Hidden for the Right Time

by Sarona Wolter

Dear 18-year-old me,

I’ve been thinking about you lately.

Your daughter—yes, we have two little mini-mes—asked me the other day: “What do you wish you had when you were younger that you didn’t have?” And it made me think of you.

If only you knew how many times you doubted yourself—for being one of the shortest girls in the class or the law degree that didn’t unfold the way you planned. What a waste of some brain cells. I joke that we took the scenic route, it was never a detour because you kept course correcting whenever it felt like we were off the beaten track. You found new ways to exist in the world.

You even started a magazine in South Africa for students, and twenty years later in Germany after a bad day at work—you created a podcast from your bedroom for international women. It’s as if, all along, you were simply trying to create spaces where voices could be heard—yours and others’.

If only you knew how much time you wasted wondering why those silly boys never noticed you, or why certain aunties never gave you the time of day. I hope you never truly believed the one who said you weren’t fair-skinned enough. One day, you would have the last laugh—not because you proved them wrong, but because being overlooked turned out to be a gift.

It’s almost as if God kept you hidden for the right person, at the right time. You became a particular kind of woman—one who would be deeply seen, cherished, and respected by her husband, in ways you once only hoped for during those years of kissing frogs. There is just one complication: he lives on another continent, far from the place you call home.

Still, you dared. You lived courageously. You followed your heart.

If only you knew you would collapse timelines, live expansively, and build a creative life in another country. You still return home, and the longing for dusky African sunsets has never left—but you’ve learned to belong in two places. You are no longer alone in that in-between space. You meet others who live between worlds, and you slowly realise what a privilege it is to call both places home.

If only you knew how strong you would become, raising two feisty girls in a foreign country. Through them, your heart would leap right out of your body and expand in ways you never imagined. You would survive the stares on the streets of Cologne as you travel with a five-month-old baby on the train—her head full of dark curly hair drawing all kinds of unsolicited attention. Old ladies will stop you. They will comment. Eventually, it becomes ordinary.

‘It’s like water off a ducks back,’ we say to ourselves.

In a stoic culture so far from your comfort zone, you harden a little. Yet your daughters’ hugs melt away all the years you once shied away from physical closeness. You learn that showing emotion is not your weakness—it is your gentle mama power.

I’m sorry you grew up believing your worth was tied to performance. If only you had learned sooner to listen to your body when it begged you to rest. Your lungs would try to betray you in the sneakiest way—endless coughing, baffled doctors, cortisone becomes a temporary fix. After eight long years, you finally find a holistic path to healing.

There are nights you lie awake during flare-ups, coughing and wondering whether it’s time to leave the cold northern hemisphere and return to the warmth of your people. You try everything: eating better, moving gently, doing the inner work. You turn down invitations you once would have rushed to accept.

Eventually, you learn to hear the whispers of your body, to understand its rhythms and your soul, begging you to speak up unapologetically, to love yourself more, and to stop abandoning yourself.

Those little eyes are watching. They are listening to every word of your self-talk.

I know you want to be a good mum, a good wife, a good daughter-in-law, just as you watched your own mother be. To be seen as the ‘good woman’ in the eyes of others is the payoff for letting go of ourselves. Some days you feel only half-whole—because of your health, or because German still doesn’t sit comfortably on your tongue. Yet your girls bring everything into perspective. They see your ferocity, and it fuels them.

Remember how you were once the only girl growing up with a bunch of boys? Now you’ve built a community for international women. The things you longed for as an awkward teenager—hairy legs and two long plaits—you now have, just in a different form.

No more wondering what it’s like to have sisters by the way—you get a VIP seat to a show of sisterly affection or bickering depending on their moods.

We dropped the bags of shame not so long ago, excess baggage that was not ours to carry in the first place. Luckily your girls don’t have to feel ashamed to be hormonal—you let them yap about everything. You may not always be ready for Gen Alpha's bold curiosity, but that's okay.

Breaking patterns takes courage, time, and grace. Yet you changed things your parents didn’t know how to change, and you still love them deeply. Reinvention could be your middle name.

Keep trusting that deep inner knowing. You knew what you wanted, even when others tried to convince you otherwise. I still have the diary you wrote at eighteen, where you said that in twenty years you wanted to be shopping in Europe. Mission accomplished—though it turns out you don’t actually enjoy shopping that much. We live, we learn.

And one more thing: we are rich. Not in the way the neighbours are, but in love, laughter, and wild adventures. That is true wealth.

With love,

Your future self

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