Besides the fact that this is an illegal restriction on movement which they have no authority to impose, more importantly, the men are coordinating en masse to break into homes, shops and buildings, and drag out more women and girls to rape.

All of this is happening on video being filmed by the men themselves.

Nobody is accusing them, they are manufacturing the evidence of their own guilt.

The videos are not easy to watch, — I have excluded any actual rape and left only the precursor — but I must include them here because we must never diminish the gravity of the truth of what is happening.

Understanding how serious the crime is, is the foundation of understanding how serious the punishment for the crime must be.

The Nigerian police has done nothing about this until prompted by public exposure to make a weak attempt at imposing order.

In fact, when questioned on his generic PR statement about the incident, the Delta State Police Public Relations Officer, Bright Edafe asked the woman questioning him why his tweet turn her on, indicating that he too is of a similar mindset as the people his police force are being asked to arrest.

Countless women and girls in Ozoro are enduring rape and per the men’s own claims this is a tradition so the true number of women and girls who have been raped by their whole community is actually much larger and uncountable.

Almost 20 years ago when I first came online and said based on accurate real life observation from growing up in Nigeria, that the average Nigerian man is a rapist and a paedophile, people reacted as if I was crazy and my claims were outrageous.

Yet they were just factually accurate.

The average Nigerian man you see walking on the street WILL participate in rape if he sees the opportunity to.

Every single man and boy (watch the videos there are clearly male children among the rape mobs in Delta) who is currently participating in hunting for women and girls to gang rape is someone who on any other day, would be considered a normal, average person.

Someone’s brother, someone’s son, someone’s cousin, someone’s friend, someone’s boyfriend, someone’s husband, someone’s uncle, someone’s father.

After this week of gorging themselves on rape to their satisfaction, these men and boys will blend back into their normal lives, go back to calling women and girls who come out to talk about being raped false accusers. They will form mobs online to hunt down women who name their abusers just as they formed mobs in real life to hunt down women to rape in Ozoro and other parts of Nigeria.

Nigerian men know that the average Nigerian man is a rapist.
They just don’t want women to say it aloud because part of the entitlement they feel is the expectation that women should shut up and endure it quietly so that they as men will be able to go on to have happy lives, get jobs, get married, have children, all unimpeded, and enjoy the benefits of being seen as respectable and valuable members of society, despite being the complete opposite.

And we know that they know this is true, because when other men say it or inadvertently admit it, like their Ozoro brother in the video below, they have no rebuttals to make. When women say the same things said in this video word for word, Nigerian men coordinate online to hunt down the woman and try to make her face consequences for telling the truth that they tolerate being said from male lips.

There will be no justice for the latest rape victims because in Nigeria there never has been and there never will be.

Nigeria is a country where rape is built into the very fabric of society and rapists openly hold seats of power.

The only thing for every woman and girl who has been raped in this week’s rape festival in Ozoro is to simply endure the life sentence of trauma from having been raped.

And that’s fine.

No harm, no foul.

But since there is no expiration date on the effects of rape, there is also no expiration date on its remedy.

Like countless men who have raped women as a casual hobby they occasionally indulge in, the men in Ozoro will eventually fade back into the regular background hum of life and all of this will be forgotten as a fun memory of good times with their boys and best bros.

They will come home and sleep in their beds, they will go back to their school classrooms or their jobs, they will wake up in the morning to eat food cooked by women in their homes, sisters, mothers, etc. They will go outside and buy food from mama puts and roadside stalls run by women.

Life supported by invisible female labour will become normal again.

All that matters is that men in Ozoro lose complete access to women and girls as much as possible, and that whether it takes six months from now or six years from now or sixty years from now, the women in Ozoro kill as many of the men who raped them as possible.

There is no benefit to marriage, romantic relationships or even friendships with men for women in Ozoro. What exactly is the point of engaging with the men in this community, when at any moment in the near future, your friend, your boyfriend, your husband, or even your father, will join other women’s friends, boyfriends, husbands, and fathers to waylay you in broad daylight, rip off your clothes, and take turns raping you while they capture your despair and futile screams for help on video to replay and enjoy later?

Why should any woman from this state pretend that it is acceptable to forget what the men around them have done and reward these same men with continued access to women and girls through friendship, relationships, and marriage?

Parents of toddlers and owners of dogs know very well that if you continue to reward bad behaviour, the behaviour will escalate, and the wrongdoer will become emboldened to do even worse than they originally did.

The only way to nip it in the bud is to make those actions negatively consequential.

Consequences for destructive male behaviour like rape matter enormously, so no matter how slow the trickle, as long as the men who participated in these gang rape mobs in Ozoro continue to be killed, that is the only change that can make a difference to ending the impunity of rape terrorism by Isoko and Urhobo men in Delta State.

This is no different to how the only real solution for the women in Afghanistan is to kill as many of the Taliban as possible, men who themselves undoubtedly wear clothes washed by women, rape women forcibly married to them, live in houses run by women, and eat food cooked by women on a daily basis.

Nobody is coming to save any woman who is currently being raped in Ozoro.

Tagging NGOs, calling for DSVA, are all things we do because without doing them, we cannot feel better about the fact that we are powerless to help.

The men of Ozoro and other similar communities with devastating criminal practices targeted at women like mass rape, FGM, child marriage, breast ironing, and so on, always defend these practices saying it is their tradition and their culture.

Culture is what the people of any given group choose to do repeatedly. Tradition emerges when that choice is passed on to the next generation.

The current culture and tradition of Ozoro women is to keep quiet, cry, endure flashbacks, even drink pesticide and kill themselves because they cannot live with the pain, and longterm horrific effects of being raped.

Killing men who rape women and girls is a new culture that Ozoro women can choose at any given time, and one that women can pass on to their daughters and granddaughters to transmit in perpetuity.

After all, men are not the only ones who can determine culture. Culture is made by women too.

The only people who can save themselves from this inhumane barbarity are the women who are themselves subjected to it and who as members of that community, even if they have not already been victimised, are likely to be victimised by the men around them in the future.

This mass rape of women and girls has been going on unabated for decades, maybe even centuries. The only thing that is different now is that there are smartphones with cameras so now the world gets to watch women and girls be hunted in the streets like frightened animals by a laughing, gleeful mob of baying men and boys.

And the video evidence of it will do nothing to deter the crime, because Nigeria is a society in which nobody feels shame for being a rapist. Men who rape are celebrated and elevated and their victims hounded and demonised.

Rather, the videos of this successful rape fest is an advertisement to other men who are eager to try it themselves. Not only will those remote communities in Nigeria who have no such tradition attempt to recreate it on whatever scale they can, but men who are not even from Ozoro will flock to Ozoro at the time of the next festival hungry to participate in rape without consequences.

Consequences are the only thing that can change this kind of mentality at scale.

Until the natural consequence of participating in recreational rape is death no matter how long the timeframe, all documentation of the crime will only drastically increase the number of enthusiasts because it is also documentation that you can reliably get away with the crime of hunting and raping women in broad daylight in 2026 Nigeria.

💛,
Lotanna

Every time a new Nollywood project came out from an exciting, buzzy filmmaker, people would hype it up and insist I watch it.

I’d ignore my instincts, give in to their entreaties, and watch it, and predictably, the storyline would be aimless, lacklustre, meandering, and ultimately bland.

There would be endless scenes of parties as though their sole purpose was to emphasise that off that Nigerians do have access to luxury, but ultimately served no real purpose in furthering the story’s narrative.

The characters would be flat and forgettable, and for almost every film I’ve ever seen come out of Nollywood, the actors and actresses themselves dominate their characters such that you remember the actor in the movie, but you never remember the person they were they were acting as.

I almost didn’t watch Kemi Adetiba’s new eight episode Netflix series titled To Kill a Monkey because I was exhausted.

I had Nollywood fatigue.

I was so used to being disappointed and let down no matter what kind of excited reviews I saw, that I almost skipped it but I’m really glad that I didn’t and took a chance on it after all.

This isn’t supposed to be a review of To Kill a Monkey, which in my opinion, was a fun watch but had problems with pacing, loose ends, and could have benefitted from a tighter narrative as some scenes honestly felt like filler, but I just want to give flowers to the incredible acting performance of Onyebuchi Franklin Odurukwe, who goes by the stage name Bucci Franklin.

Enter Oboz da Boss

In the series, Bucci Franklin portrays the character of a cultist criminal gang leader named Oboz da Boss, and called Oboz, who leads a criminal organisation that’s into fraud and all manner of unsavoury activities .

He embodies this character so well that I completely forgot about him as an actor.

He lived and breathed the character of Oboz.

The subtlety of his acting goes beyond just his line delivery, but he really delivered this subtle facial acting. His micro expressions communicated the emotions of the character in every scene. It was done with a finesse never really seen before in Nollywood, and very reminiscent of the of the incredibly subtle micro expressions and facial acting that Lee Jung Jae is feted the world over for, in his role as Seong Gi Hun of Squid Game.

If he is able to transfer this kind of character embodiment into subsequent roles in other films or television series, I am convinced that Bucci Franklin is going to be Nigeria first true breakout international acting superstar.

I haven’t seen his other work yet, but his portrayal in TKAM makes me excited to see anything he’s in, whether it’s a feature film or a multi part series or even something as short as a commercial.

Bucci’s ability to transcend himself to make us forget reality by sucking us into the inner world of his character as if Oboz truly existed, to feel Oboz’s burden; his motivations, his fears, his anger, and ultimately, his betrayal, is the kind of superb acting that inspires devotion in fans.

He’ll certainly gain a massive fan base, and really, his acting is only going to be constrained by the quality of work that’s able to come his way if he’s fortunate to pair with great directors and producers.

If he’s fortunate to be given well rounded, fleshed-out characters that he can bring to life, Onyebuchi Odurukwe will go on to have an enormous acting career and may probably end up Nigeria’s most beloved actor and most recognisable acting export in future.

Aside:

I’m really sorry to say, but to my surprise, this was Bimbo Akintola’s worst performance. I’ve always considered her a good actress, so I don’t know what was going on with her this time, but majority of the scenes with her lacklustre character could have been deleted with very little impact to the final outcome of the story, and her portrayal just failed to deliver.

💛,
Lotanna

Okay, so we have to start this thing over because I completely fell off the wagon, and the reason it happened was because I was not sleeping, and I don’t mean missing just a few hours of sleep per night.

I mean I wasn’t sleeping at all.

I kept pushing myself to get my walks in, get my workouts in, but once I stopped sleeping, I wasn’t thinking properly anymore.

It became really difficult to do anything.

I was trying so hard, but nothing made any sense.

I tried to follow my diet, but I wasn’t eating in a way that made sense.

Sometimes I would eat multiple meals in a row, and sometimes I would eat nothing at all and completely forget that I needed to eat.

