“I am creating cohesion between where I’ve been and where I’m going” - Nana Bruce-Amanquah (Ghana/USA)

Hi everyone 😊  I’m excited to join the Eyala team as the blog’s new Team Coordinator. This blog post on transitions was hard to write, which is interesting when you consider that in my relatively short 24 years of life, one thing I’m very familiar with is moving from one place to another. 

Here’s my story: I was born in Accra, Ghana (1). I spent all my primary/elementary school years in Harare, Zimbabwe (2) and then all of middle school and the start of high school in Bonn, Germany (3). After that, my family moved to Orlando, USA (4) which is where I graduated high school. I did my bachelor’s degree in Baltimore, USA (5), started my master’s in Paris, France (6), and went back to Orlando (7) when Covid hit. I decided to take a gap year from my master’s and ended up going back to Baltimore (8) for my first out-of-college jobs and finished my gap year. Then, I returned to Accra (9) for the first time in years to complete my first paid internship. Now I’m currently back in Paris (10), finishing my master’s degree while doing this job remotely.

So, in short:

Makes perfect sense, right? 😅 Rrrright, more like:

If you got lost while trying to track the arrows on the map, don’t worry, because so did I. 😂

Jokes aside, I have honestly struggled and continue to struggle with connecting the dots of my life’s journey. Every school year (including this one!) has started with questions along the lines of “where are you from?”, “where did you grow up?”, or the most daunting one: “where’s home?”. Then to make matters worse, as a higher education student you’re also asked, “what are you planning to do next?”. I have always liked feeling grounded by having clear (and not necessarily simple) answers to my questions, so grappling with the uncertainty surrounding who I am and who I want to be at the exact same time is a lot to deal with. Coupled with a not-so-over pandemic and the challenges of adulting, the whole situation is enough to make me want to scream internally some all most times.  

A clear path isn’t always fulfilling though. For the past several years, I’ve been very used to going through the motions and academics has made that incredibly easy. I go to school, I do my best to look smart in class, I complete my assignments, I get good grades, and the cycle repeats over and over again. Whether or not I actually understand let alone resonate with what I’m doing isn’t really the point. The point is to just keep moving, often at the expense of things like rest and reflection. Not being able to reflect makes it easy to take things for granted. 

To be honest, I think I’ve treated my feminist journey in the same way. I’m a university student at a time when feminism is relatively “cool” or even “mainstream” so it’s pretty easy to find information, follow people on social media, and pay attention to different debates without stopping to ask how all the theories and ideas practically apply to my life and what I would say feminism looks like for me and my future if there was no one around me to impress. It feels like there are so many questions and not enough time to ask them. And even if I did have the time and energy, have I even figured out my own identity or recovered from my academic fatigue enough for me to properly answer whether I’m more of a feminist or a womanist, or whether I’m a black feminist versus an African feminist, or whether I’m even “feminist enough” because I’d rather rant with my friends and read novels than do something that seriously scares me like protesting or calling out members of my own family when they say something I don’t agree with? 

So the internal screaming continues 😅. However, as I head into another moment of transition that comes with eventually graduating with my last degree this June, I wonder whether the internal screaming is less a sign of distress and more a sign that my body and mind are acknowledging the internal tensions I need to take the time to harmonize. 

The almost endless sense of transitions have shown me that I can be resourceful, that I know how to do what I need to do, but this almost constant sense of being on the move makes it hard to know what is really going on when the dust settles. I’m still not really sure what comes next when I’m done with school but I do have a sense of where I want to be eventually. For one thing, I want to get to a point where I’m not moving around so much. Just to shake things up, it would be interesting to see what happens when I live in one place and not relocate for a while. And perhaps most importantly, I want to get to a mental and emotional place where I’m able to harmonize, nay, coordinate (HA 😆 get it? Because I’m the team coordinator? I regret nothing 😁) my life experiences with the future I want to build for myself. I’m hoping that eventually, when I take a step back to look at the map of all the places I’ve lived, I’ll nod to myself, recognizing that I am creating cohesion between where I’ve been and where I’m going. 😌