String Theory

an essay about multitudes and why they matter.

I. A Chunky Pasta Necklace. 

My favorite type of pasta is fusilli, it quickly became a staple in my kitchen cupboard after I saw a cartoon by Charles Barsotti from the New Yorker. In the cartoon, a piece of rigatoni is on the phone and it is captioned “Fusilli you crazy bastard! How are you?”. That cartoon makes me laugh every time I see it and I think I have reposted it on my Instagram story more times than any other photo or video. I like to think I am quick to find wonder in the mundane, and that is why I find pasta to be very interesting. All it is made of is wheat flour and eggs but to me, eating spaghetti is a very different experience from eating macaroni and that is more so different from eating fusilli but they’re all still pasta. As I am starting this and thinking about myself, all I see is a chunky pasta necklace. You can’t thread a string through a piece of fusilli unless you have a laser you can make a hole with. I don’t have a laser, so here I am with a slowly forming pasta necklace and a piece to add with no holes in it. To shake a necklace made of pieces of dry pasta would be to send waves of noise that disrupt a silent room or a silent mind. In an attempt to recover my memories, I encourage the disruption and somehow all of that chaos seems to blend into itself and settle at a delicate hum. That hum is the baseline of wheat flour and eggs that remains the fundamental dough for the spirals and arches and folds and corners of all the versions of myself to have ever existed. That hum is me.

When I was fourteen I won an essay writing competition. The essay I wrote was titled “My Life Ambition”. I was in SS2 and had recently been named an acting prefect. I was two years into a senior secondary science class well away from the 14 C’s that marked the end of junior secondary. I quoted Abraham Lincoln and wrote about making decisions for myself so I could prepare for the ‘real’ world. I made a joke about staring at the night sky and wanting to be an astronaut. I wrote about asking myself where my strengths lay. I wrote about the moment of realization. I wrote about becoming a pastry chef. That same year I failed a term of chemistry. The next year I remember reading about anxiety and depression and knew I was going to become a child psychiatrist. In the midst of all of this, I had a brown wrapped notebook that was filled with chapters of a fanfiction story I started writing that moved from classroom to classroom in between periods. I also wanted to be a best-selling author. I could tell you the same stories about my third year in university. There is something about penultimate years in educational systems and the similarities they share. It feels like the moment you hit the pulse button on a smoothie blender. In those years leading up to the final one, each ingredient has been placed carefully into it - the berries, the spinach, the bananas, the chia seeds, the honey, and the almond milk. Each hit of the pulse button, an attempt to create a homogenous solution that's drinkable. So in a penultimate year, you are taking different forms and to you each form seems drinkable so of course each form must be the final smoothie, but it's not. At the end of several assessments, you’ll sit in a cold hall and someone important will serve you a version of a “the world is your oyster” speech. So you set out at sixteen or twenty with drinkable dreams in hand and a WAEC certificate or Bachelor’s degree in the other.

A few weeks ago, I had fried rice and salmon for dinner. It was a quiet Sunday evening and my apartment was filled with the warm orange hue of the six pm sun. I do not know if being Yoruba and finally getting to use about a tablespoon and a half of ground pepper in a dish played a role, but I felt satisfied. That satisfaction and the consciousness and appreciation of it led me to think about my third year of university. That year I struggled with friendships. At that point, most of my closest relationships were virtual and long distance. I found it hard to understand the concept of platonic love and I desired a level of depth in my friendships that due to distance I perceived as shallow. I read articles about the psychology of friendships, I sought out tweets that described good friendships, I read poetry on Tumblr about platonic love, and my favorite shows were sitcoms about friends who lived in the same building. I have since gotten to a place where the thought of my friends, far and near, makes my heart swell with joy mostly at the thoughts of how beautiful they are and how thankful I am for their love. So that evening, as I laid on my couch, happy with the state of my friendships and my meal, I realized I didn’t think of snacks or what to eat next. I didn’t look up the benefits of shrimps or carrots and I always look up the benefits of ingredients when I eat. I also don’t remember the last time I read an article about how to be a friend. I just simply was. I then thought about the types of articles I currently seek out, the videos I watch on YouTube, and the tweets I seek out relative to my current point in life. Then I realized that to desire is to be hungry. We all have several stomachs eager to be full.

