ME, IN A NUTSHELL: THE WRITER

THE BEGINNING  ...

Hello, my name is Maeve Cheryl Adema and I’ve had an interesting relationship with words. 

I read and finished my first actual novel at the age of approximately eight. And by actual, I am implying that 'Goat Matata' in my eight year old opinion didn’t count, because it had pictures. The book I speak of was one of the Secret Seven variety, not a single picture to speak of. No one in my family believed I actually read the thing. Now that I think about it, I feel like even after reading it I did not fathom the magnitude of the milestone I had just passed. 

Before then, art to me had always been drawings, paintings, pictures and all sorts of physical representations of things. But then Enid Blyton had opened up my mind to so much I had no idea existed, and in this way she had made an artist out of me. I had drawn all these mental pictures and made an actual movie. And it had been as easy as sitting still and chasing words across the pages with my eyes.

SEX

I started writing in class four. It was all shitty, I had the worst handwriting you will ever see and spellings eluded me for the most part. To further complicate things, I mostly wrote about sex. 

Yes, you read right. 

I had no idea what it was, just knew that it was this foreign thing and people my age weren’t allowed to have it. So quite naturally, I wrote about people who were having it. My class had a kind of writing club and we’d write stuff. There would also be illustrators who drew pictures to go with what they were writing. So to get an edge you’d have to draw stuff as well as write. Then we'd swap and read each other’s work and ruthlessly critique. I remember grossly repeating all the English words I knew then to try and make a page long article. Drawing what at first were mangled images but gradually began to resemble people. Like if you looked from just the right angle you could tell. And then if you read the text you could probably figure out what they were doing.

With time, we had people specialize and go into art, others just got bored and ditched the thing altogether. Me? I discovered that I could absolutely not draw, but my writing was halfway decent. Mark you, all this was done in our free time and way under the wraps lest a teacher get a hold of us doing something that wasn’t expressly recommended in our Kenyan education system.

So yeah, I was a writer! I wasn’t really improving though, I just kept doing the same thing over and over again, telling myself it was different. All of that changed when one of my bolder friends approached me and said bluntly that I used the word SEX too much in my writing. That stopped me in my tracks for a hot sec, it also hurt my feelings quite a bit. Let’s face it: no one was born confident and the shaming was quite public. But in hindsight it made me aware of something; there was so much going on in the world that I didn’t know about and that I could write about. And with that realization I started to ask myself what was sex even? I didn’t know, I was disgusted with myself and this changed the direction of my work completely.

Anyway, I kept writing and reading, especially books I wasn’t allowed to, Danielle Steel and all. I honestly can’t tell you how I balanced all the reading and other extra-curricular activities with my school work. Somehow, I did. The reading also helped a bit with my grades in English. There were times when we had assignments to read a book and write a summary of it. Since I had already read most of the books that were around me, all I had to do was write what I remembered. It was brilliant!

THE HUSTLE

In the primary school I went to, we had Saturday tuition for class 7 and 8 without the benefit of school transport. The thought was daunting at first because in our great republic, unaccompanied kids in uniform did not exactly get V.I.P treatment in public transportation. However, void of a choice, I did what I had to. This exposed me to a lot. 

For starters, my friends and I embraced the hustle a hundred percent! We’d bargain like crazy and get to ride in mats for almost nothing, save up our lunch money and buy a book each. We’d discovered a hidden section in a local supermarket where they sold really cool books at a fair price. So after school we’d all head over and get a copy each, of different books of course. They were The Baby Sitters Club Series and we loved them! 

Additionally, since we each had a library card, we’d head over to the library right after and use up two book credits each, in exchange for our library cards for the week then finally head on home. Over the week at school, we’d each read the books in our custody and then exchange among-st ourselves.  This way, by the time it was Saturday again, everyone had read every book cover to cover. There were three of us. Honest to God, it was something of an obsession.

THE ONE-WOMAN EDITING SHOW

Meanwhile I wrote and let people read and comment on my work and even doubled over into editing. I had gotten quite good at the whole shebang and was quite confident in my abilities. Sometimes when I edited people’s work, they didn’t like it because I changed almost everything, but I honestly meant well. The grammar had to be on point and the facts had to add up, was all, but I don’t think they got that. 

