How depression forced me out of a top University

Early days

My first days at the city university were full of adventure. Each night there were activities: Comedy nights, dances, art exhibitions, talks, visiting dignitaries and so forth. I spent my mornings at the library sampling books. On sunny afternoons, I walked to the arboretum. The growing body of foreign students was the latest show-off on campus. In the psychology class for instance, we had a Nigerian, a Malawian and a South Korean. I fell into the routine of attending lectures, sitting for C.A.Ts, writing term papers and preparing for my end of semester exams.

I experienced sunsets on the flyover outside the university’s main gate.  The flow of traffic on Nairobi-Thika Highway was as engaging as chewing on roast maize or sipping coke.  In the entertainment halls, I watched soccer with my friends.

But everything quickly turned grey and lost the allure at the end of my first year. I became restless and irritable. I began to miss my lectures. I spent more time at the arboretum, brooding about everything except my studies.

A failed foreign scholarship threw me on the edge. My family was going through a tough economic period. The sugar industry was crumbling; the farmers were reaping less and less. My father was barely keeping us in school.

As a result, I felt empty and lifeless. I lost sleep and appetite. I wandered aimlessly around campus.  We broke up with *Lindsey.

Both my parents tried to reach me, to squeeze the truth out of me, to help me, but I had learnt and mastered the art of evasion. I stayed away in the city and denied them a face-to-face opportunity. I didn’t want my parents to know that I wasn’t attending my lectures. I knew I was doing my family a grave injustice but I did not care.

My father was a lowly paid civil servant and my mum was a stay-at-home mother, a small time farmer, a woman of the church. I grew up with my brothers on a small farm owned by my father. We ate what we harvested from the small farm. Education was the key to our success.

Childhood dream

From a young age I dreamt of pursuing Law at the university. This didn’t come as a surprise. My father brought home copies of Weekly Review magazines and FORD propaganda papers. I was fascinated by the exuberant brilliance of lawyers like James Orengo, Gitobu Imanyara among others. Blood froze in my vessels when I read about Nyayo House torture chambers. It was hard to believe that such a thing existed in the real world. I wanted to study law in order to stop evil.

Foreign-bound

In August 2007, I received an offer of scholarship from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. My uncle, a dentist, played a big part in ensuring that everything was done right. The prestige that came with such a scholarship, the prospect of flying across seas to a different continent and culture, left me spellbound. In just a matter of days, I shifted my focus from Law to Civil Engineering.

Then bad news came. My father couldn’t afford the air ticket. My first impulse was to smile because I thought he was joking. I had read a lot about Pakistan on the internet. It was a nuclear power. Its cities were bustling. Technologically, Pakistan was better than Kenya. My father was being untruthful.

The failed scholarship took its toll on me. My sense of isolation deepened. The next course of action secluded me from the hustle and bustle around me. I was distrustful of close family members and relatives. I felt that they had not done enough actualize the scholarship. Other Kenyan fathers would have killed to have their sons and daughters take my place, this I knew. Why was my own father acting careless? I did not understand.

Slowly but surely I fell into depression.  When I finally joined Kenyatta University to study a degree in education, I was suffering the effects of depression. Since I was living a secluded life, I kept the pain and confusion to myself. I hid away in the city, out of the glare of family and relatives. I did not want to set my eyes on my own father. I felt betrayed by him.

My love for literature

I took to reading novels to escape the reality around me. Most of the books I read were African and African-American. In literature, the author can contrive a happy ending for his or her character(s). I wanted to contrive a happy ending for myself. I had lost interest in everything but literature.

Depression made me a pessimist. Life was meaningless.

At the end of my sophomore year, I was not attending any lectures. I moved around the campus desultorily. I spent long hours in the library reading African and African-American literature. I began to write short stories. At first, my writing was horrible. I loathed it. But I could not stop scribbling. I was a man on a mission. Reading and writing gave me joy.

I surprised myself when I told my roommate that my new dream was to be an author of fiction. My roommate was not surprised.  I read many books and stayed up late into the night to scribble in my journal. I praised men of letters as if they were gods sent to save the world from its innumerable ills.

The dark hour

The day it happened, I was sitting at the fountain, watching thin jets of water shoot into the sky, creating fleeting rainbows that were captivating to the eye. I was absentminded. Solitude was my new love.

In January of 2011, I made a formal decision to drop out of university. My friends Emmanuel and Patrick were horrified at the idea. I just didn’t care.

So when the university opened for a new semester in January 2011, I had other plans. I stuck around the campus but I did not attend to my academic work. It was an ‘awesome’ plan for a depressed mind.

"It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling—that really hollowed-out feeling." —J.K. Rowling

The writer is an undergraduate student at Laikipia University. He is an aspiring poet and fiction writer. His e-mail address is [email protected].