In summary, April started off well but turned into a complete shit show because I spiralled into a complete mental and emotional breakdown, partially due to lack of sleep, which threw me off completely.

April started breaking down around the 17th. I was an emotional mess, and unsurprisingly, my period started shortly after, which cleared up the mystery of why I was so sensitive that week to that stupid man trying me and everything was triggering me into floods of tears.

May would have been fine, but I somehow managed to injure myself, and that escalated into a much bigger problem than I anticipated.

June was spent trying to recover, and now at the end of June, I’m only just starting to feel like I’m back on track, but effectively, my weight has yo-yoed for three whole months.

I must have lost and regained the same five or ten pounds twenty times, which is so frustrating because if I had just been consistent, I’d be significantly lighter by now.

I decided to quit my meal service.

I was getting great high protein food, but I just couldn’t eat it.

And it’s not because it doesn’t taste good. Most of it is actually delicious, but psychologically, it became that thing where once you have food in the fridge, suddenly everything else is what you want.

I just wanted to order out, go to restaurants — anything except eat what I already had.

I still don’t know why or how I got injured.

I don’t remember falling or twisting my leg or anything specific.

I just woke up one day and felt pain in my left knee. From that point on, it was hell.

It was so stiff in the mornings to bend or straighten my leg. Just moving my knee hurt so much.

I couldn’t put my full weight on it.

I had pain walking, standing, even trying to momentarily balance on one leg like one does trying to dry oneself after a shower.

I ended up getting an X-ray and then an MRI.

I thought I’d torn my meniscus or damaged some tendon or ligament, but the X-ray said nothing was wrong. The MRI said the same.

I was confused because I was in so much pain, and just hobbling everywhere.

Still, I kept trying to do my workouts. I would walk through the pain, sometimes holding onto the treadmill bars and walking sideways just to finish.

I was dragging my leg.

I was in so much pain I was taking painkillers to sleep, and then stupidly, not wanting to take more powerful painkillers, I started adding Bailey’s Irish Cream in my hot cocoa at night, hoping to knock myself out and actually get enough sleep.

What a way to become an alcoholic overnight.

That was not my brightest idea but in my defence my brain was broken.

I tried massages. I bought a massage gun. Nothing worked.

Eventually, I just had to stop — walking, exercising, everything.

That was the only thing that helped the pain start to subside.

Right now, I don’t have pain in my knee anymore, just a little instability. It took a while to get here. I was so used to pain that the first day I woke up without it took me by surprise.

Now I’ve started walking again, cautiously — but I’m always worried it’ll come back and I haven’t returned to the level I was at before. Back then I was walking three and a half hours a day, twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand steps like clockwork. Now I’m lucky to hit five thousand. What’s holding me back is the fear that the pain will return.

The MRI did show that I have a little bit of arthritis in my knee — just mild arthritis.

That shocked me. If that was mild, I don’t even want to know what serious arthritis feels like.

I was in agony. I really thought something was torn or worse, so to be told structurally everything looks fine, just a bit of arthritis — I was completely bewildered.

The silver lining is that it means I can get back there.

I might have to ramp up more gradually, but I can get back to the peak of my fitness.

So I’ve started again.

The diet is now modified to prioritise foods I know that even on my worst day, I will have no problem eating.

Until I get my headspace back, I’m eating mostly chopped salads, chicken, and a can of sardines (or mackerel or kippers) every day (along with overnight oats, nuts and skyr)

I also stopped drinking.

That’s probably the most surreal part for me because I’ve never been a drinker, so I never thought I would ever have to say the words “quit drinking” but I honestly don’t think I was drinking per se, but I was just desperate to sleep and I’ve always felt drowsy from alcohol, so I thought if this will knock me out, let’s do it.

As my five year old self would say:

She who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.

We go again! (sleeping by fire by force this time)

Other things that were on my mind

We need to talk about Fulani Herdsmen

The recent massacres in Benue and Enugu were so depressing.

Benue especially because it feels like I have been hearing about massacres in Benue my whole life.

Nobody is counting the total number of people killed.

We are seeing war time numbers of people murdered, yet on paper Nigeria is a peaceful country that only ever suffered one major war.

Then there are the lies from the government trying to cover up and distort and propagandise what is clear for everyone to see:

That non-Muslim (mostly Christian but some Animist) people from middle belt tribes are being systematically exterminated in a slow motion genocide to terrorise them off their land in order to make room for nomadic Muslim Fulani herdsmen who come from as far away as Mali, and are mostly not even Nigerian to begin with.

This genocide has been going on for over a century in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, and it’s one of the most overlooked yet critical aspects of Nigerian History.

Last year, I started (but stopped as I got distracted with other concerns) reading The Diary of Hamman Yaji, which is a true historical account of the daily activities of a Fulani herdsman, raider, and slave trader, who lived between 1863–1929, and later rose to become the Emir of Madagali in the Adamawa Emirate in what is today, modern day Adamawa State.

The vast majority of the book is reproduced from his own personal diary, and it’s staggering how much of his daily activities as written by him involve casually attacking, kidnapping, enslaving, raping, and murdering the indigenous people of Adamawa (which is part of the Middle Belt), among whom he as nothing but a obtruding guest.

The Fulani Herdsmen who kill their way across Nigeria are continuing the same campaign that Hamman Yaji was a part of, something anyone well grounded in Nigerian history would know, but what is unique today about what is happening, is how in bed the Nigerian government seems to be with them, and how it is their victims whom the government should be protecting, that it flexes its muscle to silence.

Take for instance, poor Sunday Jackson, a Christian farmer from Adamawa, who back in 2015, was rightfully on his own farm, and rightfully defended his own life from a Muslim Fulani herdsman who had unlawfully trespassed on his farm and unlawfully attacked him with the intent to end his life, only to be overpowered by Sunday, who then killed him in self defence.

Yet, Sunday was sentenced to death and his death sentence just upheld by the Supreme Court in Adamawa, a decision that makes zero legal, logical, nor moral sense.

Mind you, he had already been held in prison for seven years over this.

Unless of course, you connect the dots that over the last hundred years, there has been incredible state capture in Nigeria by Fulanis, and the legal system in Adamawa is now being used to carry out injustice in service of the historical campaign perpetrated by the likes of Hamman Yaji, which continues to this day.

It’s hard to talk about matters materially driven by tribal or religious factors in Nigeria without hitting a nerve or inviting accusations of bigotry, but I will never in my life understand people who so eagerly advocate for speaking truth to power about international causes, wars in faraway places, yet keep silent about the grossest of injustices at home.

92 killed in Benue… 150 massacred in Plateau… 21 killed in Niger

All by the same people — Fulani herdsmen

In one particular year alone, Fulani herdsmen killed over 3000 people in a handful of states in Nigeria.

These killings have been happening consistently for over a hundred years.

And every response from the government has been to appease them, baby them, beg them, and pet them.

The government in two different administrations has told the families of their murder victims to give up land to build them ranches for free to appease them to stop killing people.

That is a genocide if I ever saw one.

Sorry to end on such a hard note, but Nigeria is my favourite place in the world, and what is happening breaks my heart.

💛,
Lotanna

I haven’t lost any weight in two weeks, and I had a fucking mental breakdown.

The last time I did a serious diet like this, I gained a little weight in the second week, which made me spiral mentally, and I crashed off the wagon entirely, so I was wary of the same thing happening to me this time.

Yet despite anticipating it, it still sort of did.

The Problem

A man.

A fucking man.

A man with whom I have a delicate and emotionally complicated relationship.

In his words…

there is a huge danger of a very serious codependency developing between us

Within Week 2 just happened to fall an emotionally significant date, and of course he made things difficult, and I know that I would have handled it well otherwise.

I would have been able to just ignore him ignoring me, and power through on any other day, but not that day.

It had to have been the strain of fasting, dieting, pushing my body to keep exercising, and then on top of it, this fucking man pissing me off was the final straw.

It was so shamefully ugly.

I just broke down.

I sent a million text messages.

I called a million times.

I cried all day and stayed in bed sniffling and crying some more.

I’m so ashamed of myself, and part of me just blots it out and tells myself, it wasn’t me who did that.

But it was.

I have a complicated relationship with crying and expressing my emotions to men.

When I was a child, and especially when I was a teenager, I tried very hard not to cry when someone hurt me, because I was tall for my age, and perhaps because of it, people treated me with so much less empathy than shorter children of the same age.

When I started having romantic relationships with boys (and then men), I quickly observed that my tears were never met with kindness.

No-one that I ever loved (outside of family or close friends) ever comforted me when I was hurt or cried, so I learned to hide my tears and not cry in their presence for fear of being hurt worse or mocked or humiliated.

And so for this reason, it hurt me a lot that I have been vulnerable with this man, and that he has reduced me to tears, and that I could not hold back my feelings and how sad I was, and that I spent three days sobbing over him not speaking to me on his birthday.

And I know it’s because birthdays are special to me.

As an only child, outside of the ones that were celebrated, I have spent all other birthdays completely alone, in isolation.

So of all the days that love is formally expressed, my birthday, and your birthday matter the most to me.

But I wouldn’t call what currently exists between he and I love.

It’s not that yet.

It’s something formless and ever shapeshifting.

A dark cloud of mutual apprehension, because we’re both fond of, and dangerous to each other.

Love is peaceful and benign.

He and I are not.

The irony, is that these lyrics from a song he sent me describe how he made me feel the whole week.

Do you ever get a little bit tired of life?
Like you're not really happy, but you don't wanna die
Like you're hanging by a thread, but you gotta survive
'Cause you gotta survive

My Fucking Knee

Something is wrong with my knee.

It had been hurting just a little bit once in a while for the past two months, and feeling a little stiff here and there, but two weeks into my consistent streak of walking 20,000 steps a day, and my knee went on full blown strike.

Pain, stiffness, feeling swollen (without actually looking swollen).

I pushed through even though it hurt so badly.

Half of week two and all of week three was just me waking up every day hyper aware of my knee, and walking hours and hours with pain in every step.

I felt like my knee wasn’t as solid as the other one. It felt like my bones were just moving around in there and I just didn’t feel steady standing on it, and sometimes it felt like something was moving out of place at the back of my knee. Plus my thigh above my knee just constantly felt tight and painful.

Finally I couldn’t take the pain anymore and I had to see the doctor.

Last night I did an MRI of my knee, so now I’m waiting for answers as to what’s wrong, but all of my googling suggests quadriceps tendinopathy, popliteal tendinopathy, and a meniscus tear of some degree.

I didn’t think it could be a torn ACL because I can still walk and move my knee properly, it just hurts a lot to do so.

I’ll let you know if I end up being right.

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The bad place.

Inside my mind is a very harsh place to be.

I was angry with myself and ashamed of myself that it affected me so much that it derailed my efforts, and resulted in me completely plateauing for the last two weeks.

