Hey, how's it going?
If you're new here, welcome.
Something Shifted is about identity after interruption.
It's about who we become after a lifequake hits and the stories we tell ourselves when everything changes.
And I think you're gonna like it here.
My name is Sean, and this is Something Shifted.
Today's story,
belongs to Kamini
I think that the entertainment industry is a bit like the guy you really like but who is only giving you just enough and so it breadcrumbs you and every time you sort of say oh I
want to get out I want to do something else it goes oh yeah here's a little thing it'll keep you happy
That's next.
Right after this.
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It's not often that I get starstruck in the studio.
Then again, my guests don't often arrive with an entourage.
This is very cute with you above and Tuxedo below
send photos to Rue she would be keeling over if I was spending the morning with a dog that wasn't
Dog envy is real.
I was only expecting Kamini this morning, but she showed up with Tuxedo, her very well behaved and rather distinguished miniature schnauzer.
It meant that I had to go to Pinelands every Saturday and go to dog school, which was the best investment.
yeah, I mean, it's great.
I trust this dog a lot.
That's kind of what puppy school got us.
Tuxedo exudes a quiet confidence and quickly settles at Kamini's feet, a partnership seven years in the making.
And like most parents, dog parents included, we do a lot of grown-up stuff to take care of our babies.
I do work so that my dog can go to the good schools.
It's mid-morning, late into the month of October.
The Cape Town sun is still warming up, saving herself for later.
But Kamini has been going for a while.
For my sins, I've decided to be part of the 5 a.m.
club.
And I have to admit, it's just because I am much better in the morning, my brain works better.
You can see towards the end of the day that I look as though I shouldn't be around people.
And so I'll wake up and I'll either go to the gym, go for a run, and then the day starts.
And if I didn't start the day with a run or the gym, we would be in
This is the kind of wisdom the ancient Greeks spoke of.
Know thyself.
The balance of understanding what energizes you, what matters to your soul, and knowing your limits and the discipline of doing the things that keep you going.
Or as we like to call it in modern times, adulting 101.
Kamini started running long distances back in 2016, and to this day, it's one of the things that keeps Hope grounded.
I drew such a lot of uh strength and the ability to shake off energy that I didn't know I was holding on to.
This is not an episode about running.
We don't do those here.
During that time, I actually would listen to podcasts and people couldn't understand it.
They were like, yeah, but the music gets you going.
was like, yes, but you're there for like two hours or three hours.
I need, I need like, it's like dead space.
You're filling it with information and things.
Don't worry, this is not an episode about podcasting either.
I think it started out with the history of a certain ingredient or the evolution of a fork, really nerdy things.
m And then I sort of branched out into more businessy sort of things and then how to, like the science of quitting, like the joys of knowing when that moment before things start to
crumble, when it's right for you.
the science of quitting, the skill of leaving at the height of the party, before it gets sloppy and goes downhill.
This is an episode about knowing thyself, about knowing what you want, about getting it, and about knowing when to let it go.
This is an episode about Kamini Kamini created a cheat code to help people pronounce her name, spelt
K-A-M-I-N-I pronounced Kamini like harmony.
Kamini grew up in Durban, matriculated from Durban Girls College and promptly stopped wearing green when she was done with her school uniform.
She then completed a bachelor's in commerce at the University of KZN.
So with her degree in marketing and management under her belt and a fire for food in her belly, she packed up her life and relocated to Cape Town back in 2006.
I was a far less accomplished food writer.
That was the time when blogging was a thing and I was hosting radio on two oceans and I was being invited to events and just being annoying.
Kamini's blog was called Deelishuss spelt with two E's, three S's and an H.
And my first blog post was about toast and about how it's gonna be toasty toast.
Don't give me this like warm bread story.
She had opinions, she had nerve, and she was building a career around food.
Food writing.
Food making.
Food talking.
It was a lot of fun, but I also think this is the thing about being young and having nothing to lose and nobody knowing you.
I would rock up at events and be that person.
that's the editor from so-and-so.
And then go tap them on the shoulder and be like, Hey, have you seen my blog?
um And I think with enough time and enough just generally being irritating, people are like, okay, fine.
All we have this project.
Do you want to photograph this?
Do you want to do whatever?
And so.
And so, Kamini was willing to do whatever it took to break into the food industry.
So in 2013, she entered season two of the wildly popular TV show MasterChef South Africa.
I was in the food world at that time, um even if I had to crow by my way into it.
So by season two, I was back in Cape Town and I just decided to go for it.
and she went for it with a panna cotta.
It's a yogurt panna cotta, citrus fruit salad, honeycomb twill.
