Find your why

‘Find your why’, yet another book to help me find my purpose and calling. My friend says it’s good and truly helped her, I should read it. I decide not to. Later when she asks if I liked it, I would say I did. I would say it was insightful and now I know my why.

I’ve spent the better parts of my life asking myself who I was and the person I wanted to become, and it’s funny because every time I’ve thought I had it figured out, something happens that makes me question my entire existence, again and again. My life has never really had the perfect landscape, instead pieces and pieces coming together to resemble an upsetting looking collage.

At the beginning of my university days, even though I was studying to be a lawyer, I told myself I was also going to be a writer, publish a book and be the next chimamanda, so I put my everything into it. It felt good because writing came to me easily, and I just wrote and spoke about writing all the time. I had it figured out. I was zainab, lover of literature, writer, poet and I was going to become chimamanda. I was so sure, I started and finished writing a book.

A few months later, the doubts crept in, and writing didn’t come as easily to me anymore. I talked less about writing, and wrote less. I still wanted to be a writer, so I told myself it was only but a writers block. I was a writer, it’s what everyone saw me as, and even when I wasn’t really the writer I told people I was, I wasn’t about to introduce people to the writer I had become, so I held on. I must have held on to this version of myself until the people around me weren’t interested enough to notice, when I let go.

As time passed, I found other interests and became those interests. If I liked tea, then I was a tea maker and I was going to make tea for a living, and if I liked art, then I was an artist and I was going to have my art hung in museums. Somehow who I was or wanted to become was always intertwined and attached to my interest in that moment. So that if I had no interests, I was lost and completely withdrawn from reality. I lived in envy of people who didn’t need a creative outlet to be themselves, people who could easily talk about the things they liked without it meaning they were describing who they were.

If having these outlets made me feel worthy, then finding even more creative outlets would make me feel even more worthy of my own love, at least it was what I believed. So I did just that, I immersed myself in all the things I now call my passions. You’d think that this was enough, that I had finally felt at ease, but you’d be wrong. This is not an account of my success, or an account of self discovery. I still don’t know who I am. All my passions and interests are still not enough and on days when I’m confronted with the question of who I am or what I do, I quote someone, most times Roger Ebert, “we are put on this planet once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our mind”