Relapse Is Not a Refund

12. Never go backwards. Once you pass a class you dont go back to it. FORWARD EVER, BACKWARD NEVER!!

Two exclamation marks. I had heard the slogan at a school assembly, delivered by a visiting Old Girl in a suit the colour of a ripe pawpaw, and I copied it into the plan that evening as if she had handed it to me personally. I did not know it belonged to Nkrumah. I thought it belonged to her, and then, once it was in my exercise book in blue Bic, to me.

The thing about it that I liked, at twelve, was that it made life a staircase. You went up. You did not trip, because tripping was for girls who had not planned. If you found yourself on a lower step, the plan had no instructions for you, because the plan did not believe that lower steps were possible for anyone who had written a plan.

You can probably tell where this is going. I could not, which is the point.

The director answered my email on the Friday morning, at 7:42, which is an hour at which nobody sends good news. I was still in my wrapper, holding a cup of tea gone the colour of a muddy road, and I read it standing up in the doorway of my room, where the network is best.

The board had considered my application. The forty percent stood. It covered tuition. It did not cover the research fee, which was "outside the scope of the bursary as constituted." I could apply again next academic year. Kind regards.

"As constituted." I read the phrase three times. It had the confidence of a document that knows nobody will ever ask who constituted it.

I want to be accurate about what happened next, because the accurate version is less dramatic than the one I would have told you two years ago. I did not cry. I did not throw the phone. I put it face down on the table, finished the tea, and went to my nine o'clock seminar on research methods, where we discussed sampling bias for two hours and I contributed one intelligent point and wrote "research fee" in the margin of my notebook four times, in small letters, like a girl practising a signature.

That was Friday.

On Saturday I got the other email, the one from the organisation in Ntinda where I had interviewed for a part-time monitoring and evaluation post, the one I had let myself want. They had "decided to proceed with candidates whose profiles more closely match our current needs." I had been through four rounds. I had prepared a presentation with charts. I had ironed a blouse with a pussy-bow collar that my cousin says makes me look like a bank manager in a Nollywood film. The current needs, it turned out, did not include bank managers.

On Sunday there was a baby dedication at church. My cousin's second child. I went because I had promised, and because not going would have produced a phone call from an auntie, and the phone call would have produced a lecture, and the lecture would have contained the phrase "these days you don't come for family things," which is the kind of sentence that is technically true and should still be illegal. I sat in the third row and clapped in the right places. An auntie I had not seen since my graduation held my wrist and asked how the job was going. I told her the master's was going well. She said, "Eh, more books," with a little laugh, and then, quieter, so that it would be private and therefore count more, "But don't wait too long, nnyabo. Time is not your friend."

I said, "Yes, Ssenga." I said it nicely. I drove home and parked and sat in the car for forty minutes with the engine off, which is the kind of thing that, when you write it down, sounds like nothing.

On Monday I didn't go to the library.

Here is the part I have to slow down for.

There was no single moment when the grey came back. If you have read this far you know what the grey is, the season I described earlier, when the world went the colour of a Kampala sky just before it decides whether to rain. I had been out of it for long enough that I had started, privately, to think of it in the past tense. I had a ledger. I had a counsellor I saw every other week. I had pencils. I was, in the language of the kind of Instagram post I usually scroll past at speed, "doing the work."

And then I was lying on my bed at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday with my shoes still on, and I could not have told you when I had lain down.

It came in the way damp comes into a wall. You don't see it arrive. You see a stain one morning and realise it has been spreading behind the paint for a week.

I made a list, later, of what that week looked like from the inside, because my counsellor asked me to and because lists are the only way I know how to hold anything still. I am giving it to you exactly as I wrote it, in pencil, on the back of a fees receipt:

Did not bathe until afternoon. Three days.

Phone face down. Answered nobody except Mama, and to Mama said "I'm fine!" with the exclamation mark in my voice.

Ate rolex for supper four nights in a row. (Rolex is not a meal plan. It is a cry for help wrapped in a chapati.)

Stopped opening the ledger.

Started opening the job sites at midnight and reading adverts for jobs I had no intention of applying for. "Must have 7 years' experience. Age not above 28." Read that one eleven times.

Lay in bed doing arithmetic. How old I was. How old the girl in the plan said I should be when things happened. The difference.

Did not laugh at anything. My brother sent a voice note of his goat trying to climb into a matatu. I listened twice and felt nothing and sent back a laughing emoji, which is the emoji equivalent of saying "Yes, Ssenga."

And there was one more item, which I wrote smaller than the others, and which I am going to write here in plain words because I promised at the start of this book that I would not hide the parts that are hard to say.

On the Wednesday night, the old thought came back. The one from before. The quiet one that says everyone would be less burdened without you. It did not come with a plan or with any urgency. It came the way a visitor you once knew well might walk past your gate and look in. It did not knock. But it looked in.

I need to tell you that this frightened me more than anything else that week. I also need to tell you that I did not act on it, and that nothing about that night was safe in the way I would want it to be safe for you. If you are reading this and that visitor has been looking in at your gate too, please don't wait the way I used to wait. Tell someone today: a friend, a counsellor, a doctor, a pastor who listens more than he preaches. In Uganda you can go to the counselling service at your university or any health centre, or Butabika National Referral Hospital, or call 112 in an emergency. Wherever you are, there is a crisis line, and the people on it have heard what you are carrying before. It does not have to be a good time. It does not have to be the right words.

I have been in the grey before. I have been in it longer and deeper than this, and I wrote about the worst of it, the night I stayed, earlier in this book. So what I want to describe now is how this time was different, because the difference is small, and I almost missed it, and I think the small difference is the whole thing.

The first difference was that I noticed.

That sounds like nothing. Before, in the year after graduation, the grey was simply the weather. I didn't know I was in it, the way a fish presumably doesn't know it is wet. I thought the grey was the truth finally revealed: that I was a disappointment, that the plan had been right and I had been wrong, that this flat, heavy, colourless version of the world was what the world had always been and I had just been too busy and too hopeful to see it.

This time, on the Thursday morning, I was lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, and a sentence arrived in my head in my own voice, slightly sarcastic, slightly bored: "Ah. Rolex four nights. Phone face down. Here we are again."

I want you to hear the tone of that. It was the tone you use when your neighbour's generator starts at six in the morning. Here we go. It wasn't wisdom. It was recognition, and recognition has a very particular texture. You can't recognise something you have never seen before. The fact that I knew it meant I had been here, and the fact that I had been here meant I had left here, at least once.

The grey, I realised, was lying to me about something specific. It was telling me that I had never left. That the last year and a half — the ledger, the counselling, the master's, the weeks when I woke up and the sky was simply the sky — had been a kind of trick, and now the truth had come to collect. As if healing were a loan and this was the bailiff.

That was the second difference, and it was harder to catch.

The old plan had taught me to think in staircases. Forward ever. You climb, and if you fall back to a lower step, you have lost the climb. So when the grey came back, the twelve-year-old in me did the sums immediately: we are back on the bottom step, therefore everything since was false, therefore the ledger was a game for a girl pretending, therefore. You know the rest of the therefore. It goes down quickly.

But healing has not been a staircase for me. If I have to draw it, and you know I like to draw things, it looks more like the road from Kampala to my grandmother's village in the rainy season. You make progress. Then there is a stretch where the murram has washed out and you are in first gear, swerving around holes, and at one point you go downhill for a while, and if you had only that stretch to judge by you would swear you were going the wrong direction entirely. You are not. You are on the road. The road just goes down there.

I knew this in theory. My counsellor had said it, more or less, in a session months before, and I had nodded in the agreeable way of a person who is currently feeling well and therefore cannot imagine feeling otherwise. "Healing is not linear," she said. I wrote it in my notebook and drew a small box around it and privately thought it sounded like a poster in a dentist's waiting room.

It turns out posters in dentists' waiting rooms are sometimes right. Very annoying.

On the Thursday afternoon I did the thing I had never, in any previous grey season, managed to do while still inside it. I opened the exercise book.

I had not opened it since the director's email. It was in the drawer under my sweaters, where I keep it, the blue Picfare with MY LIFE PLAN on the cover in capitals and underlined three times, the corners soft as cloth now. I sat on the floor with it, with my back against the bed, because the bed felt like a place I would lie down again if I sat on it.

