My Life Plan (Pencil Edition)

13. Read this plan every New Year and tick what I have done. If something is not ticked by the right time it means I did not try hard enough. Then try HARDER.

That is the last item. After it the exercise book has forty-one blank pages, which I counted this morning with the seriousness of an auditor, and the inside back cover, where someone, possibly me, possibly my brother, has drawn a moustache on the Picfare man who stands there in his little logo, forever about to teach arithmetic.

I never ticked anything. I want that on the record. For fourteen years I read this plan, not every New Year, but often enough, and I never once put a tick beside an item, even the ones that came true. When I got into Makerere I did not tick item two. When I graduated with good grades I did not tick item five. I think I believed that ticking would be presumptuous, the way you don't say "I'm fine" too loudly in case God hears you and takes it as a challenge. So the only marks in the margins of the original plan are the ones you have watched me add across this book: small pencil numbers, keyed to the pages of a second notebook where the ledgers live.

Today I am going to do something I have been circling for weeks. I am going to write the pencil edition in the exercise book itself.

Let me show you the book first, because you have been hearing about it for nineteen chapters and I have been stingy with the description, the way you are stingy about introducing a relative you are not sure will behave.

It is blue. Picfare blue, which is a particular blue, darker than sky and lighter than a police uniform, the blue of a thousand Ugandan childhoods and at least one government report I once saw a clerk wrap his chapati in. The cover has gone soft at the corners, like old bread. Across the front, in capitals, it says MY LIFE PLAN, and under that are three lines, ruled with the edge of a geometry-set protractor because I did not trust my own wrist. The third line wobbles. At twelve I must have been pressing so hard the protractor slipped. Someone has written "Rose loves" in tiny letters near the bottom corner, and then scratched out whatever Rose loved, which tells you the book spent at least one afternoon unguarded in a classroom. The two staples in the spine have rusted to the colour of tea. If you open it flat, the first page tries to come away, and I have learnt to open it only to a right angle, gently, as if it were sleeping.

Inside, the blue Bic has faded to something nearer purple. My handwriting gets smaller as the items go on, the girl running out of confidence or running out of page, I can't tell which. There are the three item sixes. There is the blank ruled line between four and five, the item I forgot to write. There is the stick-figure family beside the house with the chimney. There is the full stop after "baby" that went through to the other side.

For fourteen years the left-hand pages of this book have been empty. Twelve-year-old me wrote only on the right, a habit from school, where teachers marked on the left. She was leaving room for the examiner.

Here is what the examiner wrote back.

MY LIFE PLAN (pen, age 12) · My Life Plan (pencil, now)

1. Make Mama proud of me. ALWAYS. (Not just on report day.) · 1. Let Mama know me. Proud is her department. Being known is mine.

2. Get into Makerere. (Not Kyambogo. Not "any university." MAKERERE.) · 2. I got in. I was there. I am allowed to love the place and grieve what happened in it, both.

3. Never give any one a reason to talk. Be decent at all times. Even when nobody is looking. (ESPECIALY then.) · 3. People will talk. Be kind when nobody is looking, including to me.

4. No boyfriends until I have a job. A real job with a office. · 4. Love whoever I love with my eyes open. Ask for what I need. Tell the truth sooner.

(blank line) · (The item I forgot to write.) Plan for what I'll do if things go wrong. Who I'll call. What I'll eat.

5. Be the first in the family to have a masters. (But first graduate from Makerere with GOOD GRADES.) · 5. Finish the master's because I want what it teaches. If I need to pause, a pause is still part of the road.

6. Get maried at 27 to a saved man with a good job. Then have 2 children. A boy first then a girl. (In that order.) · 6. I don't know yet. I am allowed to not know yet. I will not decide my future using the shame from my past.

6. Learn from your mistakes. Never make the same mistake two times. · 6. Learn from my mistakes. Expect to make some of them twice. Be gentle the second time too.

6. Get a good job with a office and a desk and my name on the door. (Gorvernment or a NGO. Not a shop.) · 6. Find work that pays and doesn't eat me. A shop is fine. A desk is furniture.

7. Be somebody by 25. · 7. I was somebody at 25. She was having a very hard year.

8. Wake up at 5 am EVERY DAY. Even Saturday. · 8. Wake up. On hard days, that counts. On good days, go for a walk before the sun gets proud.

