I have always been considered someone who’s lived an incredible life. I had traversed five continents, created diplomatic ties in three nations, become the youngest ever opinion contributor to the New York Times, received national acclaim for work in public radio, obtained a fully funded ivy league education, started a consulting company, produced a talk show series, and written a memoir, all before the age of 23. So it may come as a surprise to you that a one point, very recently, I began to hate my life, enough to almost wish it gone.
I entered a blurry darkness that my nana used to call “the thick of it,” that long stretch of life when you are completely immersed in your own affairs; when you no longer have a choice of whether or not to be “self-centered” as you have now been violently yanked into the center — the fat, the hips, and the thighs of your own little world. Now it no longer matters if you were ever more important, more intelligent, or more talented than anyone else, because the same perpetual confusion that’s sucked them in has struck you too, and you cannot evade it.
I knew I was in the thick of it, because there was no longer any clear next step. There were no more graduations, job offers, or clearly marked ‘exit’ signs above my own sadness. Unlike in ages prior, the consequences of my actions began to rest solely on my own shoulders. My parents, friends, and lovers remained a critical yet painfully separate part of my “self.” The world in my head, once optimistic and colorful, grew deathly silent. Unwilling to concede to this silence, I attempted, like always, to think my way out of it. I began to ask myself “What went wrong? Where did you lose your way?” Perhaps poetic, but the only things these questions revealed is that I had a fundamental inability to admit I was no longer in control; to admit I had no idea what I was doing.
So I returned to Harlem, which had always been my own Mecca, because I had to move outside of myself. I had to watch the lives of those around me who were living without ambition or false notions of progress. I had to talk to Yusef, the bodega owner, and Flash, the building super, and Rosa, who runs the french bakery. I had to meet them, know them, and love them, because they had already mastered living in the thick of it. The world had long ago written them off as average and forgettable, so any magic of their days was purely self-concoted.
And because of them, who spent lifetimes spanning this darkness, I began to ask instead, “What does it mean to sustain?” And this question bred a fight in me — a battle to love myself beyond the reasons everyone else had — for the parts of the show that had no audience and the songs in me that no one clapped for. You see, I realized while I did have an incredible life, more importantly I have a worthy life. And I am not worthy because of beauty, ability, or even intellect, but because I have a will to persist despite all that I insist I must die. This we call dignity, and it brings you through the thick of it because unlike talent, which is learned and cultivated, it’s irrevocably God ordained, and no one can take it from you unless you so choose to relinquish it.
Today is my birthday. I’ve reached another plateau of twenty-something, and I am still in the thick of it. I have no more answers than I did at the beginning of last year. I am knee deep in the most urgent and critical journey of every young woman’s life, learning what love is and what it is not.
And the truth remains that besides faith, which has sustained me always, I am ill equipped for the road ahead. The things that have brought me this far will not keep me for the things that lie ahead, and the fear of that inadequacy at times grips me like nothing else. However, it is that same fear that has relinquished me from the banality of living for other people, and out of that blurry darkness has come the ability to entertain the radical possibility of something new. If you are anything like me, still in this moment, you may be asking yourself “What do I do next?” and if you are anything like me, you still don’t know. But whatever it is, I know you can, because you must.