The September Effect: Daring to Disobey the Script

by Ewura Adwoa Larbi

Seven fifty-five in the evening and the sun hasn’t set. A mix of conversations in a foreign tongue drift up the street to my window; the surest sign that I am away from home. In my comfort zone, the sun smiled at 6 am and set by 7 pm like clockwork. Barely days ago, I stood at the airport waving goodbye to the family I love, the land I cherish and the only home I have ever known. Tears threatening to fall from my eyes, I heaved a steadying breath and turned away to face my future.

Thinking of this as my come-back article, I have so many thoughts. Is this the right time? Am I saying the right words? I wonder what genre it might fit into, as the words pour out of me. Then again, it would be against the very theme of it, if this could be placed successfully in one box. For I am here to tell you, that there isn’t one box that could contain the whirlwind that you are.

If you were raised in a culture of community, you would love it until your life starts to veer in a direction that the majority cannot relate to. Let me tell you from the Ghanaian society’s point of view. Born a woman in the city, your life trajectory should take this route: basic school, high school, traditional undergraduate degree, (marriage before 25 / work in a traditional career / postgraduate degree abroad on a scholarship, before the ink dries on your undergraduate certificate). Charting any other course would be abnormal.

So if you were like me, studying an undergraduate program that wasn’t considered traditional, not wanting to enter a traditional ‘well-respected’ career path afterwards (eg. Medicine), not wanting to get married immediately, not finding a job after school, not getting into any of the masters programs you applied for, then you would be an outlier. And oh, how unpleasant that place would be.

It could lead you to depression, sometimes even deeper, to doing the unthinkable, deterring the brightness of your mind. A mind created to think outside the box, so this world would lose its monochrome colour and give way to the iridescent solutions only you could rack up.

This would make the majority look right. “Your light is not shining because you are towing a path we told you not to”, they would say. And you would give in because you only hear their voices. But it only takes a word, a wiping of your lens (as I am hoping to do here), to make you see how important you and the timing of your life are.

This is why I have come out of my writing hiatus, to be one voice at least that tells you, you are right where you need to be. And you are not alone.

We seriously can’t fall for the lie that all lives must look one way to be right. It is not true that when things seem to be going downhill for our young lives, that we should cower and hide. In fact, the opposite has proven to be the butterfly effect that has changed my life for good.

Last September, I was in this dark place of stagnation. No school, no work, no clear future and countless discouraging opinions. But it was the September I decided to be more vocal about my passions; I wrote more on the Commonwealth Youth Blog, I leveraged my LinkedIn space, and I participated in national issues that were close to my heart in spite of. Every month since then, leading up to this September where I have begun a new journey I had always dreamed of, has proven to me that that September was the catalyst.

It took not quieting down. It took literally raising my two hands to block my ears from the noise of opinions. It took staying the course that I believed my God had placed in my heart, to get to this day where everyone who hears my story, including the previous naysayers have nothing to say except “Wow, God is good” or “Congratulations”.

If you are willing to bet that ignoring people’s pessimism about your life and chasing your dreams with renewed focus and flair will bring no mind-blowing success your way, then, I dare you to give up.