Iheoma Amadi: What Does It Feel Like to Navigate Life as an 18-Year-Old?

Growing up, I was advised that being good at school equals successful living. My family said I was going to be a lawyer, and I agreed, as long as it made them happy and proud of me. Without complaining, I started working towards it. It was easy for a while: reading, studying, graduating from secondary school and preparing for every exam to make the dream possible.

Until it was time for admissions.

I studied hard and had good grades. So I wasn’t worried about admission. “I am going to the university this year,” I was sure. But maybe I should have been worried, because the good grades weren’t enough for admission. I couldn’t describe what was more painful: staying home for another whole year or the fact that I didn’t get admission. At the time, I was prepared to leave home. University had become or represented something bigger: freedom, independence, and, even more importantly, discovering a world outside the one I’d always known.

I accepted my fate and decided to sit for another exam for another round of admission. Since good grades weren’t enough in the previous year, I thought then maybe higher grades would make it easier for me to get away. And it was going well. I was hopeful for admission.

Then my mom died, a day before she was supposed to accompany me for my exam.

That’s how uncertain life can be. It hurt. It hurt a lot, and even more because we were finally getting closer to each other. Days after her death, I became regretful of all the times we spent arguing instead of bonding, all the things that could have happened differently. All the things I wish I had done differently.

For a while, everything I thought was important suddenly felt insignificant. The exams,…