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The thing about depression

The thing about depression in an African home is that you can never say it out loud. It's not something you give life to, you don't speak it, you don't breathe it, you don't dream it, you don't even think it. You swallow it with your eba and gulp it down with water, you bury it and burn it the way you burn used sanitary pads. Having depression in an African home means that you need to find a realistic reason to explain why you can't possibly make your lower limbs move faster when your father asks you to get him some water or when your mother asks you to fetch a broom from the kitchen. You'll learn to blame your incessant migraines on physical stress and you eventually learn to stop talking about them because you really can't be stressed everyday, can you? As for your highly irregular sleep pattern, you learn how to deal with it and not let it affect your duties, because how could you possibly explain that during the day, your brain wants nothing more th
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Unsolicited Opinions

It's become increasingly hard to practice your art the way you want to in this world of ours, much less in a country like Nigeria where everyone wants to control what the other person is doing. If you're not doing it the way your neighbor wants you to, then you're doing it wrong. If you're not doing it the way the vast majority wants you to do it, then you're most definitely on the wrong path. It's heartbreaking and terribly frustrating. Once you're an artist or a celebrity of some sort, everybody expects you to live your life a certain way, the way they would live theirs which is practically impossible because we're all different and we can't all do the same thing. I decided to talk about this because the amount of backlash I've received over the past few weeks has been alarming. I recently started a poetry series I intend to compile and publish soon titled,  "Dear May (Letters from June)",  where I write a poem everyday for the month

We are all racist.

We are all racist , stop fighting it. Just accept it. Remember when we were little and we would watch all these movies about how a Yoruba mother didn't want her son to marry an Igbo woman or how an Ijaw man didn't want his daughter to marry a Hausa man? Sometimes, they didn't even have to be from different tribes, they could be of the same tribe, just from different villages. You'd hear things like "don't marry him, our village doesn't marry from that village". In my hometown in Edo state, there are certain villages where I'm not allowed to marry from even though we're all from the same local government, even though we speak the same language. Tribalism is something that runs so deeply, so freely in our veins that it's almost now part of our culture, here in Africa and yet, we're always so quick to call the white man evil and spit on him for treating black men as slaves or lesser beings. A lot of us have forgotten that some of thos

Call it what it is!

Hello people of earth. I'm not very good at small talk so I'll just go straight to the point. Today has been one of those days when I was forced to sit down and contemplate the meaning of humanity. There is so much going on, there's so much evil and pain and suffering that one cannot just sit down and keep quiet, so I'll do the only thing I know how to do best, I'll talk. From the George Floyd murder to the murder of Uwa in a church in Benin, there's so much to talk about, but I can't talk about everything at once, so today is for rape and abuse. 42.2% of rape victims were under the age 18 when they were first raped. What this means is that even a child with barely developed sexual organs is not safe. What this also means is that you probably know at least five people who have been sexually abused as children (both male and female). You can't leave your 5 year old with Uncle Tunde because you never can tell where and how Uncle Tunde will tou

Dear Secret Anonymous Crush...

Hi everyone. It's May again. This past week was a rollercoaster of emotions for me. The major problem I had was making up my mind about what to write, which was quickly solved when my crush texted me and now I know, that I don't like missing people. I don't like knowing that I miss someone. I don't do well with the knowledge that I miss someone. There's this squishy, uncomfortable feeling I get in my chest when I realize that I miss someone. It's even harder when I'm fighting it. Distance makes it easy sometimes, because at first, you miss the person so much and you get used to it. You tell yourself that "yes, I've stayed a few days without talking to this person or seeing this person, I can stay a few more, I won't die". It will hurt, yes, but slowly you learn to just be. What I hate most of all, is learning to be without a person, struggling to be without this person, convincing myself that I'm free or that I don't want this pe

Baby Steps

Hello there. It's been a while. I haven't posted or written anything here in ages because, in a way, I felt like there were so many questions I left unanswered before deciding to start a blog, I felt like a fraud. So,  for a while, I just decided to not write anything. I wrote poems and other things but I just wasn't sure if I knew what I was doing, I still don't, but I've decided to just go with the flow and see where it leads me instead of trying to force something out of nothing. I'm just going to write as me, no embellishments. I'm not going to try to agree or disagree with anybody, I'm just going to be May. So think of this as a diary of sorts, think of this as a sneak peak into my mind and my feelings. Who knows? Maybe we'll all learn how to be comfortable in our own skins and with our abilities. I can only do this by being as honest as I can be. The first step for me, is to evaluate why exactly I stopped posting. So this is my gift to yo

For the love of music

You know that moment when you're just sitting in a car or bus, lost in your thoughts and suddenly an old song you used to love comes on. In that moment, every other thing fades into the background of your mind, it's like it's just you and the music. What makes that moment more special is when there's someone else with you who can feel exactly what you feel, it could be a friend, a sibling or even a random stranger. Just knowing that there's someone else who can relate to the music is enough to bring a smile to your face. I'm sure that all of us, at one point or the other in our lives have experienced this unexplainable feeling of ecstasy and nostalgia that music brings. When I was in secondary school, my music teacher said, "music is a combination of sounds that is pleasant to the ear", I don't think so. I think music is more than just an ordinary combination of pleasant sounds, I think music is magic. I believe music is joy, I believe music is m