the writing nib

Category: nib’s things

  • did you girlboss too close to the sun?

    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.

  • Trad wife fantasies, Girlboss realities

    A trad wife is a married woman who makes it a point to live according to traditional gender norms. Essentially, a housewife, but with a religious fundamentalist attribute. Trad wives, including trad wives of colour, tend to be politically right wing. Another thing that makes them “trad” is that they are usually based in societies where they don’t really have to do all that, i.e., places where women’s rights are a thing in the law, among society and, to a large extent, properly enforced.

    I started thinking about trad wives two years ago when they were popping up on my Instagram reels. I blocked them everytime. I remember when I felt I had had enough after seeing one African American trad wife’s TikTok about picking cotton and her saying that it was part of her DNA. I wish this was fiction.

    In the last few months, i.e. in these tough recession times in Germany (yikes), I’ve been wondering what my life would be like if I hadn’t chosen to pursue an academic-adjacent career path. The rejections, the constant feeling of not being enough and non-stop grind has been exhausting and demoralizing. So, naturally, I have been questioning my career wants and wondering why I didn’t dance on TikTok during lockdown.

    One night a few months ago, I wrote a text in my notes app with the title of this post. The title was inspired by another article whose title used similar words and style. I thought it was a smart way to summarize opposing perspectives of the same situation. This text was my way of writing out my feelings at a time when I had doubts about my chosen path in life. I also thought of the “girlboss to trad wife pipeline” and whether my mind was going that route. (It is not lol).

    Screenshot of me texting my friend in January

    The note went like this: In another universe, I had trad wife fantasies early in my adulthood. I pursued them and now live in a nice house, paid for by my husband, with my 3 kids. I am happy because my husband is loving and I have everything I need. In that world, I don’t dream of being a girlboss. I don’t have to network over hot beverages, or embarrass myself in people‘s inboxes. I‘m just me and that‘s enough to be a wife and a mother. I love to cook and play with my kids. In that world, I don’t spend 9 months of my life scrolling through LinkedIn and obsessively checking my emails everyday, waiting for something that’s not there, chasing after a career not meant for me. In another universe, I just know better. In this world, I am who I am: a girlboss at heart. I feed off the self-pat on my back that I’ve done a good job. When others say they love my work, I love that too, but it doesn’t make or break me. I’m a bad b*tch and I know it.

    A girlboss is “an ambitious and successful woman (especially a businesswoman or entrepreneur)”, according to Merriam-Webster. First, I need to say that, depending on who is using it, I think the term girlboss can be somewhat misogynistic. Calling a grown woman a “girl” can be disrespectful, but I don’t see an issue if we call ourselves that (maybe I’ll change my mind about this one day). I like this Merriam-Webster definition because it’s broad and doesn’t paint all ambitious women as mean girls who “gaslight” and “gatekeep”, unlike other interpretations of the term that I read elsewhere.

    Some might say that a trad wife can be a girlboss, but I don’t think this to be true. Yes, online trad wives are, in fact, working as content creators and chasing after fame and followers; they make money doing what they do. However, I think being a trad wife or labelling oneself as such is a limitation: I have to dress a certain way, have babies, serve my husband, act a certain way, etc. When it comes to a girlboss, these limitations do not exist. She does what she wants to get what she wants. A girlboss, in my view, is not characterized by how she fits into the patriarchy-defined attributes of a good woman.

    I’ve been in the girlboss mindset for my entire conscious life. I never ever seriously believed that I needed to live my life as a woman according to what the culture around me or my religion told me. I had concrete career plans in politics and policy that are not anything new, but ambitious enough to characterize me as a girlboss. And I pursued them as aggressively as I could. In these trying times, however, when I’m not able to picture the path ahead in the way that I envisioned, I feel lost. Who am I outside of my political grind?

    A friend wrote to me recently, “I really feel like the universe is pushing you towards something you can do for yourself…” I feel this too, I guess. I decided to get serious about writing (which is why I finally got a domain for this blog and started a Substack). While I love to write and have never not enjoyed it, even in school or university, I vented to my friend about how I wish a detour felt more like my choice rather than a semi-forced path because I had no other options. Maybe this feeling of lack of choice is why I’m the opposite of a trad wife: I hate doing things because I am made to by tradition, a husband, society, the economy, etc.

    That is why, dear reader, my trad wife fantasies are just that: fantasies. Regardless of the circumstances, I stay locked in on all my pursuits until I get what I want or die trying. This is my reality as a girlboss. Here, I’m reminded of a quote from the movie Dolemite Is My Name, “shoot for the moon and if you miss it cling on to a m*****f*cking star”.

