Non-Fiction by nanama boatemaa acheampong

PART I

She said it the night before I left for university, as if it were a warning and not an accusation.

“I don’t want you to turn out like me.”

She was in the kitchen, the light too bright, too white, for the hour, her anger arriving quickly, and
without a cause I could see. My father had come by to leave money for school; he stood near the door, already half gone. I was sitting at the dining table with my younger brother, aware that nothing I knew explained what was happening, aware enough still to answer honestly.

“I…won’t.”

And that was when the sentence turned, when she asked if she should be ashamed of me.

Nothing in my life had yet happened to justify the weight of what she was placing on it. I didn’t know then that this would become a refrain I’d live inside, a line I’d keep returning to, not because it explained her, but because it never stopped asking something of me.

Years later, the sentence still meets me in quieter places. It surfaces when I think about marriage and hesitate, when I imagine children and inventory the cost of having them, when I measure my ambition against the life my mother lived and wonder which parts of it were chosen and which she endured. I think about her life as a parallel draft. Her marriage, heavy with loneliness and starved of real support. The way child-rearing fell to her and then, in many ways, to me. The different careers that never fully took shape and were borne out of necessity. I examine my life the way I imagine she might have examined hers, only hers was too late and without witnesses. I am like her in ways I can’t deny, and unlike her in ways I’m still testing.

The sentence, “I don’t want you to turn out like me,” follows me because I’m still trying to decide
what, exactly, she was asking me not to be.

She had warned me before, though I didn’t recognize it as the same sentence then. Once, while we were walking through our estate when I was about 12 years old, I said I couldn’t wait to have children.

It was an ordinary hope, spoken without any urgency or real thought. She stopped walking abruptly, let go of my hand, and launched into a lecture so sudden it felt rehearsed—was sex all I thought about? sex becomes boring, marriage and responsibility give you no energy for anything else, one day you won’t even want it anymore.

I remember looking at the Sakumono road ahead of us, its surface more pothole than road, feeling embarrassed and ashamed and wishing I had kept my mouth shut. I went quiet, trying and failing to locate myself in what she was saying, confused about what it all meant. I hadn’t been thinking about sex at all. I was just a kid with a kid mind saying kid things. What startled me wasn’t the content of her warning but its direction: my childlike desire arriving in her as something already exhausted, already regretted, as if the life ahead of me had reached her too late.

In my first year of university, the warnings grew stranger. She called me once, screaming that she had seen me in a dream, promiscuous, reckless, beyond herself with certainty even as I tried to correct her. She spoke as if she were reporting fact, not projected vision. I listened and tried to locate myself inside her conviction. She sounded so sure that for a while afterward, I wondered if my body had learned to move without me, if it woke while my mind slept and went on to do unspeakable things alone. I asked my closest friends if they had seen me at odd hours, checked the outlines of my days for evidence I’d misplaced. Everyone said no. Still, I lived for a time with the idea that if my mother was so convinced of her dream to scold me for it, perhaps I was divided, and some part of me was already behaving in ways I could not remember, or forgive, or name. It was terrifying to live this way.

We would later learn that my mother was bipolar, a word that arrived with the promise of clarity
and failed to keep it. Sure, for her family it explained her volatility, but little else. It explained the
way her fears could claim knowledge of me before I had any, but it did not return to me what I had already lost. By the time the diagnosis came, its effects were already woven into our daily life: into how we spoke to one another, into how I never knew which version of her I was getting.

Would it be the mother who kissed me goodnight, or the one who looked at me as if I were a stranger? The word helped my family name what we were seeing, but it could not reach back in time to soften what had already taken root in me. I had already learned to brace myself.

By then, I had learned to meet my own curiosity with suspicion. As a teenager at university, my
limited sexual exploration was threaded with guilt and shame, guided less by desire than by my
constant vigilance. I censored my sensuality before I got to know it, mistaking my restraint for
safety. Childhood experiences—unwelcome and unnamed at the time—had already taught me that the body could be a site of danger as much as discovery. My mother’s warnings didn’t create that fear, but they gave it language and authority. The diagnosis accounted for her mind, but it did nothing to undo the careful distance I had learned to keep from my own life.

