What the Streets Take, and What They Don't

If it were all mine to choose, today I would close my laptop and ask every client and partner who needs me for thirty days off. I would give my team a month away too, no stand-ups, no deadlines, just the rest they've earned from watching me carry mine.

It is a strange kind of tired, the kind that comes from being needed in five directions at once. One role wants my face and my voice every week, tutorials, posts, an event to curate each month. Another wants me present every morning without fail. A community wants my research. A training center expects a course delivered on schedule. A client needs their engineer sharp, always sharp, never the one who is falling apart. Every single one of those claims is reasonable on its own. Together, they leave very little room for the version of me that is just trying to stay standing.

The world is cruel, and for a while, it kept proving it to me on schedule.

Cruelty does not always arrive as a stranger. Sometimes it arrives as four men on a matatu at night, and a ditch you don't see coming. Sometimes it arrives as a client telling you the contract will not be renewed, and suddenly the quiet arithmetic of rent and time no longer adds up. Sometimes it arrives twice, months apart, as if the first time hadn't been instruction enough. And sometimes, quietly, without any single dramatic moment, it arrives as love fading in the background while everything else on the calendar kept its claim on you.

I built things for a living. Systems, workflows, small pieces of order coaxed out of chaos for people who needed their businesses to run smoother. I understood structure. And still, structure was the first thing taken from me, twice, in the space of half a year, while the one part of my life with no calendar entry, no deadline, no standup, was left to fend for itself and slowly came apart.

The first time, I was coming from a room full of people trying to use technology to make the country safer, only to be dragged into a ditch twenty minutes later and relieved of a laptop, a phone, a hard drive, an identity card, and a body of work that had taken far longer to build than it took to steal. That night, in the kind of shock that doesn't ask permission, I found myself dialing a number I had not called in years. Not out of longing. Out of instinct. Shock reaches for whatever the hands remember, whether or not the heart still wants it.

What followed was not just recovery, it was scarcity. A client I had counted on chose not to renew. The income that should have cushioned the fall wasn't there. I learned what it is to rebuild a career and a bank account at the same time, with a bruised hip and a missing ID, while still being expected to show up steady for people who needed answers from me.

Then came a second night, months later, that was supposed to hold nothing but pride. My brother's graduation. I stood in a crowd meant for celebration and watched my mother, fragile in a way I had never quite let myself notice before, and I said little. Not because there was nothing to say, but because I understood, without being told, that she needed me to be the calm one that day, not the one who needed holding. So I held it instead, and let my phone get taken from my hand without a word, because the loss that mattered more to me in that moment was not sitting in my pocket, it was standing beside me in a gown she had waited years to see. I loved the phone it had two months content for our startup. on top of data 95K had just vanished in thin air

I do not know yet whether this is what strength looks like, or simply what silence looks like when you run out of better options. Perhaps they are the same thing more often than we admit.

Here is what I have gathered, not because I asked for the lesson, but because it was the only thing left standing after everything else was gone. That rebuilding rarely moves in a straight line. That grief for a hard drive is still grief, because the hours poured into it were hours of a single, unrepeatable life. That grief for a love that quietly ended is still grief too, even when nobody scheduled time for you to feel it. That asking for help, whether it is a borrowed phone to recover five years of memory, or a quiet conversation with someone trained to help carry weight like this, is not a failure of character, it is simply the door still open when everything else has closed. That the people who ask nothing of you while you are breaking, a mother, a brother, a quiet friend, are worth infinitely more than anything that fits inside a bag.

The world is cruel. I have had it proven to me twice in seven months, in ditches and empty pockets and contracts that quietly ended, and once more, softly, in a love that faded while I was busy being needed everywhere else. And still, I choose not to let it finish the sentence for me. Cruelty took my devices. It did not take the hands that will build again, or the mother I still get to sit beside, or whatever it is in me that keeps choosing to stand back up instead of staying down in that ditch for good.

If it were all mine to choose, today would be thirty days of nothing. Since it isn't, I will settle for one evening this month that belongs to no deliverable but my own healing.

If you are living inside a season like this, I hope you find whatever your version of standing back up looks like. And I hope, when the moment comes, you take it.