I turned to item twelve. FORWARD EVER, BACKWARD NEVER!! The two exclamation marks looked at me. I looked back.

I got a pencil and a fresh page in the back and drew the four columns, the way I have drawn them for every item, slowly, with a ruler borrowed from my brother's old geometry set.

Planned. I wrote: Never go back. Once you leave the grey, stay out.

That last part was not in the original, of course. The twelve-year-old had no idea there was a grey to leave. But it was the version I had been carrying, quietly, the version the grown woman had written over the girl's words without telling anyone, including herself.

Happened. I wrote: Bursary does not cover research fee. Ntinda said no. Ssenga said time is not my friend. Went back.

I stopped there for a long time. I wanted to write more. I wanted to explain myself, the way I always want to explain myself, to make a case. I left it. It was enough.

Paid. Here I had to think. You know by now that this column holds more than losses, and I sat with that for a while, because everything in me wanted to write only the cost. So I wrote that first: four days. Sleep. A seminar I missed. Frightened by a thought I thought had moved away.

And then, because the column asks it of me, I made myself look for the other side. It took long enough that the light shifted on the floor. What I finally wrote was: Noticed by Thursday. Last time it took four months.

I looked at that for a while too.

Revised. I didn't write anything in the Revised column yet. I held the pencil over it and could not find the sentence. Instead, I picked up my phone, which had been face down for four days, and turned it over.

There were nineteen unread messages. Most were from a group chat of old Makerere friends in which someone had shared a video of a pastor in Mukono prophesying over a man's Toyota Premio, and fourteen people had responded with variations of "Eh!" One was from the bank. One was from my brother: "You didn't laugh at the goat??" One was from Brenda.

Brenda is a friend from the master's programme, a quantitative person who calls me when she is stuck on qualitative coding and whom I call when I need someone to explain why my regression looks like it has been in a car accident. We are not old friends. We are new friends, which in some ways is braver, because a new friend has no history to fall back on if you turn out to be a disaster. Her message said: "Missed you in methods. Are you alive? Also the lecturer said sampling bias 6 times, I counted."

In every previous grey season I would have answered that message with "Yes!! Just been busy, see you Monday 😊" and then not gone on Monday. I had a whole repertoire of these messages. I could have written you a manual. Short sentence. Exclamation marks. Emoji at the end, to carry the weight of a smile I wasn't making. I was very, very good at it. I think, if fineness were a degree, I would have a First Class.

I typed: "Alive. Not great. Not dangerous, but not great. Bad week. Can I tell you about it?"

I want to tell you how long it took me to press send, but honestly I don't know. Long enough to delete "not dangerous" and then put it back, because I realised if I left it out she would worry, and if I left it in she would know I had thought about it. Long enough to hear Ssenga, and Pastor Kasirye, and the twelve-year-old saying a clever girl solves her own problems. Long enough to think, she is a new friend, you will frighten her off, you will become the person who brings heavy things into a light friendship.

I pressed send.

She called eleven seconds later. I counted, because I could not do anything else.

"Hello," she said. "Okay. Talk."

So I talked. Not beautifully. I told her about the research fee, and the Ntinda rejection, and the baby dedication, and I tried to make it funny, because that is what I do, and then partway through the auntie part I stopped trying to make it funny and my voice did something I didn't plan. She didn't say anything wise. She said "Mm" a lot. At one point she said, "That woman needs to be stopped," about Ssenga, and I laughed — a short, surprised sound, like a cough. It was not the laugh, the big one, the one my friends say they haven't heard in a while. But it was a relative of it. A cousin, maybe, who visits at Christmas.

When I told her about the Wednesday night, she went quiet, and then she asked me plainly whether I was safe right now, and I said yes, and she asked whether I would tell my counsellor, and I said yes, and she said, "Tomorrow. Not next session. Tomorrow," and I said okay.

"And the fee," she said. "Have you asked about paying in instalments? Because my cousin did that at the school of public health. They have a form. Nobody tells you about the form."

Of course there was a form. Makerere has never in its history had a problem that did not have a form, usually in triplicate, usually kept by a man named Mr. Something who is at lunch.

On Friday morning I did three things, and I am listing them because I think the list is more useful to you than anything I could say about it.

