public speaker Archives | A Million Beautiful Pieces

My Inspiration November 27, 2018

My Inspiration: There is ALWAYS Time to Dance

Today Savannah is reminiscing about the wedding last year when I was the MC and I danced a special dance.

Now that I work from home, it is a mixed blessing.

My children and my husband love having me around and I find we are using our time more productively. I wake up everyday excited to meet the day. I can’t remember ever feeling like this in my whole life.

For those families who have a child with a disability, you will know why this dynamic is precious. My daughter Savannah is witty and funny and kind and thoughtful. She is also different in her way of thinking and feeling.
She is my ever-long learning course. Teaching me all that I don’t know and often after working hard at understanding her point of view, I come back to the realisation that I just can’t reach all the depths that her mind wanders too. As an autistic person, she sees life in a way that I work very hard to understand; only to find that I fail.

So often I fail. My struggle to keep up with the “normal” world collides with trying to grasp her view; and I become frustrated, and angry at myself. At her. At this life and it’s persistent demands. Yet, I have to live in both worlds. I have to try so hard to keep up with life so that I can be part of it’s rat race and try to earn a living to provide for all our children.

Governing all that we do, like so many families like us, is that we must try very hard to earn more than a living.
We must provide for Savannah long after we are gone. And that is what keeps me awake till the early hours or gets me out of bed long before the sun rises. Working from home while also being a caregiver, a companion and all that encompasses being Savannah’s mother, is my “more than a conqueror” daily challenge.

If I could stay at my desk all day, I would not eat or drink because truly writing feeds me like nothing else does. But my reverie is broken every time when Savannah calls me. Sometimes what she needs is reasonable and makes sense that she called me. Other times, she calls me to tell me something so far off base from the moment that we are in, that I throw my hands up in the air and proclaim out loud that I don’t need to know the tit bit of information that she is supplying. She doesn’t grasp that I can’t know what goes on on her head and so we tussle with memories until I either get what she is on about or I give up and walk away.

For example, a month ago she suddenly jolted to March 2014 and for several days, she recounted everything she remembered about that time. Everything. Details like what earrings I wore and who we saw. People who I have long forgotten. She remembered their earrings, their watches and who said what, when and where. As I fight back the urge to weep for what feels like the hundredth time that she calls me to say something that I cannot see the relevance in; I ask myself if anyone else lives in so many spaces all at once? And if so do they survive themselves?

Right now, I am in the middle of writing about Domestic Abuse for the UNWomen’s Campaign and it takes me back to times in my life that I have closed the door on. Yet, now at forty, the shock of what I was allowed to be privy too as a child, washes me afresh. I have several other writing projects underway and a new client who I have to do some research for. So my mind is a little more than preoccupied on a daily basis.

Then Savannah calls. Again. Not being sure if she needs physical assistance or if it is just another newsflash from the past; I walk to where she is because that’s my life.

Looking back over the years, I’m most in awe that while I was trying to glue my heart back together as a teenager who learnt too much about the hypocrisy of the adults around her, I somehow kept my sanity as I became Savannah’s mother. Over these twenty-two years I’ve listened to the same story that my heart didn’t have the words to utter when Savannah was little. Parents grappling with the heartbreak of the unknown as their child begins life in a world designed to set itself against them. The most competent of people, crumble as they understand the force that will be required to help their children live their best lives.

Each time, I’m stunned anew that a girl like me became Savannah’s mum. What was God thinking to trust me with her? It has never been easy. There are days when I wish I did not know of the things I have to know. But I survived and I have learnt how to thrive right where I am. Having Savannah at eighteen was probably the worst thing to happen in a life already falling to pieces. Yet years later I understood that being Savannah’s mother saved my life. Who knows what I would have become, had I not have to fight for her in all the ways imaginable and unimaginable? Would I have known how to fight for myself or for that matter would I have known that I could change the course of my life?

Even now as I try to juggle housekeeping, children, writing, keeping up with everything, Savannah calls. She is now remembering December 2017. She wants to play the song I performed at my cousins wedding. I’m not in the mood for this and I grumble something to that effect.

As I walk away from her with the clock ticking and the checklist running in my head of all that I have to get done today, I hear her say: “Pretty mum the wedding. My mum good dancer. Well done.”

Savannah and I decked out at a wedding last year.

I can’t help looking back at her as she gives me a big grin. Maybe I am wrong again. I don’t think I am looking after her at all. I think she is looking after me. Drawing me away from the square boxes everyone is fighting to fit themselves into.

If you have heard me speak you will know that one of my key points is that there aren’t answers to everything that life throws our way. For those moments, there is always dance.

