The Pursuit Of Light.

It is sobering to imagine that all of life as we know it builds up to that one moment when we die. Yet, before that final moment there are countless smaller arrivals and departures that shape who we are.

I came into the world on an autumn evening in 1986. My mother tells me about the night before my birth, how she bled and felt uneasy, sensing that one of us was in distress. My father, a consultant, called a colleague and by dawn drove through the mist to William Harvey Hospital in Ashford. Placenta previa, the doctors said. My brother arrived blue and fragile, taken to intensive care. I stayed with my mother. Three months later she carried us onto a plane bound for Nigeria with my father and my older brother. A new exciting world already mapped for us.

From the start there has been a voice that has never left me. It is not my own. It has always been there, a presence that has kept me safe. The presence of God. It has taught me that God is both darkness and light. Psalm 139 is my favourite psalm because it tells me there is nowhere I can go where He is not. Even in the deepest darkness His hand will guide me.

As I grew, my names shifted like borders redrawn on an invisible map. At nine my parents decided they had made a mistake with the names they first gave me. Edugwu Catherine was gone. Christine Acheini appeared. Yet the child underneath remained the same. I was the fat girl with the glasses, the bad hair, the bad skin. I disappeared into the background while everyone loved my twin. At ten I weighed thirty-nine kilograms and I wondered why beauty seemed to pass me by.

The first light I ever caught was through my voice. People noticed me when I sang. The sting came when someone said I was not as beautiful as the sound I made, but I kept singing. It was the only thing that lifted me above the background and the only thing that felt like home.

In 2007 I won the MTN Talent Hunt, almost absent mindedly completing my first degree at the University of Jos at the same time. I was seeking validation, chasing affection through bad choices, trying to draw a straight line through the maze of family obligations, fickle friends and imagined lovers. There were chances at marriage that slipped away yet I carry no regret.

My parents, ever protective, decided I should return to England. Perhaps I could begin again, since life in Nigeria seemed to spit me out at every turn. At Northumbria University I earned a commendation, performed, wrote more songs, and continued my pattern of mistakes. Then came the brick wall. A failed British passport application kept me in limbo for years. I could not work. I could not move forward. I could have returned to Nigeria, but in my heart I knew I should not. The dreams and strange encounters that had brought me here would not let me abandon the journey.

Christine was lost once more. Asylum threw me back into the identity of Catherine Edugwu and together we became a restless army of doubts, insecurities, anger and self sabotage. I sometimes wonder if any of it mattered.

When my father died in March 2021 I could not bring myself to travel home and say goodbye. By August the grief had settled in my body as cancer. Chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a bone marrow transplant. I watched the scaffolding of my dreams collapse. Out of shame I erased myself from social media and tried to survive. Through every needle and every night of pain the presence of God remained. Psalm 139 played like a heartbeat. Even the darkness will not be dark to You. The night will shine like the day.

Four years have passed since then. The storm has receded. The cancer has gone quiet and recovery is underway. I sing again. I write again. I play the guitar that once saved me. And though the record of my names is legally long, I answer most simply to Cathy.

I carry many maps inside me: maps of birth, of name changes, of songs, of grief, of hospitals, of silence, of return. All of them point toward the same horizon. The pursuit of light.

I pray that at the end of this long and complicated journey I will be met by the blinding light of God. I pray that He will congratulate me on a life well lived, no matter how tangled the map seems.

Not all of life builds up to death. Sometimes it builds up to the courage to live again.