Journey

Words by Natasha Nyanin
Art Direction: Natasha Nyanin and Colby Blount
Styling: Natasha Nyanin
Photography: Colby Blount
Great appreciation to LATAM Airlines and Explora Hotels for photo location

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision”- Helen Keller.

This was the quote emblazoned on all my posters when I ran for the highest office in my high school, Girl’s Head Prefect. I lost that election. Miserably. I instead however ended up being appointed, as a consolation it would seem, as both Editor in Chief of our school newspaper and president of our Model UN council. Two jobs could not have been better suited to me.

Fast forward past high school, university and a 7-year stint as a health scientist at one of the most prestigious institutions in which a scientist can work, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I find myself diverging from the well-trodden, well-mapped road of working in science into a career as an artist. My foresight could never have revealed to me in high school that I would decide, well past my prime, that becoming a medical doctor was not indeed what I wanted and that I would find myself here today, in the melee of creating a path only I can walk, a road cut to fit only feet, and yet one that often stings like a pair of new shoes yet to be broken in. Vision though, changes with age, and it would be sacrilegious of me to continue to blot out that light that has been quietly beckoning me all my life.

I would say it all began when I returned from an unforgettable holiday in Europe and Morocco to work at the CDC only to be called a few weeks later and told not to return to work the next day. My contract had been summarily terminated. Just like that. In actually, however, perhaps it began some two years earlier – but really it began I was born and imbued with a purpose as we all are— when I met my mentor and great friend, Gail, in a yoga class. On and off the mat, Gail is a woman is full of grace. It is she who saw in me a stream of light when I had only ever before been cognizant of flashes. Our first meeting outside of the yoga studio was on Mother’s day. Gail took me out to brunch. Thanks to her uncanny gift for causing others to open up, I confessed to her that I was in the midst of a quarter life crisis, because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I’d been working in a dead end job, knew I had no desire to go to medical school, and yet had no sense what else I could do professionally. “It’s obvious”, she said without missing a beat, “you are an artist.”

“No, no!” I riposted. “I mean like an actual career”. You see, growing up in Ghana, I had scarcely been allowed to see my creativity as much more than fun and games and my affinity for fashion a mere frivolity. But Gail was adamant, and she broke it all down for me. My subconsciously entrenched beliefs that success could only be spelt by alphabet soup after my name began to fade away but only with considerable effort to shatter the veneers and begin to see myself for who I truly am. I eventually I admitted to my mother that I who studied neuroscience (as well as dance) and was to culminate my education in some scientific arena did not, as a matter of fact, want not to cure diseases or study science, but to celebrate the beauty of living through the clavier and majesty of language.

Admitting that realization to my mother has not been as hard as the work of admitting it to myself. You see, the ability to reimagine one thing, oneself, as many things, to see oneself as what Walt Whitman termed “multitudes”—this act itself requires unseeing the illusory self that one has built up, and challenging the ego. It is a lifelong work.

So, by the time I was spat out from my place of work at CDC like rotten fruit, I already knew I had my sights set on different pastures. But the manner in which I was cast into them made the glade feel more akin to wilderness than a glorious lush field. If I could have seen this far in to the future, perhaps I would not have taken this leap: I may not have given up all of my comforts to move to New York, the city that had been calling me for years; to jump into a dream and be met only by stark reality.

“In some instances, one’s limited vision is a gift that allows one to forge forward despite fear: you close your eyes and you jump.”

Having plunged head first into the New York life, all the events leading up to my moving happening as though by fate, I have come to better trust that the universe is on my side, or to put it more tritely, that “fortune favours the brave”. I now know that intuition is itself, a form of vision, a luminous guide.

I moved to New York in 2016 and that year was a beatific melee. For one with so little, my life was miraculously full with as much richness as it was paucity. Opportunities presented themselves to travel to lands of which I had never even dreamt. I stood at the “far end of the world”, and returned to some of the lands I’ve always loved. I discovered a theme: my affinity for old port cites (Tangier, Valparaiso: the enchantment is ineffable. Perhaps it’s the feeling of passage, exchange, and the breath of the ocean). I found out Jamaica is Ghana (with Demerara sugar sprinkled on the coconut flesh). I stood at Pablo Neruda’s desk, the site from which words that lit up most of my 20s were fashioned from fire.

“I knew first hand what it means to be homeless (but, somehow, always with a roof over my head); I knew what it means to call many places (and hearts) home. I had creative impulses that could only be described as divine; I felt as creatively arid as the desert, which I love.”

I locked myself in bathrooms and wept; I stared in awe at a glacier, drinking a glass of whiskey diluted by a shard of that glacier. A man I once thought to be the love of my life married the love of his life and I felt nothing but boundless joy for their union (and perhaps a fleeting concern as to whether I’d ever love that way again). I continued to learn that paths may diverge with even the friends we hold most dear; I learnt that the convergence of new kindred paths over French toast in some brunch corner draped in velvet curtains in Williamsburg cannot be stopped; We all lost Prince; my Ghanaian/German/ Kurdish niece Céleste was unleashed upon the world in all of her doe-eyed perfection. I explored Japanese Wabi-Sabi; as always, the Polish poets lit my way. I reviewed Michelin stared restaurants; I met legendary pastry chef Cedric Grolet and talked pâte sucrée with him; I found my 80-year-old uncle makes the best groundnut soup. I was re-reading a book about omens with a protagonist named Santiago and the next week I found myself invited to Santiago.

I moved out of the apartment I called home for 8 years in 5 days so dramatic and magical, one might not believe me if I recounted the story. I broke down the bed in which I slept for some 8 odd years, tied it to the top of my friend’s car, and sold it for pennies on the dollar to an international student who was just now making a home of the city from which I was fleeing. Sometimes life is this beautiful chiasmus and all we can do let that inspire us. I finally moved to the city that was always a dream, always felt like destiny and was now simply reality. I lived Jonn Dunne’s opening line, “no man is island entire of itself” and owe where I stand the kindness of family and friends. I found the true meaning of grace. (And the true weight of a Kitchen Aid mixer when you have to tote it about the city).

Yet for all the pain and each and every struggle, both expected and otherwise, I learnt that I must experience the joy of having achieved the dreams of my future now. As I dragged my suitcase to the next couch or bed during my peripatetic 2016, their wheels were turned by feeling the ecstasy of future “success” now, by the conviction that success is indeed waking up and trying, that happiness is the goal and as long as I could find happiness that day, I was succeeding.

I firmly believe that visualizing my desires and feeling tomorrow’s joy today obliterates the linearity of time and draws one closer to one’s desires as we seek what is seeking us. I visualize the reality I want for myself daily and believe that everything I desire, I already Perhaps this Pollyanna view of life is nothing but the Kool-Aid that keeps me from dying from the thirst of living. I refuse to live the life I have been given blotting out my light, which, like all of our lights, is an expression of the divine.

“The road may be long, and the path convoluted yet life has taught me that vantage point determines one’s experience.”

The journey towards the heights is an ecstatic one, littered with great beauty, dizzying crests and sobering troughs, and always lined by what Polish writer called “road side dogs” who help us see our way home.