Of course, I took it out on myself.

I mostly stuck to my diet and fasting, but I kept gaining weight.

Some of it was muscle, so at first I wasn’t alarmed, but this second week just plateaued, and I was so mentally spooked by it, it was really uncomfortable psychologically.

Still, I pushed through, not wanting to break my walking streak no matter what.

Sleep

What made it so awful, is that I barely got any sleep this week.

For whatever reason, I started every day late, exhausted from the night before ending late, and spent each day having to catch up my steps too late in the day, and well into the night.

I was walking on the treadmill at 11:59 pm one night. Finished my workout at the ass crack of midnight.

What a shitty week.

Diet

Little by little, I fell off my diet.

I also started putting Baileys Irish Cream in my protein shake to numb the pain because I was crying every few hours.

Which in hindsight is odd, because I don’t drink alcohol.

And by don’t drink, I mean in 365 days of a year, I might drink one alcoholic drink on one day (usually Christmas or New Year), and then go a few more years without even drinking any at all.

But my frustration with this annoying man made me finish a whole bottle of Baileys in the span of a few days.

And I know why.

It’s because I was in emotional maelstrom, and under emotional stress, I find that I am either unable to eat anything at all, or I eat constantly to dull the pain because I cannot feel calm.

Water

My water intake fell off as my stress rose.

I was drinking maybe one litre a day (not counting other drinks like tea), when I was supposed to be drinking three.

Being dehydrated made my body feel out of sorts, and probably made me even more miserable.

Walking

This is the only thing I managed to keep up with, but even the way I did it suffered terribly.

As I was waking up late, I was consistently missing the 6am walk, then too depressed to catch up, and that snowballed into frequently missing the 9am walk as well, which put me on track to have to shift all the subsequent walks (12pm and so on) forward, in order to catch up steps and hit the goal.

The only upside of how miserable this was, is that I gained muscle and lost fat from it.

Transfer Addiction

I also found out that once I quit my usual social media (Twitter, Clubhouse, Reddit etc) and ordering food from DoorDash and UberEats, I suddenly started shopping and spending a lot more money.

I started taking more Ubers.

Started buying more stuff on Amazon.

It’s almost as though my dependency on the former set of addictive things just switched over to something else just as addictive rather than lessened.

Transfer Addicton is a real thing by the way.

Even the fact that I started drinking more alcohol than I’ve had in the last five years is probably part of it.

Tracking

This is where I did the absolute worst.

NOTHING is working.

I am very orderly in my mind.
I love to keep track of things, I love to have precise measurements, I love data.

So this is precisely why I feel like I am losing my sanity because I completely failed at recording things in my bullet journal, or in Todoist, or anywhere besides random scraps of paper I reached for out of desperation.

Writing broke down. Reading broke down. I now have an accountability debt, and I owe 5000 words of my novel.

The Purgatory of Intention

I haven’t done any exercise for the last three days, ostensibly to give my knee a rest, but with each day that passes, a terror grows inside me, that perhaps I can’t really do this.

There is this fear that perhaps the version of myself I dream in my mind won’t survive if it becomes reality.

But my greatest fear of all, is to remain trapped in the purgatory of intention.

To forever just be waiting, and wishing, and wondering, and dreaming while life passes by.

I want to be free to go wherever I want and meet whoever my heart wishes to meet, without fear of being judged before I’ve even been properly seen, or struggling to hold together my confidence.

The last two weeks have been a complete disaster, and I have cried almost every single day, but I am going back on my diet, I’m going back on my fast, and I’ll keep walking.

This is so hard and miserable but even if nobody believes in me, I believe in myself.

This guy on Youtube said “There is always a piece of you that wants to quit just before good things happen. Don’t do that. Keep walking.”

So I’m closing this one out like this.

April, take this one.

First week of April, a mess.

Didn’t start my 100 Hard until the second week of April, unlike as planned.

Last week of April, also a mess.

No wahala.

Come hell or high water, May will be perfect.

I will make it so.

💛,
Lotanna

I’m surprised I survived the first week of this self inflicted hell.

I managed to walk at least 20,000 steps every single day of the last eight days, but if you include Friday, it’s been nine full days of walking 20,000 steps or more.

The Routine

• 5:30am → Get up

• 5:30am - 6am → Brush my teeth, bathe, get dressed and put on my workout gear

• 6am - 7am → Walk on the treadmill for an hour

• First Period (7am - 9am) →

  • Lift weights: I do five reps of the weights above my head, trying to lift them by the side, and hanging my arm down behind my neck and straightening my arm, then ten reps of basic bicep curls.

  • Take progress photos: I take front, side, and back full body shots, and same for face closeup shots.

  • Eat breakfast if it’s an eating day

  • Read 4 pages of my chosen novel — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count

  • Write 600 words of my own novel (name is a secret for now, but the tentative title has something to do with cupcakes 🧁)

• 9am → Walk on the treadmill again for 35 minutes

  • After each walk, I lift weights again.

• Second Period (9am - 12pm) →

  • Work

• 12pm → Walk for 35 minutes

  • Lift weights after

• Third Period (12pm - 3pm) →

  • Eat my one meal if it’s an OMAD day.

  • Run errands.

  • More work.

• 3pm → Walk for 35 minutes

  • Lift weights after

• Fourth Period (3pm - 6pm) →

  • Work.

• 6pm → Walk for 35 minutes

  • Lift weights after

• Fifth Period (6pm - 9pm) →

  • Eat dinner if it’s an eating day.

  • Write about my day in my journal.

  • Track what I did in my bullet journal.

• 9pm → Walk for 35 minutes

  • Lift weights after

• Sixth Period (9pm - 10pm) →

  • Plan the next day

  • Get ready for bed.

    Ideally I am in bed and fast asleep by 10 or 10:30 at the latest.

What’s going well?

The walking works.

The fasting works.

I’m not so sure the weight lifting works, but perhaps it’s too early to tell.

The first few days were both easy and hard.

Easy because I had high excitement for it, I was ready to get started, I was mentally hyped, but hard because I had low physical tolerance for how much sheer work it was to just get through it.

There were several really hard days, like the day before yesterday, when I was so tired that I skipped two workouts, and was in serious danger of not hitting the goal.

By 8pm I had just 12,000 steps, and I was panicking, but I forced myself to get on the treadmill and walk for an hour and a half, which was hell.

I learned my lesson, and I’m not skipping workouts no matter how tired I am, because making it up later is so much worse.

Staying off social media has been surprisingly easy. I just set Screen Time limits of one minute on each of my apps, and now whenever I open them, the screen just locks before I can get sucked in.

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What isn’t going well?

I was a bit surprised by the things that ended up being hard, because going in, I had my own idea of what I thought was going to be difficult, and so in hindsight, some of the hardest things I realise, were psychological or mental barriers as opposed to physical barriers where I was afraid that I just wasn’t capable.

What I have learned so far this week is that I am physically capable of walking 20,000 steps every single day without feeling like it’s killing me or without it being some horrifically superhuman effort although it is a lot of effort it is a lot of strain, but it’s well within my capability which is something that I wasn’t sure about going in.

I had a lot of trepidation on the first day, and I felt physically nervous throughout the day because I wasn’t sure if I could do it or if I would be fighting for my life every single second.

Something I found so difficult to do was to take the progress photo every morning, just from a place of feeling self-conscious, and then also seeing the result, and not being happy with it, but having to ignore that either way because I’m going through a process, and I just have to keep going if I want to eventually get results that I’m happy with.

The other thing that I found was the biggest challenge was journaling, but this one was partially my fault, because I had brought out my journal for the challenge before hand, then promptly mislaid it, so I have been writing my journal entries on scraps of paper to be compiled later.

I really regret not measuring my body parts at the beginning, even though I did buy a body tape measure beforehand.

I was just so exhausted that I forgot, but I will be measuring myself this week since I’m just one week in, to have an idea of what my measurements were prior, and how much I’m losing, not just in terms of weight and pounds, but in terms of inches and dimensions.

What needs improvement?

The biggest revelation so far, is that the hardest challenge to conquer is what I do with my time in between the walks, rather than the walks themselves, which are monotonous and tedious, but definitely doable.

Initially, after each exercise I was so exhausted that in the two and a half hours between my exercises, I just didn’t have the energy to do anything else.

I would just lie on the couch or collapse onto the bed, and I felt like I couldn’t do anything else, which defeats a huge part of the purpose of my 100 Hard challenge, because the goal isn’t just to lose weight, it’s to make massive progress in other areas that have stagnated for me for too long, like my writing.

The only thing I was able to get done besides diet, fasting, and exercise, was reading the book Dream Count, and even that was initially difficult, but got easier with time.

The other huge mental block I had was writing my novel.

This, I was most scared of because writing used to come so easily to me in the past. I wrote so many stories. I launched Nigerian Fiction when I was a teenager in college. I was the editor of the school literary magazine The Roar in Loyola.

I wrote my original blog for years and years, and yet with this novel, because it’s so personal to me, I’ve struggled so much to get this out of my mind where it’s a very rich and very well developed world, onto paper, and still show the mental imagery that I have about the story.

But I did find that writing right after reading helped somewhat, and I don’t know why that is. I suppose there’s some connection there.

In the past I had tried to break my writing goal down but that did not help.

I even made the goal as simple as just write fifty words a day, and that did not help, so to my pleasant surprise, this week, I made some progress with that mental barrier, because I have indeed written six hundred words each day, although because I had to be out of town for two of those days, that part of the schedule did break down .

I ended up not writing and not reading while I was travelling though I was able to catch up on the reading on the way back, but I wasn’t able to catch up on the writing so I have a deficit of writing that I have to catch up today so I can go into the next week without having a backlog.

Also, I absolutely need to sleep more.

Okay, so is it working?

Despite the flawed execution, it seems to be working.

I’ve had to ramp up my focus, discipline, and just force myself to do the things on the schedule regardless of how I felt.

That alone is a marked improvement for me and how I operate in life.

Week 1 Results

Over the last 8 days, I have lost 9.9 lbs 🎉🎉🎉

That’s an average of 1.24 lbs lost per day.

Once I find my journal and set up the bullet journal pages for this, I’ll try to think of more metrics to track.

The obvious ones are weight, sleep, water intake, etcetera, but if you can think of anything else (my mood would probably be a good idea) I should keep an eye on or try to measure during this process, let me know.

💛,
Lotanna

If you’re unfamiliar, every day for seventy-five days you have to commit to

• exercising for at least 45 minutes twice a day, one of which must be outdoors

• sticking to a diet

• drinking 1 gallon (3.78541 litres) of water

• reading ten pages of a nonfiction, personal development-focused book

• taking a progress picture

Also, if you don’t complete any of these or skip even one day, you have to start the whole 75 days over from scratch.

