my weight gain. Some even believed that I was pregnant, hence my dropping
out of school. The gossip made my depression even worse.
Meanwhile, my skin problems kept worsening because of
the depression.
To deal with my skin I used so many products. But they
did not work, partly because I was always in a rush to see improvement. I was
not patient at all. I wanted to see immediate change, and if a product didn’t
work to my satisfaction, I dropped it and bought another one. I was desperate
to see my skin improve. Every month I was buying some new product and applying
on my face.
Then, after trying all these products without success,
I visited a skin doctor in Johannesburg. The doctor gave me some tablets. They were
very strong; you could only get them by a doctor’s prescription. They dried my
skin as they worked on my face. I was alerted that it was part of the healing
process. I had to endure that process for six months. The drugs were resolving
the skin problem from the inside, as compared with the creams that I was
applying on my face to try and solve the problem.
From then, I started seeing some improvement. I was later
introduced to aqueous cream to remoisturise my skin. I was advised against using
alcohol-based products as they would damage my skin. I was advised to use
natural products instead. I used spot corrector products and my skin kept
improving.
ON BEING A MAKE-UP ARTIST
Why did I want to be a make-up artist? Initially, I
wanted to be something else, but because I had dropped out of school (I had
been out of school for 3 years due to the depression) and felt that I could not
go back to school.
Wearing make-up every day somehow made me have passion
for make-up artistry. Yes, during the depression period I was wearing make-up
merely to hide myself, not because I loved it, but as time went on, I started
embracing it. All those depression days I was feeling ugly, never pretty, and
thus make-up hid all my ugliness, as I felt then. My love for make-up was
therefore only in so far as it created some hiding space for me. I even slept
wearing make-up.
A LIGHT AT THE FAR END OF THE TUNNEL
Later I searched on the internet, with great help from
my sister. My passion initially was just on basic make-up, not the more
advanced things like special effects, air-brush, and so on. All I wanted was to
apply make-up on people, nothing more.
I was able to find a school to further my passion for
make-up. When I got to the school, I decided to register for all the courses
that were offered just to get experience and to learn. My sister was very
helpful in terms of guiding me through this journey. I wanted more, so that I
could be able to survive and make a living through my passion.
As I was engaging myself on my studies, I was slowly
discovering myself. My feeling at that time was that God had placed me where I
ought to have been from the beginning. Going through all those painful phases
and moments helped me discover myself; who I was and which direction in life I
ought to be taking. This made me remember that during my school days I excelled
in arts and culture classes. I was always a creative student although I did not
realise that at the time. I always got high marks on creative work, free drawings,
doing colourations, and so on.
It finally dawned on me that I had in fact been “lost”
in the most beautiful place; lost into a field that I love and have passion
for. To be a make-up artist, one must be very creative and have talent and lots
of ideas on how to mix different things and make them look beautiful or
interesting.
I love the space I am in today. I am currently allowing
the beautiful waves of fate to take me wherever they please.
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