In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Amy March declares to Laurie that she wants to be “great or nothing.” A similar drive for success underlined my childhood. I was fiercely ambitious, and my wild imagination galvanised my aspirations. I wrote colourful passages when our teachers asked us to write on “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” By turns dreamy and driven, my being bubbled with the desire to leap out of my body and become larger than life, boundless, something close to God. This high-achieving optimism attracted both adulation and chastisement from my loved ones. Obstinate and oblivious to earthly limitations, I created a 70-year plan for my life at the cusp of my 11th birthday. I was so excited that I showed a family friend this meticulously drawn plan, but his response, punctuated with derisive laughter, threw the first speck in my bright-eyed hope.

“Most of these are not feasible. You are young now. You will understand as you grow. You cannot do all these things in one lifetime. How do you know if you will even live for 70 more years? Did you create yourself? We all made these plans, but now…” he shrugged with a faraway look and patted my head.

I would come to understand him—or rather, what he said became a self-fulfilling prophecy that slowly drove the birds of my ambition into a cage, buried somewhere under the demands of reality. Many conversations came up between me, my parents, and my guardians. They wanted me to be realistic with my plans in the face of an unstable economy. As a middle child from a working-class family, little and big disappointments corroded my dreams of the future I had always envisioned. At some point, I had to switch from a private school to a government secondary school where the JSS1 student population exceeded 1,000. The class division stretched from A to I, with at least 120 students struggling for space in each poorly ventilated classroom. The shortage of chairs and tables for the sprawling number of students pushed us to place planks between the few seats arranged in rows, and so there was no space for fluid movement as we sat on those thin slices of wood and put our books on our laps or bags to write. Sometimes, those who were not lucky had to sit on their bags and receive lessons from the teachers who taught multiple subjects to make up for the scarcity the school faced in the distribution system. Some teachers taught students in sheds, dilapidated blocks, and, in times when everywhere else was occupied, under the trees in the school compound. 

During my six years there, I became cognizant of poverty and how it individually and collectively shrunk dreams. When your existence begins with the struggle for survival, you become less concerned with changing the world. I found myself editing the plan that I would keep for years, making it acquiesce to the reality I knew. Lack shrinks your world; a blooming flower becomes shrivelled without water. When your taste buds and neurons are wired with the routine of feeding on breadcrumbs, even a commonplace bakery bloats into an inaccessible space.

However, at the heart of every invention is a dissatisfaction with the present. German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, posits that the future is not a predetermined outcome as fate. Still, through a combination of courage and knowledge, man overcomes the future and steps into it with purpose and direction. The story of Jacob and Laban in the Bible (Genesis 30) inspired me to practise a ritual of manifestation. Just as Jacob resorted to a radical breeding program after Laban cheated him out of his wages, I began to break down my goals and paste the papers everywhere in my room. Even when they seemed unachievable, my eyes were forced to see and internalise them at every waking moment.  The notes on the walls of my room mirrored Jacob’s peeled branches in the watering troughs where flocks in heat came to mate and bore offspring, streaked, speckled, or spotted. I studied with the ferociousness of a hungry cub. This militant optimism is what Ernst Bloch terms as the attitude towards the future, which can, however, be decided through work and concretely mediated action, “concretely and utopianly comprehended correlate in real possibility.”

While this resulted in a string of excellent grades and achievements characteristic of a precocious child, reality struck multiple times as though to remind me of my place in the world. After a series of misfortunes, strange illnesses and the loss of a few close loved ones, multiple depressive episodes quelled the fire in me. If lack shrinks your world, despair obliterates it totally. Suddenly, that large expanse of red earth that you imagined building civilisations on disappears, and you are at the sharp jaws of a cliff, plummeting into an abyss of despondence. I burnt my journals and the 70-year plan I had created as a result of the nihilism that had replaced my bright-eyed hope with a crippling dullness and ennui. Nothing mattered anyway, I thought. Everything was meaningless. 

Subsequently, I quit the teaching job I had after secondary school, much to the bewilderment of my parents. I spent days and nights reading the news about all the chaos in the world, and became jealous of casualties whose dreams and hopes were reduced to statistics of tragedy. Why did I get to live and achieve my lofty dreams when these people, near and distant, died? What was the point in striving and pushing if one’s life could just end abruptly, like an incomplete sentence without a punctuation mark to end it? And how much of a fulfilling life could I even hope for as a queer person in West Africa, where I constantly lived in fear of another homophobic slur or action that could make previous incidents even less significant? Could I hope for safety, love or self-actualisation? Every beautiful thing I wanted seemed only possible in my mind. Reality mocked me with laws, expectations, constant disappointments and the lingering threat of insecurity.

A shell is a constructed self for survival, and that is what I became. I dreamed, but this time with my eyes open to replicate my droll reality on a canvas of projections. But Bloch was right in his assertion: “Even disappointed hope wanders around agonizing… this waiting will not go to sleep, however many times it has been buried, even in a desperate man it does not stare into complete nothingness.” I knew what I wanted, and these spurts of ambition pushed me to surmount challenges. One semester into my undergraduate degree, my dad admitted that he couldn’t fund my education in his financial state. The obsession that powered me through childhood returned. I knew I was very close to dropping out and I hadn’t completely paid my tuition fees to sit for the exams. With the help of loved ones, I started applying for scholarships and managed to convince the school authority to allow me to write the exams for that semester. While other students strutted into the hall with confidence, I could only present a chit from the finance office with molten shame lining my guts, and that was how I successfully got in.

With my pen fiercely scribbling on the examination booklets, I had to believe that I deserved to be there despite the poverty that had defined my life to that point. I didn’t know how the following seven semesters would unfold, but my militant optimism had returned. The night after my first paper, I wrote down all the grades I wanted for the individual papers. I was returning to the self that was propelled by hope, processing scholarships and writing the exams by dint of my determination. I passed with perfect grades that semester, and my application for a scholarship was approved. 

And so I would go on to be a student for the next four years and press on with determination despite the challenges I would face: the mental illness that threatened to make me drop out, the breakdown that landed me in a psych ward, my worsening eyesight that made reading difficult, and the significant chunk of my time spent in hospitals for reviews, scans and emergency visits. I would strive to make it work. My future was within me, and the onus was on me to create meaning in this formless world. I was a god commanding with “Let there be.” It all went back to the beginning. Let there be.

Thankfully, this optimism has blessed me with pockets of happy endings—we have to take stock of our joy in compartments because life will always bring its tragedies so long as we breathe. I graduated as the valedictorian of my class, and as that day ended, I pondered on the alternate reality I would have been living if I had given up because of one of those obstacles. Outside the gates of school, life tempts me with the option of truncating my ambitions and settling in the middle somewhere. Sometimes, the flood of setbacks threatens to drown me, but my hope is no longer caged to suit my current reality, even though I’m nowhere near where I want to be. My soul rises above the flood like a dove. It is not searching for dry land. My future is within me.

The bird rather chirps, “Let there be. Let there be land. Let there be blue skies. Let there be light. Let there be greatness.”

Let there be.

About the Author:

Rigwell Addison Asiedu is a Ghanaian writer. In 2019, he won the Dei Awuku Writer’s Contest, and was longlisted for the African Writers Awards (poetry category) in 2022. Rigwell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lolwe, African Writer Magazine, Kalahari Review, Akowdee Magazine, Akpata Magazine, Musings Anthology, and KepressNG Anthology. He is obsessed with water, black cats, and crows.

*Feature image by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash