A Rant: New Year, Same old me?

  Happy New Year, my loves!  🥂

It’s been what, a whole year?  Way too long to be away from something one claims to love, I know.  I do not even want to insult this sacred space with a lame excuse. I am here and that is all I will say. 

Mini Life Update: I am now 23years of age.  

Were you expecting more? Are you disappointed? Well, join the club dear reader. I’m the president. See, I have spent the past 5years making plans, adjusting to life on this impossible planet, writing vision boards, starting things and honestly…not finishing them. Today, in January 2022 (7years after High School) I sit at my desk, writing. In my head, I see all the plans I have made, the changes I told myself I would enforce and never did.  I see the half-used and abandoned maps of quests I’ve embarked on to become a better person and quit. I see them and I recognize clearly, my own inability to fulfil my own promises to myself. And no, this is not me being unnecessarily hard on myself. This is honesty. Rigorous, painful and loving honesty.

 It occurs to me that perhaps the problem is that I am responsible for my own actualization. That perhaps, it is because I have a choice, and I exercised that choice,  that I failed, or am failing…whatever. Critics of the liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill (author of On Liberty, the man who advocated for freedom of choice as a founding principle of liberal states), argued that not everybody deserved the freedom to choose their own destiny. They said that some people would benefit from being chosen for and indeed, society would benefit from choosing for such people.

 Today, I wonder if I am such people. But then, if I am to be chosen for, then who is to do the choosing? Upon whom will the responsibility of dictating which choices Siboe makes and when, be thrust? Again, I have no answer for this. I think often about the structure of my life now. How easy it has always been for people to trust me. People have decided that I would not let them down before they even understood me. I have become the kind of person who is reliable before I even knew if I was and although this is not a bad thing. I often wonder if this is not what happened with my adult life as well? I was allowed to choose the path I wanted seemingly without question because I seemed like a good kid. And for the most part I am. However, I am much more than that. I also have the capacity to fail, especially if the assumption of my goodness does not come with an offer of support. 

Now, I do not mean to blame those who entrust me with responsibility for my own shortcomings. If anything, their only crime was believing in me and that is more than most people get. I mean only to grapple with this humanness I feel. The inability to understand why of all the people on earth, I am the one who got to be given free rein over her own life? Who determined that I deserve it? I look around me and I see the ways in which I have been continuously blessed with that freedom, even when I have proved that I cannot handle it and I ask why? I love it all. I love the life that I live, the people I get to love and the moments I get to experience but why? I feel undeservedly privileged at this moment because if the scriptures say that “he who is faithful with little can be entrusted with much”, then how do we explain me? Anyway, I do not mean to sound self-deprecating, or I don’t know…ungrateful? I do not view myself in a negative light, as a disappointment or a failure. However, it would be dishonest to not admit (to myself and you as well, dear reader.) that I have failed. That I have not accomplished what I set out to do years ago and that I have in essence, not become the woman I dreamed of being by now. Nevertheless, because God has mercy upon the weak, I am something else totally and it is, beautiful. I am what I never ever dreamed I would be. I am courageous and full of love. I am content and grateful for the life I live and the things I have managed to accomplish. I believe in my own potential for growth, and I am hopeful that I might reach still be what I once dreamed of being and perhaps, even more?

So no. New Year, definitely a totally different me. A braver, more self-assured, and peaceful me. 

Love, 

All the versions of Siboe I have known and been ever since I last wrote here. ❤

 Ps: This rant was brought to you by courage, loads of counselling sessions, self-acceptance, and the crazy hope of being better.