Pretty brutal, but I’ve seen so many people get incredible results from completing this (although I’ve also seen many more fail at completing, hence the rise of more flexible variants like 75 Soft in which you can just keep going if you mess up)

@dexterheymanworth it 👏🏾 #75hard #75hardchallenge #dadbod #75hardresults workout with me gym post trying to find myself again gym day in my life 75 hard results weight loss before and after

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My version isn’t as strict, yet feels like it is.

First rather than doing 75 days, I’ve opted for a neat 100.

100 Hard

Here are my rules, and what I’m hoping to accomplish every day:

• Walk 20,000 steps

• Stick to my diet

• Fast intermittently

• Drink 3 litres of water

• Sleep at least 7 hours at night

• Lift weights morning and night

• Write 600 words of the novel I’m trying to write

• Write in my journal

• Write a weekly check in blog post here on my blog

• Read 4 pages of a novel (I’ve chosen Chimamanda’s Dream Count for this)

• Take a progress photo

• No coffee

• No ordering food on UberEats or DoorDash

• No social media except my blog

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The Diet

The diet I’ll be following is heavy on fibre and protein.

What doesn’t get measured, doesn't get managed, so as much as possible I’m trying to eat food out of containers where the amounts are pre-measured and the nutrients and calories in them are known, so I can track how much I’m getting easily.

I’ve broken the week into three types of days: Eating days, OMAD (one meal a day) days, and Fasting days.

Wednesdays and Sundays are Eating days.

• I can eat whatever I want between 6am and 9pm, but ideally I shall eat three high protein meals from my meal service.

Tuesdays and Fridays are OMAD days

• I can eat only my breakfast starter and a salad between 3pm and 6pm.

Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are Fasting days.

• I can’t eat anything at all.

The Fast

This works out to four intermittent fasting periods for me every week.

• 42 hour fast from 9pm Sunday to 3pm Tuesday

• 12 hour fast from 6pm Tuesday to 6am Wednesday

• 42 hour fast from 9pm Wednesday to 3pm Friday

• 36 hour fast from 6pm Friday to 6am Sunday

The Rest

This seems like a lot, but I’ve done a less intense version of this before, or at least i’ve done the full fast before while maintaining a 10,000 step average.

This time I’ll be attempting it with 20,000 a day, even on the days when I’m fasting.

I don’t anticipate this to be the hardest part though.

Walking and other exercise is unpleasant but very easy. You just have to do the same thing over and over again.

For my the hardest part I anticipate will be motivating myself to get other things done in the time between workouts.

This has always been my problem. I have some sort of mental block where I can’t bring myself to do anything, and that’s what I’m hoping to overcome by mid July when the hundred days are done.

I started yesterday with a fast and 20k steps, so today is Day 2.

My weekly checkins on this will come every Sunday.

Wish me luck!!!

💛,
Lotanna

Interacting with the world beyond my family drove home an ugly truth about life.

People are so cruel, and the average person is cruel in such a casual, banal way, that commenting on it, bringing it to light seems navel gazing, let alone having the nerve to reveal that you are hurt by it.

And yet, I am hurt by it.

I have observed my whole life that the persistent sadness that has plagued me for most of my existence is tied predominantly to people.

The way they have treated me.

The way they have spoken to me and about me.

The way they have harmed me, and encouraged others to harm me.

The way they have prevented or sabotaged or even twisted my attempts to defend myself.

But I think more than those actions that are tied directly to myself, what has hurt separately in its own strange way, is watching people do this to other people, again, and again, and again, and then observing the reaction of the wider society, which in its jubilant support for those who mete harm, makes the message clear:

Cruelty is power.

Cruel people are valued.

The more you harm others, and successfully get away with it, the more you will be accepted, adored, included, and defended.

No matter where I have lived, I have always seen this play out, but nowhere has it played out more strongly than when I was in boarding school, and then as an adult, in the wider Nigerian society at large.

It’s something that I suppose other people do not think about much, but perhaps due to my personality, being an only child, and thus always having had too much time to reflect, and too vast of an internal world, or circumstances where I have been on the receiving end, I have thought about this a lot for most of my life, and it drove me to so deep a despair, I have been trying to claw my way out of it for twenty years, and I still have no idea whether I’m any closer to breaking through to the surface.

I’ve tried all the things, and I already know that I didn’t try them hard enough, I didn’t stick with them long enough. I have heard every version of the advice to find some things that make you happy in life, and do them because the world is cruel and life is hard, but there isn’t anything.

There really isn’t.

The New Year Resolutions are still ongoing but…

Everything I once derived happiness from has faded for me.

I once was bubbly, cheerful, social, and excited to meet people and make friends, but so many betrayals and breathtaking callousness has left me wary of who I trust.

I once loved technology and took to the internet when it was new, mostly empty, but full of hope and promise. It was my escape from all the casual cruelty I had encountered in real life from people I had done nothing to, but in the blink of an eye, so many of those people have invaded the digital world too, and brought their horrors with them. A place that once felt like a refuge will never feel safe again.

Nigeria is so different now from the way it was when I was growing up, but the bad parts have stayed the same, and dare I say, getting worse.

People were unkind back then, and are much unkinder now.

People were shallow hypocrites back then, and now to make matters worse are performative in their hypocrisy to boot.

Nobody is guided by any true values, morals or principles despite how religious they all claim to be.

Integrity is a foreign concept in our society.

No matter what crimes you commit, no matter who you hurt or harm, no matter how egregious or horrific what you did was, friends, supporters, family, and well wishers will be yours as long as you find a way to cling for dear life to power and wealth.

The only true sin in Nigeria is to be weak, poor, and powerless.

For that crime, even those in the same boat as you will side with your oppressors to help grind you into the dust as a show of their loyalty, and to distance and differentiate themselves from you, lest they too become the next scapegoat.

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I’m depressed by so many things, so I won’t try to recount, but perhaps suffice to say that in one corner, there’s the utterly bleak news every day about the country.

The way Senator Natasha Akpoti was unanimously bullied about Akpabio’s sexual harassment of her triggered me so badly. It brought back memories of not being believed, being labeled a liar, attention seeker, being dismissed and made a laughing stock, all while the abuser enjoyed so much open social support.

That’s probably why I didn’t devote a post to commenting on the issue as it was ongoing despite me following it very carefully and rooting for Senator Akpoti.

The endless mini massacres.

Every week, whole villages of people are being slaughtered and life just keeps ticking by as if they aren’t real people.

The way people just seek to one-up and humiliate other people as a way of boosting their own status while most of the country sinks even deeper into poverty and hardship.

The final straw was OpenAI releasing the new image engine for ChatGPT which conjured up the Ghiblification of everything.

As an artist who never really gave it my all (no thanks to my fucked mental health), I understand very intimately how on one hand, technology can seem like a godsend to speed up work that by hand would take hours, days or even years.

On the other hand however, I also watched artists, even those I admired, struggle to get work commissioned from them. Having to deal with selfish, narcissistic so-called customers who wanted them to argue and justify why they should be paid for the work of their hands.

The general public has never wanted to pay artists, and I daresay the general public has always hated and envied artists because they have always believed that artistic mastery is a function of divinely graced talent, rather than just technique and hard work. They’ve used this idea to justify themselves not putting in the hard work to become good at art, and they have always resented having to pay those who did.

There is a disgust I felt watching millions of people gleefully ignore pleas to stop making Studio Ghibli rip-offs of their photos. Nobody cared that Hayao Miyazaki (the founder of Studio Ghibli) hates AI and prides himself on his hand drawn work. Nobody stopped to wonder how weird it was that until this moment, they had never paid an artist the same $20 they were paying OpenAI to draw them a stylised portrait of themselves if it brought them so much joy.

It’s sad that the same people would never have paid the same money to an actual artist to draw, but they were so happy to use technology that stole from artists and made it even more impossible for them to make a living from their work.

And I don’t sit on a high horse to say this.
I too tried the Ghibli thing once or twice, purely out of novelty and scepticism that it would actually work.

But seeing people churn out these high volumes of images, and never once considering the people who made it possible filled me with disgust.

It’s forgotten now, but the day after the legendary Korean drawing artist, Kim Jung Gi died, some despicable wannabe AI bro fed all his known work into an AI system and had the guts to claim it was a homage to his passing.

The justification and normalisation of legal evil is sickening.

Everything seems shallow, unstable, and unreal, but perhaps what I’m really suffering from is some sort of existential heartbreak at how cold and indifferent they are to pain, suffering, and disillusionment working its way from person to person, and the banality of it all.

What is the point of us being here?

None of the proffered explanations by your favourite religions make sense, whether the Abrahamic Cinematic Universe, or any of the others.

One thing that does feel designed though, is that if truly there is some supernatural being with some connection to this world, it certainly doesn’t care about us, and quite possibly, we are its source of entertainment, no matter how painful for us all we experience here may be.

Another thing that is just so bleak, is in conversations with people about topics to do with society, how much people reveal their utter lack of care for others. Everyone is on a mission to extract as much out of their relationships with other people as possible. Users are a dime a dozen but the scariest part is that no matter how you attempt to reason with them, they never agree that what they are doing is using people, manipulating people, engineering unfair power imbalances that allow them to benefit while the other person suffers and can never truly be comfortable.

Gaslighting is so commonplace, calling it gaslighting makes you look performative.

People will harm you and just flat out claim they don’t remember, or it never happened.

It makes me wonder if everyone is like this, and I’ve been stupid and naive my whole life.

Every conversation I’ve had about this has concluded that the solution is to just unplug from the world.

Forget about it.

It cannot be changed.

Get out of dodge.

But how do you get out when it feels like there’s nothing to get into.

Yes, I have formally diagnosed clinical depression, PTSD, and anxiety.

But this isn’t just feeling sad, it’s inability to feel happiness about anything.

When I was little, I read this book called The Kingdom of Kevin Malone.

The main character was a girl, so naturally I gravitated more towards her, but the story was about her adventures and travails in an imaginary world made up by this boy she knew in passing, named Kevin Malone.

In the real world he had been missing for years, but later it’s revealed that he retreated into this secret world of his own making, that could only be accessed by passing through certain arches in the park, because his real life in which his father abused him constantly was too horrible to bear.

I finally understand Kevin.

The world as I know it has felt too horrible to bear since I was a teenager.

My whole life, I’ve known the prophetic poem from The Kingdom of Kevin Malone, and recited some of it from time to time, as it’s resonated with me since I first read it as a seven year old girl.

A princess in mourning
A princess in gold
A princess with talents as yet to unfold

Shall join with the strength of a hero foretold
And win if their hearts be both tender and bold

One princess must press on through terrors and fears
And solve the great riddle of using the years

One princess must choose for a guide and a friend
A being she fears but will love in the end

One princess must bring from her distant home's heart
A magic more mighty than any smith's art

These three, imprisoned in walls made of stone
Pressed to the uttermost, bounded by bone

Using a weapon they already own
Can bring the prince worthily home to his throne

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What I’ve always taken from it is to be brave in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds, to press on regardless of fear, and to find the strength within yourself to survive the great horror of life itself.

