Somewhere in the middle of my undergraduate degree, I got restless.
Not bored. Restless. There is a difference. Bored is when nothing interests you. Restless is when something is calling you and you have not left yet.
For me, the call was coming from the USA. I could not fully explain it. I just felt drawn there, the way I had once felt drawn to boarding school, to campus life, to every next room that was bigger than the current one.
So I did what I do when I want something: I turned it into a project.
I decided to finish my degree fast. Not “graduate on time” fast. Faster than that.
I loaded up on summer courses while my classmates rested. I compressed a degree into three years. And here is my favourite part, the detail I still enjoy telling: by the time my graduation day came around, I had already completed one full semester of my MBA in the United States.
I did not attend my undergraduate graduation. I was busy, there were classes to attend in Maryland. The ceremony happened on one continent while I sat in a lecture hall on another. I picked up my certificate later that year, when I came home for Christmas, the way one collects a parcel.
The girl who once could not answer which rivers we had passed, it turns out, was extremely good at getting where she was going.
I went to Maryland for the MBA.
And I want to be honest about what those first months were, because “I moved to America” can sound like one smooth cinematic scene. It was not a scene. It was a project with many moving parts, run by a very determined young woman in her early twenties, very far from home.
Within three months of landing, I had my own apartment and a job at the school, working while studying. Let me repeat that for the people in the back: three months. Own apartment. Employed. Enrolled. The household operating system I was raised on, hard work, competence, excellence as the default setting, turned out to run perfectly well on American soil.
I did really well in that MBA. Graduated with a 3.6 GPA, while working, while running my own little life from scratch.
But the grades are honestly not what I treasure most from those years.
What I treasure is the world getting bigger. I made friends from many countries, people whose childhoods looked nothing like mine, whose foods and accents and assumptions were all new to me. After a lifetime of being the different one, I was now in a place where everyone was different. It was like arriving at a global version of the truth I had been carrying since childhood: everybody has a special kind of story. Everybody has a way to shine.
I travelled a little around the USA too, collecting states the way I once collected skills. The quiet girl who watched the world through a screen was now walking around inside it.
And, as long-time readers of this series already know, it was during these MBA years, at about 22, that a certain drummer’s forecast from years earlier finally moved from “unverified” to “in progress.” An ocean away from where he made the declaration. He was patient, that one. Drummers understand timing.
Here is the lesson from Day 39.
Restlessness gets a bad reputation. We are told to be content, to bloom where we are planted, to stop rushing. And there is wisdom in that, sometimes.
But some restlessness is not discontent. It is direction. It is the pull of a life that is ready for you before you are ready for it. The trick, I have found, is learning to tell the difference between running from something and being drawn toward something.
I was drawn. So I built the bridge and crossed it: summer course by summer course, semester by semester, one apartment lease and one campus job at a time.
If something is calling you, do not just sit there feeling the pull.
Turn it into a project.
Come back tomorrow for Day 38: the duet, the full story of the drummer.
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