My mother’s presence did not only bring fear. There were other moments. She could pull a crowd with her dancing, command attention without asking for it. People watched her light up a space, and I watched them watch her. Her laughter could be enormous, her wit, sharp and magnetic. In those moments she seemed to inhabit herself fully, as if nothing were leaking out of her life. In others, her words landed with the force of a slap, sudden and disorienting. I grew quieter under her constant surveillance. I think the reason I live such an examined life is part trauma, part inheritance.

Her life was both cautionary tale and unfinished question. She left that question with me, and it has walked beside me ever since.

PART II

I did not become ambivalent all at once. It happened slowly, without my noticing, as I moved into
young adulthood. At university, newly unobserved, I found that the reckless abandon I had feared never arrived. I lived carefully and sensibly. I stayed mostly in my hostel, in my room, reading. I didn’t venture far into campus life or off campus at all. My upbringing had been sheltered, and my mother’s refrain echoed loudly enough that freedom felt less like an opening than a risk. I kept myself small and safe and intact.

That instinct showed itself first in me, in intimacy. When I started university, I met a boy, and
gradually, he became my boyfriend. I remember feeling genuinely happy to be with him. I liked
having my own person, enjoyed the rhythm we created together. I planned Valentine’s Day gifts
as excitement bloomed in my chest. I was in love. We spent nearly all our time together—talking, laughing, eating, napping— separating only to shower and go to class. And then, without warning, something in me began to resist him. The feeling was physical and immediate. A tightening in my chest that would not go away. I felt stifled. Imprisoned. I asked him for space, tried to explain that I needed to feel like myself again, that I wanted time apart so I could miss him. He nodded and left, only to come back a short time later to say that he couldn’t. I stayed a little longer, but my feelings had vanished, and the only way I could think to end my suffocation was to end things. And when I did, I felt euphoric, like a caged bird suddenly set free.

Weeks passed, and with the distance between us, my feelings for him returned, whole and convincing. I missed him. I thought of him often. I wanted him back and this confused me. But wanting him was easier than being with him.

After that, I developed crushes. There were a few boys I talked to, enjoying the early, low-stakes
back-and-forth. But the moment someone showed their interest too clearly—checked in too often, confessed their feelings, looked at me a certain way—something in me shut down. My feelings went away. I stopped replying. I let conversations thin out until they ended on their own. Each time, the same sensation followed: relief first, then curiosity, then the pattern unknowingly repeating itself. I discovered that I could daydream about having a boyfriend while remaining unable to stay close enough to actually have one.

I instead gravitated towards boys who did not ask much of me, who did not tell me how they felt.
Some of them were not good for me, but they were safe in a particular way. There was no fear of being engulfed, no demand to become someone else. I could remain near them without risk. I told myself I was happy being single, and in a sense, I was. Untethered, I felt most like myself. I did not examine it. I only knew that distance gave me safety.

The same logic governed how I thought about marriage and children. I decided early that neither was for me. I had watched my mother’s marriage, as she gave freely of herself and got little in return. I had watched what motherhood seemed to cost her: her time, her energy, her love of life. She belonged fully to her children and her husband – barely to herself, and the weight of responsibility depleted her. She loved us deeply, but love did not protect her from exhaustion or regret, which lived visibly in her posture. I did not want to become someone I no longer recognized. I did not think of marriage and children as future desires; I saw them as threats.

I framed these decisions intellectually. I told myself women should choose freely whether to marry or have children, and I believed that. I still do. But I also treated these futures as dangers to be avoided. If I didn’t marry, if I didn’t have children, I could not become my mother. Her refrain wrapped around me so tightly that I couldn’t see other realities as possible. My refusal felt like clarity, but it was also a containment. Over time, my hard no softened into a maybe, then retreated, then returned again.

The fear extended to my body. As a child, I was praised for being sensible, well-behaved, and
academically excellent. Beauty was not named. Femininity was not offered as a safe option. And so, intelligence became my proof of existence. It was the thing that protected me from erasure. I learned early that achievement and discipline made me visible at home, so I read every book, did every assignment, fought to be among the best in school. My clothes were chosen for me, and there was no room to experiment. When I arrived at university, I bought my first pair of skinny jeans. They were the tightest thing I’d ever worn, and even then, they barely hugged my thighs. Dressing myself made me deeply self-conscious. And so, I drowned my body in oversized clothes.

Compliments came, flirtation came, but the idea that I might be beautiful was foreign to me. What made more sense was that people liked my personality. My wit. Even now, that is where my mind goes first, as if attraction could not possibly be physical. The programming runs deep but I’m not angry at it. Without beauty organizing my sense of worth, I developed other parts of myself—my mind, my humour, my interior life. But I lived largely unseen, unsure how to inhabit my body fully without the fear of danger.

