I cannot begin to count the number of times over the past couple of months that I wished I was never born. These thoughts have troubled my days and haunted my nights. It has shaped my character and coloured the way I see the world. Not only has it become my identity, it has shaped the way people see me, so much that the previous couple of months, I got messages from my friends telling me they read or saw some depressing shit on the internet and it reminded them of me.
Luckily, I haven’t sailed as close to the bitter end as those who have taken their lives, still I remember days spent lying on the floor, listening to music, thinking about all the crazy things I have had to deal with in a meaningless world, and knowing if I had been told about all this in advance, and by that, I mean given a chance to choose if I would be born or not, I would have passed on the opportunity to be here.
Something tells me people who have followed my evolution since I started this blog on the third of March 2020 know what it feels like to be me. To be out of place, to be disconnected, to not wanting to do anything because it just appears inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to say he or she feels addressed and I get such feedbacks anytime I write a piece. I have also come across mails that sounded like, “Bro, not again. You almost always sound depressed, get a life”. I will admit that although they have a point, there isn’t much substance to their claims because outside this blog, I mean in real life, I have a life.
I have some of the best set of friends anyone would wish for. I know people who are better off because they know me. I have a mother who would give her life for every one of her kids without thinking and a father I can always turn to when I need a reason to smile.
Conversations with my dad seem to reveal a man who was insensitive to the sad realities of the world. When confronted with the possibility of failure, he would say things like, “I’m not worried. I’ve got God.” But apparently, it never mattered if you had God or not, because something almost always went wrong somewhere and somehow for everyone. For him, it was always something obscure, unexplainable, some sort of bad luck and whenever it happened, the results were always the same every time. We will deal with the setbacks as a family, telling ourselves the same story all the time. A lie told so much it became the truth. That this was a temporary setback for a bigger leap forward. Meanwhile the thing was we were close to the end of the tunnel, but now we were right back where we started.
There was this week, when my sister had fallen sick, very sick and it had been a very scary incident for everybody. When my mum and I got back to the hospital after going home to freshen up, we had walked in on him, staring at the drip hooked to her veins. He had caught no sleep for over thirty-six hours, and he was looking older than his age, which was no big thing since it was never easy to guess his age. Nothing like youth ever lasted on a Nigerian man’s face for very long. Reasons vary for everybody but for him, it was his eyes: because whenever he was under pressure, like when things were really going to shit; his eyes were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank and they had nothing to do with the rest of his face, which always held a smile.
I had always suspected that on such days, beneath the smiles, it frustrated him that he was unable to give us the life he wanted, and I couldn’t help but feel a sympathy for him. There were decisions people made in the past that shaped their present, but for him, it wasn’t a lack of hard work. He had been working hard all his life; he had no understanding of what it meant to relax. And he has never complained. Not once did he complain we may be asking for too much. In-between the storms of our many requests, he had learnt to dance in the rain, but this incident, this crazy one that had landed my sister in the hospital was a Tsunami that had knocked him off his feet, so in that moment he had thrown away the bravery he had been wearing all his life, and for the first time since I was born, I saw them all at once; his fears that I knew he had hidden somewhere and his frustrations that was always buried under a smile. It is a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory because right there; I had seen years of him acting without thinking about himself, years of putting the lives of his kids before his, the result of spending all his energy pursuing every one of our fantasies until they became his experience and then afterwards, he had no strength left to handle his own experience. You know, they say parents live longer because they’ve got something to live for, but are they really living, or just alive?
It is so sad that one of the many secrets of life is that we may never get the true answer to this question. Opinions will always differ as to what living your best life is. Some found it in churches, others in parties; some believed in solitude, others in the bare thought of just watching their kid smile. But even if we couldn’t ourselves reach these genuine answers, or indeed, the ultimate answer that interweaves all these forms of happiness, the answers must exist — else the questions were not real.
What may be even more interesting is that there is no proof that these answers, when discovered, will prove interesting. Tomorrow will be a better day doesn’t always mean today was bad. Questions like what and how much must we sacrifice to be happy, seem to me to have no simple reply. What is certain though is that if you don’t have your own story, you become lost in someone else’s and it is obvious my dad may have been lost in the story of our lives and the lives of everyone he tries to help even when he did not have enough for himself. But that is a story too. A story I am proud to be a part of. Now and then, you come across people with no love for their parents. And you can’t point out where it went wrong other than knowing that most times, it is never always about the money, the allowances, the fancy schools and cars. Sometimes it is not even about winning, but that you tried.
