Bearings

It's too late for a quarter life crisis, and too early for a mid life one.

It has to be the Pandemic.

I’ve thought about everything else, but the only explanation that makes sense for the unanchored sense of purposelessness I feel is that the Pandemic did something that fundamentally warped my sense of time and what the whole point of being alive or doing anything was.

I haven’t felt like myself since 2020 began, and I haven’t felt like there was a point to life since then either.

Perhaps it’s burnout after too many years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, chasing FIRE and trying to make enough and save enough money to finally feel like I’ve earned the right to relax, but for the last four years, I’ve felt like flotsam.

Just aimlessly bobbing on, being pushed in a general direction by the waves of my job, where I currently live, who I went into lockdown with, but definitely not propelled forward by my own purposeful volition.

I suppose this would be okay, if it wasn’t that not even semi-idyllic inertia lasts forever, and through it all, I’ve been engulfed by a niggling but growing tsunami of panic, looming ever closer, and just waiting to swallow me alive.

The list of things I want to do is probably longer than I am tall.

And I am very tall.

Mornings start with dread at the prospect of my inevitable failure.

Today is going to be yet another day in which you did nothing worthwhile, you moved no closer to your goals, you improved no skills, you produced no work worth mentioning, and you will close your eyes drowning in disgust at your own inexorable mediocrity.

This is the sort of thing I think to myself every morning as I wake up from dreams that are far more satisfying than my present reality.

I know that the cure to anxiety is action that works towards the source of the anxiety, yet I feel paralysed and unable to act.

And so, I have watched time slip away.

Hours lost turned into days lost.

Days lost turned into weeks lost.

Weeks lost turned into months lost.

Months lost turned into years lost.

It’s hard to confront and accept, but I lost years of my life trapped inside my mind, in a mental prison of my own making, or more accurately, a prison built from depression, anxiety, loneliness, isolation, PTSD, and self doubt.

Especially when in 2021, I suffered a complete health breakdown which led to a mental breakdown as worry about my health issues compounded my daily struggles.

I’m still there to be honest, but the only thing different about me is that now I’ve mustered the desire to break out, and while I’ve made many plans in which I have much doubt, at least I’m willing to try.

I hate to sound cliché, but there’s an Igbo proverb I like:

Mbọsị ọbụna ị teta bụ ụtụtụ gị

Whenever you wake up is your morning.

Nobody tortures themselves over missed chances, lost opportunities, and time wasted more than I do, but perhaps the key to starting over and doing it well is being kinder to myself, and making peace with all the ways in which I let myself down despite the sky high expectations I had for myself.

So what am I going to do now that I finally awoke to my morning?

Get married? Have children? Grow a business into a financial success? Climb the social ladder? Make new friends? Write a book? Change the world in my own small way?

Hopefully all of those things in an order that makes sense.

But the very first thing is the thing that probably all the others depend on: regaining my health.

Lots of people weren’t so lucky in this Pandemic.

They actually died.

I didn’t, but I didn’t manage to completely dodge it like some other people. I went from someone who had always had pristine health, to battling chronic illness for the last three years which on multiple occasions forced me to quit my job.

If not for the money I diligently saved when I became an engineer, I couldn’t have ridden out the endless hospital visits, scans, specialists, etc without surely ending up in poverty.

At one point I was living in a hotel and just going to the doctor and the hospital from there, paying both my major city rent, and nice hotel bills at the same damn time.

That doesn’t even include the well over $60,000 I spent in just 2021 on various medical bills despite having excellent health insurance, in pursuit of getting to the bottom of what exactly was wrong with me that was robbing me of the ability, and quite frankly at that point, the will to live.

Money I had wanted to spend on a house in Abuja.

Long story short, my eyes have seen hot pepper these last three years.

So the status quo is this:

• I’m on the mend now. Feeling a lot better but not yet 100% and back to my old self.

Although since the plan going forward isn’t really to go back to just being my old self, I’ll take a new and improved self as compensation.

• I’m overweight from some pretty strong medications I had to take.

I’ve started an intermittent fasting schedule, and generally am just trying to eat better and more nutritious food.

• Financially, I’m okay, but I took a bloody body blow from health related costs.

That thing they say about everyone being just one medical emergency away from poverty is kind of true, but it’s also kind of false.

The silver lining of this horrible experience is that I proved to myself that with preparation, you don’t have to be that person who is bankrupted by a serious medical episode.

Have I lost a huge amount of money? Yes.

But all the financial buffers and careful, strategic financial management I put into place and committed to over the years absorbed the impact like a bulletproof vest, and it shows that the system worked as intended by protecting me from financial ruin.

Still, once a bulletproof vest has been used, you have to get a new one, so now I have to do the work of rebuilding, and honestly, this is the part that scares me the most.

Maybe that’s just because I’m a pessimist and I’ve been a pessimist my whole life.

I’m trying to change that though, so as one who is striving to become an optimist despite this cruel, disappointing world, I should say I’m thankful for surviving such a massive health and financial crisis, and I should regard the battle to regain my bearings as an interesting and enlightening journey.

Three years ago, I felt invincible. I had enough money to not work for three years straight without dropping any expenses if I so chose, so the goal now is to get back to that level and surpass it.

I’m not sure what exactly I should do about having lost confidence in myself.

Although I suppose that is something that can only be regained by a series of successes however small.

If you know of a path you think I should take, a hobby I should try, or see something I myself may have failed to observe, or even if you’re feeling stuck like I am, and trying to get out of a rut, let me know.

Confucius said

When I walk along with two others, from at least one of them, I will be able to learn.