I was a quiet child.
Not the sad kind of quiet. The watching kind. I used to feel like I was observing the world through a screen, as if everyone else was in the show and I was in the audience, studying how it all worked, taking notes, waiting for my cue that never quite seemed to come.
I did not spend much energy trying to figure out how to fit in with the cool kids. That particular project did not interest me. What interested me was everything else.
In short: quiet doesn’t mean empty. Some of us are just as busy building, only inside where it’s harder to see. That’s still its own way of shining.
By the time I was 8, I could knit. By 12, I was knitting baby booties and socks. Actual socks, for my actual feet, made by my actual hands. I played the piano and the recorder. I could sight-read music and have it under my fingers within seconds, which felt less like a skill and more like a private conversation between me and the page.
At 13, I wrote my first lines of code. On a Wang machine. For those of you too young to know what that is, imagine a computer that took itself very seriously despite having extremely limited range. I made that Wang play music notes. They did not sound great. They were not supposed to sound great. They were supposed to sound like something I had made happen, which they did, and that was enough.
This was the pattern of my childhood. Find a hard thing. Learn it alone. Do it until it works.
Not because anyone asked me to. Because the doing was the point.
While other children were busy being children, my mind was almost always somewhere else entirely.
I remember once, riding in my parents’ car, there was a fly inside. Everyone around me was doing what you do with a fly in a car: swatting at it, opening windows, trying to usher it out. I was not doing any of that.
I was thinking: what if the fly were to hover in exactly the same position, not moving forward or backward, just suspended in flight, while the car was moving? Would it get hit by the rear windscreen? Or would it somehow be carried along at the speed of the car without even trying?
I did not have the physics vocabulary for it then. I just had the question. And the question was, to me, infinitely more interesting than the fly.
This is still, largely, how my mind works.
I think now about what that little girl was building, all those quiet afternoons with knitting needles and piano keys and a Wang machine that beeped reluctantly into the future.
She was building a relationship with her own competence. She was learning, before she had the words for it, that she did not need an audience to do something worth doing. That the work itself was company enough.
That lesson has followed me everywhere.
But I would be doing little Muthoni a disservice if I only showed you the quiet, disciplined side.
Because there was also the other side.
I must have been about 5 years old when Sunday school introduced me to the concept of satan. I listened carefully, as I listened to everything. I processed the information. And I arrived at a conclusion that seemed, to me, entirely logical:
Someone needed to stop him. And I was probably the right girl for the job.
Apparently he was in hell which was deep inside the ground. So I went home, found a suitable digging implement, identified a patch of ground in the garden, recruited my sister, and got to work.
I did not have a plan for what would happen if I actually found him. That detail had not yet presented itself as relevant. What mattered was that the project was underway. That I had identified a problem and mobilised.
I dug for a while. I did not find satan. I did find some interesting rocks and at least one very startled earthworm.
I considered this a partial success.
That is the child I was. Quiet on the outside. Running very loud, very ambitious, very unilateral projects on the inside.
Some things do not change.
Come back tomorrow for Day 47: what I actually loved. (Not quite the same as what I could do.)
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