Learning to walk again
...because we've walked before, we'll walk again.
I recall stumbling on a tweet from “Humans of New York” back in 2019. It was the story of a young lady who had left Venezuela for New York.
The opening line is forever etched in my memory:
“All of the young people are leaving. You have to say ‘goodbye’ over and over again.”
I remember thinking about her a lot and wondering if New York was kind to her. I had considered leaving home that year, but it didn’t happen. I wanted to go to school and learn more about writing. I believed so strongly that I’d be a better teacher and writer if I could learn more – so I had poured my energy into seeking opportunities. But I was restless. Time after time, I’d go back to that saved tweet, look at her face and think about what life in New York was like for her. Had she made new friends? Was she finding her job easy? What about her family back at home? Was there time to catch up? How did she learn to start over?
In the last few years, there’s been an intense exodus from my home country, Nigeria. It’s not the first time this has happened, but there’s such a shift about this season that you can’t help but notice that everyone is leaving – not just the young people.
People are resigning from well-paying jobs, uprooting their kids from school, some are learning entirely new careers to have a shot at starting over elsewhere.
But to start over is like learning to walk again, metaphorically of course. And for one who has walked before, it can be a challenge. A typical example is going abroad for a higher degree program eons after leaving the university. I think it’s brave because not only are you going through a cultural assimilation (which will include weather changes, social etiquettes and so on) but now the brain is introduced into learning, and probably with aspirations because you did not leave home to fail.
Learning to walk again is like learning to drive on the left side of the road in the UK when all you’ve done is drive on the right side in Nigeria. It’s being taken by the hand and told to stop because you’re going too fast when you’ve not even hit full gear. It’s like having guardrails and being conditioned to walk in line so you don’t fall off…but they don’t know you can fly. Learning to walk again demands that you be patient and give a lot of grace to yourself like you did the first time.
It’s like having guardrails and being conditioned to walk in line so you don’t fall off…but they don’t know you can fly.
It takes courage to start over. I don’t think we full grasp the weight of our decisions – the loss of people, places and sometimes identity, before taking the plunge. And maybe that’s a good thing because if we stopped to think about all the pros and cons, there’s a chance we’d always give in to fear.
To everyone learning to walk again – either in a new country or on a new job or in a new relationship or even in your faith, please put one foot in front of the other.
One thing we’re sure of is: Because we’ve walked before, we’ll walk again.
This is such a nice read Tomi. Thanks for sharing your story. I used to be an avid reader of your blog (tommyslav island) some years back. I remember going there recently to see if you've written again, updated something. So it's nice to read something from you again.