Thirteen

a young woman's journey to self awareness

I never had any problems when it came to making friends. The first time I became aware of this was in my first term of Jss1. I was 10 years old, entering boarding school for the first time, and I was so scared but so excited. My mum saw me off to boarding school. She was more emotional about the whole thing than I was. Her baby, her last born, was really going to be away from her for the first time. There were many tears and prayers but I felt ready. I was not. 

On resumption day, after all the new parents had left, I walked into my new school’s clinic building. The girls from the fresh Jss1 set would stay in this building for the first half of the term while the school was finishing up the bigger girls’ hostel because there was not enough space for us yet. The clinic building was a narrow-looking duplex that had been transformed to part clinic, part Jss1 girls’ hostel. The “hostel” was upstairs where all the hospital beds had been replaced by steel bunk beds. It looked like a normal hostel to me. My room was the innermost room on the floor with four bunk beds, a view of the basketball and volleyball courts and one of the bigger bathrooms. I walked into chaos; the sound of girls making beds and friends; conversations about lives before this new school; my assigned bunkmate praying for all of my roommates. My prayerful bunkmate was a petite brown skinned girl who had little tribal marks on her cheeks in the form of small dashes that looked like hyphens. Immediately she saw me, she came to me, took my hands and began to loudly pray the sort of prayer that she knew would elicit loud and excited amens from the other girls. I understood her intention really quickly and played along…

“Dear God! Turn - what’s your name?”

“Osato”

“Dear God! Turn Osato’s water into sprite!”

“Amen! And dear God, please turn - what’s your own name?”

“Remi.”

“Turn Remi’s margarine to Nutella!”

“Amen oooo”

And then we were friends. 

I would later remember this day and marvel at how easily everything came to me. Conversations with complete strangers; comforting myself by comforting these other girls who were also finding it hard to accept that the next time they would see or hear from their family would be in a month; telling animated stories and facilitating introductions with ease; quickly replacing my own fear and immediate homesickness with the satisfaction that came from making my new friends laugh; feeling validated by this satisfaction and already thriving off of it. 

My roommates and I were inseparable. We did everything and went everywhere together; the eight of us walking in a scattered horizontal line to orientation classes and sports activities. We looked ridiculous but we no longer felt lonely and before we knew it, we had conquered the first half of the term. Oh, so naive!

The mid-term break was for ten days and I had really missed my friends. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I missed my friends. They did not seem like just friends, they felt like my own little community; like family. Unfortunately, when we returned to school after the break, we had been moved to the main girls’ hostel. Work was not yet finished on the new girls’ hostel but the SS3s were moved to another block to create room for us in the main hostel and so we would be moving to join the JSS2s-SS2s. I cried so much. We all did. It was as if we knew that things were going to be different. We had not been in the “real” boarding school because we had not lived with seniors in the hostel. Things were about to change. To make it even worse, we were then separated into “houses” – Red House, Yellow House, Blue House and Green House. I was in Red House and none of my roommates from the clinic hostel was in Red House. I was so scared. I had settled in and made friends already. The move felt like the first resumption day all over again. Luckily for me, there was no space for Remi in the Blue House room and she was moved to my room. We were together again. 

Eventually the novelty of being in a boarding school wore off. I had learned how to wash my own clothes by hand, how to hide my unironed school shirt with my school sweater, how to not stare at seniors to avoid being told to kneel down, how to walk in order to avoid being in a senior’s way, how to comport myself during assemblies, how to talk less and listen more, how to laugh less loudly, how to be “mature”, how to exist in a Nigerian boarding school. I learned how to survive and I thought I had become used to the school. I clearly did not learn enough. 

JSS1 flew by. So many things happened and yet nothing really happened. One thing was for sure, though – I hated everything about boarding school. I hated the fear that we were conditioned to wear as second skin. I hated that we had to be afraid of everyone in order to survive; afraid of seniors, teachers, and bullies and even afraid of reporting said bullies because that only meant you were a snitch which meant more bullying. It was truly exhausting. It seemed like safe spaces did not exist and I quickly learned that I was by myself. 

JSS2 was interesting. Puberty hit all of us like a dirty slap. The boys in my set had grown a lot taller and almost all the girls came back with bras. We looked and felt older. To make everything better (or worse), we were now seniors to the new JSS1s and that somehow automatically meant that it was only right to show them what “they” showed us. 

I became very aware of my body in JSS2. I started to really look at boys and began to understand what was and was not accepted from a girl. It did not matter if you could not change these things. If you looked a certain way, you were treated a certain way and my fat body was not treated kindly. I experienced body shaming and bullying because of my size and complexion. I was implicitly rejected by boys I tried to get close to. As a result, I hated my body and I became very aware of how self-acceptance could be a form of rebellion. One thing I loved, though, was how much I danced. I danced a lot. It was my only means of escape before I really got into reading fiction. I could not bring myself to love my body but dancing made me like my body. I could move any which way and learn complicated dance steps in minutes. I was not a dancer but I loved dancing. Mine was not movement that was meant to impress but movement that made you want to move too. It was in JSS2 that I became aware of how contagious my energy could be. I found that in dance. 

