the eleventh one
you'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling
The last time you heard from me, I wrote about the toll moving takes on one’s life. A fact that’s somewhat ironic, given that a few years ago, I sent a small prayer to the universe in a tweet - “I want to live in 5 cities in the next 7 years”. What I had in mind at the time was to live in 5 completely different cities, but I guess the universe took this to mean moving to the same place more than once.
My last move took more than a toll. In fact, I believe it required my entire essence to be sacrificed for a “new” person to emerge. I’m being dramatic, I know, but there’s no other way to say this. It's been almost two years since my last newsletter, so to catch you up, I wanted to share some of the things I've learned about myself since then.
Since 2022, I’ve had to figure out exercising, cooking, sharing a living space with another adult, starting a new job, and then transitioning to a new role—basically being “new” at an unbearable number of things. These are some of my epiphanies from the last two years.
—
I don’t like being new at people, places or things.
This is ironic because I’ve spent the last seven years living in three different cities, and with as many jobs in that period. The irony is in the fact that every change was initiated by me, not always directly, but I always had some agency, and I always chose the new. I used to enjoy being new at things. I used to look at the prospect of new things as an exciting frontier to conquer. These days I find myself wondering if it’s worth the stress. Lately, I’ve settled on this - being new at anything sucks, so just hang in there with your current thing, whenever you can, if it's good.
In the spirit of writing this down in the hopes that someone else can relate, I want to describe how I know it's time to move. It starts with a mood you can’t shake. The same problems, the same small annoyances, the same inconveniences start to weigh more heavily than usual. All of these consolidate into a low hum that follows you around, telling you that time is up, and you’re due for a change. This is also when life starts to feel like a tight loop on repeat and this realization colours everything else, and now leaving doesn’t feel like much of a choice because the current situation doesn’t feel right. You frantically try to fix things by tackling each annoyance or inconvenience as they come. Eventually, you realize that this is futile, and you’re in a state of limbo even as the loop continues. So now, the choice is the limbo and all that comes with it, or something new. This is when it stops feeling like change, and starts to feel like the logical “next step”. This is how wanting something new feels.
By October in 2021, I knew I was ready for the next thing, so I started moving towards plans that led me to something new. I ended up moving back in with my parents to cushion this change. This new situation did not work for very long, and I quickly got that mood that’s difficult to shake. Then my life started to feel like a tight loop again. I knew I needed to take the next step. That happened to be no job for a while, because being at home meant I could afford to quit my job. When having no job didn’t fix it, I started looking for new jobs. I got one and still, no quiet. So I moved cities. I didn’t really say goodbye, and I was a seasoned mover by now, so I filled one large suitcase and one small one–which carried about 60-75% of what I owned–and took the next step.
By the end of 2022, I was drowning in a million different new things. New city, new job, new colleagues, new team, new team structure, new flatmate, new flatmate that’s also a teammate, new neighbourhood, new city, new beauty standards, new values, new responsibilities, new lifestyle, new culture. I didn’t have space to even notice if there was a mood I couldn’t shake, and the feeling of living in a tight loop was sufficiently drowned by the volume of new things I was involved with.
I hated being new at working out. I don’t like to struggle at things, so imagine my discomfort when I eventually realized that exercise goes hand in hand with failure. You’re supposed to shake after lifting or planking and it’s normal to feel like dying after a farmer’s walk or some barbell squats. It felt embarrassing to put that much effort into anything in the full glare of everyone in the room, with the end goal being to work so hard until you fail. It’s hard to describe why anyone keeps going back to what is essentially grunting and sweating like a goat in front of mostly strangers, but that’s a big part of my life now. 2023 was the first year I walked into a gym with the goal to exercise. I used the treadmill on the first day for about 20 minutes and played around with the machines. I didn’t look anyone in the eye, and I felt extremely self-conscious. Someone advised me to get a trainer and after my first session with him, I didn’t return to the gym for a full week.
Before the gym, I created a checklist to help myself through the stages. My only goal that first year was to not quit. My personal goal was not strength or weight loss or feeling better, all I knew was that the next step was to get to a place where I felt as comfortable in the gym as I felt at my favourite bar. It’s been more than a year since my first day, and these days I’m on first name terms with the gym staff. I’m also one of the regulars, and wave to at least five people anytime I go. I’ve also reached that miraculous point where I not only look forward to going to the gym, but I actively seek it out as a means to feel better. I recently started to track the year-on-year growth of my gym attendance, and we’re up by 50% on average. Alhamdulillah.