II. What to do when your dreams expire

When I was ten years old, my friends and I would pretend our Home Economics sewing kits were baby carriers. We’d set the plastic storage bins in between us on the long wooden benches we shared in our class room. We would turn our cardigans into swaddled faceless babies and imagine the future over rice and stew and Ribena during breaks. I remember taking the 2010 prospectus of the University of Manchester to school with me a lot. Mindful of the sleeping cardigan babies resting on top of thimbles and a yard of khaki, we talked about going to study abroad together and coming back to Nigeria to establish the best hospital in the world. I didn’t study in Manchester but I still held on to my dreams about medicine.  When I was applying to medical schools in 2021, I listened to a lot of podcasts. One I cannot forget, I listened to while at work. The host was interviewing a member of the admissions committee of one of the schools I applied to. During that interview, the committee member said, as advice to students, “Don’t let your dreams live past their expiry date,”. I remember dropping the pistachio shells in my hand to write that on a pink post it note. I find it deeply funny that the first school I got rejected from was the school of the committee member from the podcast. I eventually got rejected from all seventeen schools I applied to. 

When you’re a child it is not amiss to be asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. There is an element of finality that comes with the words you utter in response. “The Law!” “My Engineer!” “My Doctor, I hope you will take care of me when I am sick o”. When you are left without a path to an identity you have held onto your whole life, what do you tell yourself? Who do you become?. Well, I became a plant mom, partly because I found out I am allergic to cats, therefore fulfilling half of my friends' wishes for me to have a pet-free home so they could visit without having their childhood fears sit next to them. One of my first plants was a Pothos, a trailing vine plant, gifted to me by my neighbor. I named it Imole which means light in Yoruba. It turned out to be a pretty insightful name. At a time where I felt weighed down by unfulfilled ambitions and identities I held in the past, some leaves on my Pothos started turning yellow and falling off. Imagine my shock as a first time plant owner, I felt very disappointed in myself. A few weeks later on several vines, new leaves started to grow and they eventually became some of the biggest and prettiest leaves on the vines. In my Uncle Iroh bag (sans war criminal era), with a cup of chamomile and lavender tea in hand, a thought settled gently in my mind, the thought that you may need to lose older leaves in order to grow newer, stronger ones that can receive larger amounts of sunlight. Those ambitions have served a purpose but you must now set them down in order to use your energy to grow new ones, possibly ones that will have a lasting impact on the current and next version of yourself. Losing your leaves does not take away from who you are, an oak that loses leaves in the fall is still an oak at the turn of spring. 

Many species of plants over the years, have developed seed dormancy as a means to ensure they do not germinate in unfavorable conditions in order to ensure their survival. After receiving the last rejection, I quickly entered a phase of passivity when it came to my life. I no longer recognized the person who wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t set goals for a year and I also do not clearly remember the quarter where most of the emails came through. I spent a lot of time alone and I no longer felt like any version of myself. All I was, was a lump of dough ready to take shape or in this context a dormant seed waiting for spring in order to bloom. I saw a video a while back where a person said something along the lines of  “We ask children what titles they want to hold and not what kinds of people they want to be”. I think in those decade old words of finality it is very easy as you grow up to assume your sense of fulfillment will only come from that one title you mentioned because people thought you knew how to make an argument or because you read Ben Carsons’ Gifted Hands. In moments of solitude, like a seed in the soil, your roots begin to grow. These are the roots that will nourish you at every stage beyond their generation. These are the roots that will help you realize that as you settle into the ‘real’ world, it is important to be sure of the kind of person you want to be. These are the roots that will allow you to draw fulfillment from all that surrounds you including all that you have been. These are the roots that will show you everything else you can be. There is a necessity to the complex process of becoming. Take advantage of it each time even if it feels like you’re starting again. Every strong tree was once a sapling. 

