No sleep for the wicked

It is now 2:15am and I obviously cannot sleep. It may be because I am back in the bed where I tried to kill myself 54 days ago. My friends cried when I told them and I was supposed to feel like shit when they were crying but I felt absolutely nothing. My family has still refused to address it, to give them grace maybe they just don’t know how to and to be very honest, it is absolutely not a conversation I want to have with them anyways. My bed feels like a coffin in a poetic way. Like those glass coffins in Disney books where Prince Charming has to kiss the sleeping princess. Such bollocks. On kissing, I think it is one of the greatest things ever invented. Did Adam and Eve kiss, or did it start with Solomon and his 1000 women.

Again music is bae, because someone has usually sang/sung what I am feeling. See below.

I don't feel a single thing
Have the pills done too much?
Haven't caught up with my friends in weeks
And now we're out of touch

And the world, it feels too big
Like a floating ball that's bound to break
Snap my psyche like a twig
And I just wanna see if you feel the same as me

Do you ever get a little bit tired of life?
Like your body's in the room, but you're not really there
Like you have empathy inside, but you don't really care
Like you're fresh out of love, but it's been in the air

Am I past repair?
A little bit tired of trying to care when I don't
A little bit tired of quick repairs to cope
A little bit tired of sinking, there's water in my boat
I'm barely breathing, trying to stay afloat

So, I've got these quick repairs to cope
Guess I'm just broken and broke
The prescription's on its way
With a name I can't pronounce
And the dose I gotta take
'Cause I just want to see if this could make me happy


Anyway, happy new month to us all. My new negotiation with myself is to try to make it to 33.

Draft titles for future posts

• I can’t shout – something about how the world silences you and you need to shout louder than the noise to be heard, but if you don’t know how to shout then good luck to you
• If you’re reading this it’s too late – just like the title
• On tommyaches, headaches and heartaches
• To all my babies – an open letter to my nieces and nephews
• Mummy, don’t cry, I love you
• What to feel when you don’t feel anything
• I have a dead fingernail and I know it is dead but it is still on my nailbed, it’ll fall away eventually as it has almost fully lifted
• The last days – things I felt leading up to the last days upon dully deciding to exit
• Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestments
• You can only help me to help you. Tell me how to help you. You need to take a step. What then happens when you cannot do all of this
• On how this is not about money or success or health , lest we fall into comparison with less privileged people
• What if i write a book? working title – I’m okay ; maybe make it in collection of essays …hmmm
• Becoming a liar – lying is how i survive this

May 2

I am very happy today, for no real reason. Maybe because I had somewhat better sleep today than the last two weeks. It seems the marginally better was okay enough. I was even dancing without music.

A random thing happened today. Freddy (an acquaintance from Oxford) reached out to me. Normally, I wouldn’t have responded but I did and we had such a nice chat, I laughed and smiled a lot. I think it was easier to respond because he is one of those people who actually don’t know me beyond 2 or 3 interactions, so there is no shared history or baggage as such. He apparently has been looking for me for 2 years because I just disappeared. It made me wonder if there are people like him, looking for me. He extended an invitation for me to visit Congo. That’ll be nice. Not for right now, but for much later when I feel more stable.

The happiness I feel has also been a bit dampened by twinges of anxiety as my plans for the month seem more and more uncertain. I took a deep breath and yh, I took a deep breath.

May 1

I will attempt to write a post everyday in May. To avoid cheating, each post must be at least 3 healthy paragraphs long. The posts can be anything. An opinion piece, a rant, an unstructured journal dump, a poem. Anything really. Okay let’s go. Before we start, a lot of it may be bipolar related content. maybe. maybe not. okay. end of intro. that is one paragraph done. i kid. i kid.

Today, I came across a tiktok where a girl who has bipolar 2 shared that she has been in a longest continuous severe depressive episode which has lasted 8 months so far and that people should share in the comments how long their longest episode has been. Before I say mine, I haven’t thought of it yet, just stalling, but i do sometimes feel as though bipolar 2 (before you achieve some form of stability) is just one long ass depression tbvh with brief periods of rest split between a semblance of normalcy and hypomania.

