Growing Pains (I don't fit into my jeans anymore. I don't fit into my life anymore.)

A Collection of Miscellaneous Thoughts

As I grow older, I struggle not to fall into the doom and gloom of the twenties. Life comes at you fast, and I find myself internally retreating to when I was 4, pigtails and butterfly clips, and my parents got me a cake big enough for my full name to be written on it. I find myself wanting to relive my life, and I have to tell myself to simply allow myself to exist. It is essential to practice slowing down, hitting the brakes, and allowing yourself to take a break: to be here, and not there, in some other place, some distant land, some imagined future. As my friend Claudia wrote in her recent blog article, “Sometimes life is quite simple.” It is essential to take a few steps back, and see things with the simplicity of a child. Rediscover the world and my place in it. How can I be good to other people? How can I be good to myself?

Often when I try to navigate my adult life, I try to imagine myself as being the guardian of my younger self. If I am in a supermarket I think of what I, at age 3 would have wanted to get but couldn’t, and how that would make her (me) happy. What that would satisfy within her that in turn will satisfy me now, at 20. When I evaluate myself and the progress I have made, I often ask myself what type of person I want to shape myself into being. Who do I want to be? I seek to become the kind of person younger versions of myself would have felt safe around.

Adult life is a constant and monotonous cycle of repetitions. Wake up, commute, work, commute, cook and sleep. It doesn’t help that because everyone is so busy crafting their own lives and futures, we hardly have any time for each other. We live in different cities, different countries, different continents. Soon the jaws of real life will have snatched us up, and there will be jobs, and children, and weddings and engagements. Some have already set off down this path. I feel as though it is not worth it to constantly be in a state of pondering over the future. Just live now. The weddings will come and the Masters’ degree will come and the life partner(s) will come at their own time; for now it should be enough to be here, eating noodles for the third day in a row in a shitty college apartment in a country you don’t really know. Homesickness is terrible and I often think of trips to Mutare with my family, Marco Sibanda, Oliver Mutukudzi and the Madzibaba choir music playing while we pass Bikita and the mango tree lined highway in Nyanyadzi. There is a novel by Thomas Wolfe called “You Will Never Go Home Again” and this is a tragic and debilitating reality for those of us from politically and economically unstable countries; there is something quite depressing about living as an immigrant, the foundations upon which you stand are never fully secure, and completely depend on a set of circumstances that you cannot control. But there is something to be gained from exploring the cultures of others, immersing yourself in their way of life, their food, their language, their being. I’ve discovered that I like to tell people about home, and even though Zim has its pitfalls, it has a lot of positives too, and it’s a real shame that these people will never taste a Colcom sausage or experience the mass planting during the rainy season when everyone begins growing maize in every inch of space in their backyard. That they will never see the ridiculous kombis in Harare with the wildest statements and colours, and the euphoric feeling of finding a really good thrift find at the Highlanders thrift market, or at mabhero ekuMbare.

Community is essential for combating the inevitable despair and existential crises that will come, as you outgrow your clothes, your old shoes, your old life. You will put on these foreign clothes and have to adjust to this foreign life, to not having your parents to speak to every day, to having to craft the perfect CV and worry about whether the future of AI means you won’t have a job when you graduate. The fear of whether you’re studying the wrong thing, the anxiety of whether you’ve made the right choices. The fervent desire to go back and change everything.

At the very beginning of my semester, one of my lecturers emphasised that with the degree we’re studying, there is simply no time for anything else; It is our life now. I found myself scrutinising this, and all the other capitalist notions of killing yourself in order to succeed. I wondered why they didn’t make an emphasis on balance, because at the end of the day, before we are anything else, before we are students, musicians, lawyers, doctors, accountants, we are human beings. Human beings die. One day we will all die, and it could be tomorrow, in thirty days, thirty years or even later tonight. You do not want to leave the earth, the only experience you will ever have of being here in this particular time surrounded by these particular people, and have only had filled your life with meaningless work in a system that will replace you before your body settles into the breast of the earth. I hate that it is impossible to meet every person and see everything worth seeing in the world. The earth is full of rich and wonderful things.

I am learning to overcome grief, or at least to live with it, to co-exist with it, to somehow make it a companionable roommate I never asked for but got anyway. I am learning to love my life, or at least, to first like it. To call my family, to listen carefully to the unbridled laughter of children; to mimic that laughter. I want to know what it feels like to be a child again. There is a child in my building who laughs so much in the hallways and reminds me of my brother. I want to cry when I hear children laugh. I envy them their joy, I envy them their innocence. They have not met grief, pain, sorrow, regret; these woeful foundations upon which our adult lives are built.

I feel sometimes that I lost the last of my innocence but I am laughing more, paying more attention, sometimes smoking a little bit too much. But this is life. It is easy to fall into the pit of the 20s. Loneliness. Despair. Gloom. Doom. Sometimes you have to fight it, reclaim your life. You do not want to wonder where the years have gone when they have all spiraled into one another and passed you by. You do not want to look into your mirror three decades from now and ask yourself "Who am I? What have I done to myself? What has happened to me?" 

Hold hands with your friends. Kiss their cheeks, their foreheads, their lips. Do not reserve love for romance. Give it. Become it. Do not wait to receive it. Give love freely, fiercely and unselfishly, at every moment, every day. 

Sing, though you cannot sing; I have laboured over my life and I will not labour over it anymore. 

Remember yourself. Look Homeward Angel.