But I can’t lie…

I’m tired.

I want to be the person my eternally hopeful, eternally sunny, optimistic, bubbly, enthusiastic teenage self once was before I looked at the world too closely and saw all unseeable, and knew all unknowable.

If like the Ship of Theseus, I have become many new versions of myself in reaction to life itself but still seem the same to others, which one of those versions is really me?

I don’t know.

Nor would any of the various mes.

I want to go home.

But both in place and time, all homes I have ever known are now forever lost to me.

Were I to have a home, it would have to be one that I create somehow.

Adulthood is clinging for safety and sanity from moment to moment, hoping you will not lose your grip and plunge into a bottomless pit of despair as you leap to try to gather enough about you to make yourself feel secure in this uncertain world.

Or at least it has been for me.

The people I loved and clung to for safety turned out to be anything but.

Perhaps to people with siblings it doesn’t matter much because they will always have their family, but to I who has always been alone, each abandonment wrought a painful gully that marred my internal landscape.

Still, somewhere inside me, I am stubborn and undefeated, even as I feel defeated in this moment.

Inside, there is a me who says I must rise and fight for my happiness because it is the tax I will pay myself by taking it by force from this world that has tried relentlessly to end me and blot me out.

If I have recreated the happiness of my childhood once again by the time I die, then I have won.

Until then, that me says.

Don’t die.

Stand and fight for every future moment to surpass the pain of the past.

I’m scared, I’m exhausted, and I don’t know how says another me.

And yet, press on I must.

Love,

Lotanna

In it, she claims that society (who?) has conspired to sell women an idea of success idealised by a career at the expense of relationships with men and family life.

It attracted a huge amount of criticism and in my opinion, well deserved eye-rolling, because to be honest, this kind of social commentary has always baffled me.

As far as I have observed in my thirty something years of life on multiple continents, people who say this about women’s choices and the social influences and incentives affecting them, are describing their imagination.

The society they are describing does not exist.

Everywhere in the world, the dominant message, especially to women, is that the height of success is to be married with children.

Women who are not married or don’t have children, despite having careers are treated like failures or lacking something.

Those who loudly lament from this perspective, largely cook up an imaginary world in their mind, in which society is dominated by career over family as ideal, then go about claiming this is what we have been sold.

Who is selling singleness?

Nobody sold that and nobody is selling that.

Especially not to us as Nigerian women.

We come from a country where majority of women are already married, and the average woman has five children.

And more importantly, it’s so dishonest to pretend that beyond constantly being pressured to attach ourselves to men in order to be viewed as fulfilled human beings, women are actively punished and dehumanised in a million little ways by so many people in society, for not being chosen by men, despite quite often, very much wanting to be.

I personally, for as long as I can remember, have noticed, that of the torrential antagonism and interpersonal abuse I have been subjected to, both offline and online, most of it has revolved around devaluing my worth as a person because I wasn’t chosen to be some man’s girlfriend or wife, or because I had been rejected by whatever men had been in my life, or speculation that I would never be wanted or chosen by men for love, relationships, and marriage because of some irredeemable quality about me, and how that clearly marked me as worthless or even subhuman, or at least, surely less of a woman, and unworthy of dignity or respect.

For anyone, the effect of this kind of casual cruelty in so much of life, would be to make one desperate to be married, or at least in a relationship, even if only as a means to gain status and a modicum of respectability and the social protection from ridicule it affords.

I’m not immune to this psychological and emotional manipulation, so I’ve also had my moments of feeling intimidated by it, and questioned my worth as a human being and a woman, but at least, I can see it for what it is.

Though in its own way, being able to see the ugly machinations behind what we accept as socially normal is a curse.

I think women who suddenly start espousing these ideas are experiencing anxiety about getting married or having children, which is normal.

But it’s dishonest to falsely claim as prevailing a narrative that is in fact, a minority view everywhere in the world, in order to justify your own anxiety over your personal choices.

The most dominant reality in society is that women’s lives are made hell for not having a relationship with a man, and women are devalued for being single and childless.

Married women especially those who are mothers, are elevated and respected by society more than other women.

You can process how you feel about your 🫵🏾 own life and your 🫵🏾 own desires as a woman for marriage and a family, without seeding falsehoods into the already toxic pool of shared social consciousness.

As a woman, we all have a duty to protect and safeguard ourselves as a group, but many women unfortunately seem to want to outsource this task to men, believing they are special, and that some fake traditional role playing of “The man is the provider and the protector” will save them from being treated by men the way billions of women before them have been.

History teaches us, that the women for whom the man they shared their lives with failed or refused to provide and protect them, are too numerous to count.

I wish there was more of a sense of conscience and duty, to realise, that ideas are not neutral, and some narratives harm women more than others, especially when they’re not true.

Money and careers, and the financial security they bring, are the safety net that women didn’t always have, and they’re not mutually exclusive with marriage.

Nobody ever questions men’s ability or commitment to relationships and marriage because they have work and careers, which bring them wealth and stability.

Questioning it in women, is attempting to attack women’s ability to safeguard ourselves in a world that chewed up our foremothers and spat them out to die of broken hearts in poverty and ridicule.

And as a Nigerian woman, when the women of our country have always worked, have always provided, have always made and kept their own money, always run their own businesses, always maintained their financial independence from men, until these practices were upended and demonised by male supremacist powers of Islam and Christianity, is a further degree of dereliction of duty to your female sex.

There is no age in which women have ever been able to guarantee the relationships they had, but at least in this age, if the relationship falls apart, we won’t lose everything like too many of our female ancestors did.

Why is that such a bad thing?

I tried, really hard.

It was very painful and uncomfortable, and took so much effort, and at some point I was really moving forward, and then winter hit and I just fell off the wagon, and ended the year on a slump.

I have a PhD in self flagellation, so all I’ve done this whole time is excoriate myself in my mind, but it doesn’t help. Beating myself up inside doesn’t make my outside any better anymore, and that scares me because I feel paralysed and overwhelmed from how much to do I’ve let pile up, and yet the only way to escape this psychological hell of my own making is to move.

I have to do something, and keep doing it long enough for it to make a difference, or I’ll always be stuck.

And quite frankly, I’d rather just die than be feel stuck for the rest of my life.

I’ve struggled with severe depression, anxiety, PTSD, and executive dysfunction resulting from that for almost two decades now, and as someone who has always set impossibly high standards for myself, it’s been really hard for me to confront myself and admit that I simply have not done the best for myself that I could have with the time I had, the resources I had, and the access and opportunities I had.

That’s very sobering, and it also makes me really sad.

On one hand, I do feel kind of sorry for myself because it feels unfair that I had to struggle with all this every day, and just could not overcome it, despite how much I threw at it because it knocked me down so much.

On the other hand, I hate myself for not being stronger, not being able to just shake it off, not being the battle princess or the shield maiden I needed myself to be, to show up for myself in ways that other people let me down, and to push through the casual cruelty of society and adult life, to create a bubble of safety and peace for myself through work that feels like I actually did something with my life.

Regardless of how I flipflop between these feelings, the fact remains that I’ve been treading water too long, and it’s because I was scared.

I tried so many things last year, and failed at all of them.

I tried to do art school and failed (to be fair I was really ill), but I learned that to be good at drawing and painting, I just have to force myself to draw, over and over again.

I tried to get fit and failed, but I learned that to actually see noticeable changes, I need to walk three and a half hours every day, broken into fifteen to one hour intervals.

I tried to lose weight and failed, but I learned that to drop weight effectively, I must eat mostly fibre and protein and fast three days a week.

I tried to finish writing my novel and failed, but I learned my characters weren’t compelling enough, and I just wanted to tell the story, but I didn’t have strong characters who would realistically drive the story.

I tried getting rid of 90% of my possessions and failed at that too.

But I learned that if I pack up everything I own into weatherproof plastic tubs and take them away to storage, it has the same mental effect. Out of sight, out of mind, and once I’ve lived without something for long enough, I can know for sure it’s okay to get rid of it.

I tried to start a clothing line, and designed a whole collection of clothes based on traditional Igbo aesthetics (designed designed, meaning I drew all designs by hand from scratch, not cut and paste design), and failed.

I was forced to scrap the entire project because I have a very specific kind of migraine (since I was a child) disorder that makes me get severe migraines and violently ill when I look at certain patterns of lines.

Traditional Igbo aesthetics are very line heavy, and basically, the more designs I produced, the more I began to vomit, have headaches, and migraines in which I would lose my vision. So I had to abandon the project halfway through.

This design is based on traditional Igbo doors.

I still have the designs I made though, I just cannot look at them without feeling ill.

I even tried to build an alternative social network app, because Twitter is honestly so toxic, filled with misinformation and well past its heyday, Clubhouse is a cesspit of meanness and bullying, Facebook wants to be everything and somehow is nothing, and Instagram gives me and many people anxiety.

But I also failed at that too despite having what I still think is a brilliant idea (not that I think my social network is going to compete with any of the above abeg. I just wanted to build a cool, niche place that people would genuinely enjoy coming to, in addition to whatever major apps they use)

Anyway, the primary reason why I failed with this one, was because even though I think the major features of my stealth social app are fucking brilliant, I couldn’t figure out what the main functionality should be.

Should it be a video app? I can’t afford the cloud hosting fees to store video

Should it be an audio app? Same problem, but to a lesser degree.

Should it be a picture app? I can guarantee bad actors will immediately try to post terrible things like child pornography, or far less severe but certainly annoying things like AI slop images, and I simply cannot afford to hire a moderation team for a small app.

So it was going to be a primarily text based app until it could pay for itself, but I still don’t know what the main point should be.

I know HOW I want it to work, HOW I want people to interact on it, but not WHAT they will be spending most of their time doing.

Does that make sense?

I thought about making it a news app or a blogging app, but Substack is already a blogging app. I’m literally writing this on my blog hosted on Substack.

I need to figure out whether people are going to primarily consume content on the app or interact with others and create content.

At this point, I’m very open to suggestions and ideas.

Tell me what your dream social network would be about.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

I promised to be freer, more light hearted, and actively work hard at my own happiness and fulfilment this year, no matter how scary that might be.

I also want to travel a lot more this year to go see all of my friends who are scattered all over the globe.

I’ve been a hermit for way too long, it’s time to get back out there.

Still am scared by the way.

But fear doesn’t matter in this world.

Action does.

Love,

Lotanna

I dared to show my face after abandoning my blog?

Yes.

I didn’t abandon it. I was just…. trying and failing to write.

