Teenage crisis could be a thing

This image has a grip on me.

January 2023

It is a Sunday today. A blank and busy day. I have story ideas — not pitched — and trying to reconcile with doing no freelance work for the year, an easy way out of confusion and not too much to do in less available concentrated time. For instance, I’ve been off this space for a while, hardly reading about people like I used to and it doesn’t mean people are not interesting anymore or I stopped reading entirely but that, I’m engaged. With work.

After eight hours away from home, performing secretariat (as the General Secretary) duties in my fellowship, I’m here taking a rest to be suspended by another compulsory meeting, following rounds of meetings I’ve had earlier. I’m in between asking myself if I’m doing the right thing at the right time but, it’s service for God.

Apart from having to be in fellowship four times a week and making collective congress decisions for the fellowship, I have my paying job, as a tech journalist. I’ve been in tech for almost a year; and journalism for three solid and unrelenting years. Advancing to tech and making the best experience out of purposely committing to something is getting sabotaged by my should-be priority: my undergraduate degree.

My penultimate year is full of different but important commitments, ones which I’ll regret not having myself carried along with the stress and pain of perseverance. I’m staking my personal life (people mention the phrase often but I don’t know what it even entails), deeper relationship with people (running away from people who will demand a lot and unapologetically cutting people off at the point of getting close), getting high on energy drinks and having constant pleasures I can’t satisfy for now.

One of my long nights of doing research and getting work done.

It’s going to be a year. It’s February rightly and all I can figure this unplanned year (or January) to have been is a totally escapable but irrational spending spree for random people and my family.

I stabbed an important journalism fellowship which could have meant another significant path in my career but, what is meant to be must/will be or so they say. I think I’ll be joining the next cohort while I focus on a life that’s dutiful and seems happy.

I should be fine. I mean, I’m not dead.