So you make the honeycomb into a dust and then you use a, uh like a shaping sort of tool and you use a sieve and you dust it into this little round thing and then you pop it back
into the oven and then it melts again, but it becomes this like disk of honeycomb, which is clear.
This is a recipe Kamini had been working on, tweaking and testing for quite some time.
I had been away with friends and I took panna cotta as one of the desserts.
And the next morning, somebody's girlfriend came to me and said, you know, I got into bed and I thought about that dish and I was like, that's where the money is.
Kamini take on a yogurt panna cotta with citrus salad and honeycomb disc is what got her through the door at the MasterChef auditions.
Like you go, stand in line and somebody tastes it and then you keep going through these rounds.
Until I got to the, you've got to meet the producers.
And although her panna cotta got her through the door, it was her personality that sealed the deal.
And the question I'll never forget is, what fruit or vegetable would you be and why?
And I said I'd be a pineapple because it takes time to get to the good bits.
Who knows where that came from?
So that might be the Kamini you remember.
Kamini from TV, radio or the emerging blogging world.
You might even have thought, there goes Kamini living the dream.
Friend of mine works in film and TV and I said to her like, I would love to shoot a cooking show.
And then 2013, I won MasterChef and then 2014 and 15, I then have my own TV show.
And it was incredible, but.
There were things that I didn't know about myself.
More often than not, hard things in life happen to us or at us, and however terrible they might be, we can mostly rely on sympathy from others to help us get by.
But sometimes we create our own lifequakes.
We set wheels into motion with the best intentions, and then we have to make sense of the fallout all on our own.
Like pursuing a career path and getting exactly what you want, and then realizing
It's not for you.
Somewhere around 2016, 2017, I realized that I was deeply depressed.
I was burnt out.
I didn't realize this.
When we shot Girl Eat World, I'd traveled to 10 different countries around the world and everyone's like, oh, so glamorous.
Sure, there's an element of that to it, but it's like you don't sleep.
What happens off camera, the whole film and TV industry doesn't care what happens to you unless you're on screen.
When she entered MasterChef, the screen was the pathway to the thing Kamini wanted, a career in food.
I don't think it was ever that I was thinking about what happens after this.
When Kamini had rocked up at the audition, she'd made her panna cotta, likened herself to a pineapple, and kept progressing through the rounds of the TV show.
She found herself living in a house on a golfer's date with other top contestants, with the TV crew waking them up and leading them to breakfast, telling them exactly where to
sit and where to stand.
You had to be focused on the task at hand and I think maybe that I was kind of in flow in that moment if I think about it now because I didn't ever think about what was going to
happen after this.
It was just like what am I doing right now?
Truthfully, Kamini wasn't thinking about winning per se.
But then she won, and she was celebrated, and she had what she wanted, and everyone wanted a piece of Kamini.
Even some people who didn't have her best interests at heart.
Some like old school marketing person that nobody knows about then had bought a Kamini Pather .co.za and had set up this site that was just taking all my social media.
There were many T's and C's that came with the thing Kamini thought she wanted.
Legalese and strategies and battles around things like domain names.
You do feel like you're under siege.
You do feel like you're being attacked.
The legal framework makes sure that your anxiety is like right at the top for a very long time because it's a language you don't understand.
There's such a lot at stake.
But then Kamini got the next thing she wanted, her very own TV show.
Which of course came with another set of Ts and Cs.
Girl Eat World was in the world.
was broadcast on Netflix North America, so that's before Netflix is even in South Africa.
But then the old hammer of the legal reality of being an adult.
There were production company issues and then there was like a legal dispute about who owns Girl Eat World, what happens, how things get paid for.
And I think those sort of experiences bring you back to reality.
Kamini had technically gotten what she wanted.
Or at least what she thought she wanted.
And maybe even a little bit more.
I think creatives often find themselves in that space, but my undergrad is in commerce and I think my PhD is in full-blown combat.
So somewhere along the lines, I was able to find the right people to be able to navigate that space.
I think oftentimes creatives are the people in the back making all the stuff when in actual fact, you need to be a business person.
You need to know how this world works.
You've got to be able to take it to market and perform some other functions.
Kamini wanted a career in food, and here she was learning on the very public job, needing to make decisions and hone her craft while being scrutinized and critiqued all the way.
And just because the public celebrated you for a hot minute doesn't mean you get to relax.
think that the entertainment industry is a bit like the guy you really like but who is only giving you just enough and so it breadcrumbs you.
And every time you sort of say, I want to get out, I want to do something else, it goes, oh, here's a little thing.
It'll keep you happy.
As the heat was dying down around the television show and Kamini had the headspace to consider her next move out of the entertainment industry, a breadcrumb would appear.