I have been of late, seeing a lot of bipolar content on my tiktok and it seems as though for quite a number of people who were diagnosed and started meds in their late twenties, it took them between 3-5 years to find some form of stability. And most of this time was spent in some flavour of depression. For me, this is not exact but since 2021, I can say that on average, I have spent 4 months in continuous depression. The longest would be around 6 months I think and that would be in 2022. Accounting for breaks(hypomania or ‘normalcy’), in the last 4 years, I have spent around 7-9 months each year in a major depression, not an ‘i am sad’ depression, more like ‘everything is a black hole and i want to kill myself depression’.

This year has been quite strange actually because I can’t really pinpoint clearly my periods of depression/normalcy/hypomania. I also do think i have been having a lot of mixed episodes. I also think a lot of things I have done because of depression e.g isolation, not going out like at all at all, going off social media, talking with only a limited number of people and not regularly at that, and being broke has tempered the more the socially destructive aspects of hypomania and i’m only left with thoughts going at 1 million miles per second, not sleeping, making grand life plans with urgency and convinced they are realistic, thinking i’m in love, etc etc.

On my depression so far this year as well, it has been of such a different flavour that I can’t really pinpoint it. I did go off my antidepressants at a point for like 3 months, although I am back on them now. Because of some societal factors I have also been really withdrawn and kinda numb/resigned. Numb in the sense of I don’t feel the pain and despair I used to feel with depression regularly. It does come up sometimes but quite infrequently. I am very careful to conclude that this means the depression is getting better. Even though I have no scientific/medical workings to show, i actually feel it is getting worse.

I will end with a note of sunshine though. A lot of the bipolar content I have been seeing, a number of people do share that after the long years experiencing the worst of it, it really did get better. So, I will hold on to that.

Forty

it takes roughly forty minutes to boil/steam moin-moin. that’s the inspiration for the title. yes i am currently embroiled in a moin-moin boiling situation.

anyways, i wish i write things down immediately they pop into my head because now for the life of me i cannot remember what i wanted to write. i need to wash my bathroom but i cannot bring myself to do it and i cannot explain it in a way that will make sense. inability to wash my bathroom is a 7 on my depression severity scale.

i read a book today called reasons to stay alive. his reasons to stay alive didn’t do it for me because we are from entirely different demographics. author is a white british male from a non-religious british family with a girlfriend turned wife who basically did the art of living for him while he couldn’t function. admin, bills, housing, volunteering etc etc, basically everything. she’s a saint and i applaud her. funny enough i voiced a version of what she did for him in one of my blog posts last year as what i needed. so it’s not like i do not know what i need to get better, it is just that i do not have it and do not not think i will get it from anyone i know currently in a fashion that is devoid of time pressures/emotional pressures or guilt. in my fantasies i do have it though, cos you cannot suffer in real life and suffer in your fantasy as well. so until my fantasy becomes reality, i will continue to trudge along.

there were some things i gained from the book though which i will attempt to articulate. i took a long break to see to the affairs of moin-moin and also gossip with friends now i cannot remember what i wanted to write yet again.

How many hours are there in one day

When you just want to get on to the next day, so you can mark it in your calendar that you survived the current one, then the hours stretch out awfully long. Anyway, that is not the gist of the day. Random before we go to the gist of the day. I wonder what will happen when any of my family members stumble upon this blog. Will it be good for them or bad for them. Only time will tell.

The gist of today is the number of hours I spend in a day thinking of killing myself has gone down from about ten to one. Progress. I ate this very sweet yam and egg on Sunday. Ore my good friend is coming to Lagos. Folasewa is also around. I hope I can get enough vim to see them in person. But if I do not, I will not berate myself.

