It isn’t writer’s block. I don’t know exactly how to describe it but I do know for sure that it isn’t writer’s block. It’s more of a combination of emotions from boredom, to anxiety, to fear and uncertainty, like this cumulonimbus cloud of emotions coming together to shower this rain of anxious uneventfulness over me. it’s like i'm in the midst of this dark covering that’s supposed to be a part of the trying times and I’m simply trying to navigate my way to the light and make sense out of this chaos and find some meaning some explanation to all of this. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t lost the spark of light and it’s not like I’m cold and cloudy inside, it’s more like it’s cold and cloudy outside and it affects the fire inside and that’s what worries me not necessarily that it would find its way inside but rather that It seems to be happening for so long and quite frankly I am tired of it. I’m tired of the mundane, the regular, the repetition and most importantly the wait, I am tired of the wait.
Good morning folks
Not too long ago I had a lengthy chat with a very good friend of mine who had his recent spell with depression and it got me thinking about a lot of things. Things that usually would seem scary for me to think about, things that for years I consciously prohibited my mind from thinking either because of my conditioning or my fear of the dark, by that I mean the mental dark; the place which for so long I have hypocritically asked others to fully explore in other to discover truth. However in my conversation with my good friend I discovered a few things and these discoveries are the reason behind this write up, the reason behind these ramblings and infact they are the core factor behind this question.
Is the fall into darkness inevitably?
To attempt to answer this question let me first start by talking about the conversation I had with my friend and also a little background on who he is and why his story is so interesting and peculiar to my situation. In other to protect my friend's identity I will be using an alias instead of his real name so that just in case any of you were to see him walking on the streets tomorrow knowing he is the person I am about to talk about; you wouldn’t have some preconceived notion about him. [Damn I've used "about" three times in one sentence gaddamn].
Meet Carl
So my friend, let’s call him Carl, [hopefully I don’t get to bear a friend named carl in the future]. I met him in secondary school, SS1 I think for you non Nigerian folks that would be senior year of high school. One way or the other we became very good friends probably because his parents would drop him off at our house so that he could follow us to school since they stayed very far away. So we became close friends and the fact that he was one of the coolest, nicest, well trained persons I knew then made it very easy to be friends with him. We were basically the well trained nerds of schools who had no clout or coolness and had no shot at being the kings of secondary school. He was way smarter than me though and he always had higher grades than I did so maybe he had a higher chance at getting clout than I did but he didn’t really care about those things though. He simply was a genuine friend who truly cared about the people he cared about and was committed to them in the true sense of it.
source (Not actually Carl)
We basically kept in touch and stayed friends all throughout senior year until it was time to go to the university. He got into the university before I did and the university he went to was a private one and not just any private university but a Christian private university, one where students weren't allowed to bring in cellphones because apparently it would be a distraction to them. Yea I know it sounds strange but it is what it is. This meant that for the duration that he was in school I couldn’t contact him and he couldn’t contact me and it stayed like this for about seven years. It went on like this until last year when I saw him react to a story I put up on Instagram and I decided to track him down and get back his contact. What happened next and the story he told me is what led to this triggering question that made me write this post.
The meet up
When we finally met to discuss after so many years of not seeing each other, we had one of the most enlightening conversations I have ever had and I was shocked at all the things that had happened in his life in the seven years I hadn’t spoken to him. My good friend had gone into the deep ends of depression and debauchery and had come out alive to tell the story and I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice, he had gone through some really crazy shit. The kind of shit I tried to keep my mind from thinking about, the kind of shit that made me not want to associate with some kind of people. My friend for the past seven years had being to the abyss and he had come out and I needed to hear all about it not just because it was fascinating to listen to and even more fascinating that it was the good so who turned ugly but more rather that it was an opportunity to learn about a riotous lifestyle by observing what it does to people first hand
He told me about his stint with drugs in school and how it was the greatest undoing to his academics. Initially when he got into school he wasn’t interested in living a riotous life. In his first year he had a good GPA and he was serious with his academics. He continued like this up until his second year and then by the time he got into his third year, peer pressure finally got to him. It was at this point he started going for parties and mixing up with the wrong crowd and he started using marijuana. At this point he went all out, he didn’t hold himself back, he was partying regularly going out from school into the city and drinking like crazy. One time he said he got so drunk that he was conducting highway traffic in the rain before his friends stopped him from further embarrassing himself.
Then came his depression episodes which he said were so bad that he wouldn’t have any human contact for weeks and he would do was to stay indoors and smoke all day. it affected everything from his academics to his relationships with people and I love the way he put it, he said nothing really mattered to him anymore.
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Mind you he was in this state for about two years and so it wasn’t that everything just happened suddenly, it was more of a steady decline until he had gotten really deep into it. It was also at this point that he fell seriously sick for a year and he had to go home recover and come back to school only for covid to hit again and then he had to finish school at home. It really was at this time that he was able to piece himself back together and find a working relationship with God, not conventional orthodox religion but a true spiritual connection with God. He says that that’s what saved him and changed him forever, the year he fell sick and the pandemic that followed. It was like he was forced to go into involuntary rehab to find his way back and finally graduate from school. Since 2020 he has been sober and clean and he has seriously been committed to God and to church and since then his life has had a massive turn around and he’s episode and his story is going to be on my podcast soon so if you want to get the full story you can check it out on spotity. Get the links to it by asking for it in the comment section.
The lessons learnt
Finally we get to the why of this post. You see i consider myself as what some people might call a model child. Not model in the sense of being good academically but model in the sense that I’m pretty docile and co-operative. I don’t like conflict and so I try to avoid it by being diplomatic and being agreeable more often than not. What this means is that more often than not I would tend to others rather than myself meaning that I usually do not stand up for myself at least that is the way I see it most times, it might be a biased interpretation but for the sake of where I’m heading, let’s keep it that way. Because of this the only time I get to leave my life unhinged and unbothered is when I am alone, away from the people I care about and because I currently don’t live alone it feels I have to live the life of modest not because I want to but simply because I have a reputation to keep. The question however is that am I good because I want to be good or am I good because I have to be good. If I see the opportunity to be unhinged, will I let myself go or will I muster up self-control.
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Has my training and conditioning really worked or is it just a matter of time before I go back to my default setting and finally how can anyone understand the essence of morality if he doesn’t juxtapose it with the immorality. I cudon’t know if anyone reading this really catches my drift. I think about this because looking at the story of this friend of mine he lived the modest life as a teenager but not necessarily because he understood it but simple because that was what he was trained to do. When he had the opportunity to be alone for seven years he explored the crazy life, he paid the price and he learnt his lesson, this time however he didn’t just come back to the side of morality unchanged, this time he came with a much more deeper, richer understanding and appreciation for morality and the nuances of a simple life. He has chosen to stay not because that is his training but rather because he sees all the reasons to stay. And somewhere deep down I am tempted to cross the bridge too to see whatsoever at the otherside. To know the true color of what’s in between the black and white because I believe the color grey is not something anyone can explain for you, it’s something you have to see for yourself. For now however I don’t have the guts to cross that line or maybe the opportunity hasn’t just presented itself, I don’t know which is which. I guess only time will tell what it will eventually be for now all I can do is ponder myself to sleep, read and listen to the stories of others and try to manipulate the things that are in my control until the future eventually catches up with me.
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Thank you for taking out time to read this, I know it’s not the kind of posts I conventionally write on but at this time I just needed a medium to let my thoughts out so once again thank you for reading through this and until I see you again,
CIAO