8. Do masters straight after degree. No break. Then PhD. Then I will be Dr. · 8. The uncles can call me whatever they like. I will call myself by my name.

9. Dress decently at all times so that men respect you. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. · 9. My body is mine. Respect is something people give or don't give. A hemline won't decide it.

10. Dont waste time being sad. Count your blessings insted. · 10. Sadness is not wasted time. When it goes dark, tell someone the same day. Count blessings and the bad days too.

10. Never tell people your problems. Keep house business in the house. · 10. Tell one person. Then maybe two.

11. Always write in PEN. Pencil is for people who are not sure. · 11. Write in pencil. I'm sure about some things. I just want to be able to change my mind.

12. Never go backwards. FORWARD EVER, BACKWARD NEVER!! · 12. Sometimes I'll go back a few steps. That doesn't mean I've lost my place.

12. If a boy hurts you cut him off COMPLETELY. Dont look back. · 12. Look back when I'm ready, with someone holding my hand. Decide each person one at a time.

13. Read this plan every New Year and tick what I have done. Then try HARDER. · 13. Read this plan whenever life changes. Rub out what no longer fits. Then try softer.

I have printed it here as a table because a table is tidy, and the book is not. In the book, the pencil is grey against the purple-blue, and it does not line up. Some of my entries are longer than hers and run down into the space beside the next item, so that "Be gentle the second time too" sits elbow-to-elbow with a girl who wanted a desk with her name on the door. Item 6 (marriage) is the shortest thing I have written in years, and it took me the longest. I wrote "I don't know yet" and then sat there for most of an hour, holding the pencil above the page, while a hen outside argued with somebody's radio.

I want to tell you that writing it felt like freedom. Mostly it felt like vandalism.

The book was supposed to be untouched. I am the woman who used to hold it by its corners. For nineteen chapters and fourteen years I kept the ledgers in a separate notebook, a Kakasi one with a picture of a footballer on the cover, precisely so the original would stay as she left it, a museum of a girl. And I still think that was right, for a long time. You don't renovate a house while you are still angry with the builder. But last Sunday, after the phone call with Mama, I sat down with the Kakasi notebook to copy the revisions into a clean list for myself, and I noticed I was copying them in pen.

I had my pencil right there, sharpened at both ends. I picked up the pen anyway. Old hands.

So I put the pen down, opened the Picfare book to a right angle, and started on the left-hand page beside item one, and my hand shook. I am not exaggerating for the comedy. You can see it in the "L" of "Let Mama know me," a small tremor in the downstroke, like a word typed on a minibus.

Here is the part I nearly left out of this book.

Halfway down the page, beside the two item sixes about marriage and mistakes, I stopped. The original items are written next to each other: the stick-figure family, then "Learn from your mistakes. Never make the same mistake two times. Only stupid people do that." You know, because you have read Chapters 7 and 8, what those two items have come to mean to me. You know why the second one was a knife.

I had a revision drafted in the Kakasi notebook for that second six. It read: "Learn from my mistakes." Full stop. That was all I had been able to manage when I first did the ledger for it, months ago, at my counsellor's suggestion. It had felt like an achievement at the time, cutting "only stupid people do that," the way removing a splinter feels like surgery.

When I came to write it into the real book, beside her, I could not make myself stop at the full stop. I wrote "Expect to make some of them twice." Then I sat back and looked at it and felt sick, properly sick, the low churn you get before an exam result, because writing it down in that book, beside that drawing, was the closest I have ever come to saying in ink, even pencil, what happened twice. Nobody reading the line would know. That isn't the point. I would know, and she would know, the girl on the right-hand page, and I had promised her for fourteen years that I would protect her from exactly this.

I wrote "Be gentle the second time too." The pencil lead broke on "too." I sharpened it and went over the word again, lightly, the way you would touch somebody's shoulder.

Then I did not write anything for a while.

You will notice the pencil column is mostly about people. It surprised me, too. The original plan is a list of achievements with a few rules of conduct holding them in place, like tent pegs: university, job, master's, marriage, title. Even "Make Mama proud" is an achievement, if you read it as a twelve-year-old meant it, a medal you pin on your mother. When I wrote the pencil edition, I did not sit down meaning to make it softer or more relational or any of the words you will find in the self-help books that cost forty thousand shillings at Aristoc. I sat down meaning to write the truest thing I could put beside each item. And the truest thing kept turning out to be about who I wanted beside me and how I wanted to feel while I did whatever I did.