And so as Savannah played the song “Tere Bina” from the Bollywood movie Guru for the umpteenth time this morning, I took my own advice; and I danced. She clapped and squealed and made her happy sounds.

No one ever tells us that the lines of our broken hearts, make for the most polished dance floors. Or that dance is meaningless unless someone gives you a beat to dance to.

A Million Beautiful Pieces August 31, 2018

The fire inside me is burning brighter

“I survived because the fire inside of me burnt brighter than the fire around me” – Felix H.

Too often we allow the circumstances of life to define our character. Yet character isn’t about the circumstances we have lived through; it is about how much we understand our value to God and how that influences us in the choices we make in those circumstances. That becomes the grit and the grace that fills us with determination not just to survive but also to thrive.

This year I challenged myself to new experiences and to give myself one year to live just for me. I say one year because as a parent to an adult with special needs, by default my life choices are always filtered by being her mother. To that end, I’m so excited to announce that I was able to change my career to pursue my dream.

I’m now a full time blogger, freelance writer and public speaker.

It was a big decision to make as I loved my previous career as an Assistive Technology Advisor. When I thought it through though, the aspect of that job which excited me the most was when I was teaching and training. So to have the opportunity to positively influence people through the medium of writing and speaking is hugely exciting.

This means I’m learning new skills that will help me to become better at my chosen craft. It means that after a year of experiences with this blog, and also entering the Mrs South Africa competition and then writing for sponsors; I’ve grown as a writer and public speaker.

Writing to influence people to live their best lives, to tell stories of human triumph and struggle that promotes self reflection and to influence society towards being kinder and more understanding is my great passion. Then as a speaker; I’ve always been a motivational speaker and I’ve had the opportunity to host a few events as an MC. Now I get to do that more often as a career. You can contact me via my website for my media kit or email me at desirae@amillionbeautifulpieces.co.za.

Having essentially felt like an outcast in society when I became a teenage parent then feeling the second wave of that exclusion when my daughter was diagnosed with a disability; left me feeling like an outsider in my own life. I know that when people have set backs or are on the road to picking up the pieces of their lives, it’s a lonely place to be if you don’t have people to champion you. I was blessed that along my journey I met people who reignited the fire inside me when it was in danger of burning out.

And that is what A Million Beautiful Pieces will be more about now. A place to find your strength and to know that you are not alone. Your life has value and you are valuable.

I’ve learnt this only in the last few years and what I know for sure is that: it’s a process. It’s taken all of my adult life to have the courage to pursue the career that I want.

In this process of becoming me, I’ve learnt this:

Be patient with yourself. It takes time to unlearn the unnecessary.
Self love is often confused with selfishness. Remember when you know how to love yourself, then only can you love someone else.
Oh man, this is what gets me out of bed in the mornings: This life… It’s yours. No one else can lay claim to how it is lived but you.

As I get up to face this last day of August I hope that the fire inside you burns brightly enough for you to live and love well in every moment of today.

That’s what makes life beautiful. ♥

My Story March 27, 2018

This is my story

I am a motivational speaker, an aspiring author and a blogger. I love, love to write but I had no idea that in my fortieth year, I would find the courage to take up my mantle as a full time inspirational speaker and writer. I did not begin my adult life planning to become an inspiration but God had his own plans for me.

I grew up in an unhappy home and by the age of eighteen I became a mother. Being a teen mother was painfully difficult but learning that my daughter, Savannah was diagnosed with cerebral palsy was even more so. It was a torrid period in my life. I was married and divorced by the time I turned twenty one years old. I mourned in silence the loss of my hopes and dreams for my daughter and for myself; as I slowly came to grips with the reality of her diagnosis.

Teenage pregnancies and sex outside marriage was frowned upon then just as much as it is now. It’s still astonishing to me that even now we don’t do enough to address the “why” young women look for love in all the wrong ways in the wrong people. My own self loathing and self doubt coupled with the taunts of those around me should have destroyed me. The assumptions that I would not be able to parent a child, and more so be capable to parent a child with a disability, chipped away at what little self-esteem there was left in me.

I have journeyed a long way from the 18-year-old who thought she always had to do what everyone else deemed right for her. I was forced to do what was right for Savannah first and in so doing I slowly learnt to let go of everyone else’s expectations of me. Being Savannah’s mother meant learning to fight for her in ways that took me to the ends of myself. I had to learn to parent her while I was still trying to figure out what being a whole person meant for myself.

