I’m feeling embarrassed writing this. I mean, how many girls out there would willingly share the personal things that happen in their lives with strangers? But here I am, writing about myself for you to read. You can read this book for fun. You can read it out of curiosity. You can even read it simply because you want to know what happened. But I would prefer that you read it for the lessons. That’s the significant reason I’m sacrificing my dignity to put these things into words.
I’ll start with my background. I’m the second child in a family of three. There are two girls first, then our last born is a boy. We aren’t rich, but we aren’t battling poverty either—if you know what I mean. I’ll say more about my background later in the book. For now, I want to focus on the main reason I’m writing this.
Was life created to favour us, or against us?
A couple of people are doing well, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all looked at them at some point and assumed that life is favouring them. We see the cars, the houses, the businesses and the money, but we rarely see what happens behind all of that. We don’t see the countless nights someone spends thinking about the money they’ve invested in a stock market that could go either way. We don’t see the restlessness that comes with wondering whether a risky financial decision made a week ago will ruin everything they’ve worked for. We don’t see the person who already has five million dollars worrying about how to turn it into twenty-five million. And maybe we shouldn’t even start talking about the health complications that can come with wealth.
On the other hand, there are people who are genuinely struggling. People trying to figure out how to eat twice a day. People who wake up every morning already thinking about what they’re going to survive on. We look at them and assume life is against them. But even they have problems we don’t always consider. They don’t have to worry about losing millions in a risky investment. They aren’t losing sleep over how to protect a multimillion-dollar business. They probably aren’t dealing with the kind of responsibilities that come with having more money than they know what to do with.
I’m not trying to compare poverty and wealth or determine which one is easier. We’ll save the rich-and-poor discussion for another episode. What interests me is something much simpler: life doesn’t always cooperate with our plans.
You make a conscious decision that you’re going to wake up every morning and jog. Then the next morning, it rains heavily. Your plan is ruined. But that same rain might be exactly what your neighbour, Mr. Sicasa, needed because he gets to stay home from work that day. Same rain, different experience.
And that’s my point. We make conscious and intentional plans about our lives, but life itself seems to always have another plan. Sometimes, those plans collide. And that’s exactly what happened to me.
I’ve always considered myself a strict and disciplined girl. I’m the type of girl you could call and I’d ignore you bluntly—in fact, unapologetically. I grew up around boys, so I know quite a lot about them. And yes, I mean a lot. I’ve seen how some boys can chase a girl for months just to get what they want, only to disappear immediately after. Sometimes I genuinely wonder why anyone would go through all that stress for months just to be satisfied once and disappear. My surprise isn’t even about the disappearing part. It’s the amount of effort required to get there.
Anyway, the secrets of boys can wait for another part of this book. For now, let’s talk about how my discipline was attacked.
During my secondary school days, I successfully saw and ignored every advance that came my way. Yes, I had a lot of male friends, but they were strictly platonic relationships. And no, I’m not going to lie and pretend I was some perfectly innocent girl who never crossed any line. There were a few stolen kisses here and there—with guys I genuinely liked. Eventually, after secondary school, I dated a guy and even had a make-out session with him. But somehow, I still felt in control of myself. I knew my boundaries. I knew the kind of girl I wanted to be.
Then I got into the university, and the environment changed.
If you’ve ever felt unusually tempted or vulnerable during your 100-level days, trust me, you’re not alone. For years, we’d lived under the scrutiny of parents, neighbours, relatives and almost everybody who thought they had a right to know where we were going and who we were seeing. Then suddenly, we entered a world that felt free. Nobody was constantly asking where you were going. Nobody needed to know who you were with. Nobody was watching every decision you made. You could finally make your own choices.
Looking back now, I think I allowed that freedom to get to me. And that freedom eventually led me to something I never planned for—something that happened on 15 February 2020.
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