You will fail this year. But it’s okay.

Hey Malusi,
Keep calm. You’ll get used to it. Nobody calls you Faith anymore, at least not in your teens and early twenties. Also remember to tell Mrs. Elikanah to spell your name correctly. It’s Mwongeli, not ‘Nungeri’. Own your identity as early as now. It caught on in high school, Moi Girls’ High School — Eldoret. Spoiler alert. It’s a great school. It’s beautiful and pristine. Your batch will teach you more about life, friendship, love, growth and female spaces more than anyone probably ever will. They’ll be the basis of you understanding how patriarchy, feminism, privilege, femininity and religion all work. You’ll learn bits and pieces about how society works mostly from your literature teachers. The rest you’ll learn on Tumblr, Soundcloud and Twitter (you’ll understand later) Be especially keen on Mr. Lumasai. He’s astonishingly brilliant. Don’t sleep during his afternoon classes, you’ll be hella tempted, but don’t.
Before I delve into this odd exercise, I’m obliged to explain what’s going on here. It’s me. I mean, it’s you. It’s us. You are 9 and I am 22. I’m not sure how all this works, but I’m here and we’ll figure it out together. The assumption I’ll be consciously making is that we are inherently different while simultaneously the same. It makes sense, trust me. This I presume, is a journey for my introspection and for you, awareness.
To answer the obvious questions first, of course cars are flying now, we can communicate telepathically, we eat air now, Mum and Dad are hella (very) rich, its obnoxious, Nigerian music is hella amazing, I’m unmarried, our president is a woman, you have to pay a small fee to go to space (where akina Timo live now). To address the immediate concerns, you’ll fail this year. You’ll be number 19 in your third term. You’ll be disappointed and then you’ll be fine. Watch out for Rahab, Opiyo and Nickson. Those little shits will try and beat you next year. I’m not too sure why this has stuck with me all this time. Maybe it’s will crystallize as one of the subconscious reasons why you’ll be debilitatingly passive and repressed in your 21st year.
What To Look Forward To
To be clear, I’m not sure how the debate of free will versus predestined will was resolved. However, seeing as this is a feat of trying to reconcile who I am and who you are, the loop of choice and action holds as an indestructible part of our current identity.
Nothing will change how you will behave, but hope is the insane possibility that we have within us an opportunity to be different, better. Sober, maybe.
- You’ll break your left arm in September. It won’t hurt as much as the assumption is with these things. It will be on Tuesday, during the lunch break. Whitney will do it, accidentally. We should probably address why you’ll decide to tell mum that your hand is hurting on Thursday. Maybe you didn’t want to upstage Lovi’s burnt arm. Even in pain you let others walk over you.
- You’ll move to Ngong in 2 years. Thrive in the memories you are creating now. You’ll miss the thrill of childhood, the unconditional friendships, the naive games and the unabashed softness of home and the just being. They’ll be your best memories and they’ll lull you to sleep mostly when its gets dark. Dreary. Bottomless.
- You’ll be a star student, until university, when grades won’t matter anymore. Your grades will never disappoint you, well, except in form 2, but that year is inconsequential. You’ll let it define you and you’ll never step out to try anything else, which is an agreed shame. For this reason, your brother will resent you. It’ll hurt but I am working on it. Slowly, and quite expensively. Despite it all, your stellar grades will also grant you opportunities that you wouldn’t have possibly envisioned.
- You’ll have an awakening in 2011, and you’ll thrive. Thankfully, you’ll write everything down.
- You’ll pick up habits. You’ll drop some, you’ll accept some as part of your identity and you’ll struggle with some. Alcohol will fix your soul in ways you should probably analyse. Smoking will reinforce your asthma while simultaneously giving you a subtle high that reminds you of Limuru in July. You’ll have an on and off relationship with it. Mostly off. You’ll stick with the excessive reading and journaling. You’ll struggle with cussing, of course. You’ll hate poetry, secretly because you can’t understand it. Surprisingly, you’ll love Nigerian pidgin and you’ll have conversations with yourself in it in your head. You’ll write, and write and write and write and then write because you’ll forget how to cry in 2015.
- Your religious journey will be messy. You’ll try everything and you’ll find solace in a path that’ll make Dad take you to Pastor Mueti for ‘consultation’ which really means they’ve not approved and whatever teenage-induced demon this is, it needs to be expunged. You’ll have protracted periods of faithlessness. You’ll lose your faith, only to find it again, with warm reverence. You’ll be really angry because you think that if you do everything right, you will find redemption. That you would be saved. But you will not. So, it will be years of enforcing, reinforcing, remembering, and then remembering again what Christianity means to you. So, now, it has been a journey of realizing that we’ve spent a lifetime feeling disconnected to a faith that has always felt like ours, but because of our own naivety or somebody else’s, we’ve constantly landlocked ourselves, distancing from other’s interpretations, without sitting, contemplating, and factoring how Christianity fit into our life. Is this complicated to understand? Yes, because you are still in Standard 4.
- A lot of things will change while inherently remaining the same. Your dreams will always revolve around the same thing: writing. You’ll do a bunch of things that will make you happy, and that’s ok. You’ll grow perhaps too comfortable in this perpetual state of self-examination and light sadness — you’ll bleed onto the page and then admire the pattern you’ll leave behind. You’ll mine your past(future?), not as a reason to change but as rationalization for your worst behavior. But at least you won’t stop.
- 2015 will be the worst year of your life. Some scathingly shattering events will happen to you. They’ll redefine you. How you view the world will change. You’ll metamorphose into a cocktail of fidgety, detached, humorless, depressingly critical and cynical version of who I am, but you’ll heal. Some amazing people and some amazing places will ensure that. Lena, Momanyi, alcohol and Ghana. You’ll be better. I am better, I promise.
- In 2012, Excellent, an amazing album by Propaganda will be released, and although you’ll consume it in 2014, it’ll resonate with everything you’ll go through. Emptiness will be the bitch that sits smoking beside you as you choke on your own vomit in your 21st year. You’ll make friends with pain, anger, crippling loneliness and darkness. You’ll have vivid, brief moments of clarity when you’ll honestly believe that you are crazy. Insanely, acutely and raving mad. You’ll cry in matatus, in class, in the office, alone, in calm soft, tearless sobs. You’ll appreciate the questions but you’ll not answer them. Because you don’t know the answers. Not yet, at least. In 2017, you’ll realize that unresolved trauma from 2015 and its relatives need to be resolved was the correct answer.
I don’t regret anything that will happen to you in this journey. Were some events painful and unnecessary? Of course. But I don’t regret them, it took a while to get here. Propaganda says, “Even crooked sticks make straight lines.” We are being made, so hang in there.
Some days are fire. Some days are ash. Some days are complicated, some ways I’ll take the blame.
Always with love,
Malusi, in 13 years.
I’m trying to reinforce a writing culture, so validate my dreams by clicking the heart and maybe someone will stumble on it.
