How I failed at reinventing myself (Series 1)
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you.
Charles Bukowski
When I discovered the famous Charles Bukowski mid lockdown, I was a fresh graduate who spent most of my days sniveling in a corner because I was about to loose my first uninteresting and non literary job in the middle of a pandemic. It didn’t make sense to me, all of it. Life really felt unfair, I mean I spent the previous years trying to reinvent myself as a writer and creative but here I was, failing. I wasn’t a writer (a writer is someone who consistently writes and puts out their work to the public). I didn’t do any of that.
Years before that, I tried to reinvent myself as a smart high schooler and it worked, it really did, but I had to sacrifice a lot. Boys, Friendships, fun, relaxation, all of it! I had to put in the work. Many famous people have successfully reinvented themselves. Kim K is currently trying to reinvent herself as a lawyer, we watched Adekunle Gold grow from being a musician to one of them most fashionable musician in the industry, they both set their minds to becoming someone else other than who they were and it worked, because they never stopped trying to learn and grow. After I spent most of my nights binge watching and reading all of Bukowski’s works during the lockdown. I felt liberated. It also helped me understand that I couldn’t get sulky about not getting published or being in any writing sphere because I didn’t actually write. I didn’t commit my hours and minutes and seconds to writing.
Reinventing yourself might be one of the hardest and longest phase you’ll go through. You never truly know how it’s going to work out, when you’re in the early stage of your learning process on how to become or be a thing entirely different from your past life or even your current reality, you start to have mild bouts of the imposter syndrome. There’s that tiny voice in your head that keeps telling you you might never be good enough, that the chances of you becoming that thing is the size of a grain of sand, that you don’t deserve to be in that room or on that table with others because they’re obviously better or are experts at being that thing than you are. Imposter syndrome is that tiny voice that gets louder and louder when you seem to be growing and learning. It tells you to quit it before it gets harder.
For years, while I struggled with establishing myself as a writer, creative and entrepreneur, I let myself be held back by that voice, I barely wrote and I barely tried. If I tried something and it didn’t go too well, I’d quit it. Once, I started a blog without direction or a content guide. I wrote just about anything I wanted to write, then it became even more difficult to write so I quit it. Another time, after watching a DIY YouTube tutorial where the tutor made a sandals out of some flip flops, I made one for myself and my sister who after wearing it to work, returned home to tell me her colleague liked it and encouraged me to make it into a business. Two months into it, I got drafted to Kano for my mandatory service year and switched to making slippers. When it didn’t do too well in terms of sales, I quit it! I sometimes stare at the unsold sandals and slippers, still stashed away behind my wardrobe with guilt. I cannot list how often I had a burst of idea and acted on it only to quit whenever I’d hit a wall. I did all sorts until I crashed and burned. I thought the world was after me and truly believed it was not my fault, that I had done everything right by trying all those different things (things I ended up quitting) but the universe wasn’t just on my side or that it wasn’t yet my time. Now that I reflect on it, I can’t help but call bullshit!
It’s always my time until I stop wanting it strongly enough. Until I stop trying!
I failed at establishing myself as a writer for three years because I simply wasn’t writing enough or consistently, if I was, I would have found my voice and niche. It doesn’t mean I’d have become an author of several novels by now, it just means that I would be some steps closer. I was incapacitated by fear and failure, the fear of being a shitty and failed writer who doesn’t even know how to construct a well written paragraph so I tried waiting until I learnt(in isolation) how, and learning took me years.
I have failed at reinventing myself and finding my ink as a writer because I’ve been waiting to know before trying when I should be trying and learning from my mistakes. That’s what successful people do!
NB: Thanks for reading this far, I do not take the time you’ve spent reading about my failures for granted. Neither should you. If you’d like to read about the many businesses and Ideas I started and quit on, what I learnt from each of them and ways you can succeed in reinventing yourself, do click the follow button as I’ll be publishing a piece on “5 things I failed at and how you can succeed in them” next week.