This is an incredibly difficult thing to do, even for parents who planned their lives and had everything go according to that plan. It is a complicated struggle to figure out who you are as a parent when your child has a disability. Sometimes the battles are not just with other people. The toughest battles are often the battles that erupt within us. As a parent of a child with a disability, it was incredibly difficult to fight my own preconceptions and expectations of who I wanted my child to be. I am still learning all the time, as each new season unfolds how to accept the life that lies before me.

Savannah has become an inspiration to many people from many different communities, but non more so than to me. She is also autistic and struggles with complications from her physical disability. She is the reason that my husband Michael and I met and fell in love. We have two more children: a daughter Talisa (16) and a son Eli (10). Savannah’s life continues to test my faith in God, in myself and in people and over and over again I find that Faith, Hope and Love remain.

I started out as a parent at eighteen and went on to carve out a most unique career that is diverse as it is fulfilling. From talking publicly about raising my family in the face of disability, to working as an assistive technology advisor, to being a motivational speaker, to using my skill as a speaker to host events and to conduct trainings in various sectors; I found so many beautiful pieces in these experiences that make up this life I live today.

I was chosen as a South African to Watch by #SA Bloggers for 2018 and I was awarded the Most Inspirational Blogger by the #SAMommyBloggerAwards.

My family lived through more heartaches and struggles than my 18-year-old self could have imagined she would survive. And yet I did.

I learnt that life is frail and must be handled with care.

I learnt that there are heartaches that will never be healed, but living with a broken heart doesn’t mean you are broken.

I learnt that people need people, but not everyone wants to be the person who is needed.

I learnt that unconditional love is real and a rarity, and I am blessed to know it.

I learnt to trust the process.

I learnt that people are always more important than things, always.

I learnt that God does not give his strongest fights to his strongest warriors. He helps normal, everyday people to face their difficulties and He never leaves them.

I learnt that…… my true self…… is made up of A Million Beautiful Pieces.

To book me for an event please click here:

This Is What I Do

Features February 14, 2018

Jozi4Autism Main Speaker

Join me on the 25th of March 2018 at the Johannesburg Zoo where I’ll be helping you to understand the power of communication for the autistic community.

“Our speaker is superwoman Desirae Pillay – mother to an autistic adult daughter, assistive technology advisor at Inclusive Solutions and AAC advocate. This talk will inspire you and change your perception of autism and communication.” – Jozi4Autism

Buy your tickets here.

My Services July 10, 2017

This Is What I Do

Most recently I changed careers to work as a trainer, a public speaker and a freelance writer. It is my great love to teach. To use the mediums of speaking and writing to do that is a wonderful opportunity.

In my professional career my great passion was teaching and training. As a facilitator for training sessions, I know that it is vital to ensure that everyone understands the content, they feel confident to engage in the session and that they find value in the time that is spent in training. It gives me great satisfaction when trainees feel confident at the end of a session.

As a speaker, I am passionate about helping people to live their best lives. Using the experiences that shaped my life from being a teenage single mother in post apartheid South Africa to building a family and a career and now to facing the future with an adult child who will require full care, has taught me so much about what influences our decision making especially when one has to choose from a set of bad options. As a motivational speaker my goal is to share stories that remind people about the preciousness of each moment and that life is still beautiful.

As a writer, last year I entered the blogging space to contribute to social change in my own small way. I have learnt a little something about human behaviour because of the unusual circumstances that my life path has followed. Writing and sharing my insights is a way to give a little Faith, Hope and Love to the world. For my journey as a writer, I have also embarked on content writing for businesses which is an interesting avenue and one that creates diversity in my ability as a writer.

If you would like to engage with me in any of these capacities please complete the form below:

My Inspiration July 10, 2017

Soul Sharers

This poem is one of my favourite poems of all time.

It perfectly encapsulates my life from how broken and confused I felt for so long to how I learnt to be comfortable with myself just as I am.

It also impresses on me how much compassion and kindness we all need.

I remember when the world broke in,
To rip apart my soul,
For years after that one event,
I thought myself not whole,
My hours were spent with trying,
To fix it up with tape & glue,
Until one day I discovered,
Everyone else was broken too,
Here we were with pieces,
Of ourselves in both our hands,
So fragile and so open,
That I began to understand,
Maybe I’d been greedy,
To want my soul all to myself,
When it could be a lot more helpful,
In the palms of someone else,
Now every time I go somewhere,
I leave part of me behind,
And collect all of the pieces,
Of others’ souls that I can find,
So when I’m meeting someone new,
It’s not just me they get,
But also tiny fragments,
Of all the others that I’ve met,
And my life’s become much bigger,
Now that it’s home to things so small,
And if this is what “broken” means,
I do not mind at all.
– Erin Hanson

Image credit: Michon van Staden