The Dawn Of A New Day

It is after midnight as I lie in bed to write this. I am not sleepy because I slept for quite a bit this afternoon, as my body continues to battle a cold. While I am not completely out of the woods yet, I do feel like this is a new beginning. My republic has held its general elections and Masisi has been elected to office. I am hopeful that this is a new dawn for my country. With the legitimacy of an election, now he can focus on leading the nation instead of dealing with the drama of his predecessor, the guy with long name that I am lazy to type. Focus! I look back at the past few years and realize I have been on auto-pilot. There has just been a lot of never ending drama in my life, and that has derailed my focused ambition. I am even surprised I graduated from Stanford on time, and convinced them to admit me for graduate school. Most of the drama has come from struggles around my mother's illness, but I realize now that it is time to let her go. Going through life without a zest for it is no way to live. In an attempt to honor my mother's generosity, I have spent the past few years living for others - just as my mother had done for us. It is noble to lead a life that is centered around serving others, but we ought to remember that we cannot pour out of empty tea pots. But as this new day begins, I sense a renewal of sorts. As this illness leaves my body, may it take with it this timidity that has characterized my life in recent years.

It would be wrong of me to claim that this is the beginning of this process. It is in fact the tail end of it. It started last December when I deleted my social media accounts. I started to use social media extensively in 2012, around the time my mother fell ill and was taken away. Prior to that I cared not for it. Do not get me wrong, I enjoyed the attention I got in my village as the smart kid of the time. But it was a popularity that I did not have to manage actively. But in 2012 somehow, perhaps as a means of coping with my mother's illness, I focused a significant amount of energy on building this online persona of who I was. I gave life to the myth of Tumisang Ramarea. But last year as I reflected on how life was going, I was confronted with the reality that the whole social media influencer thing was not for me. First of all it was just too much work to maintain the social media accounts. Secondly, I felt they were taking away from my ability to enjoy the simple things that matter to me, like reading a book, for example. Last month, after 9 months, I relapsed and opened a Facebook account. I was back for about 3 weeks before I decided to delete it again. While it was hard to see the benefit of being back on it after 9 months of a Facebook-free life, the real catalyst that convinced me to stay gone from Facebook was the realization that public opinion of me is none of my business. There was an individual who had written some disturbing accusations against me on their Facebook account. At first I was really hurt by these claims, and even reached out to university resources to intervene. But there was nothing the university could do because of this individual's documented mental health struggles. I realized then that the true madness was me trying to curate what information about me is out there on the internet. 

With the exception of this platform, I have decided to discontinue trying to shape public opinion about me. This platform is slightly different in that it is an online portfolio of my work and interests, with a few of my thoughts in my two blogs that are infrequent at best. It is less about shaping public opinion of me and more about creating some place where my loved ones can come to one day - hopefully in at least 60 years - when I am gone. Specifically, I have discontinued the use of WhatsApp stories. While it was a smaller audience, it was basically a continuation of the myth of Tumisang Ramarea from Facebook. I recognize that there were people who found my daily posts inspiring and at times entertaining. However, I felt whatever good it was doing for them was less than the cost to me. I cannot afford to continue as a WhatsApp influencer. I need to focus my energy on developing my skills as the aspiring data scientist I am and on getting to know this other fine auntie in my life. I need to focus my energy on being the best uncle I can be to my nephews and nieces, who are now navigating the complexities of their teen years. I ought to focus on being a supportive sibling to my other siblings as they deal with the loss of our mother in their unique ways. But of all these things, focusing on developing my technical skills as an upcoming data scientist and getting to know this baby girl are paramount. I ought to take a chance on life. It is what my mother would have wanted. 

I am currently enrolled in 3 classes that are really great starting points for my journey as a data scientist: MS&E 226 (Fundamentals of Data Science: Prediction, Inference, Causality), MS&E 252 (Decision Analysis I), and CS 238 (Decision Making under Uncertainty). Since tonight enrollment opened for winter quarter opened, I also enrolled in classes for  next quarter. They will also add greatly to my toolkit and experience: MS&E 135 (Networks), MS&E 250A (Engineering Risk Analysis), and MS&E 355 (Influence Diagrams and Probabilistic Networks). In addition to these, I have decided that I will sharpen my skills in R, MATLAB, Python, Java, and C++ between now and March 2020. Then in Spring I want to devote time to adding Julia to my skillset. I am in the process of securing a data science internship for Summer 2020. I am done grieving for my mother's life. It is time I live mine. I am grateful for all the people who have been there for me all along as I have tried to make sense of this loss. It is because of you that I start this new era with a Stanford degree in the bag, another one in the works, and a great social network that will carry me through any of life's challenges. This is for you, but this is also for my resilient spirit that even at its lowest of lows, has not given up.