The Four-Column Ledger

11. Always write in PEN. Pencil is for people who are not sure. If you are sure you dont need a rubber.

The rubber in question was a pink one shaped like a strawberry, a gift from my auntie in Entebbe, and I gave it to my younger brother the same week I wrote this item, as a public act of faith. He used it to clean his football boots. I remember feeling sorry for him, the way you feel sorry for someone who has not yet been saved.

You already know how this ends, because the first thing I told you in this book was that a pencil got me off the bed. What I have not told you properly is what I did with it after I got up. I have been doing it in pieces all along: every chapter so far has opened with an item from the blue Picfare exercise book and then quietly run it through four columns. I have been showing you the result without showing you the machine. This is the chapter where I open the bonnet.

Fair warning. The machine is not impressive. It is a ruled page, four headings, and a pencil from a kiosk. My counsellor, when I first showed it to her, said, "So it's a reflective journalling framework," and I said, "Madam, it's a table," and we were both right.

The morning after the phone call I sat at the small table by the window in my room. The sun was doing its usual thing over the neighbour's mabati roof, turning it into a sheet of light you could not look at directly. I had a cup of tea going cold and the exercise book open and a page I had ruled into four columns weeks before, with headings in my best secondary-school capitals:

PLANNED. HAPPENED. PAID. REVISED.

I want to define them for you the way I wish someone had defined them for me: plainly, with examples, and without anyone saying "journey."

Planned is what the twelve-year-old wrote, copied word for word, spelling and all. You do not correct her. You do not paraphrase her into something more reasonable. If she wrote "a office," you write "a office." The point is to see the plan as it actually was, with its certainty and its capital letters, rather than the softer version you have been carrying around in your head to make yourself feel less ridiculous or more guilty. For item two, the Planned column reads: Get into Makerere. (Not Kyambogo. Not "any university." MAKERERE.) Box and all, if you can manage the box.

Happened is what actually took place. Facts only. This is the hardest column to keep honest, because it wants to become an essay. It wants to explain and defend. For item two, the Happened column reads: Got into Makerere. Three words. That one is easy, which is why I am using it as the example. For item four, No boyfriends until I have a job, the Happened column is a little longer, and you have already read most of it in chapters five through eight. I will not make you read it again. On my page it says: Fell in love in second year. Two pregnancies. Told almost no one. That is the whole entry. It took me forty minutes to write and I rewrote "almost" three times.

Revised comes last on the page, but I will define it before Paid because Paid needs the most room. Revised is the new entry, the one the woman I am now writes for the woman I am now. It goes in pencil. There are other rules, which I will get to, and I broke all of them the first time.

Paid is where the accounting happens. What did this item cost me? What did it cost the people around me? What did living by it, or failing it, take out of the account?

For a long time I thought that was all Paid meant. I filled the column like a debt collector. Under Make Mama proud, I wrote: Years of lying about where I was. The grade sheets I hid until they were good enough. The secret I am still keeping from her. Under Graduate with good grades, I wrote: Studied through grief. Smiled in the photo. Under A good job with a office, I wrote a list so long it continued on the back of the page, and it ended with nineteen cover letters that began "I am a highly motivated graduate," which was the one item on the list that made me laugh, because it was true and it was not motivated in the slightest.

Every column of every page was a bill. I would sit at that table and add them up and the total was always the same: you owe more than you have.

Here is the item I chose to audit that morning, because the phone call the night before had rattled something loose and I wanted to look at it while it was still rattling.

3. Never give any one a reason to talk. Be decent at all times. Even when nobody is looking. (ESPECIALY then.)

You met this one in chapter three. I wrote it in the voice of every woman in my church who ever lowered her voice to say "That one's daughter." I wrote it at twelve, when I believed that if you were careful enough, nobody would ever have anything to say about you, as though gossip were weather and good behaviour an umbrella.

I copied it into Planned. Then I wrote in Happened:

Gave them a reason. Two reasons. They never found out. I made sure.

I stopped there, and the pen I had picked up out of habit (the pencil was on the windowsill, a full arm's length away, which at seven in the morning is a commute) hovered over the Paid column. I knew what went there. I had written versions of it before.

Silence. Years of it. Sitting in church beside Mama with my hands folded and my face arranged. Being "the decent one" at every wedding while I carried what I carried. Not telling my best friend from campus. Not telling anyone. Letting the secret do the talking inside me since nobody else could hear it.

I wrote that, and it was true, and I sat back.

And then, because of the night before, I could not stop there.

The night before, a woman I had known for years, a woman I had watched sing at a Kabaka's birthday party and post sunsets on her status every evening like a weather service for joy, had told me she had been going to Butabika every second Tuesday since last March. She had been doing exactly what item three told her to do. So had I. We had been sitting across from each other at the same functions, two decent women, each one giving the other absolutely nothing to talk about.

The silence had cost me. It had also done something for me, and I had never once written that part down.