But I’m here now which means I’m succeeding ever so marginally to actually distill my thoughts in ordered form, so as far as I’m concerned, a win is a win.

I think writing today’s post is a lot easier because this time, I have something I’m actually really excited to talk about.

It has always been a resolution of mine to write in Igbo every single day, but don’t worry, I’ve already failed colossally at this goal, so you’re not missing anything, trust me.

That said though, after failing to think of anything to write about, I surmised that writing poetry might be an easier, and potentially funner starting point.

The problem was, I didn’t want to have to write a whole poem, and I strongly doubted that I could even come up with a whole poem at gunpoint, so I needed something shorter, and I’ve been thinking about how to create a condensed form of poetry for Igbo for a long time.

In light of that, earlier this year, I devised a simple, but frankly I think genius poetry style that I’m calling Four Box Poetry for now, until I can think of a better name for it.

If you want to suggest a name, feel free to do so in the comments by the way.

Anyway, so last week, I decided to try it out with a couple of friends and acquaintances, and I was actually really shy about it because I didn’t think people would get it, and in the beginning, they honestly didn’t, at first.

Here are the rules as I explained to my friends.

A Four Box Poem is a poem made up of boxes.

At minimum, a poem must have one box.

At maximum, a poem may have four boxes.

So, what the hell is a box?

A box is a sub unit of a poem that can serve as a chunk of a longer poem, but can also stand on its own as an entire poem itself.

So if a poem has more than one box, technically, that poem is made up of X poems since each box poem is a full poem itself.

1. Each box is made up of four lines.

2. Each line is made up of exactly four syllables.

• Not four words.

• Four syllables. Four little chunks of sound e.g. Ba / Cha / Da / Fa

• Oh, and one last rule.

3. Each box has to make grammatical sense.

I persevered in explaining the concept however, and bit by bit, people started to understand the idea, and even tried to come up with their own poems, which was so exciting because I didn’t think anyone would be interested.

It ended up being so much fun, and my friends came up with such amazing poems in Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, and even Itsekiri.

Me in Igbo:

Nẹkwá ènyò!

Bùté kā ń gó

Ń g'àkwụ gị

Órù ìlí

Regard the mirror! Bring, let me buy. I shall pay you… ten slaves.

in Hausa:

Yarinyar ce

Babu miji

Wa zai ba ta

Ci mai dadi?

This girl... No husband… Who will give her… A good fucking?

Layo in Yoruba:

Jeje ore!

Aye ole

Funmi l’owo

Ka jo gbadun

Slow down my friend … Life is not that hard … Give me your money … Let’s go and enjoy ourselves.

Misan in Itsekiri:

Oritse mi

Towi noran

Molagbe mi

Jemi nuwa

My God… that is in heaven…. Bestow upon me wealth… And make me prosperous.

MacKenzy in Hausa:

Karuwanci

Ya na kawo

Iskanci a

Sabon Gari

Prostitution… brings… immorality to… Sabon Gari.

I.K. in Igbo:

Bùté m mili

Ka n sa aru

N’abani a

Na chi efo

Bring me water… That I may bathe… This night… For the day dawns.

Teni in Yoruba:

Mi o tii lo

Mo ni fe e

Su gbon amo

Gba ti se tan

I haven’t left yet. I love you. We know that we aren’t done.

OmoAkin in Yoruba:

Ebin pa mi

Mo be ishu

Mogbe lena

Kin to momi

I hunger… I peeled yam… I placed it on the fire… And then drank water.

Jonathan in Hausa:

Maganan nan

Da kun fara

Ba zai kawo

Mun hankali

This conversation… that you started… will not bring… me peace.

Which one did you think was the best?

I’m pretty pleased with myself.

So far, I’ve held three different audio conversation rooms about this, and between us, we’ve come up with over 20 poems.

At first, everyone’s poems were very simplistic and crude, but as we kept going, there were some surprising gems that sounded so elegant, and even employed double entendres, puns, and metaphors.

Towards the end, it took a hilarious turn because wouldn’t stop making raunchy ones, and we couldn’t even keep our faces straight reading them aloud in Hausa.

Elnathan’s R-Rated Hausa Poems:

Tsuliyan ta!

Babu gashi

Harshe na fa

Har can ya je

Her pussy! No hair... My tongue has… gone there.

It was such a good time, and I’m looking forward to not only renaming my little poetry art form something more elegant, but actually trying to push myself to see how witty I can be with such a restricted style of poetry.

I’ve tried my best to transcribe the poems but I might have made some spelling mistakes. If you spot an error, please let me know.

If you want to try writing your own four box poem, share it in a comment below so we can all enjoy.

💛,

Lotanna

Then on a few days later, a young couple (or at least, they’re presumed to be a couple) visited an Omah Lay concert, and called up to dance by him, the presumed girlfriend got very carried away in a decidedly intimate performance with the singer behind a sheet, while her presumed boyfriend looked on in dismay.

The common thread between these two is that they quickly became the target of massive online campaigns of vicious bullying, when arguably, both were the victims of their situations.

Growing up all over Nigeria, my extensive personal and community experience with Islam unfortunately cottoned me on quite early, to how bullying, coercion, and other tactics are employed on a daily basis amongst Muslims to extract compliance from believers, who are almost always conveniently women and girls.

My childhood sequentially had Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, and even Atheist atmospheres, so I had plenty of opportunity to observe just how ingrained the constant reinforcement of dogma is in these various religious communities, and nowhere is it wielded so harshly, as it is in Islam.

And then there’s the unkindness against men that’s baked into patriarchy.

Why is a guy’s girlfriend leaving him at a show something to laugh at him about?

What is it about the way men are socialised that stops them from comforting each other in the very human way that we all need?

Instead, men look to women for comfort, but never other men. If there are no women around, young men learn very painfully that they can’t rely on one another for kindness in a moment of distress.

I’ve been online longer than most people on the internet today, and I’ve watched it go from an empty, yet wonderful, fascinating place, so full of potential connections, to this soulless hellhole full of roving psychopaths, and the banally evil masses who cheer them on for their own entertainment.

Both offline and online, I learned a simple truth:

The average person is evil.

Not in the grand, theatric way you’re used to thinking about as portrayed by famous villains, but in a casual, unobtrusive, and totally unremarkable way. So banal as to be completely forgettable, yet I would say that this kind of casual, everyday evil is possibly the most impactful.

And I’ve been the recipient of a lot of it, so perhaps I’m somewhat jaded.

How have people been mundanely mean to you?

AT ALL.

I would like to speak to the Manager of this Existence, and get a refund.

Evil Life Manager: Sorry we don’t do refunds, all sales are final.

There has to be some exhaustier word than exhausting because the last two weeks have been whatever that is.

Fatigueception - I am tired within my tired.

With a healthy sprinkle of executive dysfunction, meaning I fall into doom spirals of anxiety thinking about all the things I’m supposed to have done that I haven’t done yet, then the anxiety sets off a chain reaction that makes me feel like I can’t breathe, and mentally paralyses me from making any sensible decisions, so I’m incapable of actually doing anything which would relieve my anxiety.

The only thing I barely managed to stay consistent with, was going to art classes, and I still missed some, and now I’m behind on even my art school homework.

The worst thing though, is that I had another major allergic asthma attack where despite taking two doses of my control inhalers, and then my rescue inhaler, I still couldn’t breathe, so I had to go to the Emergency Room… AGAIN.

The doctor prescribed me Prednisone, but I haven’t taken it, and I don’t want to take it because it’s a steroid, and I’m already on steroids (inhalers to control allergies / asthma are steroids), and I don’t want to deal with the pretty fucked up side effects steroids have when you take them even medium term.

I have enough health problems.

Ergo, a luta continua.

I couldn’t even get through the week, before I had to go to the Emergency Room AGAIN, this time for sharp stabbing stomach pains, that I previously had thought were food poisoning, but it turns out I might have been wrong all this time, and besides that time in April when I nearly died, it probably wasn’t food poisoning the rest of the time.

Turns out, the Nigerian doctor who saw me this time, couldn’t believe I’d been to the ER over six times since January, and decided to look through my whole medical history, and what did she find there?

Right there on my chart, all the way back from 2014, was a diagnosis under my positive test result for H Pylori (a pretty common bacteria that half the world has in their stomachs or GI tracts):

Severe Chronic Gastritis.

How come I’m just finding out TEN YEARS LATER that I have severe chronic gastritis and nobody told me?

I immediately fished out the memory of the day the nurse called to tell me the test result, and I could hear her voice saying “Your test for H Pylori was positive, so you need to take these Proton Pump Inhibitors for a few weeks, and then we’ll test you again to make sure it’s gone”

That was it.

She never said a single thing about the very important fact, that I had been diagnosed with gastritis.

Even though I did as instructed back then, and several weeks later, I tested negative for H Pylori, meaning it got cleared from my system by the antibiotics, all my various mysterious stomach issues over the years suddenly make sense.

Of course I’m worried because medicine is one of the big arenas where what you don’t know can actually kill you.

The new game plan is that I have to go back on PPIs for the next few weeks, and then be examined by a Gastroenterologist and possibly do an endoscopy just to see what’s actually going on in there.

I’ll do my best not to worry.

Not that I have any expertise in being calm. I literally have a serious anxiety disorder.

I’m also no longer allowed to eat anything tomato based (basically snatching away my Nigerian card, because what is a Nigerian without tomato?), nor anything citrus or acidic, which means no more chocolate, and worst of all, no more coffee.

I have drunk one, sometimes two, sometimes three cups of coffee almost every single day for the last six years, all while unbeknownst to me, I had severe chronic gastritis.

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say I am majorly worried about the state of my stomach.

Alright, enough about my internal organs.

Before I get into what I drew this week at art school, let me just say that I know I was supposed to publish a post about Nigerian Number Systems, which I’ve been working on since the year began, but to be honest, while I’ve written over a thousand words about it, I just feel really lost about how to tie it to anything that might be relevant to anyone who reads this blog.

I don’t know why anyone would care about number systems, inasmuch as I myself actually do care.

Maybe this is a reminder to me to just write what I want to write, and not care or worry about whether anyone is going to like it or find it valuable.

EYE like number systems, so I apologise in advance dear reader, but since you subscribed to my blog of your own free will, whether you like it or not, I’m just going to publish it so I can free myself from agonising over whether it’s going to make sense to you.

Art School Homework

I missed quite a lot of class because I was sick, and this is all I could do because I’ve felt like shit and been so miserable lately.

I emailed my teacher to excuse myself from class, and even though she emailed back to say get well soon, she assigned me more homework.

I respect the dedication though.

She didn’t become a successful professional artist by allowing nonsense like poor health get in the way of practising until your hand turns to a pencil.

I don’t need wahala abeg.

I had to draw:

• Five blind contours of my hand.

I can’t even begin to describe how much I hate blind contour. Everything looks horrible.

