We Have to Start this Thing Over

May was not perfect. Also, fuck Hamman Yaji.

I wasn’t sleeping.

I’m talking brain damage levels of not sleeping.

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.

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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)

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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.

Hamman Yaji. — Fuck Hamman Yaji.

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.

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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