FINDING A HOME

This is something I’ve been struggling to admit and accept for a very long time. Letting go is one art I’ve not mastered. You know it’s exciting when you meet this one person that brightens up your day, makes you feel like a person, that person that completes you. And when you meet them, it’s like your world has changed, your entire life revolves around them and your pheromones just click!  So you start drafting plans of how the two of you will get married, how nice their last name goes with yours, how you’ll get two cats, three dogs, move in together in the countryside and live the stereotypical couples life. Everything seems perfect and you seem okay and happy. And while you are enjoying all the bliss of being in a relationship, they break up with you for some surreal reasons and you feel alone. For the first time in your life, you are actually alone and you start to wonder what went wrong; you start to feel that you weren’t good enough so you try again to make it work. You stick...

                                                                      “Little voices singing to me all day long     Singing me beautiful songs of impending doom     Singing me along to death;     Beautiful tones of a thousand insecurities”     VEE They are always there, those voices; the ones that tell you the girl laughing across the room with her friends is laughing at you, the ones that tell you to slit your wrists because no one would care enough to notice anyway. It’s been long since I posted anything on this blog and it’s because of them. It’s really loud in here and they kept telling me no one would like whatever I write and I listened, I always listen to them, to whatever they have to say; when I stand in front of the mirror and tug at my extra skin, or when I at...

Being different springs from subtle things; it might be wanting to eat your hotdog with ketchup instead of the traditional mustard, it might be wanting to stay indoors to binge watch a Netflix series instead of going for a girls’ night, it might be wanting to play chess with your old neighbor when your friends go out to bar to check out hot girls, it could also be wanting to read really dark books instead of the “Billionaire boss romance collection” Staying different is a very hard thing in this world that glorifies normalcy. You have to try once in a while to explain why you read those books or why you listen to those songs or why you’d rather be alone, but no matter how hard you try to explain, they just don’t get it. Being weird and crazy and eccentric is all fun until you start getting left out, your friends stop calling you out even to your favorite shows because you’d rather show up with baggies and hoodies than strapless flashy blue gowns. You start asking yourself questions...

These past few days have been depressing for thousands of people across the world. There’s just too much to take in. There is racism, corona virus is still in the air and of course, there is rape too. Rape is an issue that is not discussed well enough. I’m sure when the wave of the most recent case goes away, no one would talk about it again until another case happens and another victim is traumatized. And as people, when issues like this happen, we blame the victim and say things like, “what was she wearing?” “Why was she out so late?” “Maybe her dressing was too provocative”. And most times, parents or elders sit their daughters down and tell them how to sit, how to behave around men, how to dress and how to talk but how about instead we say, “boys do not rape!” or “don’t look at a woman like that!”. Vera Uwaila Omozuwa, a promising student of nursing of the University of Benin lost her life to rape recently and was killed in a church. She thought reading in church would make h...

There is always a vacuum in all of our hearts that we wish could be filled with the presence of someone or even people. And most times we wish that this space could be filled by our parents or by our siblings. This is not something we really experience as African kids especially teenagers. We seek comfort in the arms of strangers and we look for love in empty spaces because our parents don’t show us that. As a child, I didn’t know much about family bonds because no one showed me how it was meant to be. I got gifts; there was always a fancy dress for Christmas and nice shoes for my birthday. But, there was no connection whatsoever. Acting like a teenager is not something that is allowed in an African home. We are not told that we are good enough or that we can express our anger and fear. And so, as we enter our teenage years, we start to draw back, we start to put strains in the relationships we have with our parents most especially. Also, because we are not told that we are important...