did you girlboss too close to the sun?

Yes, I copied that title from Taylor Swift.

Being somewhat of an academic “overachiever” with multiple prestigious scholarships in my past, I thought I could easily plan out my professional life the way I had previously planned my academic life. Go to this school, do this, study this, get internships and student jobs here in these specific things, boom – the career I want!

The beginning of 2021 was tough but full of determination. I had big ideas and big dreams. I thought I could do anything; I was still existing in the high I got from spending 5 weeks in a small Austrian city in the Alps. When I say “the high” I mean… I thought I could do anything because I had spent the five weeks sleeping on an air mattress, spending an ungodly amount of time on TikTok and developing an eating disorder. So I wrote down what I wanted in G*ogle sheets and planned my career. In the next three years, I achieved the things I had wanted; I worked at the places I wanted to work at, learned alot and became more and more confident that I could become the version of me that I imagined in my head; one inspired by the many experienced women I worked with in my internships. I saw myself in my field of work (climate, energy, …).

In the last year and a half, this image of future Nibwene has turned into ashes. The future I thought of is now, but, for more than a year now, one of my biggest achievements has been leaving my apartment regularly. I even had a whole mission this summer to go out every single day and vlog it, but I failed spectacularly because I lost my desire to do things after a job interview didn’t result in a job (my one interview since early September 2024; there were alot of expectations on my side). I have become what I imagine an ATS machine to be like: scanning for words and phrases like “unfortunately”, “regret”, “we wish you all the best” each time I open an email about a job I applied for. And all these rejection emails immediately go to trash and are deleted forever. I don’t want a reminder of my failures in my phone, which has become an escape in these trying times.

So, I failed.

Everything career-related has sucked. The project I was so excited to work in back in January, the one which I had hoped would open doors for me, turned out to be the most miserable experience of my life because of an individual. My payment was withheld for 5 months and when I started to ask questions about inconsistencies, I was yelled at, manipulated and dismissed. Long story short, I got my full pay eventually, but not without a fight. The experience has had an effect on me because now I have nightmares about it even as recent at last week.

The other side of this is that I‘m not sure how to engage with the project’s report once it’s out there. I wrote about my country‘s energy transition landscape (in simple words). This kind of work typically involves being plugged into said country’s politics and possibly even directly engaging with policymakers. Now, we have an illegitimate government that “won” the recent “election” by 98%, is extremely corrupt from what I’ve seen and read, and murdered thousands of people in just a few days (and is currently trying to hide the evidence by disposing and withholding the bodies from their families). I’ve seen the images and videos of bodies on the streets of cities including my home of Dar es Salaam, on hospital floors and in places that had nothing to do with the protests. I can’t co-sign this evil in any way and that includes legitimizing the government by working on climate and energy policy in Tanzania.

What now?

This last year has made me realize how sucked in I was in these “intellectual” and “high-level” spaces where we try to save the world by fighting climate change, facilitating the energy transition and promoting “sustainable development”, whatever that means and many other targets. Most of these ambitious targets mean nothing because in these same spaces, nepotism and racial/ethnic discrimination in hiring is more important than the fairness that is often preached. I have my own anecdotes from my job search.

What I’m realizing these days is that I don’t care anymore if I’m one of the people fighting climate change or working on energy policy or “development”. Worse, I don’t want to care whether my country is on the right path or not. Patriotism has its limits. At the end of the day, all I want is to afford this very expensive life, so I don’t know where that leaves me.

In summary, yes, dear Reader, I did fly too close to the sun and burnt out.