being left in the past

face

School days were not kinder. I faced rejection like a daily meal. Some children were loud, some were cruel, some were silent, but none understood me. And the one person who could have stood with me, my mother, was often absent. Not by choice. But because work called her away again and again. She was a single force fighting against the weight of life, and work was the only weapon she had.

I understood it far later; as a child, all I understood was the emptiness.

No one stood up for me.

No one spoke for me.

No one asked, “Are you okay?”

My body, already small and fragile, seemed to attract illness like a magnet. I struggled with sickness after sickness, pain threading through my days like a sharp needle. I learned how to suffer quietly, how to hold my stomach, how to hide my headaches, how to breathe through chest pains that made me feel much older than I was.

I would walk through the day with a fever burning my skin, but I said nothing. I swallowed the pain the same way I swallowed my fears, alone.

And what hurt the most was not the illness, it was the isolation.

Children avoided me, not out of cruelty, but out of fear of what they did not understand.

Adults passed me by, too burdened with their own problems to see a lonely child drifting through life like a loose feather.

No one wanted to come close.

No one reached out.

No one asked to understand what lived inside me.

I began to live in my own mind, a place both safe and terrifying. I created fantasies of escape, wishes for magic, dreams of something powerful enough to change everything. I prayed silently for miracles, even when I did not fully know who I was praying to. I hoped for something supernatural, something extraordinary, something that could lift me beyond my pain and loneliness.

I wished for the world to shift, just a little, so I could breathe easier.

So I could feel seen.

So I could be loved in the simple, gentle way every child deserves.

But life did not move quickly.

The earth remained cold.

And I remained a child struggling to stay warm.

Yet somewhere in that coldness, in that isolation, a quiet strength was growing inside me. A strength born from hardship. A strength shaped by silence. A strength carved by every tear I wiped away myself.

But pain was building a foundation under my feet.

Pressure arrived early in my life, long before I understood what success meant. As a child, I carried the heavy expectation to have good grades, even though my mind often felt like a battlefield of confusion. My vision in school was poor, not only through my eyes but through the fog that covered my understanding. Reviews of my work always felt disappointing, and revisiting my lessons felt like revisiting lost corners of my mind, places filled with fear, noise, and doubt.

I struggled to focus.

I sat in classrooms with a lost puppy face, the look of someone hoping for pity but receiving none. My head often felt empty, as though my skull held only echoes of thoughts I could not fully grasp. Nigeria was a fun place to grow up, not fun with laughter, but in the complicated ways you learn how to survive before you learn how to live.

I watched my mother take on all kinds of jobs, anything, everything, to keep us afloat. She worked until her hands shook, until her feet were numb, until her eyes could barely stay open. And yet, every day, she pushed forward. I was young, but not too young to understand the sadness. I saw the way her tears fell at night, rolling silently across her face when she believed no one was watching.

She cried in the mornings too.

She cried in prayer.

She cried in exhaustion.

She cried from the weight of raising children alone in an unforgiving country.

We faced wealth issues that stripped us of comfort, dignity, and sometimes hope. The country itself was sinking in an economic crisis, and the leaders who were supposed to guide us seemed to have no intention of building the nation. They stood far from the pain of the people, untouched by the poverty we tasted daily. Their promises were empty, their hands clean while our hands dug through life searching for survival.

And around us, culture itself kept shifting like sand. Nigeria changed in ways that confused me, traditions fading, beliefs bending, identities stretching. But one thing remained constant: religion. We grew up learning to embrace Jesus, even though, as children, we barely knew who He was. We knew the story, yes, but we did not fully understand the man behind it. Still, the story was repeated until it became part of our blood.

Church days were common, almost mandatory. In my country, every child learns early how to pray, how to kneel, how to hold their hands together, how to cry out to a God we hoped was listening. We prayed to the same God who seemed silent, the same God who never stopped the hunger, the pain, the struggle. Still, we prayed because prayer was the only thing we were taught to hold on to.

My mother prayed every morning, every night, every moment her heart broke under the pressure of life. She prayed like the women in the Bible, fervently, desperately, faithfully. Prayer became her oxygen, her medicine, her only shield. She lived a deeply religious life because faith was her last hope. She waited for miracles from the Most High, believing that one day, somehow, something would finally change.