I got into university at seventeen. I had started school early, so while my age-mates were finishing high school, I was packing for campus.
Now, the campus was only an hour and a half from home, close enough that my parents’ preferred plan was for me to commute. Wake up at home, attend classes, return home. A sensible plan. A safe plan.
I refused.
I insisted on living on campus. Remember, this was the girl who had wanted boarding school so badly that even a miserable term near Mount Kenya had not cured her of the idea. I wanted the full experience: the independence, the late nights, the living among people my own age. And on this one, I won.
And somewhere between home and that campus, I made another decision that changed everything, quietly and completely.
I changed my name.
Not legally. Nothing dramatic. All through primary and high school, I had been known by my first name. But when I arrived at university and people asked who I was, I heard myself say: Muthoni.
My middle name. My grandmother’s name, the one given to me through Kikuyu naming tradition, the thread connecting me to a woman who came before.
I have been Muthoni ever since.
I did not fully understand what I was doing at the time. Looking back, I understand it perfectly. The girl with my first name was the quiet, invisible one, the observer in the audience, watching the show of life through a screen. Muthoni was somebody else. Muthoni could take her place in the world.
It felt like a rebirth, because it was one.
And here is the strange, wonderful thing: the world responded.
People gravitated towards me at university. I could not tell you why. I had not changed my personality, I had simply changed my posture. I made more friends in those years than in all my school years combined. On my eighteenth birthday, I received a pile of birthday cards that genuinely confused me. Cards! Plural! For the girl who once had to be befriended by force!
I lived on campus with three roommates: Elizabeth from high school, plus Maggie and Wairimu. I am still friends with all three of them today. Some women get roommates. I got a second set of sisters.
I should also mention, casually, as if it is a small thing, that I met my husband at university.
He did not attend my university. We were staging one of the musicals, and he had been invited to come play the drums. A drummer. Invited. Into my world of making things together, which by now you know is the only room where I fully come alive.
At our very first meeting, this man told me that we would get married.
I would like to report that I was swept off my feet by this declaration. I was not. I filed it under “interesting claims, unverified” and carried on with the production. We did not even begin dating until years later. I was about 22, living in the USA doing my MBA, when the drummer’s prophecy finally began its slow journey toward fulfilment.
But he had said it. At the first meeting. And he turned out to be right.
I have known engineers and analysts my whole life, and none of them has ever made a forecast that accurate.
For the record: I was also a good student. I passed my classes, even the genuinely hard ones. The house I was raised in did not produce women who travel all that way to fail exams.
Here is what Day 41 taught me, and what I would tell anyone standing at the edge of a new chapter:
Sometimes the person you have been is not the person you are. Sometimes she is just the person people met first.
I did not become someone new at university. Muthoni had been in there all along: knitting, coding, harmonising, digging for satan. What changed is that I introduced her properly. I gave the world her name and let her walk in front.
If there is a version of you that you have been keeping in the audience, this is your reminder: at some point, you are allowed to put her on the stage.
Come back tomorrow for Day 40: ten things my younger self would be proud of.
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