III. You are a person who is, so be. 

In my final year of university, I took a rhetorical analysis class. In that class we read and analyzed Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this book, Freire criticizes the banking system of education - a depository system that is characterized by boxed roles where a teacher remains a teacher (a narrator) and a student remains a student (a collector) amongst other features. There is no room for dialogue outside of these roles and so students and teachers become less critically conscious which impacts their creativity and only fulfills the wants of  “oppressors who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed”. He posits the banking system of education as one that inhibits creative power and mythicizes reality presenting the state of  society as static when in fact it is dynamic stating that “reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation”.  My main take away from this book was Freire’s constant reiteration of an education system rooted in dialogue that utilizes features of true communication - love, humility, faith, and hope, as a means to attain  humanization. A system like this would be a source of literacy with which a person understands themselves and is able to navigate the world they live in knowing that they are both made of a multitude of ever-changing pieces. 

In 2019, just before news of COVID-19 hit the timelines, I started crocheting a sweater. It is 2023 now and each time I go to pick up my laptop, I walk past a box of yarn with a crochet needle poking through the blue-green back panel of the sweater I never finished. I have not crocheted since early 2022. I would rather spend my weekends now watching Formula 1 Grand Prixes. I find it interesting that some of the drivers on the grid say if they were not F1 drivers they would be architects. I find architecture intriguing and so, I am also currently in a tumultuous relationship with Lagos real estate. I often wrote about multi-disciplinary approaches to problem solving as a university student. Architecture seems to me like a melting pot of some sort. Anyways, ever so often I'll see a post online advertising yet another house in Lagos with a fireplace, I scoff and look out the window. I am obsessed with the sky now and I often think about the day we learnt what the different types of clouds were called in Primary 4. In Primary 6,  I received a stroke or two of cane because I misspelled  a word in a spelling test. It was the word business. Over the last year I have laughed at myself severally for misspelling university as ‘univeristy’ on several occasions. I tend to journal when I am about to sleep, I write about patterns, about all the pieces of me that have influenced my present day actions and experiences. I let myself make spelling errors, I am sleepy but most importantly I am alive. 

In the summer of this year, I went to an art museum alone. It was a Sunday so it was quiet but there were several people walking around the exhibits. One of the first paintings I saw had on it a series of questions written in pencil like “What is the essence of art?” and “Can the essence of art really be different from the essence of our lives?”. Later on in that exhibit I came across a painting of a school of fish, an oil painting on canvas titled ‘One Fish Follows Another’. The water was black, the fish were silver and they were all swimming in one direction. Each fish was individually painted and it is unknown whether the artist painted that many fish as a metaphor for the human experience or simply because he was obsessed with painting. I’ve decided to stick with the former. I found it interesting how each fish looked similar yet different. I found it interesting that when I sat with my friends a few months later,  at a dining table, with an ice cream cake and a vase of roses in the middle, that the stories that came from each of us were different yet the same. The pain was the same, the fear was the same, the joy was the same, the hope was the same. The multitudes that make us, we also happen to share with the larger collective. Sometimes in a flock if a bird is injured another bird or two will stay with it till it heals and they will start their own flock again to continue migrating. It is very interesting that in our pain, in our solitude and in all the noise, we sometimes don’t think to say to our friends it hurts, it's dark, and it's too loud. It is important to take time for yourself to process different things but it is also important to let your friends be friends to you because that is what their love is for. It is for you. 

When I got to a point of accepting the medical school rejections, I realized I had come to stop looking at life and or time like Jenga blocks stacked on top of each other. Thinking like that only, with the aid of gravity, pushed my shoulders down with the weight of the future. Life began to look like beads on a string. A series of ‘nexts’ that would simply come one after the other. The next step is closer to us than the final outcome and so in anything that concerns you all you have to do is take the next step. Add the newly formed piece of pasta that is this version of you to the string. Embrace the possibility of new beginnings. Take a break and give your roots some water. Learn about something new. Do nothing. Do something. Talk to your friend. Add that next bead. Occasionally, shake your string of multitudes and remember to bask, from your mind through your heart to your fingers and down to your toes, in the hum that is you. 

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Thank you very much for reading this essay. I hope a piece of it resonates with you <3.

- Oreoluwa.