Contemplations: A Preview to My Life’s Memoir.
To contemplate: to view or consider with continued attention.
Also to ponder, ruminate, cogitate.
This essay spans across a whole year of happenings. It’s a compilation of my drafts really. I hope you enjoy.
i. circa February 2024.
I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve always considered it a grand, noble thing to plaster the highs and lows of one’s life journey with ink on paper and make a memento out of it. It’s a promise I made to myself when I was 15 and one I’ve yet to completely let go of. Does that foretell a book in my future? We’ll just have to wait and see. It’s why I remain committed to loving memoirs — not enough of them exist. My friend Usman shared a test with me the other day, and as I attempted it, I realized many of the questions were new. They were questions my mind had never wandered off to or somehow formulated answers to without knowing as a result of my introversion. All except one.
“Do you tend to see life through the lens of systems or stories?”
It was a good question, but it was also one I answered in a heartbeat. For me, only one answer encapsulated my entire ideology of life, humans, and things — stories. I always say that we are a summation of our stories. The core memories we form from childhood and the identities we grapple with for the rest of our lives — the realities of simpler times or the traumas our brains would rather lock away rather than process to function. The ebbs and flows of growth, heartbreaks and milestones, the joy and pain of experiencing these with people we love, the difficulties we encounter in adulthood, and the actualities we live in are all gigantic stories.
ii. more interviews, please?
There are but a few things more empowering than owning your story and telling it with agency, exactly how you want it to be told. This is why I’m obsessed with interviews. When I want to know a bit more about someone, I’m more likely to scour the internet for an interview about them first before reading their books, if they have written any. This is because (good) questions give birth to deep thought. They make you pause to consider why a thing is the way it is or why it shouldn’t be. They offer a platform for introspection, and I think, as a collective, we’re simply not introspective enough.
Interviews are my favorite genre of anything, and memoirs are such a genius way to keep stories alive. It is no surprise that my first book of the year, which I finished in the past week, is a memoir. While you might consider it quite insignificant, it matters to me, and that’s all I’m willing to consider.
First, I haven’t been able to finish a book in almost three years. I’ve started a number but never finished.
Second, when life disrupts your momentum in a guttural way and you learn to trudge on despite, it takes everything away from you. Everything, including the simple joy of finishing a good book.
Third, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I finished it, and that’s how I know when a thing has marked me for good.
Lastly, all it takes to get back into a habit is to start and see it through till it’s finished, and boom, all the dopamine comes rushing in, and you’re on a roll, steady, flying high. The motivational speakers on your Instagram timeline are not lying to you. Just start that thing, and the alignment and clarity that will follow will astound you.
iii. the weight of destiny.
The mark of this book, the enthralling lives it captured, their riveting actions towards selflessness, their understanding of legacy, impact, all amounting to real lives changed for the better. With generations trailing behind who will learn of such audacity, greatness, and thoughtfulness, it made me think of my life, the weight of destiny that hangs in the balance with purpose, looking me dead in the eye and asking if I’m up to the task of living up to my dreams and committing to the kind of discipline that must be painstakingly built to truly achieve anything. My friend Kelechi often told me that we must always dream because it comes at no cost. I think execution is the cost of dreaming. To think, talk, and DO. I think of how I want to remember every decade of my years spent, and I’m now beginning to understand that for some of us, life cannot stop at getting an education, living in a nice house, driving a Mercedes S Class, getting married, and having kids. It has to mean more. The defiance of my imagination has blotted out everything that represents ‘ordinary’, ‘mediocre’, or any synonym of the same in your thesaurus. Even I get wary of it because it is the mind’s work to dream recklessly and boundlessly, but it is my hands’ work to execute, and with execution comes resistance to the very thing that could change all of our lives.
iii. congratulations, I’m proud of you and other stories.
In the last 11 days, I’ve heard the phrase “congratulations, I’m proud of you” or some kind of variation of it more times than I know how to respond. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s sweet, kind even for people I know and love, to tell me that they have considered my work ethic, my courage, my resilience, my faith, and my wild belief, and it somehow elicits a sense of admiration. In my head, it’s like a fist bump after saying, “I have seen your work; I have watched you, and all I have is pride for you. Sweet, innit?
But also, in the last 11 days, I have wrestled with expectations, with hopes outside of mine, with sheer pressure, and I fear that I’m beginning to slip into a performance rhetoric. Don’t worry, I will find my way out of the pit, or better still, Jesus is my way out of the pit, but the pit is still the pit, no? As a sufferer from the chronic illness of ambition, the tussle is in the balance. How much can I demand from myself before I slip into “undue” pressure? What does laziness look like for me? When can I truly say that I didn’t do my best even if my peers think that I have done enough, or when can I say I did? At what point can I say thank you as a response to “I’m proud of you” boldly without feeling like I need to explain? What to explain being completely lost on me, mind you? When will I be able to accept compliments like that and move on without weighing them against the shadows of who I hope to be, who I know I can be?
Or maybe just revel in the realness of completion. I never know what to do with completions and endings these days. To applaud oneself for merely making it to the end is so uncommon. “What are the congratulations on?” Someone asked with disdain. As if to say nothing she has done is worth your recognition, at least not yet. As if to see the end of a thing is not victory in itself.
To move forward, I am choosing to sit with what it means to complete something worthwhile until I can see for myself that even that alone is enough.
iv. transitions, applying grace and more grace.
In the intensity of the past few months, I found myself withdrawn from most of my friendships. I worried I was outgrowing my friends. Today, I asked myself why. What I came up with was shocking. I found comfort in the spaces that allowed me to exist without add-ons. I didn’t want to talk about my life. I was living out the intensity. It was in my face every day. I wanted to hear the exciting things instead. The new job, the new gadget, cookware, recipe, the new boyfriend, the film trailer that filled you with goosebumps on YouTube, your latest obsession, the mundane activities you picked up to stay sane. All of it but my life. I would have liked that a lot, but I didn’t even know it was what I wanted at the time. In Treasure Okure’s words, “I am also getting comfortable with the idea that maybe friendships, like homes, evolve. Maybe we don’t outgrow them so much as we learn to inhabit them differently.” So I will apply grace and more grace.
With completions come transitions into new beginnings. Tis but the cycle of life. I am learning to treat each phase as a step in a staircase. Alma Asinobi once said, “You don’t climb staircases at once; it’s only logical that you don’t treat your dreams that way too.”
While I am choosing to acknowledge the election of grace thus far, I am also choosing, like Abraham, to hope against hope that every dream will come to fruition and that when mortality comes knocking, there will be nothing left because it met me emptied with a legacy to carry on.
At the end of the day, I owe it to myself to pave the path of diligence, to steer away from gifts that steal time and bury my head in silence until the time of announcement comes. I am learning (against my innate desires, I’m beginning to realize) to embrace obscurity instead of noise and to toil privately for as long as I must. Invisibility gives a beautiful effect to emergence. They will say, “What an overnight success,” and I will be content because it will mean that I now move like I was not there all along when, indeed, I was. First in my spirit, then in my mind, and now with my whole body in consonance. So help me, God.
