TINYBITSOFMADNESS
Sep 5, 2018 · 11 min read

“At this point, I was ready and willing to die of frustration, my hands were swollen from piercings of needles and whatever l ate tasted like blood because l hate injections.”

It is not so late in the morning or so late in the morning, the music in my earphones is right, very right actually, the table am seated around has the rest of the clinicpesa team at work busy doing stuff on their computers,

it’s at a job l got through my internship,where l got retained as a front end developer, a platform to help the uninsured save for health, Clinicpesa.

I would not say l love to work so much instead of hanging out with my friends at uni or in our beautifully decorated rooms, having a good time, you know!

But with this opportunity to work in a group, to know how to code better, to know how to wake up a bit earlier that usual, to work on something that has an impact on an awful lot of people, it’s a tremendous feeling, just as it is Nagging’

Am a final year software engineering student at Makerere University, and l can easily say that my internship , where l ended up being retained has given me a profound education than that l got through the last 3 years at University.

But that is not all, I have to be at work by 8 in the morning, so l wake up a bit earlier than l used to while with a normal class schedule, and after 4 or 5 hours of work(glad this place of work understood that l still had school and let me make it part of work), so after 4 or 5 hours of work, am off to school to attend evening lectures, to try and catch up with whatever is going on,

And after 9 pm in the night, l head back to my hostel room, with missed calls and text messages that l haven’t seen or heard, and boom, a group of friends who want to get drunk or get high, and of course this has to go down because you know,

“life stops. And it can stop at any moment.”
~Paul Auster, The invention Of Solitude~

So basically, there is a lot on my plate, l have a constant nagging feeling that l do not need money at all, which l have grown to understand and love as a lifestyle, money is indeed evil, and am happy to have nothing to do with it, and all this luggage in form of a job opportunity in an area of my course of education and a special passion in computers and coding, somehow all seems like a big quick money making scheme for me, like am running to fast than l should have, like am about to do more than l should be doing, like l should just wait until l finish school, like l should just be easy and comfortable,but i know the root of all these thoughts is because of a deep rooted lazy bone within me that l myself cannot manage to trace,

Amidst all this frustration, depression and anxiety, am not myself but l know deep down that l love to write, tell me to leave a calculus class to come write you a poem or something of the sort and you have totally figured me out.

Same thing goes with understanding code, writing code, changing code , fixing errors , dancing around my computer thinking of a way of making that JavaScript snippet of code work or playing around with data using mongo, all of it, it makes me feel alive,

But the question is’ , how do l pass all my modules without any retakes (because you know, it’s not my money yet, it’s from my lovely parents, and so l gotta make it in the academic world, l actually love to learn, a lot, but school just gets too much sometimes, you know), so how do l balance school, a job that l actually love and is giving me literal skills that school cannot give me even if it wanted to, and also have time to write a book and look for publishers and also make myself known to most of my possible readers of the book l pray lam able to get published in the near future,

it’s crazy, because l haven’t even mentioned the constant sentimentality for the past , about hanging out with my friends, my constantly moody and depressed boyfriend, traveling or just the ability to have a day with the beach and myself, it’s all bogged down in my brain and because am thinking like Sherlock about nothing and everything, How , how , do l handle all this that is on my plate?

I break down, l cry like a child, l tremble, l shake, l get taken to the hospital by my mother and what everyone is thinking is that am not eating enough food, the male doctor also has his thoughts on my situation “oh, girl, do you have a boyfriend? He asks, and before l can answer, he goes ahead “you gotta talk to your boyfriend, he must be making you sick with thoughts” ), this is partly true but this very intelligent man forgets that some girls have a whole bunch of dreams and shit they want to achieve that take such a toll on them besides thinking about or having so many thoughts about the boys they are with, it’s insane, l thought that a man like him would know, but alas,

Anyway, l was checked and the bacteria that causes ulcers was non existent, and this test happened because to everyone, my extreme anxiety and depression was ulcers or some other shit, my mom even ordered for the doctor to check my blood for Aids, for l looked too thin’

Needless to say, neither the HIV virus nor the Helicobacter pylori was found. (H. pylori) is a type of bacteria. These germs can enter your body and live in your digestive tract. After many years, they can cause sores, called ulcers, in the lining of your stomach or the upper part of your small intestine. For some people, an infection can lead to stomach cancer.

“At this point, I was ready and willing to die of frustration, my hands were swollen from piercings of needles and whatever l ate tasted like blood because l hate injections.”

The only thing am proud of doing this period was not going to work or to school or to my boyfriend or anyone for a solid three days, I lay in my bed, and cried to my pillow, l played very loud music it almost blew my head to pieces, l ate fruits extravagantly, i cried to God about all my sorrows, i prayed, l did everything automatically as my heart ached , along with my muscles and bones,

Somehow, on the fourth day, when l felt refreshed and a bit in control of my thoughts, l went to work, with a smile on my face, a genuine smile, because l knew deep inside my heart, that no one had called me or forced me to show up, it’s me who had come knocking on this door for a job , well knowing that by the time l finish my final year at University, this job would have shaped me into the developer and software engineer that l had always dreamed of,

And within all this chaos of trying to do what’s right by me, however much hard it seemed to be, my senses were alright, almost laser sharp, l could hear the sound of car tyres whenever l was walking to work in the morning, l could sense that the words in my head required to be put down on paper, a very nauseating feeling, for you know what you want to write down, but somehow, time isn’t on your side, and you would rather call and text your boyfriend obsessively begging him to stop ignoring you instead of at least putting down a line or two, lol,

I think am coming to a conclusion that most young women and men do not know exactly what they want, for once you find this out, l do not think any kind of depression, anxiety or emotional issues can tear you down, we need to keep digging deep within ourselves to find that, that we truly desire and want.