I emailed the counselling service at 8:15 and asked if my counsellor could see me before our next scheduled session. I wrote that I'd had a difficult week and the old thoughts had returned briefly and I wanted to talk about it before it settled. I did not soften it with "sorry to disturb" or "if it's not too much trouble." I had drafted those phrases. I deleted them. She replied by ten and offered me Tuesday at ten.

I went to the bursar's office in person. This was the frightening one, because the bursar's office at Makerere is a place where your dignity goes to wait in a long queue and comes out three hours later with a stamped piece of paper and a headache. I asked about the instalment plan. The woman behind the glass, who had the expression of someone who has heard every possible story about money and believed none of them, gave me the form without looking up. It needed a signature from my supervisor and a letter explaining my circumstances. I had to write the letter. That meant putting into words, for an institution, that I was a woman of nearly thirty with a good degree who could not pay three hundred thousand shillings in one go. I wrote it on the bench outside in pencil first, then copied it in pen. Hand it in by Thursday.

And I called Mama. I did not tell her everything. I am not there yet, and I am not sure there is a version of me who will ever be there, and I have stopped believing that's the measure of honesty. But I didn't say I was fine. I said, "Mama, it's been a hard week. The job didn't come through." She was quiet, and then she said what she always says, the thing about hard work, which you have heard before in this book and which I am not ready to argue with yet. And then she said, "Come home on Sunday. I'll make luwombo." Which is how Mama says the other things.

When I got back to my room I opened the ledger again and wrote in the Revised column. It is in pencil, like all of them. It says:

Forward mostly. Backwards sometimes. When I go back, I know the road. Tell someone by day three.

I looked at "day three" and thought about it, and changed it to "day two," and then changed it back, because I want the revisions to be things I can actually do and not new commandments for a new girl to fail. Day three is honest. Day three is already a miracle compared to month four.

Underneath, on the same page, I wrote what my counsellor later called my early warning list and what I call my rolex index. I copied the items from the back of the fees receipt: bathing after noon, phone face down, the exclamation-mark fine, rolex as a meal plan, midnight job sites, arithmetic in bed, emoji instead of laughing. Then a line, and under the line, what I do when three of them show up in the same week. Turn the phone over. Message one person, and tell her the true sentence, the "not great" one. Email the counsellor to bring the session forward. Eat something with a vegetable in it, even if the vegetable is the tomato in a rolex (I am realistic). Open the ledger, even if I only manage one column.

And if the visitor looks in at the gate, I skip all the steps and call someone that same night.

I'm not going to tell you this worked perfectly, because it is Saturday now, a week later, and I don't know yet. The weekend after the bad week was mostly fine and a little bit not. I went to Mama's and ate the luwombo and fell asleep on her sofa at four in the afternoon and woke up with the pattern of the cushion on my face, which is either rest or relapse, depending on how you look at it, and I've decided not to look at it too hard. The research fee isn't paid. The instalment form is in my bag with the letter, waiting for a supervisor's signature, which I will chase on Monday and probably again on Wednesday, because supervisors are a migratory species and are rarely found in their offices.

What I know for certain is smaller. I went back to the grey this month. I came out of it in eight days instead of eight months. The eight days were real and they cost me a seminar, some sleep, and a fright I did not want. They did not cancel the year and a half before them. Relapse is not a refund. Nobody comes to take back the good months because you had a bad week.

So here is what I want you to do, this week, while things are steady — because you cannot write this list from inside the grey; the grey hides the pencil.

Take a page at the back of whatever you have been using for your ledger. Write down what your bad weeks look like from the outside, the boring visible things: what you eat, when you bathe, what you stop answering, which phrase you use to say you are fine. Be as specific and as unflattering as I was about the rolex. Then draw a line, and under it write three things you will do when you notice three of those signs in the same week. Make them small enough that the worst version of you could manage them. One message. One email. One meal. Then write down the name of the person you will message, and, if you can, tell her today that her name is on your list, so that when the message comes she knows what it means.

My list is in the back of the Picfare, three pages after FORWARD EVER, in pencil. Brenda's name is on it. So is my counsellor's, and the number for the counselling office, and, at the bottom, in smaller letters, Tuesday 10 a.m., which is the next thing.