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03:00 am-ish, in the mystical land of Q and A that is Quora:

Why do you stop asking questions as you grow up and start answering them?

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Jade Yaa Kankam-Nantwi:

Maybe as you start to understand things, you are capable of imparting knowledge yourself so you answer more questions.

Do you really stop asking questions though? I mean you just asked one right now. I think if anything, maybe you start asking less questions and answering more because your knowledge base has expanded, but on second thought, I haven’t started asking less questions as I get older. I think that we ask questions to gain understanding, and as I get older, I’m still confused and I don’t know everything that I want to. I’ve just been asking different questions; harder questions, thoughtful questions, some that even that don’t necessarily need to be answered but that I want to hear people’s opinion on etc.

I’ve just stopped asking my parents as much and started looking for the answers myself in different ways (e.g I’m on Quora right now). Can you relate?

Written 2h ago. Edit

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Today I answered my first question on Quora. I love Quora. Like, really really love Quora (Almost as much as I love using parentheses). It’s like the love child of Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers and apparently that is very much my type. Answering this question got me thinking, which turned into a late night twitter ramble which I have now turned into a longer late night/early morning blog post.

I recently got back from my hometown, Takoradi.  Here, look at how pretty it is :

Note: Well, this is actually Cape Coast, a coastal town on the way to Takoradi – famous for its slave castles, fishing villages, and surprise, Surfing.  Technically Cape Coast should be my hometown, but my family migrated to Takoradi about 30 years ago.

I hadn’t seen this in over 5 years and despite how beautiful it is, I wasn’t sure how I felt to be seeing it again. A port city in the western region, it recently became very industrialized after a massive discovery of oil, but for me nothing ever really changed, just aged; My grandma’s house is exactly the same, from Baba, the gateman who taught me how to use a catapult when I was 4, to the playstation 2 that I used to play Dragon Ball Z on with my uncle. The princess stickers my sister and I stuck on our walls haven’t fallen off, our swingset is still upright, even the furniture is the same but seems a lot smaller now and the compound itself, once a place filled with endless possibilities, has lost its magic. Simply put, it was weird going back to Takoradi. Accra, the capital city of Ghana and where I do most of my living (my boarding school is in a different city), is constantly on the move. I mean, we even have geotags on snapchat now so it’s safe to say we’ve made it. I couldn’t come home on exeat without seeing a new building in construction or hear about a mall that just opened up. It keeps it moving and thus you are completely oblivious to the passing of time but when nothing had changed in Takoradi but me, I realized just how much had happened from when I first lived there.

Last month I graduated from high school. *Cue #NaeNae* Technically, school ended the day my final exams did, but it wasn’t official up until I was clutching my diploma in one hand and desperately trying to fit all my friends into a single selfie with the other. I’ve been to 4 schools since I left Takoradi, in 2 different countries and I know it’s super cheesy, but I am really nervous about leaving my niche. As exciting as traveling 4,983 miles to go to my dream school is, it’s also kinda scary. What will it be like? Will I still be friends with my high school group? Am I really not going to eat Ghanaian food for months? How much am I going to change? And more importantly, how does one do ‘winter’?  There are loads of questions in my mind (but really, the last one is very important) and I hadn’t thought of them until now. I also hadn’t thought of how different I was from who I was before I started high school. I could never have imagined that the people I met and the classes I took, would have had so much of an impact on me. I will always appreciate the heated debates over feminism and a ‘woman’s place’ in English class, thinking about religion objectively in Theory of Knowledge and  learning African history in History HL - even the subsequent mini teenage identity crisis (Long story, but I learnt a lot.) Over the four years I formed opinions only to be exposed to new ideas and then have to re-think them all over again. I began to use my voice more, whether it was on stage for speech and debate or during the late night sessions in the dorms on anything from discussing whether sexism is ingrained in Ghanaian culture to movie and pizza nights. It definitely wasn’t all great; there were also hard lessons like how you can give your all and still not succeed (but you still have to keep trying) or how sometimes you drift away from friends you’ve had for years (and that’s okay.) Collectively, this all contributed to my growth in subtle ways.  

High school was really an experience and while I did answer questions more, I still have a lot of asking to do.  As I grow, I’m starting to say ‘when I grow up I want to…’ less and  ‘How can I…now?’ more.  I’ve also started to realize just how normal and clueless ‘adults’ can be, much like us. I always thought that by the time I was 18, I’d be so grown and cooooool and I’d get a car and move out and all of the things I’m not doing and don’t have. But now, I’ve been 18 for about 5 months and I’m still clueless, albeit about different things.

When we were small, our parents and adults in general were superheroes – they could do anything and they were literally like piggy banks for knowledge.  Yet now, my mum and dad are no longer eligible for the justice league (well they could still get weekend passes because parents are very awesome in their own superhero-y way, but not in the way I once thought) and I am starting to figure things out on my own. I have 3 little sisters and the smallest one, Ewura just recently turned 5. The one before her is 9 and so they are both in the ‘why is the sky blue and not yellow like the sun?’ kinda question phase and I always try and answer their questions to the best of my ability. I find it interesting how now I’m their ‘superhero with the knowledge’ because I’m ‘old’, when I’m also still looking for answers to things.

That Quora user had got me thinking not only about how much I have grown personally, but also about how much I am yet to grow. I don’t expect college to have all the answers like it usually does in the movies, in fact quite the opposite. I look forward to getting un-confused and more confused at the same time, having my views challenged and seeing perspectives I’d never thought of.  I don’t know who I will be in four years or how different I will be from who I am now, and that excites me.