If Day 48 told you what I could do, this one tells you what I actually loved.
And they are not quite the same thing.
I have always been happiest when a group of people came together to make something beautiful. Not just be together. Make something together.
In high school, I was in our production of Pirates of Penzance. Singing, dancing, rehearsing, standing in the wings waiting for a cue, watching a group of individually average voices become, through sheer repetition and shared will, something that actually moved people. In university, I did two more musical productions. And I must be honest about what kept pulling me back: yes, the singing, and yes, the camaraderie. But also, gloriously, the dancing. Those musicals involved a lot of it, and I loved every choreographed minute. There is a particular joy in a room full of people learning the same steps, getting them wrong together, drilling them together, and finally moving as one body. I have found that joy almost nowhere else. I also sang with the Nyayo Choir, dozens of voices all disciplined into one sound, all working toward the same note landing at the same moment. There is a very specific kind of joy in that process: weeks of unglamorous rehearsal building toward one performance where it all clicks into place and something genuinely beautiful exists that did not exist before.
I did not do this for the applause, though the applause was nice. I did it for the making.
My sisters and I used to sing together. Not unison, but harmony. Each of us holding a different part, none of it meaning much on its own, all of it meaning something together. There is a kind of listening that harmony requires. You have to hold your own line while staying acutely aware of everyone else’s. You cannot drift. You cannot dominate. You have to fit.
I loved that. I still do.
And then there were the games: shake, kati, bladder, three sticks, all the games that filled Kenyan childhoods with rules invented and enforced entirely by the children playing them. No adult supervision. No official rulebook. Just a group of us, negotiating in real time, working toward the shared goal of the game actually functioning.
Looking back, I think that was the same pull. People, together, building something, whether it was a game, a harmony, a choir, a dance number, or a musical.
Here is the other side of that coin, and it is a side I feel no need to apologise for: I have never enjoyed sitting around just chatting.
Small talk exhausts me. Conversation for the sake of conversation, filling air, passing time, talking about nothing in particular because talking is what is expected, has never held my attention. I am not being unkind about this. I simply do not light up in that setting the way other people seem to.
But put me in a room where people are working toward something (a production, a harmony, a choir hitting its mark, a shared goal that requires everyone’s actual contribution) and I come alive.
I think that tells you something true about me. I am not drawn to people in the abstract. I am drawn to making things with people. Give me a shared purpose over shared chit-chat, every time.
That preference was there at 10 years old, singing harmony with my sisters. It never left.
Come back tomorrow for Day 46: the wrong school and the right one.
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