• Three outline contours

• Two detail contours

You can tell I was already tired when I drew this because I drew my hand too wide, then I had to go back and make it narrower, and I was frankly so fed up with the whole thing that I didn’t even finish. Anything the teacher sees in this drawing, she go take am like that.

• The negative space of the plant scene

I had to do this time consuming negative space drawing by picking a plant scene and drawing not the plants themselves, but the spaces between the plants. I looked at trees, and stuff outside but it looked like too much hard work, so I settled for the dried up flowers in my living room, but even those were too hard, so I ended up drawing this based off the photo of a plant that I found online.

I have to do a separate post about figure drawings.

Momentum

To round this up, I’ve decided I’m going to start keeping track of how things I’ve committed to doing are going in personal posts like this.

I also made a dedicated page for my bigger picture, pie in the sky, longterm, large scale dreams and goals I call my Infinity Stones.

Here’s the trajectory so far:

• Walk 10,000 steps every day — Unfortunately hitting about 6800 maximum right now. My breathing problems are also making it difficult for me to exercise.

• Follow my intermittent fasting schedule — Whole thing has collapsed with my stomach issues, but I’m going to keep trying.

• Lose 100 lbs / 45.4 kg — I’ve lost just 5lbs since the beginning of the year, but the struggle continues.

• Launch my Art business (Clothing, Jewellery, Art and Lifestyle) brand - Onu Monu — This hasn’t happened yet, but is still on the table, just running overdue by about a month.

• Finish the novel I’m writing — Zero progress. Shame on me.

• Write in this blog at least once a week — Partial win since I spent a week editing a video and got out both a post and a video. Amending this to once every two weeks since I need time to edit both posts and videos.

• Buy a house of some sort — Zero progress, although I’ve identified some houses I would like to buy, then promptly watched other people buy them like a mumu.

Alright, that was a lot, but it’s not the whole story.

More updates soon.

💛

I’m exhausted.

Art school is physically beating me up.

Probably because I’ve never been a serious artist, it had never occurred to me that artists fall into the category of people who sustain work related injuries.

My teacher says she has to work with a trainer when she’s preparing for a show because the last time she didn’t, she injured her shoulder and her wrist.

Based on how badly my body hurts, I believe her.

Contours and Gestures

We’re drawing our hands a lot in class, and the first class exercise was to draw a contour of my left hand in strong, continuous contour lines with as few hesitation strokes as possible.

I’m really bad at drawing hands, but I think I did alright, although the size of my thumb and some fingers is wildly exaggerated.

Contour lines are long, deliberate solid lines that capture the outline of an object or subject.

Gesture lines are short, quick lines that capture the feeling and the appearance of the the subject.

My seat neighbour drew this pair of hands for her contour observation, and in my opinion they were the best in the class for the hand contour exercises.

Still Life

On a serious note, fuck this plant.

It was a lot harder to draw than it looks.

Blind Contour

Probably the most annoying yet interesting part of my drawing classes is the blind contour, which involves drawing the subject without looking at the paper.

I think I did fairly well. I tried to keep my hand on the paper and make measured movements using my palm and fingers as leverage to gauge what direction I was moving in.

By comparison, here’s my normal contour below, where I was free to look back and forth from the paper to the arrangement of objects I was drawing.

The whole point of blind contour is to build the mind-body connection of drawing and to focus on observation by looking for things to draw, and capturing every contour you see without worrying about what it’s going to look like.

The last thing we did in contour practice was drawing a pure outline of the collection of objects we observed. The goal here was to capture just the outer contours in order to see multiple objects as a whole, rather than trying to judge which one might be easiest to draw.

Negative Space

This drawing?

I don’t even want to talk about this bloody drawing of three hangers.

It might seem like a simple drawing of three objects, but the task here was to draw not the actual hangers themselves, but rather the negative space around the hangers.

Doing this successfully, would naturally result in the form of the hangers appearing.

It’s a lot harder than it looks, and I was constantly fighting the temptation to just draw the actual hangers.

The shading was the worst part. One girl next to me started this class with a normal pencil, but by the end of the class, her pencil was nothing but a little stub.

I’ll rate myself in this class exercise as the best though, or worst case, second best.

When the teacher called time up, I couldn’t even believe the person next to me on the other side was seeing the same thing we were seeing. It’s like they gave up halfway and just decided to draw something while praying for divine intervention.

Figure Drawing

My favourite, but certainly hardest part of class has been live figure drawing where we have a model who poses for various lengths of time.

In my entire life, I think I have only ever done one figure drawing class, where I had the opportunity to draw a person live, and that was all the way back in 2007, so once we started, my first few attempts at this were so horrifically bad.

I am struggling so much trying to learn the box technique for drawing people.

I’ve known about it my whole life, but always avoided it because as you can see, I’m terrible at it, and to make matters worse, I had scarcely finished one or two boxes before the teacher shouted “Time’s up!” ✋🏾

All of my five minute pose drawings were trash.

Absolute rubbish.

When we began ten minute poses, I decided to change strategy.

I can’t die because of boxes. Instead I decided to just draw fewer but more critical boxes (like the head, and the pelvis), and use contour lines and witchcraft to join up the rest.

By the time we got to the twenty minute pose, I was desperate and determined to get a good drawing out of class.

In all the previous drawings, I had done both my boxes and my contours in the same black charcoal, and it honestly was confusing because sometimes I couldn’t see where to put a line because it was obscured by a box corner.

So I decided to switch to red charcoal for my boxes, and do only the contours in black.

I also had to be mindful of speed because this whole time, I had not made a single complete drawing.

I was fighting for my life every second I was working on it, but this last figure drawing of the day is the one I’m proudest of.

The model also said it was the best one, which made me so proud of myself!

Not bad huh?

One last thing … welcome to my channel 👋🏾

I also decided to give YouTube a shot, and I made a video of all my art school adventures there.

I’m not a Youtuber and I don’t know jack shit about editing so please don’t laugh if my video isn’t all “Hi guys, welcome to my channel”

Please click here to subscribe to my channel

If you laugh, you’ll get diarrhoea.

💛

Lotanna

I didn’t expect that I would spend the last three weeks deathly ill, but the whole shitty saga started on the 9th when I came down with food poisoning.

I thought I could ride it out, but by evening I was experiencing stabbing pains in my stomach and chest, as I sat on the toilet trying to shit out whatever was trying to kill me, and last April, I actually and very seriously almost died from the worst food poisoning of my life — I had to call 911. I was delirious, confused, unable to stand without falling, and almost passed out right as the paramedics burst through the door to see me collapsed in a massive pool of vomit — so I wasn’t taking any chances this time, and I decided to go to the doctor on DAY ONE.

I came back from the hospital the same day with a prescription of antibiotics, which I dutifully completed for seven days without incident.

That is, until the last day.

Literally no sooner had I swallowed the last pill of Amoxicillin, than I started feeling a familiarly sinister bloating in my upper stomach.

NO FUCKING WAY am I getting food poisoning on the last day of me completing a course of antibiotics that I had been prescribed to kill the last food poisoning I was barely recovered from.

But that was exactly what was happening.

Hello stomach my old friend…

I’ve come to poison you again…

I couldn’t believe I was that unlucky, but like clockwork, by the next day, not only was I shitting my guts out, this time there was a horrible new symptom.

Allow me to introduce you to… nonstop projectile vomiting.

I vomited. And vomited. And vomited. And vomited. And vomited.

I vomited all the food I had eaten.

I vomited all the food that had digested.

Then when I had nothing else to vomit, I vomited all my stomach acid and bile.

I vomited so hard, my whole body shook, and all I could think desperately was “no more, please no more”

But when I started vomiting brown specks of blood?

I jumped up from my sick bed (or should I say sick couch because by this time I was permanently camped on the couch leaning over a basin to vomit), and hauled my ass to the hospital, even though we literally had to stop for me to vomit into a bag, and also out the door when we stopped in traffic.

I came back from the hospital after a day of extensive testing and a CT scan of my abdomen and chest, feeling horrible. For the next three days, I kept vomiting, but thankfully less with each passing day.

Just when I thought I was finally well enough to actually keep something down after discovering I lost over six pounds in just two days, another wretched set of symptoms presented themselves.

Besides pain, cramping, bloating and discomfort whenever I tried to eat even food that had been chewed into a liquid mush, I developed chest pain and breathing became very unpleasant and very deliberate, which as you can imagine, feels like hell.

I wouldn’t be an award winning, Olympic gold medal hypochondriac if I didn’t immediately trampoline to the absolute worst case scenario, so two weeks after the initial food poisoning, convinced all that horrific vomiting had caused a Boerhaave’s Syndrome rupture in my oesophagus, I set off to the hospital emergency room for the third time.

To be fair I was in a lot of pain and I actually could not breathe nor eat.

Even drinking water was a little painful.

This time I had a chest X-ray, and now I’m back home with instructions to see my doctor about a referral to a pulmonary specialist, but most importantly, it was not a ruptured oesophagus, and I’m very grateful for that.

I’m feeling better now but not yet back to hundred percent.

Unsurprisingly, my compliance to my new year routine and resolutions took a beating.

I couldn’t get out of bed for days with how sick I was.

The bright side though, is that though I was really worried that I wouldn’t get better in time and miss it, I did manage to feel better enough in time to start Art School this week, so very big deal. At least to me.

Not all smiles though, because although I made it to my first class, I developed some breathing problems during my second class (Figure Drawing), and I had to excuse myself to go to the Emergency Room.

This honestly made me so sad because after everything I having my art school application dumped in the trash when I tried to apply to Art School as a teenager, the fact that I finally am able to fund an art education for myself is such a major milestone to me, and I hate being unwell, and in that moment I just felt like, why can’t this good thing just happen for me with no hitches?

I’m trying to take it on the chin and just push through though.

I got a rescue inhaler and made it back to class the next day, even though I didn’t feel like it, and unexpectedly I had a great time!

This is already really long, so I think I’ll do another post just focused on starting art classes and what it’s been like so far.

Hope your week was a lot better than mine!!

XOXO

Lotanna

Chun Li (of Street Fighter fame) famously asks opponents “Kakugo wa ii no ka?” (Are you ready? - Lit: Is your resolve okay? ) before beating them to bits, and I can’t help but feel that way about the new year.

I’m trying to be optimistic and hopeful about it, but optimism isn’t my strong suit.

My PhD is in pessimism, so naturally, my strongest feeling about the rapidly approaching 2024 is dread.

Still though, like everything else on this godforsaken hell hole of a planet we all found ourselves on, there’s nothing I can do to stop the inexorable march of time, even though in my mind I find myself screaming “Chelugodu!” wait a minute! Hang on! so I can catch my breath and get my bearings for a moment.

Speaking of which, Chelugodu is probably a much better name for this blog than Onu Monu, which now that I think of it, is a much better name for an art brand.

