Becoming…

Hi everyone! Day 4 of the challenge, yet today’s prompt is the most difficult one. I do not even know where to start from but I am here to take up the challenge, I mean I guess🤷🏽‍♀️. Nobody said it would be easy after all.

Lauren Mugabo Inkingi is a young Rwandan girl, a tech nerd, your very opinionated friend, wannabe writer and the person that smiles the most in the room.

At my youngest age, I was a very inquisitive sometimes borderline annoying. I was always trying to understand the WHYs and HOWs of everything going on around me. This curiosity worked a lot in my favour considering I was the youngest one in the family and actually the youngest of my extended family back then.

Being significantly younger than everyone in my home, I had to be creative with games and entertaining myself and that’s how my imagination really did the sport. When tired of my well tailored role-play games, I also enjoyed solo games but also spent time having conversations with everyone literally. I used to seat at our gate and just engage in conversations with passerby’s thinking of it I risked my life every afternoon between 4 and 6 pm. But hey; here I am safe and sound and also I earned an extra skill conversation(something loners in my category fail at).

My biggest struggle was and pretty is still is(we are working on breaking the vice) “likability“. I do not know what it really is rooted into but also as an always smiling person and coupled up with my conversation skills I kind of always achieved that. At least to a certain extent

Then came my teens, remember that conversation guru? Well, she sort of left this body. There I was a yellow quiet ball(yes, ball, I was a chubby child but I am not ready to unpack that yet). But with an imagination that was always ahead of its time. I had to find a way out and also it was the rise of social media so… I started writing. Whenever I look at my Facebook, I wonder who is that girl?

But somethings stayed constant, the smile no matter how bad things would get I wore it. Some people might think I almost never get sad. But honestly, I simply love being happy.

Thank God we outgrow our teens. I do not know how I would have survived college honestly. Today I hold conversations as a way to self medicate because well life is not always kind but we smile.

I believe I am still a work in progress and I face life every day like there is no tomorrow. Writing always feels like a challenge but it also gave me a voice.

The journey to becoming me is not over yet but is full every day.