Scribblings Of A Dramatic Introvert

  Hi,I'm writing again As a creative writer, one thing you may never foretell about yourself is the probability of losing interest in writing and ultimately losing faith in yourself. It turns out that it takes a lot of effort, courage and perseverance to keep writing and telling your stories. Frankly, I have mostly lost that zeal to overshare my troubled thoughts using words. When you've once been a protege to some super-writers, you get reminded pretty often that you're a badass. They say to you, "When would you give us something on your blog?" "Why don't you write anymore?". To these, I come up with the automated excuse that my career is ruining my creativity.    As a medical doctor who was trained in one of the toughest academic hubs of the country, having to compete for excellence with a new bar being set everyday drained me. I had my fair share of emotional turbulences, failed friendships and lost more relationships than I can recall. That’s jus...

 - 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...

Does it thrill you to brush shoulders with death? For the past couple of weeks, I've been on a posting to my teaching hospital complex in a different town - Ilesha and oh boy! There's this universality to how they drive here; like they're having a Colorado party. The rate they have fatal road traffic accidents is through the roof and I totally get it. Lagos drivers are silly and impatient but these guys literally have no reason to tumble through town the way they do. So I'm here on a rant about reckless driving. What's the point of it? To meet Jesus early, or the need to check if your room in Abraham's mansion is getting dusty?  Frankly, I understand that from time to time, there's an urge to jump into the abyss and escape from the hell on earth, as we quite often term it. It however baffles me that some of you take active steps into catching a glimpse into Hades. Do you crave death that much or what's the hurry, really? Road traffic accidents are a huge...

Alternate universe The past week has been very much interesting for me, learning a lot regarding mental disorders and their presentations.  People are so different and thresholds for handling the bullshit life throws at us is even more diverse. Some people have built fantasies in their heads where they feel at peace (the best way to handle this sick world if we're keeping it real BTW), and yet we try so hard to yank them into our own worlds based on the construct of mannerisms and appropriate retorts we grew up to learn. There's this whole concept of insight where someone has to accept that they have a mental disorder before you can say your treatment is working. But here here: There's over seven billion people on earth; living on the planet and drinking of the water that flows beneath the soil beds. It's going to be ridiculous to expect everyone to see the world through the same glasses.  Understandably, when someone fails to get integrated into the society, we categor...

Here's why old men are adorable: Today, I walked into church with one goal:  find a location where everyone minds their business and respects social distancing (I'm very big on people keeping their businesses far away from me in this panoramic) so where else would I fit in, if not among the white haired members of the congregation? I go ahead to sit beside this dude who's probably closer to ninety than he is to seventy, and I find myself staring at the white hair curled in his pinna. I think about their lives in retrospect a lot; old people.  My fave is in a lace agbada that went out of vogue decades ago when his wife was maybe still alive to critique his taste in fabric; his back hunched over and his cap in his hands, as he looks right ahead of him.  His hands are thinned out, dry and wrinkled and he reaches for his Bible as the readings begin. I look him over and every portion of his skin has lost the bounce and shine we try so hard to maintain with all sort of organi...

Maybe it hasn't been all that bad. Everybody has been talking about their year in retrospect, as today is the last day, yet I found a way to get pissed off at the concept.  It's just another Thursday. Tomorrow is just another day and it doesn't matter. While I was sulking about how cliche it sounds to carry out an end of the year accountability and rub it in everyone's faces, my brother thought to ginger me and point out that I've not been a total bum this year.  Count your little wins and exaggerate them if it makes you feel better, he said.  I had plans to write of how useless the year has been, but here instead I'd sing about how great it's been. One tiny win at a time; as a blogger, social media noise maker, educator, friend and maybe, just a little bit as a one-time medical student. The bum: I had the worst oral exam of my life this year and cried for days in the bathroom and longer under my blanket because I'm such a baby. A few weeks later, my gro...

"It was love at first sight",  "I knew she was the one", "He fought for us", "I can't imagine life without her in it." A. Must be nice to sit back and watch your 12 grandchildren turn your house into a playground, screaming and sending your blood pressure up. You tell your wife not to chase after them because kids will be kids. Of course you're their favourite grandpa. It's your last daughter's wedding and she bagged a fine young man, like her two older sisters who wed before her. You hear her tell her friends on the eve of her wedding that she wanted her man to be just like you, her father- perfect.  You pull your beautiful, incredibly 'still hot' wife to your side and whisper that you love her. You do, in fact. Despite how much she breaks your heart, you love how much she has been committed to keeping you both together. She didn't have crazy dreams, she just took care of the babies and made a few cents to buy you a t...