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I am thirty-seven years old, childless by circumstance and by choice. I’m still learning how to name it. I live in a small rural town where the road thins into red dust and silence arrives before evening. Here, the days move at a pace that resists urgency. If you had asked me five years ago what my life would look like now, I would have described a different geography entirely; an apartment in Nairobi with a view I barely noticed, a job that sounded impressive at family gatherings, weekends measured in brunches and traffic and exhaustion.
I would not have mentioned this place, where the nights are loud with crickets and the morning smells like damp soil, because back then I believed healing was something you did privately, efficiently, without disrupting your life. I did not yet understand that sometimes the only way to survive is to leave.
Growing up, we were told we were the generation of promise. The future shimmered with possibility, a glittering horizon towards which we should march with discipline and ambition. Work hard, they said, and the world would open up to you. Study diligently, and opportunities would greet you. Cultivate your emotional intelligence, and your relationships would bloom into something strong and lasting.
What no one ever said plainly but what we absorbed early was that being average carried a quiet kind of shame. In school, encouragement came wrapped in warning, you can do better, you have so much potential, phrases that sounded generous but implied risk. To be ordinary was to flirt with invisibility. Many of us learned, long before adulthood, that distinction was not just admirable, it was necessary. Burnout felt preferable to stagnation. Ambition became less about desire and more about defence, a way of outrunning the fear that a life without markers of success might not be taken seriously at all.
We believed it because belief was expected of us, optimism was our inheritance. We envisioned an adulthood shaped by progress, a stable career, a loving partner, a home purchased or built through responsibility and hard work. We imagined a society where institutions still knew how to function, where the public sphere still felt safe, where the future still felt negotiable.
But that’s not the adult life my generation walked into.
Instead, as we stepped into adulthood, the ground softened beneath our feet and quietly gave way. The institutions that once held people up – education, healthcare, employment, governance – were fraying at the edges. Crises arrived one after another, each one declared “unprecedented” until unprecedented became routine. Our emotional lives became collateral damage in a world that kept shaking. We internalized the instability until it became the texture of our daily experience. We entered our thirties carrying anxieties that never quite settled, questions that never found answers, and a kind of exhaustion that sleep could not touch.
I was raised to believe that exhaustion was a temporary tax on success, that if I just endured long enough, stability would eventually arrive. So, I endured. I ignored the numbness, the growing sense that my life was happening not quite inside me, but somewhere adjacent to me. I learned to perform functionality while quietly unravelling.
The turning point came quietly. Months later, I would recognize it for what it was. I lost my job, not because of poor performance, but because the company was restructuring again. I had survived earlier rounds of layoffs. This time, I didn’t.
The human resource manager called me into her office, clicked through a script she had clearly practised a hundred times, and thanked me for “my contributions”. It was over in seven minutes. Seven minutes to dismantle almost a decade of loyalty, ambition, and carefully constructed identity.
I remember the walk back to my desk more clearly than the conversation itself. Everything looked the same, screens glowing, colleagues hunched in concentration, but I moved through the office as if something essential had shifted out of place. In the evening, I packed my things slowly, trying not to attract attention, as though loss were something best handled discreetly. That evening, as I rode home in silence, watching the city slide past the window, I began rehearsing explanations I was not ready to give. By nightfall, the shock had settled into something heavier, the realization that a life I had organized myself around could disappear without warning, without ceremony, without meaning. It was not only the job I lost. It was the belief that loyalty and effort offered protection.
Leaving Nairobi felt like failure at first. In our culture, movement is usually in one direction, from rural to urban, from small towns to cities. Progress has a geography, and I was moving against it. Going back felt like regression. Friends were polite but confused. Some were openly sceptical.
“What will you do there?” they asked, as if healing required a job description.
Even my own voice echoed their doubts. I worried about money, about relevance, about becoming invisible. I still do, though less now. Beneath the fear was a quieter instinct telling me that staying would cost me more than leaving ever could.
So I packed my life into boxes and moved to Voi. The first weeks were disorienting. The silence felt accusatory. Without traffic and deadlines, my thoughts grew louder. I slept for long stretches and still woke up heavy. Healing, I learned quickly, is not relief; it is unlearning. I had to confront how much of my identity was tied to productivity, and how little I knew myself outside of it.
I found myself single at thirty-five, jobless, drifting through a world that seemed determined to remind me how far I had fallen from the life I once imagined.
And yet, my story was not unique.
Everywhere I turned, friends and acquaintances were experiencing the same midlife unravelling disguised as “transition”. The same exhaustion hidden behind phrases like, “I’m just figuring things out or I’m taking it day by day.” We all say the same things. We all know they are lies.
Last October, I met a friend, Sally, who had once been the most hopeful person I knew. In our early twenties, she spoke of the future with a kind of ferocity: plans, timelines, an almost religious faith in upward mobility. When we met again at a small restaurant, she looked the same, but her voice carried a weight I could not miss.
