Item 7: Be Somebody by Twenty-Five

The thing that got me off the bed was a pencil. I should say that first, because everything else in this book follows from it, and because you deserve to know early that the turning point of my life cost five hundred shillings and was purchased from a kiosk that also sold airtime, Blue Band, and single cigarettes to men who should have known better.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Before the pencil there was the bed.

It was my childhood bed, in my childhood room, in Mama's house. The mattress had a dip in the middle shaped exactly like a sixteen-year-old girl, and I was twenty-six, so you can imagine the negotiations. I had been lying on it, with short breaks for the toilet and for pretending to Mama that I had eaten, for most of a month. On the wall above me was a calendar from a church fundraiser two years expired, its picture of a waterfall going quietly pale. On the floor was my Makerere degree in its cardboard tube. I had used the tube once to kill a mosquito. I am not proud of it. The mosquito was not proud of it either.

I want to be honest with you about where I was, so let me say it plainly and then move on, because this chapter is not the place for the long version. That month, I was not sure I wanted to keep living. I was further from sure than I had ever been. I did not do anything about it, and I am here writing this, and there is a whole chapter later where I will slow down and tell you what that time was actually like. For now, know that the woman telling you this story came close to the edge of her own life and stepped back. She did not step back gracefully, and nobody gave her a medal for it. She is still a little out of breath. If you are anywhere near that edge yourself as you read this, please put the book down for a minute and tell one person. I have put some numbers at the end of the chapter. Use them before you use me.

Right. The bed.

I was looking for my old ID card, of all things, because a job advert (Graduate Trainee, Must Have Five Years' Experience, Age Below 25, Fluent in English, Luganda, French and Hope) wanted a certified copy of every document I had ever touched. I went digging in the metal suitcase under the bed, the one with the broken clasp that Mama kept "for when you go to boarding school," as if I might still go back. Under a pile of my O-level certificates, a Scripture Union badge, and one sandal whose partner has been missing since 2009, I found it.

A blue Picfare exercise book. Thirty-two pages, the cheap kind, with the multiplication tables printed on the back cover for children who cannot be trusted. On the front, in capital letters, in blue biro pressed so hard it had dented the cardboard:

MY LIFE PLAN

Underlined three times. Three. One underline says this is important. Two says I mean it. Three says I am twelve years old and I have never once been wrong.

I knew what it was before I opened it. I had written it on a Saturday afternoon in Primary Six, cross-legged on this same floor, while my cousins played outside and called me boring through the window. I remembered being told to use a pencil, because the book was for school and pencil can be erased. I remembered refusing. I remembered saying (to whom? to the room, to God, to the ceiling) that pencil is for people who aren't sure.

I was sure. Every page of that book is in pen.

There were fourteen items. Some of them I will show you later; they each get their turn. That afternoon I read through them the way you read old messages from a person who has since blocked you. Item 1 was Makerere. Item 3 was about boys, and I am not ready to talk about Item 3. Then I got to Item 7, and I read it out loud, to the waterfall calendar, in my own twelve-year-old voice:

7. Be somebody by 25. A importent somebody. With a office that has a AC and a car that is not a taxi and I will buy Mama a fridge that makes ice. NO EXCUSES.

I started laughing. Properly laughing, the way I used to laugh before that year. A importent somebody. The confidence of that misspelling. A office that has a AC. Not a big office, not a corner office; my ambitions at twelve stopped exactly at air conditioning, which tells you everything about growing up in Kampala in February. A car that is not a taxi. As if the alternative to success was being a taxi. And then, with the full moral force of a Primary Six prefect, NO EXCUSES, in capitals, underlined, with a full stop so violent it had gone through to the next page.

I laughed until my stomach hurt. Then the laughing turned over somewhere in my chest, the way a boda turns when the rider sees traffic police, and I was crying. I cried with the book open on my face, which is not hygienic and which I do not recommend. The cardboard got soft. The ink on NO EXCUSES did not run. Of course it didn't. Biro.

