musingsofawannabewriter - Tumblr blog

musingsofawannabewriter · 3 years

Text

Can I Be More Than The Person I Have Become?

Here I am again. Once every few months, sometimes years I get that urge to put pen to paper or in this instance finger to keyboard.

When I was little reading my mom’s Jodi Picoult, Danielle Steele or Avon romance novels I felt inspired. I wanted to write a book people would cherish and love. Then I read Purple Hibiscus and then the doubts came.

Purple Hibiscus is one of my favorite books ever and the author Chimamanda is an inspiration to me. But the doubts came because I believed I could never write a book as amazing as Purple Hibiscus, that stirred so many emotions and feelings in me that with each rereading makes me discover something new. It didn’t help that Chimamada is that perfect Igbo first daughter who has a first degree and not one but 2 MA’s and speaks fluent Igbo.

My admiration for her was tinged with a lot of jealousy. I am an Igbo first daughter, that can barely speak/understand Igbo despite growing up in Nigeria most of my life, I only have a BA in Law, I failed spectacularly at a Masters programme that from the start I only applied to because I thought it was expected of me.

There are so many flaws in myself I could spend hours picking on but won’t for the sake of bringing down the mood of this article/opinion piece. Despite feeling I could never measure up to CNA I still chose literature as my elective in my GCSE’s and WAEC exams. Had an A for both and was the best student in class for the former. But I still felt like a fraud. I understand English, I speak it but the technical rules stump me sometimes. Like the semicolon… No matter how many times I can’t seem to retain when it applies. I suck at writing dialogue because I am always confused where to add the apostrophes and commas. Subject verb agreement, well I stumble my way through and hope for the best which has worked out okay so far.

I used to write in notebooks fervently in Secondary School. I would craft stories which would get passed around different students and their compliments and eagerness to read my words fueled me. I was going to be a writer maybe.. Get my first degree in Law then a Masters in Creative Writing. Maybe after becoming successful I’d be the next Michaela Coel adapting my work to the screen to great critical acclaim.

Well let’s just say reality hit hard, no punches pulled whatsoever. I left my sheltered Nigerian boarding school after graduation to go to the UK full time for my A Levels. First mistake was spending my years pocket money in under 3 months. Second mistake was essentially being mute for my first year of school. I have always been quite reserved and find it hard to talk to people. Going to a full boarding school meant I saw my classmates almost 24/7 so bonding and socialisation was inevitable. Well with A levels only having 3 subjects to study and it being a day school meant I could go a week without speaking to anyone except the lovely lunch ladies in the cafeteria.

If I am being honest I wasn’t used to interacting with white people and felt self conscious about my accent so it was a perfect storm.

Then the whopper…I have always had a complicated relationship with food. Since I was younger my weight has fluctuated heavily. It didn’t help that my mom was one of those slightly bigger women who decided to become a gym addict and drop all the weight. A lot of her insecurity from being bigger rubbed off on me, directly and indirectly.

Having your mom take you to exercise classes at 13 hurts. Having your mom be so happy to see you lose so much weight because the food at your boarding school sucked hurts. Having people complimenting your mum and asking how you're related to her cuts even deeper. Every stab at my heart at confidence got buried deep. In school, I would restrict my eating by spending breakfasts which I hated asleep in class, would skip a few lunches then binge at dinner times. This had the effect of keeping my weight stable.

Even then my mom still criticised my weight. When I look back at my size 12/14 self in secondary school who was gorgeous, a rage fills me. I was so beautiful but with zero confidence. I hurt so much and wish I could go back in time for a few minutes to tell myself I was worthy of being liked, by others and myself.

Eventually being away from my mom, the safety of my boarding school friends and siblings made it easy to seek solace in food. I was in the UK, I was living in student accommodation and for the first time in my life I had a debit card. I spent hundreds of £s a month in takeaways. Then I spent over £100 on diet pills which made me feel ill. In under a year I went from a size 14 to 24 to my mothers horror and mine. I didn’t know about the body positivity movement or Tess Holliday. I only knew that my mom was angry and sad and worried I would die in my sleep one night.

In almost a decade, that has been one of her mantras when talking to me about my weight. That she can’t bury her child and she’s afraid one night I will sleep and not wake up. In her mind its concern, but the way she says it feels like emotional manipulation.

Reading back there’s a lot of mother bashing going on, but it is not intentional. Some people are besties with their mothers and I prefer a more distant relationship. We will eventually get to the daddy issues but that will take some tears and a while before I can go into that.

I crave the catharsis of writing. The word vomit and jumbled feelings in the pit of my stomach. It helps me see myself as that idealistic 16 year old with a heart full of dreams and hopes. Not the current dried out husk I think I am now. I think of my future in abstract terms.

