My New Dawn.

Hey Folks. I am elated to host my first guest writer in  this blog. Please join me in welcoming Wanjiru whom i consider my writing headmistress. I have learnt a great deal from her in  my writing journey and she continues to be  my lighthouse in as far as putting my mind into words is concerned. This is her story. May you be well fed as i am every time i interact with her writing. And remember to not just visit but move into her website listed below. But after you read this piece first. And please follow instructions. hehe… 

I’m going home to write. The thought filled me with equal parts trepidation and excitement. I was in Kisumu, where for six months I had been holding remedial classes for children who struggle with reading. I’m not a teacher by any means. I was deployed there as a volunteer for a Ministry of Education programme a few months after completing my Masters in International Business. On paper, the idea of the programme was to equip graduates with workplace skills as they served the nation. On the ground, it was a money-siphoning mill running on the hopes and sweat of young blood. All the same I made the best of it until one afternoon, hiding from the heat of the lakeside sun under the shade of an old tree, I decided it wasn’t for me.

Three years earlier I’d finished my B.Com in Accounting and crafted an elaborate five-year career plan that involved goals like making the Top 30 under 30, home ownership by 30, and other romantic ideas you have in mind when you graduate at twenty years old. (All this to be achieved by age 30 – 30 was going to be a big year for me ha-ha!). I was ahead of my time at this point, until I hit the job market.

I had always known that I didn’t want to be employed. I wanted to govern my own time, and to do creative, stimulating and fulfilling work. I had been thinking along the lines of entrepreneurship but everyone said, “Get some work experience first. You’re too green to start your own outfit.”

I did not want to be the ‘energetic addition’ to some ‘esteemed organization’s team,’ no matter how many times I wrote that in my cover letters. I knew I wouldn’t find what I needed in the nooks of a spreadsheet or the drab folds of a ledger book. Still, I caved to the pressure of knocking on closed doors – many, indiscriminate closed doors looking for the work experience that was the supposed cornerstone of my game plan. Three long years later, one creaked open.

It wasn’t the first job I had been made to believe I would earn with my pristine papers. I was to move to a dusty, little village school in Kisumu and read stories to children. I had never lived away from home even during my years in university, so I was determined to prove that I had the mettle. ‘I can and I will’ was my daily mantra and it worked. I loved spending time with the kids, but the work had nothing to do with my business career. Mid-programme I realized there would be no government job waiting for me at the end of my stint as I had hoped. While before I felt like I had a head start, now I began feeling like I was getting left behind. A disquiet started to build within me, rising every day until it reached a crescendo. Under the shade of that old tree, watching the sun sinking fast to kiss Victoria in the horizon, I deciding to go home and write.

I have always felt guilty about leaving things unfinished. People warned me that if I left I’d be an outlier, a quitter, one of the weak ones that got weeded out. I didn’t want to be a quitter but I didn’t want to stay either. It just wasn’t right for me. To make peace with my decision, I had to redefine the situation for myself. I came across a passage that spoke of walking away from something that doesn’t suit you as being a strategic disengagement and I thought, “That’s it. That’s what I’m doing.”

Once I took the bus home and had a few days to settle in though, I felt like a prisoner released into the freedom I’d been dreaming of for so long. Yet, once the gates were locked behind me, I dreaded the absence of the structure I’d come to know so well. I felt like I was groping in the dark. The uncertainty and anxiety of starting something new gripped me. Starting on a blank page can be as daunting as it is exciting.

After the pleasantries with friends, classmates, relatives and friends of my parents, there was the ever looming question of, “So where are you now?” or “What are you doing with yourself?”

I always wanted to say, “What do you mean? I’m here with you now, living, breathing…”

But I knew what they were really asking. Had I found a job and could I be an asset for the future? I’d say I hadn’t found a job yet and keep the fear and confusion of starting a writing career to myself. I could see from the way their backs straightened upon realizing they were doing better than me that they’d decided I wasn’t an asset after all. Nonetheless, I wrote. I wrote because it was the only leg I had to stand on. I wrote many bad stories – stories with loopholes, flat plots, poor endings… and I learned.

I tried things that didn’t work but I kept at it until eventually, something that did work, started taking shape. There was no eureka moment. There was no formula to be cracked. It was not an event. It was a process during which every time I sat down to write, I had to quiet the voice in me saying, “You can’t pull this off. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

That voice made things harder because I wasn’t able to see my progress and celebrate my small victories. It kept me from seeing how brave my decision was; to choose myself; to choose the path that would feed my soul; to choose happiness; to come to the roads diverging in the yellow wood and take the one less travelled. I wasn’t able to see that in struggling to find my authentic self, I was developing an authentic voice. These are all dots I have connected in hindsight.

Even so, the upside has been remarkable. For instance, I am quiet; always have been. I don’t find it necessary to speak unless called upon. Most times that works for me, but sometimes it doesn’t. There are times when it is imperative that I speak up about the things that matter to me. Before I started writing, I always felt like I was disadvantaged because I am soft-spoken. People can talk over me, and I get flustered when I want to express something in speaking because I take too long to arrange my thoughts. But since I found my writing voice, it has more than made up for what I was lacking. It speaks for itself and for me by extension.

I have learned surprising things about myself too. If anyone had described me as a storyteller last year, I would have found that strange. Writing has brought out the storyteller in me. I always wondered whether I had what it takes to succeed. Because I am comfortable in my silence, I have a vibrant inner world that is my biggest asset in writing. I like observing things and people, because how else do you learn? These are qualities I have always had that come effortlessly to me. I do have what it takes to succeed; I always did. I just doubted it because my idea of what it takes was different from what it actually takes. As well, I have had to rethink what success means to me.

I struggle with money like everyone else, (except maybe the Ngiritas), but I consider myself successful because I love my work. When I wake up in the morning (okay, mid-morning), I look forward to my work because I find meaning in it. I am able to harness my pain and turn it into a beautiful work of art. I am exhilarated when I’m going about my day and a sentence pops in my mind, and I’m energized to build on it until it becomes a story. I am successful because I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I have found alignment in this area of my life. I am thoroughly enjoying my journey and my spirit is thriving because of it.

If I have to impart anything from these seven or so years during which this all unfolded, it is that when the call comes to transition, heed it. Start, learn, and grow. You can’t grow if you don’t learn and you can’t learn if you don’t start.

You can find more of my stories on http://hootingowl.co/