  • this is me trying

    this is me trying

    The title and section titles are lyrics of the song this is me trying by Taylor Swift.

    I’ve been having a hard time adjusting

    I started my blog in high school because I was very depressed with bad thoughts, no where else to express what I felt and no one to turn to. The blog became a companion as I navigated my early 20s with even more depressive episodes in a foreign country. I stopped posting a lot because I found joy in the real world and refused to dwell in my writing because it tends to bring out unwanted emotions. I am back now, but calmer.

    I had the shiniest wheels, now they’re rusting

    Four years ago, Taylor Swift released the album ‚Folklore‘. It was the only thing I listened to that August. I was sharing an apartment just outside my old university in Bremen with a friend and essentially took over the smart TV so it only played the entire Folklore album‘s lyric videos from start to finish every morning to evening. I was very stressed back then. I had just graduated and was looking for the next opportunity. The previous month (July) had been tough, but August was starting to feel better. I did a written test which was the first part of the hiring process for an internship I wanted so badly. The waits in between the different hiring stages were excruciatingly long and at the time I wasn’t aware that this was normal. By the time September was around the corner, with no indication that I was going to the interview stage, I was in panic mode. So I booked a one-way 16-hour bus trip to from Bremen (Northern Germany) to Austria. My final destination, Leoben, a small city of less than 25,000 people somewhere in the Alps. I spent 5 weeks there.

    Most of the Austria subplot ends well; I got the internship of my dreams and made friends along the way. I had a great time and I felt like I finally had a foot in the energy sector‘s door. I was in. Things went uphill from there. After that, I worked at a research institute, a well-known international development organization, and another world renowned climate research institute. I thought my career in this sector was a sure thing, but it seems that the job market has other plans for me.

    So I got wasted like all my potential

    I look back at all these cool places I worked at and I can’t help but be grateful for the one person who hired me as an intern at the UNFCCC back in the summer of 2019 when all I had to my name was a high school diploma. That was my true „in“ and is what inspired me to want to work in some variation of climate action. I was just a 22-year old learning the ways of the world, drinking a little too much with my fellow interns after work, and having a life-changing experience. This is also the time one of this blog‘s readers, a stranger back then, reached out to me to discuss an article I wrote here. The stranger has become a very important part of my life *wink wink*.

    This past June, I graduated from my master’s program. There are a lot of mixed feelings about my experience, but what I can write here is that I learned something, I did cool things and I met amazing people even though this took some time. Strangely, the first thing I think of about this time is dancing in a club to Amapiano with my uni friends. Now it’s been almost 5 months since my last class. I‘m exhausted because I was delusional and I thought I had it in me to get a job soon after graduation (or maybe even before). It’s October and here we are. Again, I‘m in a small city in the Alps; this time on the French side – making friends and doing who knows what. I‘m trying to figure out why someone hated me so much that they told me to apply for a job and then rejected me without interviewing me and then hired someone way less qualified for the position than me. (OK, so I found this out because I did some digging on LinkedIn, the cursed website). Also, I’m paying for LinkedIn Premium LOL. I got a sweet discount for two months when I signed up via desktop. It lets you “InMail” people you’re not connected to. Probably annoying for those on the receiving end of these mails, but whatever to make you feel like you’re making the effort.

    I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying

    Rejection is redirection, they say. So I hope this phase redirects me to somewhere where I never have to deal with such bullshit things again. And, maybe the real find was the realization that the Alps are a place of refuge for me.

  • Looking for Home

    Looking for Home

    “So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves.” (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote)

    I finally watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s!

    (It is important to point out that I did not enjoy the depiction of Mr. Yunioshi. That was weirdly racist and quite painful to watch. But it’s good that significant improvements have been made in film industries worldwide and nothing of that kind would pass today.)

    I am very happy that the film’s ending was very different from the book, yet it still managed to capture the essence of Holly’s character. I found myself relating to Holly a lot more when she talked about not belonging anywhere. I am a young woman trying to figure out life and every day the world lets me know that I’m not where I’m supposed to be. It’s a strange thing to think about or even tell people especially if it’s friends you’ve had in the place you’ve been in for a while. Two years is a long time to be somewhere, but I am very detached from Bremen. Even stranger, twenty years is a very long time, but I am also detached from Dar es Salaam.

