Issaaaaa scaaaaaam!!!
The past 5 weeks, give or take have been crazy, with having
to start NYSC year, moving away from home, and settling into a new environment,
none of which I’ve quite gotten around to anyway.
In these past 5 weeks, I’ve also come to learn a little bit
more about myself and about this thing called life, none of which I think I have
totally figured out anyway.
At the centre of all I’ve learnt is this--- “Adulting issa
scam!”, and I’ll tell you why.
For most part of my life (and I hope someone out there can
relate to this), I’ve been confined to one place, literally. Enugu is my home;
I was born and bred there. When I say confined to one place, I mean I can’t
remember a time in my life when I’ve been more than 15 minutes away from home.
Let me elaborate a little further on that with some examples.
The nursery school I attended shared a fence with our house
then. Do you know how I got to school every morning? Once it was time for
school, my aunt would dress me up, carry me downstairs and just lift me over
the fence and into the arms of my class teacher who’d be waiting on the other
end to receive my cute chubby self into her arms. Saves time and energy don’t
you think? I mean why leave your compound and walk all the way out to the road
and into the next compound which was the nursery school, when you could just
throw her across the fence like a little ball in a game of catch?
Don’t worry, primary school wasn’t a game of “toss and catch the cute chubby kid”
sha, but I was still barely 10 minutes away from the house.
Oh secondary school was epic, I was sent to a boarding
school, with half my teachers and my school principal on my parent’s speed dial
list and the school of course being barely 10 minutes from the house.
Then came time for university, you should have seen me filling
out my JAMB application form and putting down every university that wasn’t UNN.
I’m sure University of Ibadan was in my application form, so was Nnamdi Azikiwe
University and one other private university like that, I think it was Covenant
university. But by some weird magic,
(the magic here being my parents) all the options were changed to UNN. First
choice—UNN, second choice—UNN, and so to UNN I went. Did I mention that at some
point, the campus also shared a fence with our house? I could have a 30 minute
break in between lecture periods and that’d be more than enough time for me to
go home, grab a snack and be back in time for the next class.
House job year? Still the same University of Nigeria, still
confined in one place which had grown to become my space and somehow I’d grown
to become very comfortable with it. Though I always had that gnawing ache deep
down that was basically just me craving a new environment. I loved being around
my family and my friends but I’d gotten so comfortable with it that I craved a
totally different experience, I was bored. So you can imagine my excitement at
the thought of NYSC year and having to serve in a totally different place from
where I grew up. Of course my people almost made me stay in Enugu for it, they
had their ways and they’d have done it had the spirit of the Lord not
ministered to them to stay kwayet!
Let me tell you what happened the first day I arrived camp
in Ekiti state and saw the thousands of people scurrying round the place, with
all the noise and fixed routines and oh, don’t get me started on the sound of
that bugle or whatever it’s called and the dirty bathrooms and most of all, the
living conditions, I mean how do you pack almost a hundred people in one room
with little to no ventilation, even my boarding school wasn’t like that. I
legit had a nervous breakdown, I’m not kidding. I broke down in tears,
screaming, and hyperventilating. I called my mum on the phone and all I was
mumbling in between sobs was, “I can’t stay here, you guys need to get me
out of here, mummy I can’t stay here. There are too many people and there’s so
much noise and the rooms, the rooms are crowded, mummy my allergies”. (if
you know me well, then you know how bad my allergies can be) Of course my mum
tried her best to calm me down.
You see, growing up
that way more or less made me an introvert by default, and an extrovert by
choice. I like the quiet that comes with being in my own space. Don’t get me
wrong, I also enjoy socializing but with a select crowd.
So now the one thing I’ve wanted so much, to move to a new
city, have a change of scenery, write a new chapter, explore—I have that now,
and I can take it all the way from here. You’d think I’d be mega excited, but I’m
not. If anything I think I’m a tad bit depressed and severely homesick. I’d
give anything to be back at home with my mum yelling at me one minute about not
having cleared the dishes and then fighting with me the next minute for who
gets the last piece of chicken, or my Dad giving me lectures on everything life
and stories about his days growing up. Instead I’m in a far away city being
used as cheap labor (cos’ let’s face it, youth corpers are cheap labor in this
nation}, and having to deal with the problems of adulting proper-- from job
hunting to house searching to future career plans and realizing that it’s all
me now, there’s no one lifting me up across a fence and onto the green grass on
the other side. And honestly, I’ve never been so overwhelmed my entire life. I
mean I have to look for a job, asin, submit applications and go for interviews
and all of that, and wait to know if I’m going to get accepted for the job or
not.
Someone legit used the “don’t
call us, we’ll call you” line on me some days back and it took everything
in me not to start crying in that office. I have to find an apartment and rent,
me? Me that doesn’t have sense! What is the world coming to? Whatever happened
to “in my father’s house, there are
plenty rooms”? Oh, and now if I have
exams to write, I also have to pay for them specifically. See baa, in school,
school fees covered for everything—accommodation, school uniform, exams too!.
And your only job was to write the exam and move onto the next exam, very
simple stuff now that I think about it.
So you see? Adulting issa scam! They lied to us. Right now I’m
just here thinking to myself if quarter life crisis is a good enough reason to get me off
this NYSC stuff cos’ I’m really thinking about scrapping this entire year.
xoxo!
Alma Rosenfield