So I wrote, underneath the debt, in the same column:

It kept me safe when I was not ready. Nobody took the decisions away from me. Nobody prayed over me in front of the congregation. I chose who knew and when. Last night I chose someone.

I looked at that for a long time. Then I wrote one more line:

I learned how to keep a secret well. This is a skill. It is also how I nearly disappeared.

I need to stop the story here and tell you what that moment did to the column, because it changed the whole table.

Paid records gains as well as losses. I had been running the ledger like a court of law: Planned was the charge, Happened was the evidence, Paid was the sentence. No wonder Revised kept coming out wrong. You cannot write a kind new rule for yourself at the end of a page that has just convicted you.

When I say gains, I do not mean silver linings. I am allergic to silver linings; I was given about four hundred of them during my grey season, mostly by people who had never been inside a grey season and were selling the linings door to door. "Everything happens for a reason." "God is preparing you." One auntie told me unemployment was "a season of pruning," and I thought, Ssenga, I am not a hibiscus.

A gain in the Paid column is not a reason, and it is not a justification. It is simply an honest entry about what the experience left in your hands, alongside what it took. Sometimes the gain is a skill. The fortress strategy I built at Makerere (the timetable, the library carrel, the refusal to go to a single party in first year) cost me friendships and a whole year of being nineteen, and it also taught me to work for nine hours straight, which is the only reason I could finish a dissertation chapter last month while my brain was on low battery. Sometimes the gain is knowledge you would never have chosen. I know things about my own body, about clinics in Wandegeya and what a nurse's face does when she has seen too many girls like you, that I would give back in a heartbeat. I cannot give them back. So they go in the column, under the costs, written just as plainly.

Sometimes the gain is a person. I will not say more about that yet.

The line that matters, the one I keep coming back to, is that both entries can be true at the same time without cancelling each other out. The silence kept me safe and the silence nearly erased me. A gain does not pay off a loss. They sit next to each other like two strangers on a taxi bench, knees almost touching, both going to the same stage.

Now. The rules for Revised, which I had broken that very morning without noticing, and then broke again in full view of myself.

I moved to the last column of item three and wrote, quickly, in pen, the way you write something you are sure of:

Be more open with people.

Then I sat there feeling pleased with myself for about the time it takes water to boil.

Then I flipped back two pages, looking for something, and found the very first Revised entry I had ever written. Item seven: Be somebody by 25. I wrote that revision months ago, on the day I bought the pencil, and I had written it in pen. I had not even noticed. I had walked back from the kiosk with a brand-new pencil in my pocket, sat down at this table, and picked up a Bic.

It said: Have a stable job by 28.

I looked at it. It looked back at me in confident blue ink.

You can see the problem, but I could not, not for months. I had taken a deadline that crushed me, changed the number, and handed myself a new deadline. "Somebody" had become "stable job," which is just "somebody" with a payslip. And twenty-eight was close. Twenty-eight was not a gentler future; it was the same cliff, three years further down the road.

Every rule I now keep, I learned from that one entry being wrong. So let me give them to you plainly.

Rule one: Revised is written in pencil. I mean an actual pencil, not a metaphor. The twelve-year-old was right about one thing: pencil is for people who are not sure. She thought that was an insult. I think it is a description of every adult I have ever respected. You write in pencil because this entry is for now, and you are allowed to come back next year, or next week, and rub it out. A revision you cannot revise is just a new commandment.

Rule two: Revised is written in the present tense. "I will be." "By 28." "One day." The future tense is where the original plan lived, and it is where I learned to measure myself against a woman who did not exist yet and always would not exist yet. Present tense keeps the entry about the woman who is actually holding the pencil. I am allowed to. I choose. I am someone who.

Rule three: Revised is about feelings and values, not titles. No job titles. No marital statuses. No degrees, ages, salaries, or the names of institutions underlined twice and boxed. Those things may come; I hope some of them come for you. But they belong to life, which hands them out on a schedule nobody has seen, and a plan built on them is a plan that hands your worth to a recruitment panel at a ministry where the one interviewer who matters has gone for lunch. A revision about values is one you can keep on a day when nothing outside you has changed.

That is three rules, and I promise you I have looked for a fourth because it would make a neater list. There is no fourth. (There is a sub-rule, which is that you are not allowed to write the revision in the voice of Pastor Kasirye. You will know if you are doing it. Your sentences will start using the word "shall.")

So I did the thing I had never done in all those months of filling columns. I took the pen I was holding and put it down on the far side of the table, past the tea, past my phone, nearly onto the floor. I got up and fetched the pencil from the windowsill.

Then I went back to item seven, to Have a stable job by 28, and I drew one straight line through it. I left it legible. I wanted to be able to see what I had once thought was mercy.

Underneath it, in pencil, I wrote:

I am somebody now, on the days I get up and on the days I don't. I want work that uses my mind and pays my rent, and I am looking for it without hating myself while I look.

