It has been a challenging couple of weeks. Day to day life has been fine, but I’ve been dealing with what I perceive to be, my failure to function as a well-rounded human being. On a surface level I get by, but there are areas in life where I am seriously lacking. For some reason, thoughts about these things recently came to camp at the forefront of my mind and disturb my peace.

When this happened, part of me, let’s call it Ife A, wanted to wallow and mope around, in a world of self-pity. However, I am one with little patience and sympathy for those who sulk, myself included. So, the more pragmatic and driven side of me, Ife B, was refusing to deal with any of my nonsense. This led to an exhausting ongoing battle between these two sides.

Arguments like this would occur:

Ife A: “If I haven’t learnt how to interact with people by now, there’s little hope that I’ll pick it up. I’m pretty much doomed.”

Ife B: “Dude you’re 20! You are barely grown, get over yourself. I’m sure that if Priscilla Sitienei can go and get a primary school education at age 90, it’s not too late for you to learn how to string sentences together.”

Or

Ife A: “Ife, why are you so usele-“

Ife B: “Don’t even go there. We know that’s not true. What good does proclaiming this aloud do for you?”

This back and forth would go for a while, until my phone would play a really good song. Then there would be a temporary truce between the two sides allowing me to completely immerse myself in the singing and/or dancing required for me to gain full enjoyment. The conflict would then resume.

Some days Ife A’s voice was louder, and other days it was Ife B that would dominate. However, the battle came to a halt when Ife B said, “you’re not that special.” Suddenly, all my thoughts froze.

I realised that, although referring to myself in multiple third persons and mentally picturing my struggles as a medieval battle, wasn’t necessarily normal, it didn’t make the situation I was facing particularly unique. Millions of people have faced very similar problems. In fact, in 3 out of 5 of the books I read over the past couple of weeks, the authors were experiencing the same challenges. But in spite of their struggles they survived and thrived. Yet, once I put the books down, the encouragement I found in those stories seemed to fade. They were just forgotten words on a page. I used the differing contexts and characters to try and mask the similarities in the tales and justify my downtrodden disposition.

Being reminded that I’m not that special was the grounding I needed to get out of my own head and put everything into perspective. Although my troubles weren’t particularly unique, what I could make my own was the lessons I learned from the situation. I should have been focusing on how I could use the struggle to better myself. Something good should come out of the mess.

So that is where my head is at now. I have not solved my issues, nor do I by any means have my life together. But the conflict has been put to rest. My outlook has changed. So hopefully, in the future, I will look back and see that I learned some valuable lessons from a challenging period that was nothing particularly special.