I'll give you item 1, because it's the one I've lived with longest.

"Make Mama proud" was a target. You hit it on report day, and the rest of the term you worked towards hitting it again. It turned Mama into an examiner, which was unfair to her, because she never asked for the job, and unfair to me, because it meant the only version of me she was allowed to meet was the one carrying a good result. Whatever couldn't be graded, I kept out of her house. You know what I kept out.

"Let Mama know me" is harder, and it is smaller. It does not mean I must tell her everything on Saturday over luwombo. I have no plan to do that. It means I get to stop polishing myself before every visit like a church floor before the bishop. It means "Mama, I had a bad night" is a sentence I am allowed to say. I have said it once. I may say it again. That's the whole item.

Or item 10, the one about sadness. Twelve-year-old me thought sadness was a leak in the day, time draining out. The pencil version is less sure of itself and more practical. When it goes dark, tell someone the same day. I put "the same day" because I know my own delays. I know the woman who will wait until Thursday to mention Monday, by which time Monday has had three days to make itself comfortable. I have people now (a counsellor, Mama in her way, one friend from Mitchell Hall who sends me voice notes that are mostly her children shouting, and one other person you met in Chapter 18) and the item is a promise to use them.

If you are reading this in a dark stretch yourself, please make the same-day promise too. In Uganda you can call the Mental Health Uganda helpline or the toll-free 0800 21 21 21 line, or go to the nearest health centre or Butabika's outpatient department. If you are somewhere else, your local emergency number or a crisis line will connect you. The phone call does not need a speech. "I'm not okay and I need to talk to someone" is enough. I know because I have said a version of it, badly, and the person on the other end did not need it to be said well.

Item 6, the marriage one, is the only item where the pencil column says, plainly, that I don't know. I want you to look at how long the original is: a husband, a qualification for the husband, an age, a number of children, a birth order, and a parenthesis to make sure God got the order right. Eighteen words of certainty and a drawing. Mine is eighteen words of not-knowing, plus a sentence I added later, after a session where I cried in a way I had not cried since Makerere: "I will not decide my future using the shame from my past." That's a value, not a plan, and I put it there because it is the only part of the item I can stand behind today.

If there is one thing I will say flatly in this chapter, it is this: a plan you can rub out is the only kind you can actually keep.

Now it's your turn. I'm going to walk you through it, slowly, the way I wish someone had walked me through it, sitting next to me instead of across a desk.

You need your original plan. Many of you did not write one in an exercise book, and that's fine. You had one anyway. It may live in a diary, a vision board from a church youth retreat, a speech you gave at an O-level farewell, or simply in your head, recited at weddings whenever an auntie asked, "And you, what are your plans?" If it never got written down, write it down now, in pen, as she would have written it. Use her voice. Use her spelling if you can remember it. Use her capitals. Do not correct her. This is a transcript, not an edit. You are taking her statement.

A practical note: write it on the right-hand pages only, and leave the left ones empty. You will need them.

Give it time. My plan has thirteen items with three sixes and two eights; yours may have five, or thirty. Somewhere in the middle you will find the item you forgot to write, the blank line, the thing nobody told her to plan for. Mark it. Draw a line where it would have been.

Then choose one item, only one, for the first sitting. I would avoid the heaviest item for your first go. I started the ledger, back in Chapter 15, with the five a.m. item, because it was the one I could laugh at, and laughing at it gave me enough breath to do the next.

Run it through the Four-Column Ledger in whatever notebook you keep for rough work. You know the columns by now. Planned: copy her words exactly. Happened: what actually happened, in plain sentences, no adjectives about yourself. "I did not get a job for two years" is a sentence. "I was useless for two years" is a verdict, and verdicts go in no column. Paid: what it cost you, and I would like you to include in that column the things it cost other people, and the things you are still paying. Revised: leave empty for now.

