your life story

Suppose you find yourself craving a better life story. There are millions of people older than you perhaps, but you know deep down that if given your last decade or so, someone else would’ve made much better decisions. You trace that thought and discover that at every point in your life’s journey, you have left crumbs of how undeserving you are of the favour that has been placed upon you. The right thing to do, and you know this, is to ask your God to take that favour away and grant it to a more responsible person. Perhaps a more ambitious young person, one who does not struggle to wake up early in the morning, one who would delight in taking care of the body given to them by God. The kind of person who would only need to read his commandments once to know how to stay away from sin. That (and you know this) is the type of person who can make the best out of the few years you know you have left on this earth. You can picture them and you can feel that they exist. Maybe in a parallel universe or another life, you can see them actually living your life better than you have so far. They study your courses with the right methods, sleep in your bed for the exact eight hours, take the test with the right ratio of anxiety to confidence, get into the right university, pick the right friends, date the right partner, and see the relationship to marriage, and … you know the rest, they have healthy babies and live happily ever after.

You snap out of the trance and you know that that person is not coming to rescue you from the mess you’ve created out of your life. In fact, it is now dawning on you that no one is coming to save you. Because everything that happens in your life is ascribable to you, you know that you have made a fool of yourself and soon enough, everyone is going to know. You may be graduating soon and everyone will see that you don’t have a gold tassel, you may be looking for a new job and they will all see the green “searching” on your LinkedIn profile, you may be getting dumped soon and everyone will see you posting “back in the streets” on your Instagram stories and know you failed at another relationship, or you may actually post an engagement photoshoot and everyone but you will see that your partner is not as excited for marriage as you are. But they will not tell you any of what they see because, in life, we often pick the wrong times to mind our own businesses. When people need us to tell them the truth, to warn them, and to offer guidance, we refrain under the guise of #MYOB. When they are living their lives peacefully, somehow our self-centeredness takes the backseat and we can’t help but snoop in on what is going on in their lives. We can’t help but draw similarities and differences between our misery and other peoples’. Because how else will we know how to cope with the pains of our lives but to think that someone else has it worse?

So the quality of your life becomes relative depending on who you look at. And wisely enough, you avoid the people that trigger you, those are the people whose vacation photos make you feel as if you are living in a slum. They are the kinds of people whose food posts make you believe that you just had vomit directly from a sick cow’s mouth. And they love to show off, those people, especially when they are thriving. They post their morning coffee next to their journal, then they post their gym mirror selfie in their Gymshark clothes and Nike sneakers and perfectly toned bodies —- and they keep it up until late in the night when they feature a chamomile tea and a different night journal. Some of them add #blessed. You know to avoid their stories now because it makes you question whether your monthly blessings have been getting lost in the mail. It makes you think that maybe your God has favourites and he is not shy that he should hide them. He parades them for the #notblessed to see… perhaps so that they may get saved and join Heaven’s wait list of people begging for blessings and favour.

You blame yourself for not having taken your blessed time seriously. For not having saved some money perhaps or investing it. But you tried though. You got lost in a YouTube rabbit hole trying to learn about the stock market. You also tried starting a YouTube channel and that failed, so did the T-shirt printing, the dropshipping, the blogging, the affiliate marketing, and all the suggested “side hustles” that have proven to be successful for your generation. Because none of them worked you start to think that maybe, just maybe, you were not built for any of it. Now, this can go either way. You may either think it’s because there is something better for you to do than these meagre jobs or you at least think that you are incapable of doing even the basics in life. Because you have learned helplessness, you pick the latter. You summon your tear glands under the subject of being inadequate. They heed your call. You go to sleep on a wet pillow and you only have yourself, your government, and your God to blame.