    From July to December I found comfort in Bonn while I was doing my internship. It was a feeling that I had never experienced before and it made me scared and sleepless on some nights. I couldn’t bear knowing that I got attached to a place and I felt safe and too comfortable in it, because I knew that I had to leave after a while. Luckily, my feelings have gotten bruised and crushed a lot over the last two years so it wasn’t very difficult to detach myself from Bonn. When the time to leave came, I didn’t feel sad at all. I knew I was sad, but I just didn’t feel it.

    The best thing about Bonn was that no one really knew me there, just like how no one in New York knew who Holly Golightly really was. I had many friends, mostly fellow interns, from work who, like me, were just passing by for a few months, but other than that I was completely alone. I could go home after work and detach myself from everything and everyone, something I could never do in Bremen while living on campus.

    What I’m trying to explain is, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere (and at times I try to avoid that feeling) for a reason. I found the reason in the film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when Holly sang Moon River by her window (beautiful scene!).

    ♪“Two drifters, off to see the world
    There’s such a lot of world to see
    We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waitin’ ’round the bend
    My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me”    ♪

    There’s such a lot of world to see. This is keeps me awake at night. To be frank, I’m not much of a traveler, but I absolutely hate the thought of being somewhere for a long time. We live in a time when we can go anywhere, at least on paper, so why not take advantage of that and live an extraordinary life? I want to move and move and move until I find my own Tiffany’s.

    “I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together.”

    Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)

    On the last day of my internship I walked out of the UN premises some time in the afternoon. It was a sad day, because most people were away for the holidays. I walked slowly to where my bike was parked, which happened to not be at my usual spot. I stood there thinking of going for one last cycle by the Rhine behind the UN and Deutsche Welle buildings, but I shrugged it off because I decided that cycles by the Rhine belonged to a beautiful memory of Fall when I went to see Joker with my friends and we enjoyed one of the last sunny days of 2019 by the river.

    By the Rhine, early October 2019

    I would like to keep thinking that in Bonn the sun always shines on golden leaves and bright green grass, even when it’s dark and cold in the Winter, and that all my Bonn friends are seated somewhere by the Rhine, drinking wine and talking while I’m still trying to find my way there through Google Maps, because I’m always late to these things.

    With friends by the Rhine near UN Campus, Bonn, early October 2019

    “Anyway, home is where you feel at home. I’m still looking.”

    Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)

  • Chasing Happiness

    A true Jonas Brothers fan must’ve felt something from reading that title.

    But, sorry, this isn’t about the Jonas Brothers.

    I’ve been trying to read two books for months now; Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah and Radiance of Tomorrow by Ishmael Beah. The former is an autobiographical book on Trevor Noah’s childhood. Now if you don’t know who Trevor Noah is please look him up, he’s very very smart! The latter is a fictional book by Ishmael Beah about a community recovering from war. He also wrote (and lived) A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which was a book about his time as a child soldier during the Sierra Leone Civil War.

    Both of these books make me sad whenever I think of them, although they have happy endings (I haven’t really finished them, but in my head these are the “endings”): Trevor goes on to become one of the greatest comedians of the 21st century (he hosts The Daily Show) and of course, a community recovering from war is a good thing.

    But being someone who has been chasing happiness for a long time, I don’t know if these are the kind of books I should be reading because the process of getting to that happy ending involves a lot of emotional moments. The same applies for the Netflix series, The Spy, which seems very interesting, but it gives me this feeling of melancholy that I can’t seem to shake off even after deciding to quit the show nearly three weeks ago. And for some reason, just yesterday I found myself trying to watch another episode.

    That’s the thing about sadness, once you feel it too often it becomes your “comfort” feeling and you keep wanting to stay in that state because the feeling of being happy becomes too foreign. Happiness shouldn’t be something that we have to chase. We shouldn’t have to tire our minds and emotions in the pursuit of something that should be a constant in our lives because life is meant to be beautiful.

    I don’t think I know where I’m going with this post.

    Maybe just to say this, if you know you’re depressed or could be triggered into depression then please stay away from sad books, TV shows, songs and films. You might say “it’s just art”, but sometimes consuming art comes with a price that no one should have to pay.

    Life should be about enjoying things you love – even when people make fun of you for loving One Direction music. You shouldn’t have to chase happiness because happiness should begin every time you do something, including the most normal things like grocery shopping or looking at memes.

    OK maybe it is about the Jonas Brothers just a bit. Happiness Begins is their latest album’s name and it is amazing!