Recently, I haven’t had terrible months; I have had awful weeks and bad days. The type you go to bed scared that you are about to run out of money and you wake up to realize the problem still exists. I am no stranger to this feeling; anyone who has known me since I was in secondary school can confirm that this has always been my reality except in the past couple of months, my finances have regressed so badly I haven’t gone a moment without thinking about them.
The answer to my problem has always been right in front of me. I have just refused to take it. Like every normal person, I know I should dust the cobwebs off my political science certificate, whip up a CV and get a permanent job, so that by bracing traffic and working eight hours per day, I may get to be a boss and work twenty-four hours a day, thinking all night how I am supposed to tell one of my juniors he has to go home and tell his kids that he no longer has a job. Still, what is the alternative to that kind of life? Staying at the same spot, punching the same keyboard, doing the boring job that makes rich people richer? working your ass off for what? For a job that pays enough to survive but not enough to get ahead, so that on the day your boss behaves like a bitch, your finances flashes before your face and you are reminded that if you told him the truth on the spot, that he was really just behaving like a bitch, you were going to end up without a job. Without a means of paying your next rent. So, you swallow your dignity and self-esteem; you go home and transfer the aggression on your kids. All these unnecessary craziness because your life started on the wrong foot, because you were born poor, because you are a beneficiary of the public education system, whose aim is never to spread enlightenment at all, but to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to destroy originality.
Flying over everyone is never always pleasure, moving below is nearly all pain. I don’t belong anywhere.
Kids are such a real motivation to pick a side, to get your life in order, and so I have never wanted one. They may not be as obvious as hunger or a landlord saying you’ve got two weeks left on your rent. Maybe they couldn’t kill you or land you on the streets, but they could bend your will to be happy and land you on your hips in tears. The levels of love you had for them were the levels of pain you felt when they suffered, and once it’s out in you that you love them, it won’t go back in, you can’t just blink it away or run the film backward out of consciousness. You see, your child needs something you cannot afford; you watch them on the verge of reliving the life you lived where you had to do the things you thought you would never do to stay afloat and all your dreams of becoming a writer go out the window. You get a job; you pick a fucking side. But how many of those sleepless nights thinking of what they were going to eat do you really want to hump yourself through? How many personal ambitions and dreams left unfulfilled are you ready to cope with? which plateau of obligations would you reach before you shorted out and decided to live for you alone?
Money? Of course, it helps to be rich, but it is almost never always about money. What do you do when you find out your child is a serial killer? How are you supposed to feel when your child has a psychosis episode? I mean, what the fuck do you even say when a fifteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too tired of this shit called life? How do you tell him he hasn’t seen the worst it has to offer? Or that there will never be a point in our life when the troubles stops because we graduate from one problem to another, so that when we are done spending the bulk of our lives working hard to provide for our kids, we graduate to even more complex issues; the agonizing sadness of watching our parents grow old — their loneliness, forgetfulness, hallucinations, their death. And when we are thru with all of that, we are right where our parents were. You are someone else’s problem now. You had your 75th birthday the week ago.
It is clear as day that I will most probably never be important to anybody at old age. I can tell that by giving up on kids and the stability a family demands, I am giving up precious experiences and relationships so that I can have other things that I think I want more. Nevertheless, I have found a way to be important to the coming generation by writing about stuff they will have to deal with in their lives, hoping that one day, when I am dead, I can live on in their hearts. The methods in which I have gone about it may not be the most morally correct. I could be less depressive when I write, I could project happy endings. Still, I do not feel apologetic about how I sound. Life doesn’t give a fuck about what is morally correct, and this is real life. Everyone might as well talk about it the way it is; I mean, someone needs to say that us being here to chase money, pay bills and be saddled with so many responsibilities only to die in the end can’t be all there is to life. There has to be more.
Still, this is all that will be for the most of us. People don’t get to escape the existence game. This is a game that is more complicated than chess. A game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman being the main player in the stories of their lives. The chessboard is the world. The opponent on the other side is death and his move is hidden from us. We know that death’s move is never fair, just or patient. And the world just dumps a lot of problems on you to make you forget that the rules of the game are simple and it is that you are playing to lose.
This game is our life. It’s rigged, but what are you going to do about it?
You can’t lose if you don’t play, but you will spend every day feeling like you could have won if you tried. You don’t know when the game is going to end, but you know it is going to have a bad ending. Yet, you’ve got to move forward, soon as you can figure out whatever the fuck that is
