Please Tell Me It Ends Well by Georgina Likukela

The sound of the bus pushing against the wind, tree after tree, almost there… We had left the cloudy and misty weather and I could feel us approaching it…the hot and busy of the city. I was almost home. Soon, I’d be face-to-face with the reality that I did fail. This was my dream job… and I’d resigned. Let’s start from the beginning well somewhere in the middle really but quite a significant middle.

I’m a Medical Laboratory Scientist and for years even in university I hated saying it out loud - there was just this pressure that came from being in the medical field, automatically people just assumed you were the smartest person in the room or that you probably thought you are. But me? Well, I was far from any of those things. I didn’t even want to do this course, I knew from the moment the curriculum got deep that I had made a mistake but I wasn’t going to give up. Me? Gina? Give up and be the girl in the family that left one course and jumped into another? Not me. Failure and I are like oil and water, we don’t mix. And we’re okay with that. Well, I was, I can’t speak for failure though because it felt like it would chase me at every single moment that felt significant. I think it’s safe to say that for all the days I felt single and lonely, failure was there to make sure I felt wanted and my willingness to be a recipient was duly noted and appreciated. It didn’t matter what area of my life it was - family, friendships, relationship (or the lack thereof), mental health - it was all… failing.

Fast forward to two years into my second real job- My perceived dream job. This particular company was the holy grail of knowledge in my career and my country. Literally, lecturers would tell you “if you can make it in that company, that means you are the cream of the crop”. And I wanted so badly to be the cream at least even just once in my life, at least in my career, without this, I’d starve. I’d finally made it in but little did I know that I’d only last ten months in which I’d be bullied, sabotaged, I’d have anxiety attacks, suicidal ideation and at the end of it all I’d owe the company thousands for handing in a 24 hour resignation and I’d be left with nothing but failure and this knot in my stomach that made me want to throw up every time I thought about going back into the laboratory.

How come we don’t speak about workplace burnout and how it can damn near kill you? Why wasn’t anyone in my circle talking about it and the ones that were, were very secretive or not in my immediate circle at all. For context sake, I’m African, so there’s no such thing as ‘burnout’, the economy is hard and I felt guilty for even complaining that I’d been struggling, in fact I think a part of me consoled myself by thinking that going through this meant that I was strong, I was mature and I wasn’t fragile. I’d hit the rockiest bottom and I was lost. Fast forward into that year, I’d gotten myself a mentor and rediscovered my love for the creative arts particularly filmmaking and writing. I finally decided to give failure a chance and realized that its name wasn’t actually Failure but Potential. Potential helped me realize that I was called to Entrepreneurship and so I started my journey of trying to build a business. I’m no salesman and I wasn’t interested in being one but something about starting a “Movement” felt like something Potential and I wanted to embrace in our relationship. So, I had to take a retrospective look at all the times that felt ‘warm’ in my journey and I’d always landed on something that had to do with Mental Health, Community, Career and Creativity. The corporate system has been something that we’ve approached so passively and I reckon that’s why so many of us are so unsatisfied. I looked at the system within the laboratory and I saw how it managed to drain the hope from peoples eyes so much so that it left them with a contagious aggression. When you build a system that ignores the needs of your employees and treats them as a redundant spare part, you bruise the community your company exists in and you damage the future generations that are attached to that community. How can we expect a woman who is constantly battered at home by her abusive husband to show up at work and perform at her optimum confidently? How can corporations help employees tackle these issues without mixing the personal with the professional in a way that is damaging to the company and the individual? It is possible to find a way if we work together. You work well under pressure when you can anticipate what to expect and have clear guidelines on how to proceed forward, but you work better when you have a supportive team. It’s deeper than I can express in these few words but I am humbled by the version of myself that firstly has birthed the idea of building a business that helps employees and employers correct these complex problems and a second business that could show my fellow Africans but most importantly my fellow Namibians that our creativity is one of the most beautiful qualities about us that should be unapologetically celebrated and that it is possible to create a sustainable creative business.

I see the future of what these could be, it’s rocky but I’ll run it because I’m not building these for me - they are bigger than me but for all of us who know that our future generations deserve better. I need a community, are you out there?