So then after that it was, uh would you like to be the face of the Sun Lump Cape Town Marathon?
That's a nice one.
Cool, let's do that.
But so after the sort of like sheen of that sort of dies down, again you're going, is this the right place for me?
I wanna get out, don't know how to get out.
What can I do?
Where do I go to?
Because as much as it's this crown, it's this mantle, it does mean that people sort of want you to play in that box.
when there are so many other things you could be doing.
all the obvious measures, Kamini was successful.
Dream come true.
Tick.
But there were many things that no one saw behind the scenes.
my nerves were shot.
I would drop something next to me and leap out of my skin.
And I think that sort of paved the way for this depression that meant that I didn't want to see people.
I wanted to stay home.
But I was still, I still had to work.
I still had to put food on my dog's table.
And so it went through this, I would go out, be a dancing monkey on stage.
and then come home and not want to see anyone.
This life quake is not necessarily like a one instant moment.
That was a few years of just trying to survive.
Kamini got pretty good at surviving.
But fortunately, even if we don't know ourselves well enough yet, if we don't know what our own limits are, our bodies have a way of forcing us into a season of reckoning.
A friend of mine who's been through a depression as well sort of described it as a reptile who during this depression you shed the skin and so you kind of resemble what you started
out as but you are different.
Kamini had started identifying at first for herself who she really was.
I am an introvert.
I do like privacy.
I get burnt out.
Lots of people, lots of small talk.
Tires me out.
And so then I don't have the energy to focus on the things that I actually want to do that, I don't know, that makes sense to me.
Kamini started cooking up something entirely new for herself.
She was coming to terms with what she was willing to pay for the life she wanted to live.
And that meant wrestling with some tough questions.
That sort of lands with this avalanche of, I worthy, am I enough if I'm not getting the validation from the outside world that I was before?
And then you do need to have another hard conversation with yourself.
Does the outside validation mean more than my piece or my own validation or how I see value in things?
Knowing thyself is the first step.
But it's hard putting it into practice because you will be confronted with what others know or think they know about you.
conversation was happening in my head.
But now to allow other people to experience the changes that had been happening within me, that was the shock.
Even my brother was a bit like, introversion?
What do mean?
You've been the life of the party.
And then I realized like what kind of coping mechanisms I was utilizing to be able to be that person that I thought I was supposed to be.
And then to kind of make it okay with myself and with other people.
to say no, to kind of go, I'm peopled out today.
I'm not OK.
And so that was an interesting interchange to take other people on this journey as well.
looking back, many ways, Kamini had created her own lifequakes.
The first ones were big and disruptive, exciting and whirl-windy, like dropping big boulders into a lake creating waves.
And now she was doing it again, but this time gently, like the ripples of a skipping pebble.
It's also the timing of the exit because I think if you quit or exit while you're still sort of at a peak, that means you have agency, you have power, you've made this decision
versus if at some point as it's starting to trickle down, then you don't have as much leverage and it's an important lesson to learn.
And so now it's been sort of who am I?
How do I make choices that are intentional?
And I know that word is being bandied about a lot, but I truly mean that.
How do I make the right choices for who I am now?
And how do I move forward with that?
You may have heard Brene Brown explain that authenticity is a daily practice.
It takes daily effort to let go of who we think we're supposed to be so that we can embrace who we truly are.
And that was the work Kamini had set out to do for herself.
The goal that was really worth pursuing.
Being able to free myself meant that I studied many a random thing to try and figure out what it is that I'd like to do.
And throughout that process, my relationship with my psychologist holds strong.
It's the thing that has kept me rooted and grounded and given me the ability to be resilient.
Because I think that's most of this entertainment game.
Do you take rejection?
No, because there are 10,000 nos before you get to a yes.
um
But within that, do you maintain some element of authenticity and remember why you're doing this?
And I will stand for this.
I will not agree to that.
It takes a lot of energy.
By now, Kamini was figuring out how to negotiate with herself, her true self.
Part of this journey led her to complete a master's in psychology and at the time of this recording, a counseling internship.
Yes, Kamini still wants to work in food and entertainment, but now she knows she has to keep track of what the costs to herself are.
I think that's the, what is it, the performer's anxiety kind of stuff.
It's the, yes, I want to be seen.
And there's a time when you're a baby entertainer where you're like, yes, I want to be seen for anything.
And then you get to a point where you're like, yes, I want to be seen, but these are my boundaries.
And this is when you're allowed to see me this is when you are not.
And maybe in the grand scheme of things, that means that I won't attain the sort of like A-lister, whatever.
But I think I'm okay with
Actually not I think, I know that I'm okay with that.