I was twenty-six. I had been somebody's daughter, somebody's classmate, somebody's former head girl, somebody who got good grades at Makerere. By the girl's definition I was nobody. I had no office, no AC, no car of any classification, and Mama's fridge still made its ice in a tray you had to wrestle like a goat.

I lay there until the call to prayer started from the mosque near the stage, and then the church choir across the road started practising to drown it out, as they did every evening, both sides certain God preferred their volume. Then I sat up.

I want to tell you that I had an epiphany. I did not. I had a habit. In my one and only job before that year, a three-month internship at an NGO whose main output was workshops about workshops, my supervisor made us do something she called a "lessons-learned matrix." Every project, however badly it had gone, got a table. What did we plan? What actually happened? What did it cost? What will we do differently? She said it in a bright voice, like the project had not just burned four million shillings on branded lanyards. I thought it was corporate nonsense. I still mostly think it was corporate nonsense. But it was the only tool I had in my hand, and that evening, with the exercise book soft from my tears, I turned to the last page, which was blank, and I drew four columns.

PLANNED. HAPPENED. PAID. REVISED.

That is the whole method. I call it the Four-Column Ledger, which sounds grander than a table drawn with a ruler that had a chunk bitten out of it (by me, Primary Five, exams). I am going to show you how I used it on Item 7, exactly as I did that night, and then for the rest of this book you will watch me use it on everything else.

PLANNED. This column is for the girl. You copy what she wanted in her words, and you do not edit her. You do not correct importent. She earned that spelling. So I wrote: Be somebody by 25. Office with AC. Car (not taxi). Fridge with ice for Mama. No excuses.

Then, because the column is for the plan underneath the plan, I added what she meant, as best I could reconstruct it. She meant: be visible. Be someone relatives point to at weddings. Be the reason Mama can stop worrying. Be finished, safe, arrived, by an age that seemed to a twelve-year-old to be roughly the age of the Pope.

HAPPENED. This column is for the facts, and the rule is that you write them the way a court clerk would, without adjectives. It is harder than it sounds. My hand kept wanting to write failed. I made myself write: Turned 25 in a hostel room at the end of my final semester. Graduated from Makerere with good grades. Applied for 140-something jobs in eleven months (I counted from my sent emails). Four interviews. Zero offers. One internship, three months, paid in transport refund and samosas. Moved back to Mama's house. Spending most days in bed.

I looked at that column for a long time. Written down without adjectives, it read like a report about a woman I might feel sorry for. That was strange. In my head, the same facts had a prosecutor's voice. On paper, they had a clerk's.

PAID. This is the column most people skip, and it is the one that matters, because a dream is not free just because it doesn't come true. It charges you while you're chasing it, and it charges you again when you miss it. Under PAID for Item 7, I wrote, slowly:

Every birthday since 22 felt like a countdown to a test.

Stopped going to family functions so Ssenga couldn't ask, "So, which office are you in now?"

Stopped answering my friends from campus because their WhatsApp statuses were all lanyards.

Spent six months' worth of Mama's money on interview transport and printing.

Stopped eating properly.

Stopped wanting to wake up.

Those last two lines took me ten minutes. The pen kept stopping. I wrote them anyway, because the ledger only works if it is true, and because I had started to understand, sitting cross-legged on the same floor where I had written the plan, that Item 7 had been sending me invoices for years and I had been paying them without ever opening the envelope.

And then I got to REVISED, and I realised I had nothing to write with.

I mean that literally. The rule, the girl's rule, was pen. But I knew, the way you sometimes know things in your body before your head catches up, that whatever went in this column could not be in pen. Anything I wrote that night would be wrong in some way I could not yet see. If I wrote it in pen, I would be a twelve-year-old again, signing a contract I would spend the next fourteen years prosecuting myself for breaking.

I needed a pencil, and there was no pencil.

I searched the room. Under the bed: the suitcase, the sandal. In the drawer: three dead biros, a lipstick from my rebellious phase in a colour called Danger, a rosary, receipts. I went to the sitting room. Mama was asleep in front of the evening news, mouth slightly open, the remote held to her chest like a Bible. I checked my little brother's school bag: one ruler, one mathematical set with the compass stolen, and a half-eaten mandazi that had become a fossil. No pencil. A whole household of educated people, and not one of us had planned for being unsure.