It was clumsy. "Without hating myself while I look" is not poetry. I read it three times anyway, the way I had read my friend's message the night before, and something in my chest did a small, unfamiliar thing, the opposite of clenching.

Then I went back to item three. Be more open with people. Pen, again. Future-shaped, even without a "will," because "more" is a word that always lives slightly ahead of you, like a taxi conductor waving you on to a fuller vehicle. And it was a rule about behaviour, which meant it was a rule I could fail, which meant it was just item three with the moral reversed. Twelve-year-old me said never give anyone a reason to talk. Twenty-seven-year-old me was saying always talk, and I knew exactly how that would go: I would overshare at a kwanjula out of duty and then hate myself in the taxi home.

I drew a line through it. In pencil, underneath:

I decide who knows my story. Choosing to tell one safe person is brave, and so is choosing not to tell one unsafe person. Decency is how I treat people, including me.

The last four words I added after a long pause, and I nearly rubbed them out. I left them in.

Here is what the full row looks like now, so you can see the shape of the thing rather than my description of it.

PLANNED: 3. Never give any one a reason to talk. Be decent at all times. Even when nobody is looking. (ESPECIALY then.)

HAPPENED: Gave them a reason. Two reasons. They never found out. I made sure.

PAID: Silence. Years of it. Folded hands in church. Being "the decent one." Not telling anyone. / It kept me safe when I was not ready. I chose who knew and when. Last night I chose someone. / I learned how to keep a secret well. This is a skill. It is also how I nearly disappeared.

REVISED (pencil): I decide who knows my story. Choosing to tell one safe person is brave, and so is choosing not to tell one unsafe person. Decency is how I treat people, including me.

I would like to tell you that I felt healed after writing it. I felt like a woman who had written a slightly better sentence in a school exercise book at a quarter past eight on a weekday while her tea went cold. That was all. It was also more than I had felt in a long time, and I have learned not to sneer at small things that are more than nothing.

Your turn, if you want it. You do not have to; I am not your teacher and this is not prep. But if you have read this far, there is a reasonable chance that somewhere in your house, or on an old phone, or only in your head, there is a plan. Maybe it was not a Picfare exercise book. Maybe it was a vision board from a youth conference, a list in the back of a Bible, a sentence your father said at your P.7 party that you took home and built a house on. It counts.

Here is how to do a first audit. Choose one item. Choose an easy one first, something like my Get into Makerere, where the Happened column is short and the stakes are survivable. You are learning the table, not testing your courage. The hard items will still be there next week; they are very patient.

Rule a page into four columns. Write the headings. Use a pen for the first three columns if you like. Use a pencil for the fourth, and if you do not own one, buy one. In Kampala it will cost you about five hundred shillings. The kiosk will try to sell you airtime as well. You may accept.

Then work through these prompts, slowly, one column at a time.

For Planned: What exactly did she write, or say, or believe? Copy it as it was, mistakes included. Whose voice is in it? (If you hear an auntie, write the auntie's name in the margin. Give credit where it is due.)

For Happened: What actually took place? Facts only, in as few words as you can bear. If you catch yourself writing "because," stop. The explanation is not this column's job.

For Paid: What did this cost you? Your time, your body, your relationships, your sleep, your sense of yourself? Then, on a new line, without crossing out anything you have just written: What did it leave in your hands? A skill, a piece of knowledge, a person, a kind of strength you did not ask for? If you can find nothing, write I can't see it yet. That is an honest entry. It also leaves a space.

For Revised: Pick up the pencil. Write one or two sentences in the present tense, starting with "I." Make them about what you value or how you want to feel and treat yourself, not about what you will achieve or by when. Read it back. If it contains a number, a title, the word "should," or the word "shall," rub it out and try again. If it sounds like a sentence you could live by on a Tuesday when nothing has gone right, keep it.

One honest warning, because I would want one. Some items will not stay easy. If you start an audit and find yourself somewhere you cannot hold alone, close the book. Put it in a drawer. The ledger is a tool, not a test of endurance, and no page in it is worth your safety. Call someone. If you are in Uganda, Butabika's outpatient services and the Mental Health Uganda helplines are real places with real people answering, and if you are anywhere else, there is a crisis line where you live, and it was set up for exactly the evening you might be having. I did not find mine by being strong. I found mine because someone answered.

And if it goes well, if you finish one row and the Revised column sits there in grey pencil looking a little crooked and a little kind, do not do another one tonight. Leave the page open where you can see it. Put the pencil on top of it.

I still have the strawberry rubber, by the way. My brother found it last Christmas in a tin of old marbles under his bed, worn down to a pink stump with the faint ghost of football-pitch mud still in its grooves, and he handed it to me across Mama's dining table without a word, grinning like he had been saving the joke for fifteen years. It lives in the exercise book now, wedged in the spine. The next item I have to audit is the one I have been circling for weeks, the one with MAKERERE boxed and underlined, and I already know I am going to need it.