Living alone diaries #13; Re-reading classics, deep reflection, and healing
It’s Wednesday today, and I’m at work right now writing this.
I think this is the most sleep deprived I’ve been in a while, wow. Yesterday night I got only four-ish hours of sleep and I have to wake up by six to prepare for work. Absolutely lovely.
Anyways, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt about certain emotional/physical states, its that faking it actually helps sometimes. So immediately I woke up, I allowed myself fifteen minutes of laying in my bed feeling like a sack of potatoes, the I put on a dance workout playlist and got out of bed — workout playlists are specifically crafted to energise you — and told myself “I feel amazing this morning, and I’m full of energy”, (I kid you not, I said these very words out loud to myself) and went ahead to start preparing for work.
And its actually working, I’m willing it to be true.
Willpower is a very powerful thing, and I’m grateful that I have a lot of it.
I’m convinced that some the most successful people deluded themselves into that success; whether its by telling themselves they are simply the best at what they do and acting as such, thereby convincing people around them as well, or smaller things like lying to themselves to find energy to forge ahead. I really don’t think very successful people have normal headspaces/mindsets.
This is very pleasing to me because I’ve always known I’m not very normal.
I want to get back into writing fiction and articles, so I have a broader range of things on my portfolio. Maybe another sonically inspired piece? Let’s see.
I think we underrate the power/importance of sleep, to be honest.
Whenever I go to bed late and I have to be up early, is arguably when I feel the most shit.
It’s crazy.
How your night went, affects most of the next day, in a very vital way that I don’t think most people pay attention to. Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.
Last night a friend and I were talking and he mentioned the uber-famous book; Things fall apart, by Mr. Achebe, and how he was rereading it. I first read the book when I was a child (comparatively) and it never held much interest for me; I thought it was, quite frankly, boring, so I put it down.
Now that I have vastly different sensibilities, and I’ve grown, he was able to convince me to give it another go. So, now I’ve downloaded it on all my devices and I’m trying it again.
I’ve found that I actually kind of like it, but I’m only twenty percent into the book as I’m writing this. Chinua has a…crisp, to-the-point way of writing, but its still interesting and witty in a way that portrays the Igbo culture in a vibrant, vital way.
A lot of Nigerian writers I read often try too hard to push the “Nigerian” in “Nigerian writer”. Let me explain, before y’all tear me to shreds, because I know you girls like to tussle.
I find that in a bid to try and seem as in touch with their roots, and as unaffected by the western world (in their style of writing and descriptions) as possible, Nigerian writers often over do it, to a point where it becomes kind of comical and also annoying. You want to describe soup and its “the smell of mothers egusi soup circulated the whole house, its rich smell bringing to mind the forests in Kaduna where tigers roam untamed and the gods Sango and Ifejioku feverishly copulate while a virgin maiden fetches water from the clean, pure streams of life”.
Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but most of the time its similarly crazy. Like, we know you’re African, write like an African, stop writing like someone who is putting all their efforts into letting us know that they’re African.
Chinua is one of such writers that thankfully, isn’t like that. His writing is smooth, cadenced, concise, and rich. Its very nice to read.
Anyways, this week I confronted the fact that I struggle to form deep, genuine connections with people in my life. Not just making new friends or anything, I mean even with the people I call friends already, being open and genuine with them is hard for me.
I came to this realization as I was watching a YouTube video by Mai Pham, I hope I remember to link the video here as I’m editing this, but she spoke about how she has really been thinking about who she is, and trying to understand who and why she is; she made a lot of points.
People aren’t just the way they are because they’re born that way, how your primary caretakers raised and interacted with/around you shapes people into who they are, in a way that many people don’t usually contemplate. So, if you’re trying to make changes or improve a certain aspect of yourself, and it seems to be too difficult, you may need to take a look at your formative years, and do some — or a lot — of back tracking, to fully understand where and why that thing has manifested in the way it has for you.
She also said that its very important to know who you are, outside of trends and what everyone else is doing and material possessions; but recently I’ve grown out of this almost completely, not that I’m completely impervious to peer pressure and trends and materialism, but these things have never really affected me to the point where it was a problem for me to do something I really wanted to do, or I felt weird doing things myself in the way that I liked.
The part in the whole video that got to me was the part about her feeling like she couldn’t form deep, genuine connections with people because she was too bothered about being a “nice” person and she was really obsessed with people meeting her or seeing her and thinking “wow, she’s such an amazing person”, and while this isn’t a bad thing, it’s not healthy when that’s the premise of your life.
And that’s something I relate to a lot.
Growing up in a family where there was substantial pressure to be a certain type of person across different aspects of my life — religious to extensive degree, an academic in the scientific regard, respectability culture etc — and then being the opposite of a lot of that — irreligious, a creative with no interest in sciences, irritated at all the fake “respect” that is demanded by older people simply because they’re old, and not for any other reason — it was hard to fit in.
I hope the above sentence made sense.
Navigating all this, means I had to bend and stretch myself so much and so frequently that I started to “forget” that I was just fundamentally different; I tried to believe in a power and a God that I never felt loved me, and was more of an obligation to me, I tried to be like my older brother who was a whiz at the sciences, even though all I really wanted to do was draw and read books, I was forced to bend and bow and smile and nod along to everything an “adult” said, even though I knew they were wrong, or speaking rubbish.
I did this so much that my own personality started to erode.
Before I even got to discover who I really was, I was already being compressed and stretched and pulled into being something that was almost directly opposite of who I am, and thus was born a people pleaser.
It was this constant bending and change to be who my family wanted me to be, that I took out of that house, and into the real world. My default mindset now became “make them like you”.
Find out who the best version of you is to them, then be it.
Gosh, this all sounds insane.
But I told you I’m self-aware to a horrible degree.
This desire to be “good” and have people like me is a manifestation of how I felt at home; being myself — whoever that was/is — was never going to be enough for the people around me, I needed to be good, the best, I needed them to like me, and I needed to be who they wanted, because what they thought was all that mattered.
Does that make sense?
Anyways, knowing the root of a problem is only the first step, I hope I (and anyone else that is going through similar issues) finds the strength to pull themselves out of this place.
I really debated whether this was too personal an entry to put out on the internet, but I think just as Mai put out that YouTube video sharing her problems and how she wants to fix them to be a better person and I saw that and I learnt from it, someone else could also read this and introspect and learn something/find a reasoning behind their problems and be inspired to fix them.
Anyways, how I ended up dealing with this deep-rooted people pleasing desire, is by being closed off.
When you’re closed off to people, they have limited perception of you, and you have a limited expectation of people, so I felt like this would help me not feel the pressure of being a different person for people, and also you can’t get disappointed when you don’t have any expectations from people.
I find that I’m always tweaking some part of myself when I’m interacting with people, and I’m self-aware enough for this to make me uncomfortable when I catch myself doing it, but not strong enough to stop completely, so to avoid this, I retreat back into myself, so I don’t feel like a pussy for changing myself; when no one knows you/perceives you, there’s a sort of “freedom” that comes with not having to change yourself for anyone.
Obviously, this is a skewed way of looking at things and navigating the world, but yeah.
I’m really working on it, because its an exhausting way to live.
Anyways, this entry is way too long, and way too personal, it’s making me self-conscious.
Share some personal battles you’ve been dealing with in the comment section?
At least to make me feel better about showing you guys my @$$hOl£ on the internet.
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