I don’t see a family, mortgage or dog. I just see myself barely existing. I feel this with a resigned calmness. Then I have my internal spiral of being to shortsighted and hasty in writing my life off at 25. I read tweets about people finding first love in their 30s, going back to school in their 40’s and getting into their careers in their 50s. Then I hear that voice in the far corner of my mind whispering, do I even want to make it to my 40’s…

And I answer back quietly that I really don't want to make it to my 40s. I’ll maybe hold on till my parents die so my mom doesn’t lord it over me that she had to bury her child and not the other way around. But some nights I really don’t want to be alive. Some nights I wish I was never born and just like clockwork the tears start. Those tears that I hold in and the dark thoughts I numb with the stimuli of food, YouTube and now K dramas.

For the past few years, I have made my Other World. This Other World is essentially a parallel universe. In this universe I have no issues with food, I have an incredible metabolism that means I can eat virtually anything without guilt. I make friends my first day of college and join so many student societies and actually participate. I push myself in school and get into my mother’s dream of a Russell Group. I choose LSE though she wishes I chose Queen Mary. I work hard, join the Law Society, meet a lovely British Nigerian with a great background, we date a few years and get married. I get a Masters in Creative Writing and have an amazing blog which gets adapted to a critically acclaimed series and I am fulfilled.

Sometimes my Other World self changes. She is the daughter of millionaires who is a genius, polyglot and fighter of social justice. I can sing, know martial arts and take the movie world by storm. Other times I am just pretty and living a simple but happy life. I know in my heart that these are just fantasies and sometimes I wish I could be like Buffy in that episode of BTVS and stay stuck in that Other World fully. I’m sure you’re thinking about my family who I’d leave behind. My response is I can’t miss them if I never remember I had them.

I am the first daughter, the Ada. My parents though flawed always tell me I am a great role model for my siblings. I am seemingly still a virgin, don’t drink, do drugs or rock the boat too much. And I feel even worse. I feel guilty that with all they have sacrificed that they have been stuck with an average daughter and by upper middle class Nigerian standards, if that even exists, a sub par Ada. I feel defective looking around and seeing others in the peak of their careers, vetting engaged, building houses for their parents. I am still afraid of driving!! I can’t even get that basic skill down.

4 years post LLB, no LLM to at least lessen me not being a lawyer and stuck in a customer service role almost 3 years now. I know I am at fault for not making the right decisions. Not applying for the grad jobs or vacancy schemes in time. Being so down and depressed I wouldn’t leave my room for days and weeks at a time. Failing all my LLM modules, adding back all the weight and more after boot camps with my parents, not having enough savings and having an even worse accent after almost a decade in the UK.

My self-deprecating joke I tell is that my sister is the multi talented one, my brother the smart ambitious one and as my parents say I have a big heart. That essentially my parents would say my thing is having a big heart, like that ever helped anyone build a career. I thought if I couldn’t write then I could maybe study Social Work. That got shot down by my mother and I was persuaded to go into the path of Law for University. I applied for Social Work Schemes and got rejected multiple times over multiple years. I was too scared to sink my own money to self fund a Social Work Masters in case it became another LLM fiasco. SO now I have made Teaching my next career goal. I am resigning myself to it the way Henry the 8ths spouses and mistresses must have whenever he wanted to bed them. Powerless and without a choice. Then I think that’s false equivalency and my pain could not be on the level of the pain they must have endured.

So many feelings, deep thoughts and memories flow out when I get the writing urge. I will likely never actually share this in full for obvious reasons except maybe anonymously. These few pages have jumped through quite a few time periods and experiences. My thoughts aren’t always linear and that ties in with something else I acknowledge but haven’t been serious about. I legitimately think I have ADHD and/or BPD. Watching the diagnosis episode of Crazy Ex Girlfriend by the amazing Rachel Bloom shone a light on feelings and behaviours I have had for a while. Maybe that’s why from the first episode of the show I was in love. She was stuck in the past, holding onto Josh who represented a time in her life of happiness. She had cutaways to magical musical numbers involving herself and the people around her.

The ADHD comes from following iconic black women on twitter who were outspoken about their diagnosis and bringing focus to how black women were being underdiagnosed. But then I think maybe I want to have ADHD as an excuse for the failures in my life and with the current NHS waiting lists I may not get a formal diagnosis for a while. So for now I manage and exist.

I like being honest in my writing. Exposing those dark parts of myself that I let fester in the recesses of my heart and mind.

#black writers #adhd #igbo #life #hopeful #scared #prose #self love

4 notes · View notes