Because feeling like burnt out and a shell of a human being...
I can't go back there.
It's not always just about saying no to the things that drain you.
Healing from burnout means needing to say yes to things that restore your nervous system.
Self-care lies in the ritual.
I didn't know this about myself.
I thought I loved this entertainment life where every day looks different, but it also does your head in, or does mine anyway.
And so I love to wake up at quarter past five and do my exercise and then go through my day.
trying to drink enough water and then end my day with some kind of yin yoga, breathing something so that I can sleep enough.
Cause I wake up early, I sleep early.
I'm trying so hard to consciously uncouple with my phone.
I know that I need to put it in the other room, but we haven't got there yet.
I have wished upon many a star that there could be a single easy to purchase solution for a calm nervous system.
But the truth is, it's the ritual of small, simple things consistently.
The world now, I'm trying to make it not be so chaotic, which means that everything is in the diary.
I've become quite militant about structure in my world.
I think that relationships with other people is one of the aspects of life that I'm still sort of learning how to do efficiently.
And I guess efficiency is not part of that social aspect.
But I think because I have sort of grown and changed and been present about that change, I think with that, some of the people in my life have, I think in terms of the picking
order, have been reshuffled.
Once you've flaked out on people, which is what they like to say, but in actual fact, I'm just guarding my peace, they do kind of realize that you're not gonna go out on a Tuesday.
uh
And so then that is a shift.
That's a when, when can we see you?
Okay.
So you, you don't want to be out till 2am.
uh Can we maybe do a walk?
So I think right now I'm trying to find more like-minded people who are looking for a similar sort of outcome for this life thing.
So it does change the way that you relate to people once you start showing up as your truest self.
Kamini's truest self is being able to hold this balance of both and.
Because once you start showing up as your truest self, the world reorganizes itself around you.
Some relationships make room, some don't know what to do with a new version of you, and some just thaw away, quietly.
None of it lasts exactly, just the natural consequence of becoming.
I'm somewhere between this counseling psychological move forward and then I'm still sort of doing some of the food content related things.
If I was just like, yeah, whatever, let's just go with it.
Just because I think of entertainment and psychology are two polar opposite ends of the spectrum.
There's one like, look at me, look at me.
And the other one is like, I'm holding space for other people.
But I know that as my personality, I do like to be seen.
I do like the personal engagement.
But now it's trying to figure out whether or not I can have that on my terms and how that looks and how I could add like evidence-based, like an evidence-based quality to whatever
content I am sharing.
So I feel like I'm in this liminal space and I'm wearing all the hats with all the jazz hands.
The important thing is that Kamini is okay with the conditions that come with every hat and that she does the jazz hands because she wants to.
I to speak to 2009 Kamini.
I think at the time I was waiting for something to happen to me and now I've been able to like lean into the agency of this life and of my world and kind of figure out which levers
I need to pull.
What I've learned about the human experience in the last 12 years is that it is always going to be in full Technicolor
beaming madness.
And that's okay.
Yes, I can see my life and I can be in it and I can experience all the madness, but I'm also able to step out and have more perspective on whatever the madness is and then go
back in with more tools to be able to work that in the best way.
you
Yes folks, here on Something Shifted it's not just identities that get interrupted.
Sometimes recordings do too.
And while the interruption threw me off my game just a little bit, Tuxedo didn't move.
Tuxedo, do you want to say something?
Tux?
Not even an ear flinch.
No, he's sort of also at that age where we have treats.
I like that about Tux.
Completely unbothered by the things that aren't for him.
I don't know if it's possible when you're younger.
That's just...
But this is also why I would never want to be younger.
Not ever.
I will deal with grey hairs, I will deal with...
I forgot my pillows and I've got to go see a chiropractor.
Like that whole story?
For the amount of wisdom and freedom that I have now.
It's not worth going back.
Today, Kamini is an accomplished food writer.
Her latest book, All Dhal'd Up, with a focus on good mood food, picked up the Best in the World award in the Indian food category at the 31st Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.
I suspect her passions of food, entertainment and psychology will continue to keep tuxedo well fed too.
Go on, subscribe to Something Shifted on your favorite listening platform now and never miss a human-centered story.
You can find more episodes and ways to support the production of this podcast at somethingshifted.co.za.
And because you've listened all the way to the end, we want to share our Something Shifted The Soundtrack playlist with you.
It's a compilation of songs we've listened to while making this season of Something Shifted, songs that make us feel a little less lonely and a lot more empowered.
The link is in the show notes.
Enjoy!
Many thanks to Rue my executor producer, for additional writing on this episode, and as always, thank you for listening.
Bye!