It got to a point where editing was making me no friends but enemies so I took a step back. The last story I remember writing (in primary school that is) was about a little girl named Samantha Prudence Robinson. Sam’s parents were getting divorced and sending her to live with her aunt in a ranch far away. She’d have to be away from her best friend Hailey Williams (not of Paramore) and the city life, which was all she knew. Everything I wrote was heavily westernized because that was all I was reading. My characters had blue eyes and were brunettes and got sunburns really easily. Yeah, you get the gist… 

Anyways, my desk-mate fell madly in love with Sam and made me swear that I’d finish what I started even after we completed primary school. In all honesty, I meant to. Funny story, I spent the holidays with my aunt right after and she had new neighbors who had three kids, two girls and a boy. Their names were: Samantha, Prudence and Robinson. I.  Shit. You. Not.

I didn’t touch that book after and not for any particular reason, I just never quite went back. Although I feared that if I had, the plot would have been a lot like Palomino by Danielle Steel because that’s the book that made me send her to a ranch in the first place. But I digress.

HIGH SCHOOL

So I finished primary school and that part of my life was over. Bummed at home for like three months before I got into high school, presumably to recover from the mess that primary school was. Eventually I got into a decent high school and met all these new people, all of the same gender. Obviously, given time, I gravitated towards people with the similar interests. 

This was how I stumbled upon two brilliant minds from Kericho: Fay and Nash, both very artistic. Nash could draw and write among other diverse things, as could Fay who had the added advantage that she could dance. And I don’t mean dance like the way I can(not), I mean she was great at it! 

Anyway, so we get lumped together by fate and there’s a lot of drama but eventually we start creating stuff, sometimes together sometimes not together and it is beautiful. Pretty soon our classmates are like hounds, demanding that we feed their minds with the stuff that we write. News gets around school and the whole thing blows up, but like in a good way.

At this juncture I have to make a confession, I was jealous of Nash’s mind. She was and presumably still is a literary genius, her imagination had no bounds. You know how sometimes people say, “you can’t make this stuff up”? In my opinion, Nash could. I remember reading the stuff that she wrote and being in awe of her genius.

MY FIRST NOVEL

I remember it being really hard to finish writing a story, because we’d be writing for ages and then one day realize that it wasn’t going anywhere and ditching it for a newer, cooler idea. This went on for a while until one day we came up with a system to battle it. So we’d all three of us come together and brainstorm ideas, develop a plot. Fay, who by now I had nick named C.J would write down the plot from start to finish. From then the work would be left to Nash and I to make a story out of the bullet points. 

It was so much easier than ever before because we each knew where it was going. So either one of us would start off and when it felt like we were flat-lining in our story telling, we’d hand over to whoever wasn’t writing and they pick up and spin it off and so on and so forth. Some light editing would be done while we read through by all the three of us. Eventually, this resulted in our first ever complete joined manuscript. I cannot describe to you what a joy it was to get to write THE END. at the bottom of that last page and finally release it to the viewership of our audience at our high school. Wasn’t a small feat either. The fans loved it through and through and they couldn’t wait for more.

THE WRONG BATTLE

I can’t say we were able to give them more because the next term C.J randomly transferred out of our school with no noticed and the whole system came tumbling down with her departure. Nash and I kept writing though, although I can’t say that I was able to finish anything else after Witch! which by the way was the name of the book we co-authored. 

I kept reading and writing till my last day of school. I remember sitting in class in my final term of high school during evening prep, reading 48 Laws of Power while my  classmates studied and contemplated their futures. It was Nash’s dad’s book. Reading it made me feel like my classmates were preparing for the wrong battle.

THE GREAT (WRITER'S) DEPRESSION

This is the part where I express my deepest disappointment with myself. Apart from not being able to finish any other story, I was also unable to organize my life. So much so, that by the time I was leaving high school I could not trace anything I had written, not even Witch!. The only things I had that meant anything were two of my journals, which weren’t even all the journals I had owned throughout high school.

