Scribblings Of A Dramatic Introvert

 - a survivor's guide through recession The phrase is quite popular among young adults, denoting a time when we were much younger and wanted every snack by the roadside. The gala hawker would almost thrust a piece into your hands because of how much you kept staring at the well-stacked snacks in his brown carton. Ice cream followed closely, and on other days we just really wanted popcorn. Some of us took liberty into our own hands when we were handed over some little change of money to go about our days. For Sundays, we'd split the offering into two. One for the Lord, and the other half for our bellies. Oily puffpuff, and for me, I was obsessed with the ₦20 meatpie they sold at church gate. Yes, we were supposed to be good kids, but everything looked so tasty. When you blink your eyes at your mom, she raises a stern look, followed by "There's food at home". Sometimes we just go along with the flow, but some days, we threw tantrums, convinced our parents hated us. ...

  I don't want to be anything When I was a little girl, I wanted to become so many things. I wanted to be a journalist one time because Jiire Kola-Kuforiji looked like she was having a swell time reading the news on TV. She looked so confident in the information she was passing to the whole country and boy, did she not look so beautiful? A couple of weeks later, my mom had me on her legs in a bus as I watched the conductor count the money in his hand. A lot of notes. He was probably a millionaire, I thought to myself. Then, I decided that becoming a conductor wasn't going to be a bad idea. I got home and we turned everything we could find into a moving Danfo bus. Shouting "Owo e da" and holding a bunch of paper notes.  One day, I overheard the adults speaking and somewhere along the conversation, I realized I had been an idiot all the while. The real cash was in banking. There was a whole machine that counted money because they had so much money to count in one day! W...

  - I'm not just another statistic "My biggest dream is to get out of this small town which I have known all my life. I spent all my childhood living here in my grandfather's huge compound and the only times I got to leave was when we went into the neighbouring town on market days. You see, my family works on a large cassava farm. It's a plantation that belongs to a chief in our village, but for decades my family has taken pride in grooming the crops to finesse and ensuring the turnover is good. It was from this job that my grandfather made enough money which he used to start his own farm, and now it belongs to my father. Or rather, belonged. - The other news  We first heard it on the radio that they had invaded the neighbouring state and people fled with barely what was left of their lives, and it was absolutely terrifying. The Fulani herders are ruthless. That was when I was just eight years old; I remember hearing the story of how they opened up a pregnant woman an...

This is a selfhype rendition It was my birthday a couple of weeks back and I realised that I actually love myself more than I let on. So I'm doing this as a special dedication to the finest girl I've ever set my eyes on out there. Here's a note to myself, filled with words that I'd love to hear from time to time. Words I hope I believe when I tell myself, especially on the bad days.  I miss having a full length mirror here. You can imagine how frustrating it is to have this full package and not be able to stare at it when I walk out of the shower every morning. I went through my gallery earlier today and didn't know when I exclaimed "Omooooo". I'm hella fine and I'm not even capping. If I were a guy, I'd woo myself. Heck, if I were another female, I'd spend a lot of time wondering what my skin care routine is. The beauty routine. And I won't even realise when I'd be like "Girllllll, you're fine af. I want to be under your s...

Over two months ago, I returned to a saner community, which has extremely slow people, but comparing to the craze I'm coming from, it's a breath of fresh air. Spending over ten months in the epicentre of Nigerian madness did a lot to my brain wiring. Each time I go out into the big hot world, I typically get irritated by the human contact and take social distancing very much personal because imagine getting home and smelling like you know…multiple humans. That's besides the point today. I spent most of my time in the epicentre, wondering how there are so many young people (XY chromosome carriers mostly), being distastefully threatening outside there.  There's an MO to the appearance of the group I'm dragging in this post. Typically, we call them omo olope, or more recently omo dangbana choco. They've earned this name by being the face of "drug users" cum irresponsible lot in public. Dropouts, young and full of energy, lounging on the road side and catc...

The thoughts in my head are haywire.  My co-worker had a fourth baby last month. I got married a decade before her, yet I have none. The baby's cries irritates me, but I don't get to complain. She tells me everything; too many details. She asks me to borrow her money sometimes, not that I have much to spare, but I can't hold back or I'd be termed the hater.  The baby is just a baby. I can't say if he's beautiful or not; I just get disgusted that she's having it easy. There was another baby today; a little girl, I heard. I should've gone to say hello to the mother, but she's also just another young girl who shouldn't be having babies of her own; she's barely twenty. Yet someway, she had no problem conceiving when she didn't want a child. She should still be in school, but there she sits welcoming well-wishers with no thought as to how she intends to raise the thing she has just birth.  I ask why I'm so unfortunate in this regard. It...