After the Uniform

The first morning I woke up without school, I still reached for my alarm.

I opened my eyes, stared at the ceiling for a few seconds and wondered why the room felt different. Then I remembered. There was no assembly. No teacher waiting at the gate. No morning rush to find a clean shirt. No reason to search for the school sandals I had probably kicked underneath the bed the night before.

I turned over and went back to sleep.

When I woke again, it was almost nine.

My mother was already outside.

“You’re still sleeping?”

I sat up.

“What time is it?”

She looked at me.

“Almost nine.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“I don’t have school.”

“I know.”

She walked away, then called back from the doorway.

“Since you don’t have school, you can help me with the water.”

That was my first lesson about adulthood.

Finishing school did not mean life suddenly became easier.

It only meant the things you had been complaining about were replaced with different things.

For the first few weeks, I enjoyed the freedom.

I could wake up whenever I wanted. I could spend hours drawing, experimenting with whatever I found around the house, listening to music, or simply sitting somewhere with my thoughts. I had imagined this period of my life many times while I was still in school. I thought I would finally have time to figure myself out.

Instead, I discovered that having time and knowing what to do with it were two very different things.

People began asking questions.

“So, what next?”

It was always the same question.

Neighbours asked.

Relatives asked.

Family friends asked.

Sometimes they asked my mother instead of me.

“What does he want to study?”

“Has he applied anywhere?”

“Is he working?”

“What’s his plan?”

I hated the word plan.

I didn’t have one.

I had interests.

That was different.

I still wanted to build things. I still wanted to learn about electronics. I was drawing more. I was becoming increasingly interested in music. I had started wondering about computers and everything they could do. I had ideas for businesses I couldn’t afford to start and inventions I didn’t have the equipment to build.

Everything was scattered across my head.

Meanwhile, the adults around me were waiting for something more practical.

One afternoon, my mother sat beside me while I was repairing a small radio.

“You need to find something to do.”

“I’m doing something.”

She looked at the radio in my hands.

“I mean something that brings money.”

I didn’t answer.

She wasn’t trying to discourage me. She was worried.

There was a difference.

Money was becoming a subject I couldn’t ignore.

School had always provided a structure. Now that it was gone, I had to figure out how to contribute at home while still trying to figure out what I wanted from my own life.

My first job came through someone my family knew.

It wasn’t glamorous.

I didn’t expect it to be.

I was grateful to have it.

I remember my first morning there because I spent almost the entire journey wondering whether I was making the right decision.

The workplace was small and busy. People moved around constantly, carrying things from one place to another, answering customers, cleaning, arranging supplies and trying to finish whatever needed to be finished before closing time.

I learned quickly that work was different from school.

Nobody cared how intelligent you were.

If you were told to do something, you did it.

If you made a mistake, someone noticed.

If you arrived late, there was no excuse involving traffic, homework or a forgotten assignment.

You were simply late.

The first few days exhausted me.

I came home, ate and slept.

After a while, my body adjusted.

Then I began noticing things.

I watched how people dealt with customers. I watched how money moved. I noticed which workers were trusted with certain responsibilities and which ones weren’t. I noticed how quickly some people solved problems and how easily others became frustrated.

I was learning even when nobody was teaching me.

That became a habit throughout the jobs that followed.

I didn’t stay in that first job forever.

There were reasons.

Some were financial.

Some were personal.

Some had to do with opportunity.

I moved from one place to another, and every new job showed me a different side of life.

There were days I enjoyed the work.

There were days I wanted to quit halfway through the morning.

There were days I came home too tired to touch any of my projects.

That part hurt the most.

I had always been used to having something in my hands.

A pencil.

A screwdriver.

A piece of cardboard.

A notebook.

Now, after spending hours working, I sometimes had just enough energy to eat and sleep.

Still, I kept my little collection of things.

The wires remained.

The old components remained.

My drawings remained.

The notebooks slowly filled with ideas.

Whenever I had a free afternoon, I returned to them.

One evening, I found the old drawing of the girl I had liked in secondary school.

I had forgotten it was there.

I stared at it for a long time.

A lot had changed since I drew it.

I had changed.

The feeling wasn’t completely gone, though it had become quieter. It no longer occupied my thoughts every day. Sometimes I could remember the rejection without feeling that familiar heaviness in my chest.

I closed the notebook and put it away.

There were other things to think about now.

Work.

Money.

School.

The future.

My own direction.

I had started hearing about people who were learning things online and making money with computers. Some were designing websites. Some were programming. Others were making graphics and editing videos.

The idea stayed with me.

Computers had always interested me, but from a distance. I didn’t own one. I couldn’t simply sit down and experiment whenever I wanted.

Still, the more I heard about technology, the more curious I became.

One afternoon, while I was at work, I watched someone type code into a computer.

I couldn’t understand a single line.

It looked like another language.

The screen was filled with strange symbols, words and brackets.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Building a website.”

I moved closer.

“With this?”

He laughed.

“Yes.”

I stared at the screen.

A website.

Something that people could see from anywhere.

Something built with lines of text.

I had spent years building things out of cardboard, wood, wires and whatever else I could find.

Now I was looking at a different kind of building.

One made entirely from instructions.

I wanted to try it.

There was only one problem.

I didn’t have a computer.

For the first time in a long while, I felt that familiar frustration again.

I had found something I wanted badly.

And once again, I didn’t have the tools.

That night, I lay on my bed thinking about the screen I had seen.

I kept remembering the lines of code.

I didn’t know what they meant.

I didn’t know where to start.

I didn’t even know whether someone like me could learn programming without owning a computer.

But I had learned something about myself over the years.

Whenever I couldn’t reach something directly, I started looking for another way.

And somewhere in my room, beside the old notebooks and the collection of things I refused to throw away, was a device I had never considered a serious tool for building anything.

My phone.

I picked it up.

Then I started searching.