The period after high school was The great Depression for the writer that I thought I was. I could not write a single thing! I was confined to texting, like that was the best I could do. And I wasn’t even doing that very well. I figured it was because in high school all I could do was write. It was a really shitty portion of my life and for the most part, I think writing is what got me through it. Out here I had too many options and a smart phone, so I didn’t really need to write, thus I didn’t. I was reading though, from actual books to Wattpad, which led to the great discovery that there exist white people with terrible TERRIBLE grammar. 

I called it a writer’s block, the fact that everyone who knew me from before expected that I’d automatically be doing it. But then I couldn’t because I felt physically and mentally incapable. I began to not think of myself as a writer. When I met new people I’d just be some girl from some town who has trouble speaking to people she only just met. I was sort of writing though: in Instagram birthday posts to my friends and Facebook when that was a thing; Journaling about my life, mundane as it was, it had things worth writing about, just not worth other people reading about. For a moment that was okay. Just being.

Did I mention that by this point I had made safe passage into university? No? Well okay, I had. 

WRITER MEETS (REAL) WORLD

The writer inside refused to die though, she kept popping up in Whatsapp posts and my friends kept telling me that I should patent my shit and I’d just go like, “This crap?” and I’d laugh and laugh but silently get an odd satisfaction that they thought I was that great. 

My head still wasn’t in the right place though. But sometimes I would feel like the old me and that would be nice. I toyed with idea of starting a blog in my head for quite a while but dropped it for various reasons. The top one being my fear of commitment, general fear of what would I write about? Would people even like it? Also I am incredibly lazy and unmotivated.

Eventually at some point I made the decision to just write, about my life, my friends, boys I liked in that season. Weird things I did or that happened to me. You know? Just write. And not for an audience either, just for me. So I wrote and wrote, skipped some days… for like a month. It’s not even funny. I wrote on random pieces of paper that I then proceeded to lose, on the margins of my lecture notes, in my journal. For the most part it was therapeutic; for the most part it’s not poetry. It’s shit. My life is an actual mess and that isn’t by any means cool. It’s boring and pain is just pain.

That might have been a good ending except for the fact that I am not done yet. 

NOT DONE YET

The past couple of months have been a transition for me, which isn’t anything physical. A lot of things have been happening and I have been doing a lot. I have been asking a lot of questions, to myself, the people around me and even God. I have more questions than answers and in a way I feel as if I am searching for more question rather than answers. I learnt that nobody has the answers and it would be futile and very confusing for me if I focused on that. 

So I am embracing curiosity and it is taking me places I never thought I would go. I am saying yes to a lot of things and they are not all turning out great. I am in a lot of pain and I know running or hiding doesn’t help but I keep running and trying to hide. I am making progressively worse decisions and constantly fighting the urge to go find a cliff and jump off it.

I am also on a quest to pull off a lot of things including life itself, so I am learning extensively about myself and my insides. Specifically about my brain and how it works. How to do hard things but convince myself it was easy. How to smile more often, not because I have to but because I want to. How to function despite this debilitating fear that has found a home inside my bones and that I know will never leave me. A lot more things than I could name on here.

And so on that note, I don’t know what this is, I just started typing a while ago and somehow it all turned into something close to three thousand words that needs to be edited before I show it to a single soul. But I feel like it says something, says a lot of things. Some things I never really thought about before. And it is rather long, which is something I always fear when I start writing. It is the only way I ever fear I might be too much.

I’ll stop now.

Signed,Cher.

**********

p.s.

There you have it folks, post two is up, and if I’m being honest, I wrote this a while ago and when I couldn’t think of what to do this week, I figured it might be appropriate to introduce myself to y’all. In a way, a lot of things have changed since I wrote this, but at the same time nothing has really changed.

Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it.

p.p.s.

Shawn is out here outdoing himself, making all the rest of us look bad. He introduced this cool new feature where you can now subscribe to receive an email every time a new post goes up on here. If you're interested in that, you can engage with it.

With no further ado, enjoy the rest of your week and hopefully, I'll see you right back here next week!