Look at the Planned column and ask what she was trying to protect. I mean this as a real question with a real answer, not as a meditation. When I asked it of "No boyfriends until I have a job," the answer was: she was afraid of ending up like a girl from our village whose name the aunties said in a particular tone. She was protecting her future from a story she had overheard. Write down what yours was protecting. Usually it is something worth protecting, even if the method was terrible.

Then ask the second question: what do I value now, in this area of my life, that she didn't have the information to value? Don't write goals here. Write what matters. "Honesty with the people closest to me." "Not working for people who shout." "Being able to sleep." "Time with my mother while she is still well." If you notice that everything you write is about feelings and people rather than titles and dates, you are not doing it wrong. That is apparently where these things go.

Only then do you write the Revised entry. In pencil. In the actual book, on the left-hand page, beside her.

Keep it short. Short entries are easier to live with and easier to rub out. Write it in your own voice, today's voice, which may be sharper or sadder or funnier than hers. Write to yourself, not to the aunties; you will be tempted, as I was, to write something you could read aloud at a family meeting. If the honest revision is "I don't know yet," write that. I promise it holds weight.

And this is the step I almost skipped, so I am putting it in a list where you can't miss it:

1. Write the revision.

2. Read hers and yours aloud, one after the other, in the same breath.

3. Notice what your body does.

4. Do not fix what your body does.

5. Put the kettle on, or whatever you do instead.

(Mine is a cup of tea and a mandazi from the woman at the gate, who has started giving me two for the price of one on days I look "a bit tired," which is, I'll be honest, an alarming early-warning system.)

When you have done one item, stop. Come back another day. Do the next. Some items will take ten minutes; one may take a week. You may write a revision, live with it, and find a month later that it is wrong. Good. Rub it out. That is what the pencil is for. Every time I open the book now there is a faint grey ghost under at least one entry, the shape of something I thought and then didn't. Item 3 has been rewritten four times. The current version is the first one I haven't wanted to defend to anyone.

What should you do with the finished pages? Nothing dramatic. Don't burn the original. Don't frame the revision. Put the book somewhere you will see it, not somewhere sacred, and open it whenever your life changes shape: a new job, a lost job, a diagnosis, a death, a birth, a breakup, a reconciliation, a semester that defeats you, a Saturday that surprises you. Read both columns. Ask whether the pencil still fits. If it doesn't, sharpen and revise. Then, if you can, tell one person you did it. You don't owe them the contents. Just tell them the court sat, the book is open, and you are keeping it in pencil now.

I'll tell you what happened after I finished my left-hand pages, because it is the reason I'm not ending this chapter on the table.

When I closed the book, I could see the pencil through the paper. It's faint, but if you hold the front cover up to the window, the grey shows behind the blue of MY LIFE PLAN, as if the second plan is standing quietly behind the first. I sat with that a while. Then I did something that I had not planned and that frightened me more than writing the item six revision.

I turned to the first of the forty-one blank pages at the back, and in pencil, at the top, I wrote 14.

I didn't write anything after it. I don't have item fourteen yet. Twelve-year-old me stopped at thirteen because, I think, thirteen felt complete to her, the last item being the instructions for using the rest. She thought she was done planning. She had written her whole life on six pages and assigned herself to tick it off annually.

Writing the number was the risk. It meant that the plan is no longer hers, closed and correct and failed. It belongs to both of us now, and it is unfinished, and there are forty pages left, and I will have to keep coming back. A finished document can only be passed or failed. An open one you have to live in.

This morning I packed for Saturday. The bus fare is in its envelope. I have put the exercise book in my bag too, wrapped in a kitenge offcut so the cover doesn't rub against my keys, and the pencil is in the inside pocket. I haven't decided whether I'll show Mama. I may show her item 1, both sides of it. I may only show her the cover and let her laugh at the protractor lines, because she will, she will say, "You were always like this," in the voice she uses for things she is secretly proud of. I may leave it in the bag the whole afternoon and bring it home again, and that will also be fine, and I will write that down too.

If you want to start this week, here is what to do before you go to bed tonight. Find your plan, or write it out. Buy a pencil if you don't have one; kiosk, five hundred shillings, smile at the man. Pick the lightest item. Copy her words on the right. Leave the left side empty. Go to sleep.

Tomorrow, or the day after, fill in one line beside her. Then turn to the back of the book and write the next number, with nothing after it, and leave it there where you can see it.