J Cole was right when he said

“I understand this message is not the coolest to say but if you down to try it, l know a better way, Meditate”

Friends, KOD.

A breakthrough always comes if you care enough to be patient and go through the heartbreaking shit with a not complaining attitude but with a grateful heart’ attitude, because if you come to think of it, life is all we have and our only job is to live it, to live each day with a full heart that contains love for everyone, with a zeal to become better than yourself from yesterday,

because l was like l don’t care what happens, lam young, and l have both the brain power and physical energy, so l worked for four hours straight at work, and spent about 2 hours of my day which was usually at night after classes to write my poetry and other material, anything that felt like it had to be written, l wrote, l woke up in the morning to run, l made more phone calls with my mother, l committed to my evening classes at university and contributed to my group work with full force like l was so interested in school work .

This only went on for about a week, ‘me pushing myself through hell to do what l really wanted to do’ and it was a Saturday morning, after l had blacked out from a heavy night out with friends when l woke up and thought about how much programming or writing code connected with writing.

I thought to myself “ girl, you use the same computer to write poetry, to write code for work, what harm is there to think about writing code the same way you think about writing poetry”

But damn, how can a brain that is my own begin to make code comparisons with a beautiful sanctifying activity like writing poetry, huh!

I was really mad at myself and my senseless brain, so l even started to hate coding with an immense hatred, hate that puts my whole being to shame, for how can l be this naive and close minded?, to hate the things that l love just to prove to myself that l can live without money or that l still have my parents cater for me, so as l can stay around my cheap hostel room hanging out the whole day with friends.

This hatred did not last long though, as the CEO at the startup, clinicpesa where l work now, pushed me in the most unforgettable way to finish the project he had assigned to me, l started off with, “i cannot do this project in just these few days your giving me”, “am not the best developer there is, why don’t these people just hire someone else and leave me alone”, “fuck, l wish l was with my friends instead of wasting my time writing stuff l do not understand fully”, the list of excuses l had at this particular moment is long enough, not even a book of records could handle to pen down all the pages.

All this negativity was only in the mind though, not in the physical(one reason why l have learnt to drink so much water, walk all my journeys to my hostel, my workplace and the university, to eat fruits extravagantly, to care care of my body), because with the help of my body and it’s energy, I kept coming into work, l learnt every small detail of Angular JavaScript, MEAN stack, mongo db, and finally handed the CEO what he had wanted me to give him after a week or so, besides all the emotional clutter and a constellation of questions that were wounding my mind with a lot of negativity and bad energy.

This project that he had wanted me to give him, had been given to me at the start of my internship which took about 3 months( July-August, 2018) and l had failed to deliver the end product because l believed coding was not for me and that l was a very slow person, but within a week of pain, within just one week of thinking straight about my core values, just one week of letting myself feel all the thoughts that were coming to me, just a week of listening to my mom about working hard for whatever l wanted, and her asking me questions like, if you cannot give someone your time at a job and full commitment, then how are you going to handle stuff or business that is your own, huh!

I came to a realization that l had been waiting on someone to come save me, for someone to come do my very hard modules for me, for group members at university to do all the assignments for me(as if they were not humans like me that were most probably going through harder stuff than l might have had at a time, but since you know, everyone only wants to think of themselves and am ashamed for having thought that l had better dreams or thoughts or problems than my friends, hence leaving the entire load of assignments to them in the guise of being too busy at work or some other lame excuses), for someone to come and help me start my career, for someone to come and help me be flexible and productive at work, and all this waiting had not yielded a single thing for me but endless depression, maddening anxiety and a lot of injections and all.

Everything is possible if you truly want to achieve it, and l like to dwell on my few little experiences and this powerful quote from the book alchemist by Paulo Coelho that goes

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Shit, it was crazy coming to terms that l loved writing poetry and l also signed up for my engineering course after doing Physics, Mathematics and Economics because l had been fascinated by the computer language, all the stuff it could do, and yet here l was with the greatest opportunity in my hands, which was the ability in this moment, to write poetry, write code and go to school at the same time with ease, at a young age while still at University, yet somehow, a big evil force , called Resistance and all the troubles that come with youth were tagging me down, making feel less powerful and less imaginative, instead more lazy and nonchalant’

Fortunately, with a bit of solitude from the chaos of the world and help from the ones l thought hated me for giving me opportunities, I beat the evil force.

It is not so late in the morning or so late in the morning, the music in my earphones is right, very right actually, the table am seated around has the rest of the clinicpesa team at work busy doing stuff on their computers, and am writing this article, yesterday night, l wrote the one hundred and sixteenth page to my poetry book that l hope to publish by the end of the year 2018 , l have a meeting with my group members at school at 5 pm that am excited about and I got introduced to the source code for my company Clinicpesa, ready to learn, write and change for the better.


Thank you for reading, l love you. And if you loved the story, please fucc up the clap button, you can clap up to to 50x

You can also find more stories me on Instagram.

TINYBITSOFMADNESS
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