Looking back, I see the pattern clearly. Across love, ambition, beauty, and belonging. I learned to stay intact by staying contained. I kept multiple futures, multiple ways of being, alive in my head without stepping fully into any of them. I learned to pause. To want cautiously. And for a long time, it was the only way I knew how to remain myself.

PART III

Work was another place where I learned to stay contained. I wanted to be an artist, an actor, a writer. I wrote and acted in plays in school, at church. My parents indulged these ideas when they were harmless, when they belonged to my childhood. But when I tried to take them seriously, just before university, the door was closed and bolted. I was asked to think instead about becoming a lawyer. Something prestigious and concrete and impressive.

I did think about it. I imagined grand ambitions, the sure satisfaction of climbing a corporate ladder, of becoming someone whose success could not be questioned. In the end, I chose what felt safest: sociology. I liked it well enough, but I had no clear idea what to do with it. When university ended and real life began, panic set in. My sister wanted to be a doctor. My brother followed my father into IT, banking. I was the outlier. The one without a plan. The one who, it seemed, had failed to amount to anything.

For a long time, I weighed alternatives that were never really mine. Law school. An MBA. Geography. Economics. I wanted approval. I wanted to be reinstated into the smart kids club. I wanted to be seen as doing something worthwhile with my life. I tried hard to want those futures. I searched for jobs that would let me say: See, I’m brilliant after all. I moved through NGO work, bank jobs, other roles that drained me, all the while feeling like an imposter.

When I landed my first writing job, the feeling surprised me. I felt airborne. Writing came naturally; it always had. The interior world I had spent years cultivating finally had somewhere to go. And editors responded. My readers responded. Money came, real money, earned honestly. At home, my mother asked, incredulous, how writing could possibly count as work. And yet, she was happy to accept what it paid for.

Giving myself permission to write felt like freedom, but also like failure. I did not let myself become comfortable in it. I stayed open to the career that would restore me to good standing.For a time, I rejected the desire entirely. I wanted to be a writer, badly, but I hid even that hunger from myself. I told myself it was something to do until I landed a real job.

Around the same time, something else began to loosen. I can’t say exactly when I started to see
myself as beautiful, only that it happened in flashes. A look in the mirror followed by surprise,
disbelief. At first, I didn’t linger, in case it vanished, and often, it did. Beauty felt impermanent, like something that only existed while I was looking at it. I had grown up praised for being sensible and smart, for discipline and achievement. Beauty was not named. Intelligence had kept me visible, but I wasn’t sure what beauty would cost.

I wore dresses later than expected. Skirts too. I learned, slowly, what it felt like to move through
the world as a girl, then as a woman. I called myself a late bloomer. When I was younger, I walked rigidly, trying to take up as little space as possible, as if my existence was already too much attention.
Clothes had served as armour. Now, they became something else. Dresses got shorter, flirtier. I liked the shape of my legs. I discovered that I still loved oversized clothes, but no longer as protection. Now, as expression.

I gave myself permission to ask new questions: What did I like? What felt comfortable? What felt
exciting and good? What felt like me? I didn’t claim beauty out loud for a long time. I avoided
photographs. I worried about seeming vain, shallow, too much. But as I allowed myself more room, I realised something quite radical: leaning into beauty did not erase me. It made me more whole. I could be brilliant and beautiful. I could be both.

Love changed, too. I became more aware of my patterns, of where they came from. Therapy helped. Friendship helped. Having my worth reflected back to me helped. I understood, eventually, that I had been afraid of the very thing I wanted. I laid out my inheritance from my mother and sorted it carefully: what to keep, what to let go. The work isn’t finished, but it no longer consumes me. Self-trust has given me room to live without constant self-surveillance.

What feels different now isn’t the world, but my posture towards it. I am willing to consider desires that once felt impossible. Nanama the artist. Nanama the lover, the wife, the mother. None of these feel compulsory, but they no longer feel forbidden. Marriage and motherhood are not obligations; they are choices that I am now free to want.

As for ambition, what could be more ambitious than making something where nothing existed
before? Writing asks for my whole self. It is not an easy discipline. It is what I have chosen. And I notice that other forms of expression call to me now too, and I am curious enough to answer.

