Anxiety
People have a habit of reading me as someone who is chasing something I’m not. they see the startups I’ve been part of, the teams I’ve found myself inside, the communities I’ve helped shape, and they conclude: entrepreneur. business minded. someone with their eye on the market.
That reading has always been a little off. I was never the one who applied. I was nominated, referenced, recommended. I got pulled in. and the reason that distinction matters is because it points to the actual motive, which was never money, and never the feeling of being supreme over others. I don’t love controlling people. I genuinely don’t. not out of shyness, not out of some performed humility, but because responsibility is something I fear, and because I have always preferred being a contributor over being a manager. a contributor does the work. a manager mostly speaks about how the work is progressing. I despised that image of leadership since I was young.
I followed up with him again after that. this time, he told me the latest diagnosis. high red blood cell count. elevated sugar levels, though not urgent, at least for now. he said he was not planning to tell his family. they worry too much.
He sounded exhausted. too tired to sleep. he kept repeating something that stayed with me. that what he was suffering from was not the illness itself, but what his head was telling him. the collapse was not only physical, but mental too.
I do not remember exactly whereIfirst learned the sentence “worry about it later”. but over time, it revealed itself as something deeper than advice. it describes a mental mechanism that works almost automatically in my mind. a form of being selectively ignorant about certain things, not because they do not matter, but because they do not matter now.
If you were to ask me what the worst feeling is, I would not choose one single emotion. it is not anger alone. not grief alone. not sadness or longing by themselves. the worst feeling is when they all gather at once. tension born from emotional suppression. confusion layered over alienation. longing mixed with hopelessness. pressure sitting beside grief. anger tangled with sadness. it is not one storm. it is many storms colliding in the same sky.
You’ve asked me before.
Is there a way out of this?
I remember that particular day. I was heading to the University Of Khartoum. I took the city train. I was standing. there were no seats left. my head was facing the floor, and the train was moving. I was just there.