Simone!

Portrait Photographer Auckland

Simone

I embrace change. 

I am three years away from my fortieth birthday. Perhaps the dawning of this milestone, coupled with a sudden paradigm shift in my religious views just over a year ago, resulted in what others describe as a “midlife crisis”. I call it my “midlife rediscovery”. Perhaps the catalyst to my “existential crisis” was just my coming to the end of myself – who knows. What I do know however, is that I am no longer surviving this journey, but am now living an exceedingly abundant and passionate life. 

Raised in Namibia, I was sexually molested as a child, raped twice as an adolescent, and eventually fell pregnant at age 16. My eldest son (of four) is one of only three people in the world with his specific congenital heart defect – resulting in him waiting for a heart transplant. I mention this only because many seek to understand my perceived recklessness through an “informed” lens centred on my prior, character-forming experiences. There may be some semblance of justification to this notion. 

The father of my three subsequent children is perfect in every way – we had a wonderful – enviable marriage for nearly 17 years, until I burnt out as I sought to uphold perfection in the various constructs I found myself in. He, even today, says that I was indeed the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect homesteader, the perfect student and the perfect religious devotee. 

I left all of that behind in 2018 to find who I truly was again. To date I have lost 49kgs. I have resumed pursuing my passions and have enjoyed a plethora of social experiences that make my every single day pure delight. 

I have changed: from a religious fundamentalist devotee, to an agnostic Pan-Romantic pleasure-seeker; from home-schooling, stay-at-home mother, to a transient woman who has daily telephone contact – and fortnightly physical contact with her children; from being mortgage-free after owning my own home since the age of 20, to house-sitting now, and as yet undecided as to which country I will call home next year. 

I have changed so much so that countless friends tell me that they do not know this, new, changed Simone. I tell them that this is the True Simone. 

I.Embrace.Change.

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