Why I LoveD Myself (pt1)

The title already reads like I’m a narcissist, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But hear me out.

Once upon a time, I really liked the way I looked. I’m talking walking past shop windows and doing a double-take, sometimes even giving myself a smile and a little wink. Picture Joey from Friends saying his famous tagline, “How you doing?”, but it’s me… talking to myself… like a crazy person. I liked how I looked, was proud to walk out my front door into the world every day, and never really cared what anyone else thought. I knew I looked good.

Now, I never felt I was God’s gift to human eyes. In fact, I was under no illusions that anyone else shared my idea of how I looked. It was just how I saw myself at 20 years old. But this confidence excited me as much as it did because it was pretty new to me at the time.

Only a few years before, my self-image could not be further from what I just described. For most of my secondary school life, I felt invisible to most students outside of my year. Like many others my age, I began my teenage years eager to find my tribe: others like me who would share a mutual appreciation for ourselves and common interests. But it was the first time I had to think about looking or being “cool”. The first time I realised I had to think of how I looked, beyond how my parents and teachers told me to look. I was a nerdy kid who looked and acted the part. The truth is, I was surrounded by others like me, but quickly found myself trying to be like the more “popular kids”. Within a couple of years I went from being an 11 year old A*  student, happy to fill my time with drawing, chess and running around outdoors, to a lost 13 year old boy at the bottom of my class academically, wearing my trousers below my bum and preoccupied with how much attention I could get from girls. It was a quick turnaround and a very humble awakening when I realised I had lost my way so much and still wasn’t one of the popular kids. Thus came a turning point. I genuinely got so frustrated with trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t and getting no results that I decided I’d go back to focusing on the things I actually liked and enjoyed, regardless of what anyone else thought, fully accepting my position as “not one of the popular kids”. Ironically, this is when I started getting the things that I had wanted for so long.

Let’s set the scene. You see, at that time, I had picked up a couple of passions that would shape my life from then on. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but they were the three main things I hadn’t fully embraced until I stopped trying to be popular. I had gained an interest in basketball and was becoming a reasonably good player for my age. I had always had a gift for drawing, and it was one of the most therapeutic tools I had at my disposal. AND, I loved, I mean, absolutely loved being around my younger siblings. Why are these relevant, you ask?

• Basketball: Well, though many of the “popular kids” played basketball, it wasn’t the sport of choice for most of the guys in my year. That accolade went to football: another sport I liked but wasn’t very good at, at least not by Nigerian standards. So some days I would be on the basketball court with a ball as my only company, smiling ear to ear as I pretended I was Lebron James.
• Drawing: In most cases, drawing is a solo endeavour. I could sit for hours drawing several pictures of Spiderman in the same pose but from different angles, all while everyone else was out interacting with each other and doing whatever it was I had deemed “popular kids” did while I sat hunched over my sketchbook.
• And finally, spending time with my siblings: In the bubble of my secondary school, age played a massive role in social hierarchy. You automatically had a little more social currency the older you were or the higher your year group. So, having friends in the older year groups was highly valued, but hanging around the younger kids? Less so, even if the age difference was only one or two years. So there I was, taking every chance I could to play with my younger brother and his friends and getting very comfortable being around my younger sister and her friends.

The truth was none of these things mattered in the way my teenage mind had framed them. In fact, they were probably things that many people found endearing about me. But my eyes only saw how they made me different from those I wanted to be like. But, at my turning point, when I decided I would stop holding back on fully embracing these three things, among many other smaller aspects of my life, I suddenly found I was becoming “popular” in my own right.

• In my last three years in school, I became the oldest prominent player on the team. This meant I got selected as the team captain by proxy. I wasn’t the best player on the team by any means, but I didn’t care. I was now Ify, the school basketball captain.
• I was stunned the day one of the “popular” boys asked me to draw him a picture to give as a gift to his Valentine. Then I started having more people offer to pay for my drawings. I gained a reputation for my art, a source of pride to this day.
• And lastly, hanging out with my siblings and their friends. The already strong bond between my younger siblings and me became unbreakable. Their friends became my good friends, some for life. I stopped being the guy who always hung around with the younger kids and became a guy who got along with everyone.

The whole thing was dripping with irony: Basketball was actually a very popular sport across the entire school, outside of my year group; I’d always been viewed positively for my drawing, and; No one actually gave a damn about me being so close to my brother and sister or their friends. In hindsight, I now know that what had actually happened was just that I started living my life for myself and not for the imaginary standards I thought I was being judged by. This, in turn, gave me a lot of fulfilment and freedom. My narrow worldview had convinced me that these were all new things I was suddenly being appreciated for in a way I hadn’t been before. But because it was so real to me, without realising, I had taught myself to love myself for who I was and not who I thought other people believed I was. That was what evolved into the self-confidence I developed going into university.

By the time I turned 20, I was actively enhancing and maintaining these aspects of my life. Playing basketball regularly meant that even though I wasn’t muscular, I was now very physically fit without ever really going to the gym (I couldn’t afford it). My passion and effort for drawing was now feeding directly into my university degree and career path in animation. And through all that time spent with my siblings, their friends and eventually my own peers, I developed a lot of social skills, empathy and a newfound confidence in interacting with the opposite sex without being driven by hormones. But most of all, it further strengthened my already deep ideals of family and loyalty.

When I looked in the mirror at the person I had become, I saw the culmination of a lot of growth and acceptance. I saw resilience, hard work, and an ability to overcome adversity—admittedly, adversity that mostly only existed in my head—but real resilience and preparedness to face anything that would affect me in the same or similar ways. I saw a lot to be proud of and a lot to love.

…And then the accident happened.

The follow-up to this should be live at noon this Monday, May 5th. I didn’t initially intend to write it in two parts, but it just kept getting longer and longer, and I didn’t want to cut out crucial parts of what happened. So please be patient. I’m putting the finishing touches on Part 2. In the meantime, why not check out my last post? I wrote it for the 15-year anniversary of the accident. Till next time, stay blessed.