My mother’s life remains a cautionary tale. I still catch myself saying I wish she had had more —
more time, more space, more love, more permission, more joy. But instead of holding those wishes at a distance, I am stepping into more, stepping toward my own life. I am choosing expansion over the safety of smallness, even when it scares me. Permission feels like adventure in my body. Like possibility. Like forward motion. Slowly, if I must, but forward all the same.

PART IV

Recently, I was out with friends. The Accra air was cool, the music, for once, exactly my kind. It had already been a good night, and I felt pleased that, as a lifelong homebody, I had decided to come out at all. Something in me loosened. I felt it happen.

I danced alone for a long time, sensually, slowly, without self-consciousness. At first, the boldness surprised me. Who is this person? I asked. I noticed the curiosity on the faces of the people who had only ever known me as contained, careful, sensible. I watched myself as I moved— an old habit—but this time the watching didn’t interrupt me. It marvelled in the same way I used to marvel at my mother in the moments she was most alive.

I thought of her then—not as a warning, but in recognition. How she used to dance her way through a room, how people watched her light up a space, how alive she could be when she was fully there. I had learned to fear that aliveness once, to associate it with collapse, with volatility, with what came after. But standing there, moving to the music, I felt something else. Not repetition, but continuity. I was not becoming the her that saddened us both. I was becoming a better her. I was carrying forward what had survived her. The fire did not have to burn the house down to be real.

It was around this time that an old flame reappeared. We met in my final year at university, back
when my life was smaller and my rules were tighter. We were in the same hostel. We talked constantly, laughed freely, never quite crossed the lines people expect people as compatible as we seemed to be, to cross. What we had was charged, sustained by mutual attention rather than any declaration of feelings. He was calm in a way that steadied me. Real in a way that caught me off-guard. Funny, sharp, clever.

After university, our lives moved on but looped back in small ways. Messages here and there, jokes, flirty memes, the occasional check-ins. He didn’t disappear but he didn’t insist on anything. Over time, I noticed how rare that was. Not long after that night, he sent another meme. I don’t know what shifted, only that it did. I didn’t laugh it away this time. I let it land. I gave it my attention. What began to unfold was sensitive. It was hopeful. It asked:

“Is there something really here, like we thought all along?”

I want to give it the space to find out. The truth is, I want it to work out. I want him to be the last man I ever speak to romantically. I don’t know if that will be the story, but I know this: I am ready for a love that stays, a love that doesn’t disappear me, a love that doesn’t stunt my becoming, a love that doesn’t make me afraid of my mother’s refrain, and I am no longer afraid of wanting it.

The question my mother left me—how to live fully without being consumed— gave me fear. I don’t know if that was what she intended. Perhaps it was love. Perhaps it was her own regret, her own unfinished life speaking through her. I’ve speculated enough. What matters is I took her warning seriously. Too seriously. I went from being closely observed to closely observing myself as an adult, even when the conditions for freedom were finally mine.

Wondering who I might’ve been without her refrain is a tempting exercise, but ultimately a useless one. She gave me what she gave me, and my life is the evidence of what I’ve done with it. I once wondered whether she would be proud of me. Now, whether she is or not no longer governs me. I am proud of myself, and that has become enough.

I am so much like her. I took her entire face. Her beauty, her poise, her sense of style. When I say something the way she would’ve said it, when I move the way she moved, I feel a small thrill. When she died, I panicked at the thought that I might forget her—what she looked like, how she sounded. It seems absurd now. How can I forget the person I carry most deeply in my bones?

Life no longer feels dangerous. I know I don’t have total control, and that knowledge brings me peace. I am still allowing myself—my desires, my personality, my ambition—to unfold. I am learning to live with ambiguity, to welcome spontaneity. The refrain still walks beside me. It probably always will. But I am repurposing it. Befriending it. I am less afraid of repeating my mother’s mistakes, even as I remain attentive to them.

What story am I writing now? I don’t know. I’m not a fortune teller. Whatever it is, it’s my first draft. And while old habits mean I may still edit in the margins, I am learning, finally, to stop making myself smaller in advance.

Bio
nanama boatemaa acheampong is a Ghanaian writer based in Accra. Her work explores memory, inheritance, growth, and the language we search for to understand ourselves and the people who shaped us. Her recent essays appear in GAVI’s VaccineWorks and Global Citizen. She also shares short-form reflections and micro-essays on Threads.