So I put on my slippers. I had not been past the gate in nineteen days. I know because the last time had been to print a CV, and the receipt was in that drawer with the lipstick.

The night air smelled of charcoal and someone's roasting gonja. The kiosk at the corner was still open, lit by a single bulb surrounded by a congress of insects. Behind the counter was the kiosk lady, whom the whole road calls Maama Brian although nobody has ever seen a Brian.

"Eh, nnyabo! You are alive!" she said, which was more accurate than she knew.

"Do you have pencils?"

She looked at me as though I had asked for a passport. Then she bent down and rummaged in a box that held, as far as I could see, matchboxes, batteries, sachets of Waragi, a single child's sock, and finally, triumphantly, one yellow HB pencil with no eraser.

"Five hundred," she said.

I gave her a thousand-shilling note and told her to keep the change. It was the most money I had spent on myself in weeks. She also had a sharpener, which she lent me on the condition that I sharpen the pencil right there so she could watch, as if I might run off with the sharpener and start a rival business. I sharpened it over her counter. The shavings curled onto the glass like tiny wood flowers. She swept them into her palm and threw them into the dark.

"You are going to write something?" she asked.

"I'm going to try."

"Kale," she said. "Write something nice."

I walked back. Mama was still asleep. The news had moved on to football. I went into my room, sat on the floor, opened the book to the last page, and in the fourth column, in grey letters so light I could have rubbed them out with my thumb, I wrote:

7. Be somebody by 25.

→ I am already somebody. She is 26, unemployed, tired, and still here. Find out who she is before deciding what she should become. Eat something tomorrow. Tell one person the truth.

That was it. It was not elegant, and if I wrote it today some of the words would be different, which is the point of pencil. The handwriting was shaky, partly from the tears and partly because I had not written anything by hand in a year that was not a job application.

I put the pencil in the spine of the book so I wouldn't lose it, and I lay back down in the dip of the mattress, and for the first time in a long time, I slept before two.

I need to tell you what kind of book this is, because you have probably read the other kind.

The other kind is written from the far shore. The author has crossed the river. She is dry now, and moisturised, and she has a podcast. She looks back at the water and tells you it was all part of the journey, and you finish the book feeling like a person who is still wet and should be ashamed of it.

I am not on the far shore. I am writing this from the middle of the river. The water is around my waist most days, and on bad days it is higher. I am doing a master's degree now, which my aunties treat as proof I am fixed and which I treat as proof I can still fill in a form. I am healing, slowly, unevenly, with help. Some of the people who helped me will surprise you. They surprised me.

What I can offer you is the exercise book. Fourteen items, written in pen by a girl who was sure, and one woman going back through them with a pencil, one item per chapter. Each time, I will show you the four columns: what she planned, what happened, what it cost, and what I write now. Some of the revisions are funny. Some of them took me months. A few are still smudged from being rubbed out and rewritten. By the end of this book the pencil column will be a whole new plan, and I will print it next to the old one so you can see both girls side by side.

So here is what I would like you to do before you turn the page, and I ask it as a friend who knows how heavy your evenings can be.

Find your plan. It might be in an exercise book like mine. It might be in an old diary, a notes app, a vision board from 2016 with a picture of a Range Rover cut out of a magazine. It might only be in your head, in the voice that speaks up whenever someone at a wedding asks what you're doing now. Choose one item, only one, ideally the one that stings. Draw four columns. Copy the item into the first column exactly as she wrote it, spelling and all. Fill in the second with facts, no adjectives. Take your time with the third. Then go and buy yourself a pencil, even if it means putting on your slippers and walking to the corner in the dark, and write the fourth.

If you get stuck on the third column, that's fine. I'll be doing Item 1 next, and I have a lot to pay on that one.

If you are having thoughts of ending your life, please reach out now. In Uganda, you can call the Mental Health Uganda helpline or the national toll-free line on 0800 21 21 21, or go to the nearest health centre or hospital. Outside Uganda, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line such as findahelpline.com. Tell one person today. You do not have to carry this alone.