I met Femi in JSS1 and we had been friends since but we became a lot closer in JSS2. Femi made me aware of desirability coexisting with fatness. Thinking about it now, there was no real chemistry. I was drawn to him simply because he liked me the way I was. He never made any comments about my weight or my complexion and he didn’t care that seniors did not really like me. It was a very innocent “romantic” relationship. We had a lot of fun and got into trouble for the love letters we sent to each other. We held hands and spoke a lot about wanting to kiss each other. It was sweet. Femi made me feel very comfortable and lovable and when I had started losing weight rapidly because I was not eating, he pulled me to a corner and told me that my health and happiness were more important than what people said about me. He told me he liked me like that and I cried because, at the time, that was all the validation I needed. He would always come to my table in the dining hall to make sure I ate and he also tried, and failed, to make me enjoy pounded yam. Even though I knew it wasn’t exactly love, I still refer to him as my first love just because I was enough for him. Unfortunately, we were broken up by a senior who decided that our relationship, which she knew nothing about, was unhealthy. Such was the way of amebo seniors. 

JSS2 ended unceremoniously. I began JSS3 very happy to be at the last leg of junior secondary school. I would turn thirteen in JSS3 and turning thirteen was a big deal to me. That “teen” at the end made me feel older, wiser and more ready for whatever life threw at me. I did not know that it would turn out to be a very defining year in my life. I did not know that it would be my last year in Premiere Academy. I did not know that I would learn the things that I learned the way I did.

There were exams to be written and a good part of JSS3 was preparing for those exams that would make clear which senior school class you would end up in. Either Sciences, Humanities, ‘Tech’ or Business. Premiere Academy had a reputation to maintain and so for every national and international exam we wrote, we wrote pre-mock and mock exams first. It was a stressful time especially for me because all I wanted was to dance. . 

It was in the second term of JSS3 that my beloved French teacher, Monsieur Michel, left Nigeria for France and so Madame Adebayo, who taught three out of five of the JSS3 classes French, would be teaching the whole set. I had heard many scary things about Madame Adebayo and I was determined to stay out of her way especially because I always got nasty looks from her whenever we walked past each other in the corridors. I had dealt with enough bullies of different forms in the previous years and she was not going to be one of them. 

It was in JSS3 that I learned that, oftentimes, people’s treatment of you is a reflection of their own personal insecurities and treatment of themselves. I learned that, sometimes, how a person perceives you has nothing to do with you. I did not need to learn this the way that I did. 

On a very random day, Madame Adebayo was teaching the class French reading comprehension when she said we should open our On y Va!  textbooks. I opened mine and realised that Femi, who was sitting beside me, did not have his textbook and so pushed my chair towards his so that we could share. There was nothing unusual about this. Sharing saved everyone’s time. Out of nowhere, though, Madame Adebayo began to yell. Before I realised she was yelling at me, she had assumed I was being rude by not giving her my attention and got angrier. She stood me up and called me all sorts of names. I was genuinely confused; partly because I didn’t really know why I was being yelled at and partly because of her choice of words. She called me ugly, undesirable and good for nothing. She told me she could not possibly understand what made me feel so “big” because there was nothing to me. She also said that everyone who thought she hated me thought wrong because she only hated people she envied but that there was nothing about me worth envying. She said a lot of things about my looks and in front of the whole class, too. She finally dismissed me from the class and told me to report myself to the Head of Learning for disrupting her class. I cried so much. So much. Exhausting and debilitating tears. I just could not understand what I had done. I never thought it was jealousy because I genuinely thought something was wrong with me. That day changed me in many ways. My confidence and self-esteem went down to zero. My hatred for myself and my body intensified and I was miserable every day. I was thirteen. 

On the third term resumption day, while unpacking and chatting with my friends, I burst into tears right in the middle of a normal conversation. My friends were confused but I said it was homesickness and started laughing. That evening, I called my mum with a friend’s contraband phone and told her that I wanted to leave that place. I didn’t know how to explain how I was feeling except that I was very sad and I didn’t want to be there anymore.  By the time my mum came the next day, whatever was wrong with me had faded and I assured her I was just being overly emotional. We both agreed that the school was changing something about me that we didn’t like and that she would do something about it. 

A month later, there was a meeting between my mum and the principal. It was from this meeting that the school’s administrative staff learned about my mental health struggles. And it was from the administrative staff that the teaching staff heard. Thankfully, that was where the gist stopped. Madame Adebayo came to me and apologised profusely. She did not “realise” that she had contributed to my feeling bad about myself. Apparently, she took mental health issues very seriously and had a few bouts of depression herself. She was sorry. I don’t know if I ever really forgave her because I could not make sense of the fact that she claimed to understand what it felt like to struggle with your mental health and what could contribute to them but was one of the EMPERORS of cruelty in the school. Nevertheless, that conversation taught me many things about insecurities and how they can be projected. It also taught me that sometimes, apologies don’t do anything. No matter how much you want them to, they cannot absolve you of the pain you caused another person. 

I left that school still very unsure about my purpose, life and relationships but I left a lot more self-aware than I planned to be. I had become aware of my personality and individuality; aware of the various ways in which human beings are flawed; aware of the different ways people tried to hide their flaws. The journey that is self-awareness is never ending and sometimes, I believe, you lose parts of yourself in order to see clearly other very important parts of yourself. Everything in life is give and take and it’s not always a fair trade.