You will probably wonder what has become of me with that title. Like one reader who visited this site sometime early last year. He read through the blog posts and wrote one long-ass comment accusing me of being suicidal, surrendered feckless plebs disintegrating on the bitter cigarette end of life, and a hopeless human being. He was particular on several blogs especially those that talked about the stories of women and death, and grief. How I am a con and how I will lose my entire family. And that I am an old man who got the first degree and thinks the world owes him shit. He finished the comment by saying that I am next. Next to mean, banished to not living anymore. He seemed so preoccupied with his comment that he didn’t realize I will still be alive ages form now in this blog as a sign that I was here at some point in time. He ought to have been easy with his self-importance if he only understood that we are not individuals but simultaneous travelers across the atlas of if.
I read that comment getting livid and irked by the second at this disgruntled blob of carbon who came uninvited to my space and who left me with such a bad taste. The thing with being a writer means having a story you want the whole world to read except everyone who knows you. And like all other undertakings, it is not easy being a writer. You suffer things like the impostor syndrome, you do not know what you are saying and who the ‘you’ you are addressing. You just hope what you are saying makes sense to atleast one human being. I would later gather a name from his email and ask a couple of people I had talked to about the blog and I placed him in his immediate state of anger. A female friend who had become my biggest supporter had shared the link with him unbeknownst to her that this chap had had a thing for her and he must have thought she had gotten a better deal and jealousy had struck him like an arrow from hell. First forward, I moved on with trying to be a better person and soon I had forgotten about that cynic because I believe cynics will easily be forgotten just like our failures will. The said lady also felt embarrassed by that chap’s criticism and since then she stopped sharing the link. I am still in touch with her but I can’t tell whether she visits the site.
That being said, well, it’s been some time since I updated anything personal on the memoirist. Circa three years ago, I graduated from the university and wrote a very long post here, Amor fati. The love of fate. And this piece is therefore about what has happened since. I am at fates behest as we speak. That doesn’t mean I have surrendered already. It means things have happened and life with its turmoil has never left me. The gods must have punished me when they answered the prayer of that undergrad paper.
See this, for the last three years I have applied for tens of hundreds of jobs some of which are painstakingly soul-sapping. Overnights and long days of doing the same thing. Applying and attaching pdfs. And for the record of it, I have never been invited for an interview albeit a virtual one by a telecom company which was put off midway. And not that I am overqualified or underqualified. I think it’s just fate. As this sentence gets saved on the post, I am from applying for a job on the most unfamiliar of institutions. I will leave it to your imagination but it’s the job of a driver, haha. Not that I despise myself that much or I am lacking a livelihood. The shop still runs perfectly despite the setback posed by the pandemic. But I didn’t get to the Uni to come run the shop. I did because I had other dreams. Ama I am not allowed to dream? Well, I applied for a job at Immigration, KNBS for the census, KRA, Safcom, MoE, PSC, TSC, ODPP, JSC, CocaCola, and a good number of NGOs’s, StanChart among other well-deserving employers. Big names, I tell you. volunteer jobs, internships, random jobs. But your guess is as good as mine, I had zero connection. The little connection to no connection that came was so embarrassing to say. The cat who knew a person who knows a person was asked by the last person on this trail why he was connecting a chap from such and such an ethnic group as if needful chaps from his ethnicity weren’t needful.
This is some of what has since happened to my former comrades. One got a scholarship to the UK and I bet he won’t be coming back after his postgrad. Another who was the most carefree comrade to ever grace a Uni hall called me some time and asked if I could access the grad list since the would-be employer too, wanted to confirm whether she was on that list. Like most of us who couldn’t come around how she miraculously graduated. I fetched it online and shared it with her. Suffice to say, a week toward the grad day, she had well over a dozen and half missing marks from incomplete papers. She did grad with us but with pass, any how, who cares as long as she did graduate. But here is your brilliant chap with complete papers and a first honors yet no one has ever asked for his papers. Several others who were pursuing the paper as an upgrade to their already existing careers have so far been promoted and are enjoying the fruit of their decisions. But, I am not alone in this, this is what life does to us, at the very least I have a source of livelihood, the children are all in school and they have never slept hungry, I bet I was the first from my class to acquire a car immediately after grad. Some have stuck on poor-paying jobs for those years. I know one who has since been thrown on the wall by life let alone some have lost their lives. Some of the comrades in my class never graduated to date too. And that is why this piece is not about me. This piece is about us. Me and you. You who feel life is unfair where as it is just a difficult involuntarily happening. You who has a brain in your head and feet on your shoes. You who can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You who are on your own. And you who know what you know and you are the one who will decide where to go.
