Monday morning this week. The sun barely up, the city still shaking off its weekend dreams. A coffee stop, quick and mindless. The kind of ordinary moment you live a thousand times until it becomes the one you can’t forget.

Click. Lock. My car’s familiar chirp of security – a lie I wouldn’t understand for another hour. Four minutes inside, maybe five. Time moves differently when you’re standing in line, mind drifting between caffeine and the day ahead, completely fucking oblivious to the fact that everything’s already changed.

The drive to work feels normal. Music playing, thoughts wandering, no idea I’m carrying absence instead of everything I own. It’s not until I reach for my laptop bag that reality splits open. That gut-punch moment when your brain tries to protect you with maybes: Maybe I left it at home. Maybe I’m just tired.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The truth comes later, frame by grainy video frame. Surveillance footage from the coffee shop, from the petrol station – a slow motion replay of violation in black and white. Watching myself in that parallel universe where everything’s still whole, while high tech thiefs with signal jammers and lock picks choreograph my loss with professional precision. The police piece it together with the weary knowledge of seeing this too many times before. A syndicate, they say, like naming the monster makes it any less infuriating.

This fucking country – South Africa. It’s like being in a toxic relationship you can’t walk away from because the good moments are so goddamn beautiful they make you forget the bad. One minute you’re watching an African sunset that cracks your heart open with its beauty, the next you’re calculating possible escape routes from a red light. Jacarandas paint the streets purple while you check your mirrors for shadows. The same roads that lead to breathtaking vistas carry the weight of a thousand what-ifs.

I could be in New York dodging yellow cabs instead of potholes, trading load shedding for subway delays. Maybe someday. But this place infects you, becomes your DNA. The raw beauty – thunderstorms splitting skies, lions calling in darkness – crashes against the urban paranoia we breathe like second-hand smoke. Always watching, always counting exits, always dancing between wonder and fear.

We live in this constant state of peripheral awareness – that low-grade hum of anxiety that becomes your baseline. Every car that sits too long behind you, every footstep that echoes a bit too close, every moment between locked and unlocked doors becomes a decision point. It’s fucking exhausting, this perpetual dance between appreciation and alertness. Between love and fear.

The people here – fuck, they’ll break your heart with their resilience. Making jokes at braais about the time they got hijacked, sharing security company numbers like recipes, turning trauma into dinner conversation because what else can you do? We’ve mastered the art of the resigned shrug, the knowing nod, the “at least nobody got hurt” mantra we repeat like prayer beads. It’s our collective coping mechanism, this forced peace we’ve made with chaos.

And then there’s Discovery Insurance – a special kind of corporate vampire that bleeds you monthly but disappears when you need a transfusion. Their claims process is psychological warfare dressed in corporate jargon. Every call rewrites the story, every email moves the goalposts, while their billing system runs with demonic precision. They’ve mastered the art of making victims feel like criminals, turning “customer service” into an endurance sport where empathy goes to die and hope gets buried in paperwork. Funny how they can’t process a claim but never miss a debit order. Premium rates for premium grade gaslighting – that’s the Discovery way.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

My laptop, iPad, both pairs of AirPods – that’s just stuff. Clinical. Numbers on a claim form. But the real theft? The memories trapped on those hard drives. The half-finished projects I started that lived only in temporary space. The comfortable digital spaces I’d carved out for myself, now scattered across some stranger’s hands. You can’t put a price tag on time. Can’t claim back peace of mind.This is what they don’t tell you about violation – it’s not just your stuff that gets taken. It’s that easy confidence that lets you grab coffee without looking over your shoulder. That belief that routine is safe. That fiction we tell ourselves about control.

But here’s what else they don’t tell you about South Africa: between the broken glass and bureaucracy, there’s a defiance that feels like victory. A stubborn joy that refuses to die. We’ve turned trauma into an art form, yes, but we’ve also mastered the art of finding light in darkness. Not because we’re resilient – fuck that romantic nonsense – but because the alternative means letting them steal more than just our stuff.

So here I am, canceling my Discovery policies like burning bridges, backing up what’s left of my digital life to every cloud service I can find, still somehow finding reasons to smile. Because that’s what we do here – we adapt, we overcome, we find beauty in the chaos. Not because we have to, but because we choose to, every single day.

Welcome to South Africa, where your heart breaks and mends a thousand times a day, and where companies like Discovery remind us that sometimes the biggest thieves wear suits and sit in boardrooms. 

The truth is, I love this maddening, beautiful, chaotic country with the same intensity that I despise the circumstances that made me write this post. It’s the kind of love that comes with calluses, that’s been tested by fire and emerged stronger, if slightly scarred. Every time I consider leaving, the jacarandas bloom or someone calls me “my brother” in that uniquely South African way, and I remember why I stay.

But here’s the thing – we can’t let this shit become normal. Can’t let the cynicism win, can’t let the resigned shrug become our default position. Yes, this place might feel messy, broken, infuriating. Yes, some days it feels like we’re screaming into the void. But the moment we stop demanding better – from our politicians, our corporations, ourselves – is the moment they’ve stolen something far more valuable than laptops and hard drives. They’ve stolen our belief in what’s possible. And fuck that. This beautiful, brutal country deserves our rage as much as our love, our demands for better as much as our acceptance of what is. Because sometimes love means calling out the bullshit, means refusing to settle, means believing in better even when better feels impossible.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a strongly worded email to draft to my soon-to-be-ex insurance provider.

And then I’ll change all my passwords. 

Again.