Muthoni Mutonyi

Tomorrow I turn fifty. Tonight I am still forty-nine, which is a much thinner difference than the last forty-nine posts made it sound. If you have been reading along waiting for the moment the wisdom kicks in, I regret to inform you that it is 9pm and I am still the same woman who cannot find the remote she is sitting on.

In August I nearly let this birthday pass the way I usually do: privately aware, then gracious on the day. A cake would appear. I would say “you shouldn’t have” and mean it. Instead I announced that fifty deserved a parade, or at least a countdown. I did not get a parade. Nairobi County does not issue permits for that sort of thing, and I would have had to stand in the middle of it while people looked at me, which is an introvert’s idea of a horror film. What I got instead was fifty pieces of a life, written in public, in Kenya, in the voice I actually use when I am not performing competence.

I thought the writing would prepare me for the number. It did something quieter. It made the number less interesting than the life that produced it.

Here is what fifty days of writing about yourself actually does to a person.

Around Day 45 you are still full of ideas and slightly smug about it. You have a list. The list has themes. The themes have sub-themes. You think, briefly, that you may have discovered a new form.

Around Day 38 you discover you have told the same story twice, and the second version was better, which raises questions about the first one and about your memory in general.

Around Day 30 you run out of profound things and start writing about matatu conductors, and those posts get more comments than anything you ever said about leadership. This is humbling in a way that leadership books never manage.

Around Day 20 an auntie you have not spoken to since 2019 sends a WhatsApp that just says “Are you okay?” because in her experience people only reflect this much when something has gone wrong. I told her I was fine. She sent a praying hands emoji, which I have chosen to accept as a blessing rather than a diagnosis.

Around Day 12 you stop checking the numbers. Not because you have grown as a person, but because you forgot, and then noticed you forgot, and then decided that counted.

Around Day 5 you realise you are going to miss it. That the 6am hour with the laptop and the chai and the cursor blinking at you like it also wants to know what happened in 1998 has become the best part of the day. That you built a habit by accident while trying to build a birthday.

I also learned things about myself I had not budgeted for. That I have opinions about traffic that could fill a second series and possibly a select committee. That I am funnier at 6am than I have any right to be, and that this funniness evaporates entirely by the 10am meeting. That the post I was most nervous to publish was the one people printed out and stuck on a fridge, which I know because two of you sent photographic evidence. That “writing in public” is really just talking to yourself with the door open, and hoping the neighbours are kind. They were. Some of you were kinder to me than I would have been to me, and I have taken notes.

And I learned that the countdown format does something strange to time. When you know you have exactly fifty days, you stop wasting them on the polite version. There was no room for the LinkedIn voice, the one that begins “Humbled to share” and ends with three hashtags and a hollow feeling. There was only room for the actual voice, the one that gets used at the kitchen table and in the car when the traffic on Waiyaki Way is doing what it does. I had not written in that voice this consistently since I was a teenager with a diary and a lock that did not work. It turns out she was still in there. She had just been waiting for me to stop being important for a moment.

The theme I kept coming back to, without quite planning it, was that old Diff’rent Strokes line. Everybody’s got a special kind of story. Everybody’s got a way to shine. I used to hear that as a nice thing to sing at children. Fifty days in, I hear it as a job description.

Nobody else was there for all of it, so nobody else can tell it. The banking halls, the church rota, the six years in an American factory town where I learned the word “y’all” and the limits of my own extroversion, the years I spent trying to be a louder person before I found out the quiet one was the asset: that is one story, told one way, by one woman who does not enjoy parades. Yours is different, and it should be. I spent a good portion of my thirties trying to be the same as the people who seemed to be winning, and the only thing I won was tiredness. The world is not short of people trying to be the same. It is short of people willing to be themselves out loud. Or in my case, out loud in writing and very softly in rooms.

That is what I would say to anyone thinking of doing this. Not the fifty days necessarily. The saying it. Whatever your number is, whatever the thing is that you have been privately aware of and gracious about, there is a version of it that could be written down in the voice you actually use. It will not be a parade. It will be better. A parade ends. A record does not.

So what does the last night of forty-nine look like? Nothing you could sell tickets to. There is chai, made properly, which in this house means boiled until it has opinions. There is a scheduled post for tomorrow that I have checked three times, because the only thing worse than turning fifty is turning fifty and having WordPress publish it at the wrong hour. There is a phone face down on the table, because I know what it will do at midnight and I would like to meet the number on my own terms first. There is the mild suspicion that midnight will arrive and I will feel exactly as I do now, which after all this is probably the point. Forty-nine did not need fixing. Fifty is not a rescue. It is just the next post.

I set out to count down to a number. I ended up counting up a life, and the life won.

Tomorrow is Day 0. Come and see what fifty looks like. From here, it looks a lot like me, only with better stories and a habit I did not plan to keep.