So forgive me for waffling but it’s Chelugodu from now on, because I actually need a damn minute.

Anyway, so like any properly burned out person, I was spending all my time on TikTok, when I came across this man holding a big ass calendar, screaming about how this was his big ass calendar, and he had already planned every single day of his 2024.

I was intrigued but honestly I’m really intimidated by such organised, Type A people, probably because I deeply aspire to be like that, but my reality is the complete opposite.

Once I interacted with that video, suddenly every time I opened TikTok, I was confronted with yet another person who had bought this man’s Big Ass Calendar, and was enthusiastically planning out all the amazing things they were going to do in 2024 with it, including this guy who bought three and forced his girlfriend to sit through a whole presentation of a year worth of dates he had planned on it.

Of course I fell victim to marketing and bought one, but in typical fashion, the clock just struck midnight, and I haven’t finished planning.

Still though, I’m resolved.

2023 kicked my ass but this time, watashi no kakugo wa ii.

My resolve is set.

Ready or not, I’m going to make it work.

In this spirit I already did a couple of brave things this last / first week.

I dissolved my company. And registered a new one somewhere more private to start afresh.

I lost all my confidence in art and my ability to draw, but it’s eaten at me for years now, so I applied to Art School a few days ago.

While I wait to hear if I’ll be accepted or not, I paid for a figure drawing class at a nearby university. About $500, but I’m hoping it will be the little push I need to get back into drawing, and also meet some new people with something in common.

So I have some modest things to look forward to this year.

My new year resolutions for 2024 are:

• Walk 10,000 steps every day

• Follow my intermittent fasting schedule

• Lose 100 lbs / 45.4 kg

• Launch my Art business (Clothing, Jewellery, Art and Lifestyle) brand - Onu Monu

• Finish the novel I’m writing

• Write in this blog at least once a week

• Buy a house of some sort

I’m not going to beat myself up if my execution isn’t perfect, but I will do my best.

And I will try to plot it all out in advance on this ridiculously large calendar I bought for $50.

Happy New Year!!!

I wish you and myself, the best that life has to offer, and the most amazing year possible in 2024!!! 🎉🎉🎉 🍾🍾

I’ve thought about everything else, but the only explanation that makes sense for the unanchored sense of purposelessness I feel is that the Pandemic did something that fundamentally warped my sense of time and what the whole point of being alive or doing anything was.

I haven’t felt like myself since 2020 began, and I haven’t felt like there was a point to life since then either.

Perhaps it’s burnout after too many years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, chasing FIRE and trying to make enough and save enough money to finally feel like I’ve earned the right to relax, but for the last four years, I’ve felt like flotsam.

Just aimlessly bobbing on, being pushed in a general direction by the waves of my job, where I currently live, who I went into lockdown with, but definitely not propelled forward by my own purposeful volition.

I suppose this would be okay, if it wasn’t that not even semi-idyllic inertia lasts forever, and through it all, I’ve been engulfed by a niggling but growing tsunami of panic, looming ever closer, and just waiting to swallow me alive.

The list of things I want to do is probably longer than I am tall.

And I am very tall.

Mornings start with dread at the prospect of my inevitable failure.

Today is going to be yet another day in which you did nothing worthwhile, you moved no closer to your goals, you improved no skills, you produced no work worth mentioning, and you will close your eyes drowning in disgust at your own inexorable mediocrity.

This is the sort of thing I think to myself every morning as I wake up from dreams that are far more satisfying than my present reality.

I know that the cure to anxiety is action that works towards the source of the anxiety, yet I feel paralysed and unable to act.

And so, I have watched time slip away.

Hours lost turned into days lost.

Days lost turned into weeks lost.

Weeks lost turned into months lost.

Months lost turned into years lost.

It’s hard to confront and accept, but I lost years of my life trapped inside my mind, in a mental prison of my own making, or more accurately, a prison built from depression, anxiety, loneliness, isolation, PTSD, and self doubt.

Especially when in 2021, I suffered a complete health breakdown which led to a mental breakdown as worry about my health issues compounded my daily struggles.

I’m still there to be honest, but the only thing different about me is that now I’ve mustered the desire to break out, and while I’ve made many plans in which I have much doubt, at least I’m willing to try.

I hate to sound cliché, but there’s an Igbo proverb I like:

Nobody tortures themselves over missed chances, lost opportunities, and time wasted more than I do, but perhaps the key to starting over and doing it well is being kinder to myself, and making peace with all the ways in which I let myself down despite the sky high expectations I had for myself.

So what am I going to do now that I finally awoke to my morning?

Get married? Have children? Grow a business into a financial success? Climb the social ladder? Make new friends? Write a book? Change the world in my own small way?

Hopefully all of those things in an order that makes sense.

But the very first thing is the thing that probably all the others depend on: regaining my health.

Lots of people weren’t so lucky in this Pandemic.

They actually died.

I didn’t, but I didn’t manage to completely dodge it like some other people. I went from someone who had always had pristine health, to battling chronic illness for the last three years which on multiple occasions forced me to quit my job.

If not for the money I diligently saved when I became an engineer, I couldn’t have ridden out the endless hospital visits, scans, specialists, etc without surely ending up in poverty.

At one point I was living in a hotel and just going to the doctor and the hospital from there, paying both my major city rent, and nice hotel bills at the same damn time.

That doesn’t even include the well over $60,000 I spent in just 2021 on various medical bills despite having excellent health insurance, in pursuit of getting to the bottom of what exactly was wrong with me that was robbing me of the ability, and quite frankly at that point, the will to live.

Money I had wanted to spend on a house in Abuja.

Long story short, my eyes have seen hot pepper these last three years.

So the status quo is this:

• I’m on the mend now. Feeling a lot better but not yet 100% and back to my old self.

Although since the plan going forward isn’t really to go back to just being my old self, I’ll take a new and improved self as compensation.

• I’m overweight from some pretty strong medications I had to take.

I’ve started an intermittent fasting schedule, and generally am just trying to eat better and more nutritious food.

• Financially, I’m okay, but I took a bloody body blow from health related costs.

That thing they say about everyone being just one medical emergency away from poverty is kind of true, but it’s also kind of false.

The silver lining of this horrible experience is that I proved to myself that with preparation, you don’t have to be that person who is bankrupted by a serious medical episode.

Have I lost a huge amount of money? Yes.

But all the financial buffers and careful, strategic financial management I put into place and committed to over the years absorbed the impact like a bulletproof vest, and it shows that the system worked as intended by protecting me from financial ruin.

Still, once a bulletproof vest has been used, you have to get a new one, so now I have to do the work of rebuilding, and honestly, this is the part that scares me the most.

Maybe that’s just because I’m a pessimist and I’ve been a pessimist my whole life.

I’m trying to change that though, so as one who is striving to become an optimist despite this cruel, disappointing world, I should say I’m thankful for surviving such a massive health and financial crisis, and I should regard the battle to regain my bearings as an interesting and enlightening journey.

Three years ago, I felt invincible. I had enough money to not work for three years straight without dropping any expenses if I so chose, so the goal now is to get back to that level and surpass it.

I’m not sure what exactly I should do about having lost confidence in myself.

Although I suppose that is something that can only be regained by a series of successes however small.

If you know of a path you think I should take, a hobby I should try, or see something I myself may have failed to observe, or even if you’re feeling stuck like I am, and trying to get out of a rut, let me know.

Confucius said

When I walk along with two others, from at least one of them, I will be able to learn.

Shortly after I got in, the driver asked me “Do you feel tired after you eat lunch?”

I responded with “I don’t want to make conversation.” and he seemed offended, said “Okay” and dropped it.

Relieved, I thought that would be the end of it, until suddenly he put on the radio, with the music on full blast.

I had to communicate again, and immediately said to him “I requested a Quiet Ride. Please turn off the radio.”

He complied but seemed even more offended than before, and we resumed the rest of the ride in an awkward and stony silence.

I felt uncomfortable and annoyed the whole ride.

After I got out, I rated him 4 stars, and prompted by Uber as to what was wrong, I selected the “Driver talked too much” option as well as “Other” since I couldn’t find something to report that he played music against my wishes.

I felt like the bad guy in this situation, but I honestly shouldn’t have to.

Uber provides a “Request Quiet Ride” option that lets you specify that you’d like to ride in silence, yet it’s probably their most abused feature because 99% of arguments and conflicts I’ve gotten into with Uber drivers has been over this option.

They simply ignore it.

One woman kicked me out of her car years ago for requesting she turn off the loud gospel music she was playing in the car as I entered, screaming “You’re not going to tell me what to do in my own car”

Another driver retorted “I can’t live without music” when I asked for the music to be turned off.

Yet more instead of actually turning off the radio when I ask, sneakily turn down the volume, meaning I have to ask yet again to turn the radio completely off to achieve what I paid for for the duration of the ride: silence.

Others still comply and turn off the radio or music as soon as I ask, but find themselves unable to drive silently and so try to force a conversation despite the Quiet Ride option clearly indicating that I do not want to converse.

I know it seems to be such a small thing to write an epistle over but it’s a very, very big deal to me.

Coming from Nigeria, where I grew up being ferried by professional drivers, it’s very hard for me to acclimatise to Americans’ inability to perform this function properly.

I’ve come to the uncharitable conclusion that Americans simply do not know how to be servants or perform service roles.

They have these functions in the society as jobs, but I think the individual American socialisation of “This is Murica, you can’t tell me what to do” makes it very hard for them to maintain the background character quality that is required of a driver.

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SIDEBAR - I feel like the “servants” bit there is somewhat spicy but it’s the truth.

Nigerian society runs off domestic servants, and while perhaps the term servant is seen as degrading in the West, I hate the fact that I have to put a disclaimer in my own blog that it’s not in Nigeria (or at least it wasn’t when I was growing up), and I don’t intend it to be in my usage here.

Anyway, I’ve endured this for years, and of all the petty little things in the world, this might just be the thing that pushes me to buy myself a car, and finally learn how to drive.

I never saw the need as I always had a driver at home, and when abroad, I loved taking trains, so I resisted all mention of buying a car for my entire twenties.

The pandemic killed my enthusiasm for public transport, so I have to admit, I’m more open than ever before to the idea of getting a car.

At least nobody will fight with me over the radio, and I can enjoy the precious silence I bought with my hard earned money in peace.

What are you fighting with your Uber drivers about?

As myself.

This will be a blog not just about life as I’m experiencing it, and the things I’ve learned along the way, but also about all the friends I hope to make and meet, and the hope for a brighter, better, warmer future, by me reaching out to the world here, and hoping that kind, brilliant, interesting, fun likeminded people reach back.

There are many things, people, and places that I want to explore, and I will do my best to do so here, so I hope you will all accompany me, and share a little of yourselves back.

Love,

Lotanna