On the contrary, you might as well wonder who is looking for a job in this age of unemployment where grads are being asked to be self-employed. Well, as said earlier, I am self-employed but I do feel that the years spent in Uni were a waste of one commodity which as humans we should be selfish about. Time. The money notwithstanding. Maybe I was wrong at first, but I think I wasn’t, it is just that fate is hard at play. It is uncommon in this country for a day to pass without policy adjustments being thrown around and rendering you unemployable. Take the case of Uni. I was awarded a partial scholarship for my postgrad which I took in the hope of becoming a Uni tutorial fellow. Weeks to my first Uni lecture the policy was changed and therefore I couldn’t find my way to a class to lecture. Fate. Towards the end of the postgrad, the world was dismantled and everyone was sent home by the pandemic. And as you can see we are still here. I did get a few gigs here and there but they weren’t sustainable as I would wish. I wrote for a publishing company some school workbooks but the contract was one-off. I did a few tenders here and there but still, I wanted my papers in someone else’s hands and us talking about them and my abilities. But then again, who am I among seven billion of us. Who am I in my aging days where employers are looking for young blood?
There are those of us who would wish to have the life I have and there are those I have wished to have the life they live. I have a friend who has never stayed a day without a job. Their ducks keep aligning after exiting one job to the next. But they have had their fair share of answered prayers by the gods. There are those of us who would wish to have and may have ventured into business in mind that if I have made it why not them. They have been left at a loss and wounded. Some have wished to have a spouse and kids and well they may have had the spouse but the kids aren’t forthcoming. That’s life. And there’s little we can do about it. Some did get the jobs and it has been the worst thing to ever happen in their lives. Some did get the spouses and now wish they hadn’t. This is what happens to all of us. We fall ill. We get old. We cant have that baby neither can we keep that relationship. We missed our chance to go to this school or take that job. Our parents died before we knew them, and our kids forget our love. We lose people before we can learn to live with them. Then we die. I have come to acknowledge the fact that we cannot and will never be correct about everything all the time. It is the Dunning Kruger effect.
Enter Oscar Wilde, a very prolific Irish poet. There are two tragedies in life, not getting what you want and getting what you want. The latter is the worst. I have this cat who has a very well-paying job with very little time to it. He has access to the very basic and very extravagant which has led him to be very profligate. You name it and he will have it. From holiday trips, designer outfits, great cars and most importantly the most stunning lasses there can be. But he can’t keep a lass to himself. He doesn’t think of life beyond that job. Be it an investment or a little for the rainy day. He does lament his former days and asserts that he’s living his life to the fullest. Maybe time will show him other things. Just maybe. The world is laden with such stories. I must have at some point written about this village wealth whoever wished he would land his hooves abroad. When he did, that was the beginning of the end of him, he has since become part of us the plebs. Getting what you have ever wanted feels good but it also requires moderation and assertiveness. In my case, I did get the type of paper that I wanted from Uni, yes, but, I have always convinced myself that it won’t be the worst thing to have ever happened to me. I have had those drawbacks of self-pity but like Seneca said I have forgiven myself on those occasions. Forgive yourself if you ever feel pity for yourself.
I have willing fully accepted whatever happens to me, good or bad, is at fate’s disposal and I shouldn’t ever lose myself as that chap at the beginning of this essay had asked me. I have solid plans for the next phase of life. Sometimes I do wake up to an empty day but I still run the retail business where fellow business persons have failed and plans to expand it are on course. It is just a matter of when. I am currently on long untimed research about writing a book which I will. But as history marches on, behind and ahead, some events will stand out. This will stand out.
@Nathan2021
one story is good until another one is told
The memoirist 