Every year, around my birthday, I choose a word to carry into the year ahead. It is a small ritual,  less a resolution than a question: how do I want to inhabit the year that is coming? This year, the word took longer to find. Perhaps because I have reached a point where there is no shortage of possibility. There are ideas, invitations, institutions, rooms to enter, things to build. The question is no longer simply, “What can I do?” It is becoming a harder one: what is worth doing? So this year, my word is

I have lived a fairly public life, but I have never been a particularly public person. There is a distinction between the two. People may know my work, the institutions I am part of, the places I speak at, and the ideas I write about. They probably do not know me very well. That has been intentional. I have always shared ideas more readily than I share myself. A public presence can be carefully curated without being inauthentic: there are parts of a life that belong in public, and parts that do not.

Still, as my public life has grown, I have become more conscious of what it means for other people, particularly young women, to see only its visible parts. Spending a week with the Young Women’s Justice and Legal Immersion (JALI) fellows recently brought this into focus. Listening to Isatou Dabo (Executive Director, National Agency against Trafficking in Persons )— someone I grew up with in the activism space — share how she stays grounded and being in conversation with so many other women, I kept coming back to a simple truth: they don’t need to see a finished life. They need to see a life still being chosen.

Much of my life has been spent moving between worlds: The Gambia and the rest of the world; Africa and its diaspora; scholarship and practice; universities and public institutions. I have learned to become comfortable in spaces that were not necessarily designed with someone like me in mind. And I have learned that being in the room is only the beginning. What matters is what you do with the room. Sometimes that means speaking. Sometimes it means listening carefully enough to understand what is not being said. Sometimes it means bringing someone else into the room. And sometimes it means deciding that the room itself needs to change.

I am interested not only in participating in institutions, but in building them. Not only in studying questions of law, politics, justice, and human rights, but in creating spaces where those questions can be explored differently. That bridge-building has become one of the quiet threads connecting much of what I do: linking women of African descent in the diaspora to the continent, most recently through a co-authored article in the African Human Rights Yearbook on pan-African feminist reimagining of reparations and creating possibilities for others to cross those same boundaries.

But being visible in these spaces is complicated, particularly as a woman. There is a strange tension in being young enough to still be becoming, while being established enough that people have already formed an idea of who you are. The visible life can look remarkably finished: the titles, the books, the meetings, the photographs. What it does not show are the uncertainties, the ordinary days, the decisions about what to pursue and what to decline. It does not show how often a person is still figuring things out.

I think about this when young women reach out to me. Sometimes they ask for advice. Sometimes they simply tell me that seeing someone from where they come from in certain spaces makes a particular future feel possible. I take that seriously. Not because I have figured everything out, but because I know what it means to need evidence that something is possible before you can imagine it for yourself. Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of visibility: not to present perfection, but to make possibility visible.

That also requires honesty about ambition. I have always been ambitious. I want to learn, to build, to contribute, to be of service. I do not want to make that ambition smaller as I get older. But I am increasingly interested in making it more precise.

Which work is truly mine to do?
Which opportunities matter?
What do I want to be known for, and what am I willing to remain unknown for?
What does it mean to build a life that is ambitious without becoming consumed by ambition?

Discernment, I am beginning to think, is knowing the difference between an opportunity and an obligation. Between visibility and influence. Between being busy and being of service. Between a door opening and a door you actually want to walk through. This year, I have started saying no to rooms I would once have rushed to enter.

It is also accepting the long horizon. There are things I still want to do that will take years. There are books I may not yet be ready to write and institutions that will require patience to build. I do not need everything to happen now. Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of getting older: realizing that a life does not have to be rushed in order to be ambitious.

So, this year, I am choosing carefully. Not because I want less, but because I want what I give my life to matter.

I know there are rooms I have not yet entered and conversations I have not yet had. I know there are younger women who will come behind me, just as there were women whose paths made mine easier to imagine. And I know that whatever comes next, I want to remain rooted in the things that have always mattered: where I come from, the people who made me, the questions that have shaped my scholarship, and the belief that institutions and knowledge should ultimately ensure that people live a life of dignity.