Where My Heart Is

Months after I had first initially planned to make this and more weekly posts thereafter, here I am finally introducing myself and this Substack…

My name is Ama, and this is: ‘Where My Heart Is’.

This may very well be my first and last post given my track record with sharing my writing, however, I hope that it is not and I hope that the fifteen of you subscribed, hold me accountable.

That is your first job. Less than 100 words in I am already asking you to make sure that I do actually build a consistent relationship with this blog of sorts. That is if you like it. And if you do like it, your second (and only other) job, is to enjoy it — allow it to speak to you and allow it settle somewhere within you so much that it brings you comfort that you are not alone. I say that, aware that the only thing I know I want to achieve with this, is to say how I feel, when I feel it, in the hopes that maybe even one person out there also understands what I go through. Whatever I post, will have written at some point, to find comfort in words and if that same comfort can reach you, I would be even more grateful for this space.

If you do not know me, again, my name is Ama and I am a recent graduate plunged into the clasp of unemployment. That, for me, best characterises where I am in my life right now and what I am consumed by — fear, unemployment, lack of confidence and a want for quiet. I studied Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (deep sigh). My whole life I have been a stifled creative, very aware that artists only make money after they die, if they ever do. Painting, writing and photography have been constants in my world and despite my parents’ many attempts to steer me towards security in either Medicine, Law or Engineering, I have always corrected my course back to the Arts and Humanities. There are times, like now, when I wish I had listened because then, I would not be agonising about having to be a corporate sellout because I am anxious for financial security, perhaps more than I am for art in this current socio-political climate. I am an incredibly insecure writer, so you will have to bear with me (third job, I lied). But, like many of us, I have things to say and I want to torture people with it. I love my friends deeply and I cherish many of the moments that lead me to them and further into their arms. For now, I feel those are the most important things to know, though I’m sure more will be revealed over time.

Originally, I had wanted to write about how sad I have been in the U.K. and how I think there is no meaning to anything we do (I think they call it depression). I simply wanted to call it, ‘My Heart Isn’t in It’, because that is the truth, it really is not. My heart isn’t in most of the things that I do to try and build something for myself because I look at the world and I look at how quickly humanity can become divided and how the value of even just one life can be discarded because of money and power. The more I grow, the more I realise that humanity has only become more and more nourished by greed and pride and it is painful to accept that reality. When I sleep, I am cradled by the knowledge that I will have to wake up in this same world and that I am not safe, because others are not. My peaceful sleep is mirrored both by the sleeplessness of those under violent attack and the endless sleep many are unjustly sentenced to. And they are not far from me, those people, because they are human. Despite our flaws and weaknesses and despite what I have learnt so far 24 years in, I like to think we are the same and that sharing humanity alone should be enough to consider one another. If it can happen to them, it can happen to me.

Living life with this weight on you is not easy, but I truly cannot help it. I cannot help that I mourn so deeply and that I yearn for the larger view of hope I had when I was 16, full of fire to change the world from the small classroom of the girls’ school I went to, protesting almost everything because I secretly hated that place. Hope, for me right now, is like the smallest star in my galaxy that I will always chase, unrelentingly, even though it is barely a star and more like a faint flash in my mind that teases its very existence. I will never stop chasing it, because I have to believe that the happiness and the joy I know I experience, have a meaning. So I am clutching onto that, and hoping, praying, that when I walk into spaces my fist clenched tightly with that small star, it will turn into something promising, that I will turn into something promising.

I could not set my writing off with the overwhelming nihilism and negativity I often feel when the hope and curiosity I have for the future is so brilliant. That is why, rather than settling on why my heart isn’t in it, I opt for ‘Where My Heart Is’, because it is grieving, it is lost and it is excited and it is full of love all at once. One day, I will write about how graduate life after university is how I have come to understand the expression ‘liminal space’ and another day I will write about how happy I am that the sun did not forget me this morning.

Whatever you read, is where my heart will be.