Are You Ever Ready?

‘I am not ready’. ‘You are not ready’. ‘We are not ready’.

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and landed on a post a friend had commented on. A woman had written in to a radio station saying that her boyfriend of 5 years is soon turning 30 and wants a positive pregnancy 🤰 test as a birthday present. The woman is 2 years shy of 30 and is not ready. 

This made me think, are we ever ready for a situation? Do we know how ready we are until we are in the middle of it? No. 

Before I braced myself and then some to go for studies, I was a bundle of doubts. 

When a friend of mine sent me the application, I fired him so many questions just to dissuade him from encouraging me to apply. He had an answer to all the questions. To get him off my case, I accepted to apply. I went to office, sat on the application for the day and sent it to him. Late in the night, he told me he had issues with sending it and I told him to leave it. But he convinced me to send it myself. I did that the following day. 

I wrote that off until months later when I received an email inviting me for the interview. This interview. Let me first laugh at myself. 😂 I received the date and time while I was busy packing for the African Women’s Leadership Institute program. It was for 7 days and at a hotel deep in Namugongo while the interview was to be in Ntinda at the former offices of National Council for Disability. You should have seen me try to make it work. 

I had already stalled with the AWLI program and to cancel at the last minute was not right. I thought of turning down the interview because I couldn’t see myself flying from Namugongo to Ntinda but my friend and my  mother convinced me otherwise. I had also read for it like my life depended on it. 

Like in all life changing situations of my life, my brother was around and had use of my sister’s car. When mum informed me that he would pick me up, I told him the time he should pick me up and to bring along the dress I had in mind to wear for the interview. At NCD, someone I know (a fellow woman with a disability) walked into the room and she told me she was interviewing for the same. I told her then that I wouldn’t mind losing the interview to her. They could only take one of us. I interviewed with the mind that she will be the one to succeed. 

Months down the road, I received an acceptance email on a really bad day. I braced myself before opening it because I couldn’t take anymore bad news and was shocked. I didn’t know what to do because I wasn’t expecting to be accepted. I didn’t even celebrate. 😢 

In the period of chasing academic and travel documents plus work commitments, my sister was diagnosed with a blood clot & was admitted to the High Dependency Unit. 

This literally put a wrench in everything. I was just returning from a trip to Iganga when my mum explicitly told me to go stay with my nephew for the duration. I worked and looked after my nephew until his mother was discharged. This set my mum and I back severally. I applied for our visas when the visa office was a day to breaking off for the December holiday. 

January 2020 dawned. We were to travel the first week of January but because we had applied late for the visas… I still harboured doubts about leaving the job, all that was familiar to me (family, friends, weather) and having a doctor a phone call away. In the background, there was also someone’s son. He had just hinted at a tea-date and I kept thinking, ‘what if this has the potential to blossom into something and my leaving kills it?’ I was a mess! Chap wasn’t even proposing but I actually considered the repercussions of the trip. That’s how you know it’s not easy being a girl. 😂

I had misgivings. I kept talking to my senior advisor about most of them and he firmly told me that losing the job should not be cause for me to turn down an opportunity to better myself. If I lost it, there would be something else. I tendered in my request for study leave 3 days to the day of travel while my mum did all the running around shopping and packing. 

On the day of, I had to do more shopping, lunch with my sister Anitsha and continue to pack. I’d also wanted to see my nephew one more time before I left because I was so afraid he would forget me. He’d just learnt to say my name, picked up on the fact that I used crutches and was becoming a little connoisseur of tea. 

Yeah, misgivings and doubts did not go away even while I was going through the student experience. Nevertheless, I went. I lived. I loved. I studied. I thrived. I did it all while I was afraid and do not regret it one bit. 

My point is you never know that you are ready for anything until you are either right in the middle of the situation or walking the steps. All you have to do is take that leap of faith but prepare for the consequences. Like leaving someone’s son yet all he had suggested was a tea-date. 😒 

This post was also inspired by a current situation in my life...