Being new at cooking is not just annoying, it’s also expensive
I didn’t even realize I was new at cooking until I started to cook for myself and let me tell you, it was not an easy feat. Cooking comes with grocery shopping, and the problem with groceries is that they’re way more complex than you think. It takes a good deal of experience and mental dexterity to figure out what and how much stuff to buy, relative to what you’re going to cook and how much space you have to store it. With cooking, it’s also harder to convince myself to keep going. Mostly because my cooking skills are intermediate, but my palate is much more advanced, which makes it difficult to convince myself to cook, and then eat said cooked food. It’s even tougher because better food is typically about an hour away (shoutout to Chowdeck), and with some girl math, the expense is justified. I know that like everything else, it’ll get better with time. But being new sucks and I wanna quit so bad.
People are difficult and strangers aka “new people” are even more difficult. The thing with being new at people in any given scenario is that they’re strangers, and the road from stranger to familiarity is fraught with “plenty of mishaps”. Sometimes, you don’t even make it to the end and you have to give up, or you learn a little bit and lose interest. But living and working with people requires you to know them. That knowing is the part that answers all the questions that rise up in our head when we think of a stranger vs someone who we know. So the way you feel about something they do two weeks after knowing them is not the same as two months and not the same as two years. You keep growing, you keep moving, and hopefully you make some progress, and they stop being strangers.
Like with most new things, you get rewarded when you stay the course. Those mishaps that threatened the relationship in the beginning turn into core memories of unlocking another aspect of their meaning to you. It becomes a shared history. Something that happened to you and them that you will always remember. With new people that eventually become just people, there’s a quiet comfort that comes with being around them. There’s also that small feeling of disappointment when they’re no longer around.
I used to say I don’t like people, but that’s not true, I really love human beings. It’s a little embarrassing to admit it, but it’s true. I like to see the best in people, and I hold out for the moment when we can just be people with each other, where the trust clicks in by default, like connecting to the wifi of a house you always visit.
I’m a socially adept introvert. It’s a new label I’m using to describe my “fluctuating” energy levels.
Fluctuating is in quotation marks because I do not think my energy levels fluctuate. They’re almost always very low. The problem is that I can be easily distracted from my lack of energy. What I’m trying to say is that if not for capitalism, all I would do all day is sleep and read books and watch tv and all of that has to be done lying down. I don’t even think I would eat. At any given time, my greatest desire is to have nothing to do except maybe a book to read or something to watch, lying down. I went to a party recently and told everyone during the icebreakers that my hobby was lying down. A lot of people found that funny, which felt good, but I made it clear I was not joking, and I’m not now. Nothing beats lying down quietly all by yourself with absolutely nothing to do for hours on end, watching funny shit or reading.
I know it has been a criminally long time since I last wrote to you, and I deeply apologize for how long this newsletter has taken. The break was deeply regrettable, but I want you to put the word out there that we’re back up.
Here’s a list - in no particular order - of shows you can watch, grouped according to contextual scenarios relevant to my lived experience.
for when you and your flatmate want to watch something light and funny to decompress after a day of work;
for when you want to expose your friends to classic Bollywood cinema;
for when you want to impress someone you’ve just met with your superior taste in tv;
for lazy Saturday afternoons when you want to watch the funniest thing you’ve ever seen;
My friend (thank you S!) from work recommended A Place for Us early the year, and the book reminded me why text is still my favourite form for content. A Place for Us follows the life of two generations of a Muslim-Indian family in the US - the immigrant parents and the first-generation children. It tries to show how you can’t pick and choose the experience your children will have and that the world can sometimes have a bigger influence than you think. I found it particularly touching because so many people my age are leaving Nigeria in droves, hoping to raise their families in a better place, but my fear has always been this - how can I guide someone’s life path in a place I am unfamiliar with? How will I be able to help them when I myself will always be learning? The book explores how what you learn from your parents is always merely the start of what you can give your children. It does a very good job of showing the fallibility of parenting, where you can try your best and use all the skills you know how and the outcome will not be what you expect. In A Place for Us, the parents are flawed and the children are flawed and everyone does what they can to get by. I enjoyed experiencing the world through the eyes of the very different characters and I cannot recommend this book enough.
From around May last year until around October or November, I spent a lot of time listening to some great music over and over again. Please enjoy these threee playlists I’m calling the Grace series;
Grace with a small g aka the best heartbreak playlist you’ve ever heard
“Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.: Essays
the end.
A massive thank you to everyone who made this happen. It truly takes a village.
D.O. took a first pass and helped me dig deeper into the narrative. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that it took almost a year to apply the feedback, but here we are.
F.A. once called the newsletter defunct, purposefully aiming at my pride to get me moving. It worked. You won. Thank you.
A special shoutout to those who subscribed, even though the last edition dropped over a year ago!
M.A, S.A and C.E helped give it that final polish.
And my new job deserves credit too for reawakening my ease with long-form writing as a form of expression.
The feeling of newness is a big struggle. I particularly liked that you conquered the aspect of exercising. It's one part of my life that I miss, yet I know I'm not ready to go back to it.
That paragraph about socially adept introversion is so great and very relatable. Nice to read from you again