I feel old
“Fu’ad, some days, you’re 35 years old,” Eniola said some weeks ago. “Other days, you’re 12.”
Today, I’m 27.
December 31st 2017.
My 2018 game plan was clear; jump more — that kind where you jump off a cliff and figure out the parachute thing on your way down. I did make a serious jump; quitting a job. The landing went well too.
“Okay tell me; what’s your favourite thing about yourself?”
“I can get up and hit the road at a moment’s notice.” That used to be my favourite pitch when people ask me about myself. I still can, but I see it in a different light.
Imagine you’re in the driver seat snaking through a horrible Nigerian highway. Driving into a bump isn’t always a bad thing, especially when you’re alone. But when you have passengers jumping around the car every time you hit the brakes abruptly, there’s going to be a lot of sorry-telling.
Being spontaneous is cute when you’re riding solo.
A lot of my spontaneity is because of my ingrained thrill-seeking missile, so I’m learning to keep this beast at bay. Lots of no’s. Managing the mundane. Re-training my secret terror of permanence. Because starting is easy, the real work is in the followthrough.
Patience is a truly excruciating virtue.
“If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.”
I’m heavily invested in content, and how people interact with the good stuff. I’ve had a lot of opinions about how it should be done in the past, and 2018 has been the walk-the-talk year. My new job has been extremely hard, demanding 110%–like how running hurts, but with the good kind of hurt. Most of the sacrifices, I can live with, like turning down the much-needed extra income because of bandwidth.
The most hurtful sacrifice though has been with a book I should be working on–a memoir of sorts–of what life is like backpacking across Nigeria. Some nights, I go into my bathroom and scream for two seconds because it sucks to not be a crier. That’s a ton of personal writing and unpacking that didn’t get done.
On most days, I’m still not confident about my work. Partly because I’m consuming better, so I believe I can be better. It doesn’t stop me though.
“I demand to be left alone.”
My entire life, I’ve never owned space to myself. I shared a room with my brother, cousins and their friends for most of my childhood. My mum was always bringing someone to live with us. My dad was always letting someone spend “just a few days” for a few months at a stretch. I didn’t hate it though.
In university, my room was a camp. Now, I live with my brother, who–after weeks of passive-aggressiveness–has learned to knock. I tried to make my room here a place where I can be left alone, but someone always knocks.
One of my biggest obsessions this year has been moving out, getting my own space, one I’m fully responsible for and I can strut around naked in peace without worrying that I’m going to run into someone on the way to the kitchen. This year, I made getting a place my most consistent obsession.
But Lagos has a way of BDSM-ing you in every regard. Making you hang on till the next one; just enough pain to make house hunting hurt, but not enough to make you give up entirely. Aluta Continua.
Keeping count
I started tracking my finances, and I’ve done it consistently for at least seven months. It hasn’t significantly made me change how I spend money, but it has changed how I see it. Maybe helped me understand saving a little better.
I imagine a conversation between Spendee and me like it’d happen between Alfred and Master Wayne:
Alfred: Took quite a hit on that spend, didn’t we Master Fu?
Me: I didn’t want to buy that thing, but I needed to.
Alfred: Weird flex Master Fu, but okay.
Me: You still haven’t given up on me?
Alfred: Never.
I’ll keep at it, and maybe give investing a shot. Aluta Continua.
Sometime in September, 2012.
It’s one of those nights I’m lying down face up in a dark room, and thinking about life by thinking about death. I make a mental note of all the people who might miss me when I die and hope they get on with their lives as quickly as most people seemed to do when my mum died a few months earlier. I hope they don’t remember me or gather in my name. I have my mother’s genes, and she has her father’s. And both of them died because small rebellions started in their bodies, and no doctor could stop it.
I’m going to die too. A tear rolls down the side of my face, and it’s not fear, it’s just this overwhelming feeling of accepting the inevitable.
But I wake up in the morning; part shocked, but part hurt that I still have to keep at life. My mind still has scars from those nights. The most prominent of them is the eery feeling I might not live beyond 30.
But it’s not entirely a new concept.
I don’t know if there’s a Japanese word for it but–the Muslim tactic is to approach the night like you won’t see the day, and the day as though you won’t see the night. But this one feels different, and it doesn’t terrify me. It just creates a sense of urgency and a constant sense of, “is this what you want to do with the last three years of your life?”
But for the first time since 2012, I thought, what if I live longer?
So in 2018, I tried to make a run for beyond 30. I tried questioning my diet. I tried running, and my running has taken on a life of its own as catharsis. Running is me asking myself every night as I run through Surulere, “how much more can this body take?”
Perhaps whatever will be the end of me will take me all at once, and not chip away at my life breath by breath, rebellion by rebellion.
Time has eaten and drunk on us.
At a wedding this year, I spent most of the time looking at people and replaying brief histories about them in my head as they smiled or waved.
Everyone’s all grown and smoothened out at the edges. The tiny insecurities are managed better, and there’s an attempt at self-confidence. Vows are being made. Babies are dropping. People seem to be settling into this adulting thing, one anchor at a time. Because adulting is really about being calculated about what kind of anchors you want to hold you down.
On the days when people ask my advice, I feel 35 but still give terrible advice like “seeking constant happiness is a false expectation that will set you up for misery. Treat happiness like an event, not a constant state. Settle for contentment.”
Or “some trauma is training.”
Other days, I want to be 12, sneaking to the beach alone past midnight, to skinny-dip and gaze at the distant lights as the water dries on my body.
But today, I’m 27. Still trying to be kind. Still trying to be useful. Still making friends easily. Grateful for the wins. Moving on quickly from the losses.
I don’t know how else to live.