My mind is doing that thing where it just goes totally blank. Which means this is where this post ends. The end

Lagos to Accra

i just remembered when i did a dubai playlist, that is a contextual gist that will die with me lol. but i have appaz been going crazy for a long time.

yunno, sometimes we are growing and because it’s not the area of growth we are gunning for, it is easy to miss. i have grown in the area of not feeling entitled of people’s devotion to me. i chose that word very deliberately. quid doesn’t always pr quo, especially when the quid has not quidded in a long time. we digress. as i was trying to write, i really like that. oh gosh, i am actively fighting back tears about something else and i am not in an environment where i can cry freely. i did lock myself in the toilet and sat on the floor and cried for like 3 minutes earlier. but i have had my bath and i cannot do that at the moment.

as i was saying, it may sound like a bad thing, but i appreciate that for me. it has helped me feel less forlon, less abandoned, less misunderstood, less everything. i don’t feel at the fringes of people’s mercy. would it be nice to be the object of solid devotion especially in my current state? it would be, yes. but not expecting it is freeing.

Okay now we will stop digressing. The title of this post is Lagos to Accra. I want to visit Accra in a couple of weeks, max 3 weeks all things being equal. I used my last money, and when I say my last money, I mean my last money to renew my passport. I have an appointment on Wednesday, which is incidentally the Wednesday my brother’s family is travelling/relocating. The thing is – you know me, I don’t really like to actually talk, so I wasn’t going to say anything, but now because there might be expectations of my availability on that day. I have to say i’m not available o.

Now to the trip itself, I have been feeling apprehensive for two reasons – i don’t know how to tell my family, was just gonna run away tbh, but appaz can’t do that, and very honestly i would have done that if i had the funds for it. second reason is i’ve been feeling like this trip is not the solution to anything, like what if nothing changes and i still want to kill myself after. well, if the extreme is the case, then i can say, i truly tried.

however, i have, from yesterday, started to look at it with more positive and positive desires/manifestations lens. from the perspective of meeting people who will change the trajectory of my life, opportunities and favour being created right now for me to walk into, from even the day i go to renew my passport to the road trip (which i am excited about).

i will start thinking and speaking positively about it everyday from now till the day i am enroute accra.

so…lagos to accra…tommorow holds beautiful things.

oh random – lola tried to talk to me yesterday, i tried to be honest and to explain myself as best i could. the end

my posts feel less and less like blog posts and more like unstructured journal entries. btw, i had a really heavy emotional anger moment earlier today, which led to me sitting on the toilet floor. also tried to explain somethings to lanre, that i don’t know if it sounded coherent.

now, currently, i’m hot, physically, the sun is boiling and we need more mud houses in nigeria tbvh. it’s 1pm and my plans for the day have been hijacked from me.

anyways, toodles. oh, i had a haircut yesterday. let’s just say, i do not love it yet.

Past Lives

Do you know how jarring it is to not know if the life you lived before was yours, if your smiles, your contributions, your likes, even your loves, were yours.

I’ve been having very vivid memories of just various scenes in my life, just like a film montage and maybe that’s because I will soon die and there are no clear memories on the other side. Oh by the way, Katy Perry went into space yesterday.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, in these memories, good, bad, neutral, record breaking, all of them, I struggle to have a feeling of that was me. In conversations with friends/family/colleagues/unit members at church, I see myself fully present but also fully disassociating because I don’t quite care about what the subject matter is, and in retrospect, I realise I haven’t cared about the world/life for a very long time, never even made like actual plans and maybe that just means I was a happy go lucky person, but I think it is probably deeper than that. In a way in all these memories I felt split.

And I will give anything to be split again, because at least I will be functioning. As it stands, only the fully disassociated part of me still exists and it is too expensive to be fully disassociated.

I don’t think anything will bring me back. It’s nice to think about it that by sheer will, my community effort, by medication, by love, by talk therapy, by envisioning the future and making plans, the present part of me will come back, but I think she is gone for good and I mourn her.

Her leaving has left me driftless. Do you know what it is to die before you are dead? I hope you never have to find out.

I’m so modafucking sleepy

I’m so sleepy all the time and we all know why

Surulere – but time has run out

Surulere means patience has virtue or something like that. I recently briefly lived in Surulere for almost 3 months. But this post is not about that.

It is about how in the beginning, everyone was all about take all the time you need. And I also thought the time I needed was about one year, because I am so careful of mot placing responsibility of my life on others like a human without agency, even though I don’t know if I am doing anything with that agency.

It is clear that that time has now run out. I’m living on borrowed time.