Act!

I have thought hard about situations where COVID happens again. What if something happens to me, something that is so absolutely out of my control that it gives me a new way of seeing life. And I think I just experienced my COVID, only that in this one, death was so near. And yet, seeing death and escaping its fangs makes you appreciate life more. I now want to live.

And this new longing to take on life head on comes at a good time. The new year is almost here. It’s December. What a time to make those resolutions and start a clean slate. You and I know there is really no clean new slate, but let’s just delude ourselves that there can be one, okay. Now that that is out of the way, let me let you in on what I have been thinking about.

For the past few days, these were the lines in my head: “I want to finish my year excellently.” As in, in everything I do, I want to perfect it. Not in the sense of that crippling perfectionism feeling that makes you edit and re edit work, push things over for tomorrow because you are afraid you are not good enough to do it yet, and even when you get a whim of courage to do it, you still feel your work is subpar. No, I am not talking about that. I am talking about just excellence, depending on how that would look like to you. Nothing too much, and also nothing too deceiving, especially when you know you could do better.

In my quotidien, it was supposed to look like submitting a final paper that I enjoyed writing and didn’t rush. It would look like writing my exams and seeing topics that I did enjoy learning about, even if I know shallowly about them. I hope you get it.

So now I am sitting here. I can still finish excellently, but it looks different. School has been cut short by the unfortunate shooting. Now there’s a workload taken off my back. That should be a good thing. But school keeps me busy. And when all of a sudden I have loads of free time, I fall into a cycle of sasa nifanye. And this time, I think I might just know what to do.

I want to peel the layers of what excellence and contentment mean and look like. I want to wring out the word of its potential. Peeling is an action. So that could only mean doing things in a way where excellence is the output. I know this is possible because I know what mediocrity looks like, and I have seen people live out excellence.

I think a lot about this quote. I do not remember it word for word. But it says something along the lines of our minds operating best on free fall. That’s when the flaps open. Okay, a better one that I have googled, and maybe they are synonymous, is that a mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work when it is not open.

My interpretation is that you have to do stuff. The moment you stop fearing and leap into that action, then that’s when you actually learn. Sometimes we complain about not seeing results, but we are actually just shying away from doing things. You know practice makes perfect, right? And that means failing and still doing it again, maybe in a different way. We are not fools. We learn from the mistakes we make.

I am guilty of spending so much time planning things when all I need to do is do them. Say I plan on being confident. The only way I can earn confidence is allowing myself to speak more and unapologetically take up space, even in spaces where my boldness fizzles out. Aside from that, I have to accept that I’ll really suck, and suck, and suck, before I suck less. And if I suck less enough, people might commend me and say, “ooh, you are really good at this.” And even if they don’t, I think I’ll know when I suck less.

And one of the things that I want to suck less at is writing. And instead of going on a rave about how much I am loving Toni Morrison, with her incomparable ways of voicing the difficult things and secrets, and of Octavia’s gift of writing so simply yet addressing hard things, I think it’s time I write. It’s time I accept to suck at this craft.

I have been meaning to write about shame. About loneliness. Moving on. Losing friends. Missing those who you feel you are supposed to. Forgiveness. The ordinary things. Being scared of being numb creatively, or dreaming big when in a romantic relationship (yeah, I think there’s this comfort that comes with being in a relationship. It dulls some aggressive, strong spirited fire in me. A friend said the same, so yeah, it’s something real).

So yeah, share with me what you want to suck less at. Also, I’d love to know some quotes that you love. I'll go first.