What happens when the things that hurt us in childhood follow us into adulthood? For many South
Africans, childhood was never simply a time of innocence. It was a time of abandonment, violence,
instability, addiction and learning how to survive before we ever learned how to heal. And sometimes, the wounds we carry don't announce themselves. They show up in the relationships we struggle to leave, the love we believe we have to earn, the chaos we mistake for chemistry, the way we constantly over-perform at work, or the way we accept less than we deserve because somewhere along the way, we stopped believing we were worth choosing. Today, we are having a difficult but necessary conversation about those wounds through the eyes of author Praise Nkuna and her memoir, The Unchosen Child. This is a conversation about abandonment, domestic violence, addiction, workplace bullying and the painful journey of finding your way back to yourself.