Late 20s is messed up. It seems like everybody is winning but you. And if you are the sort who genuinely cheers others' successes, it become extra weird when it slowly begins to feel like all you're good for is cheering on others and never achieving anything of your own.

And I often return to a tweet by Kafui (of the erstwhile VI Music fame) about how even good friends can get jealous. I think it is not necessarily a malicious jealousy. It is a jealousy of desperation, frustration, and fatigue.

This is especially true if you grew up poor and are still surviving from hand-to-mouth. As Smith has pointed out, it's worse when you take the grad school route, and I might add if you do so while being a black immigrant. The hopes of many weight your every sigh. So much so that

you forget tiredness is not supposed to be a way of life, a normal routine. You keep dragging yourself all that weight forward, toward a finish line that never seems to emerge. And you do so aware of the excellence expected of you at every turn. Sure, we all have problems but

not all problems are created the same. I used to go to wake at dawn to study and then go to school. The hope was to read my way out of poverty. LOL. I just ended up an isolated bookworm. I put in my best efforts in class, often interpreted as doing too much or being too-known

I did that while being sacked for school fees, perpetually borrowing books from others, relying heavily on libraries, often having little to no food, and with a constant threat of not knowing if there'd be a roof over me and my family's neck the following week. The situation

isn't muched changed now by the way. Still I keep crawling toward the hope of a finish line. Doing so with people in class with all sorts of access that I would never have had. And while I am genuinely happy for others, it's hard to condense a life of inaccessibility into a convo

Well meaning people often say to me, you'd be a good lawyer. Apply to law school. I love what I'm doing now. And yes, I'd have equally enjoyed law school. But how do I apply to law school when we barely have food to eat or a roof over our heads? I barely made it through undergrad

There are several people on here without whose kindness I legit would not have been fed on several occasions while in school. I could not have afforded law school. Not in Ghana. Not in the US. Likely not on Mars either, assuming I'd want to be there. People have also said things

like, you should know how to drive by now. Like I said, these are well meaning people. But our access to resources can make us blind to what others lack. I never learnt how to drive for a simple reason, the same reason I was never able to finish music lessons, couldn't afford it

And if you know me, you know I talk a lot, I may complain like the average human does, but for the most part, I keep my head up and my tattered joy about me, marching forward without excuse. Because what other choice do I have? That however means that, I naturally evolve into a

private sufferer, for the most part. Because you learn quickly that people are kind but also very mean. You become distrustful. You also become annoying. You become over dependent on others no matter how hard your necessary privacy forces you to pursue independence.

So when in your late 20s you take stock of the journey thus far and it seems like the needle of your life only moved an inch while everyone else patted you on the back and raced ahead, it can be hard not to feel all kinds of messed up and doubt yourself and the arc of your story

But with a revolving door of mantras and verbalized sighs like "e go be" "i taya" "i can't coman kee myself" "God when?" "Soonest" "we move" etc, you have to press on. So yeah, still we move. But don't let pressing forward IN SPITE OF fool you into thinking all there is the move

Because even though not all struggles are created equal, those seemingly zooming past you are also enduring their own form of crawling to the invisible finish line. So I will read my Achille Mbembe, take my paltry grad school stipend, cheer for people, fight for rights and live.