Sally had recently finalised a divorce. “It wasn’t infidelity,” she said. “It wasn’t abuse. It was the exhaustion. We were drowning in bills, pressure, fear. We stopped being people. We became problems for each other to solve. And when the money got tighter, the love got thinner.” She paused, then added, “Do you know how embarrassing it is to realise your marriage did not fail for a dramatic reason? Just the quiet grind of surviving and performing.”
I had heard variations of that same confession. Relationships collapsing under financial strain. Friendships fading as everyone retreated into survival mode. People postponing having children because they couldn’t imagine raising them in an economy where every month felt like a gamble.
Our emotional landscape is littered with small, silent heartbreaks, some spoken, most swallowed. We are ageing into disillusionment, carrying the debris of a generation promised much and handed little.
For women, this uncertainty carries an added, unspoken scrutiny. We are encouraged to be educated, capable, and self-sufficient, yet our lives are still quietly assessed for signs of relational completion. Marriage reassures. Motherhood settles people. When those markers are missing, curiosity turns into concern, and concern into gentle, persistent questioning. There is little room to admit fatigue without it being interpreted as weakness, or mismanagement, or regret. To exist outside the expected arc of womanhood, especially in midlife, is to keep explaining oneself, to insist that a life still unfolding is not a problem to be solved.
I am ageing into midlife without the usual anchors that once defined it. Home ownership, once a rite of passage, is now a distant fantasy for many. Stable careers have been replaced by contract work, gig jobs, or positions that pay less than the cost of existing. Retirement savings are sparse. Healthcare is fragile. Communities are fractured. And relationships – romantic, platonic, familial – are strained under the weight of cumulative exhaustion. Our generation is drifting into its forties with fewer assets, fewer children, fewer safety nets, and more uncertainty, than any generation in recent history.
We did what we were told. We studied hard, chased careers, stayed adaptable, and still found ourselves anxious, underpaid, and unsure. We are grieving futures we planned for sincerely. That grief does not always look like tears. Sometimes it looks like numbness. Sometimes irritability. Sometimes we joke about the deep fatigue because it feels safer than admitting how disappointed we are.
It’s not that we failed to reach the milestones. It’s that the milestones moved.
My parents built their house in their thirties. Most of us rent. We talk about investments the way our parents talked about vacations imagined – distant, reserved for people with more stability than we have ever known. Midlife is supposed to be a period of consolidation. For us, it feels like a second adolescence: messy, uncertain, unfinished.
Like adolescence, this stage is marked by instability without instruction. We are learning boundaries later than expected, discovering limits we were never taught to respect. Financial dependence returns in uncomfortable forms; shared housing, family support, deferred plans, arrangements that feel like regression rather than adaptation. Emotions sit closer to the surface, less buffered by the confidence we once performed so convincingly. There is shame in this unravelling, in needing time and care at an age meant for consolidation. Unlike our first adolescence, there is no cultural patience for our uncertainty. We are expected to arrive fully formed, quietly resilient, and grateful for whatever remains. This second adolescence is lonelier, heavier, and lived under the constant suspicion that we are already behind.
If you ask a millennial how they are doing, the answer you will likely get if they are being honest is, “I’m tired.” The existential kind. The tiredness that comes from years of precarity, overwork, and instability. Therapy has become our religion. Self-care, our survival strategy.
But beneath the language of healing is a quieter truth; we are worn out because we have lived through too many transitions, too many crises, and too few moments of rest. The emotional cost of being a millennial is not a footnote, it is the defining feature of our adulthood.
Being thirty-seven without children is its own complicated terrain. In Kenya, womanhood is often measured by marriage and motherhood, milestones accompanied by relentless questioning. Even now, people ask gently but persistently, “So, when?”
I don’t have a neat answer. Part of me grieves what I may be postponing. Another part is relieved not to carry the weight of caring for others while still learning how to care for myself. Depression taught me humility. It stripped away the illusion that I could will myself into wellness or outwork pain.
Out here, away from the noise, I have space to feel grief without judgment. I mourn the version of myself that believed clarity would arrive with age. I mourn relationships that did not survive the pressure of becoming adults in a hard economy. I mourn the certainty that life would eventually settle.
But grief and gratitude can coexist. I am grateful for mornings that do not demand too much. For conversations that linger. For the chance to rebuild my mental health without pretending it is a side project.
Healing has not been linear. Some days I feel light, almost hopeful. Other days the heaviness returns without warning. The difference now is that I don’t panic when it does. I have learned that depression is not a personal failure.
I don’t know what the next decade holds. I don’t know if I will return to the city, or if love and family will find me here or somewhere else entirely. What I know is that this pause, this deliberate step off the expected path, has saved me.
At thirty-seven, I am still becoming. That no longer frightens me. It feels like permission to choose health over hustle, presence over performance, honesty over appearances. I came here to heal from depression, but what I am really healing from is the belief that my worth is tied to how closely my life resembles the script I was handed.
Out where the road ends and the days stretch open, I am learning to breathe again.
In the ruins of the promises I was raised on, I am learning to hope differently; quietly, cautiously, and on my own terms. It is a fragile hope, one that does not deny the bleakness of the present, but insists, nonetheless, on trying again.
