The first time I started writing this, I looked at the calendar and realised we were two months into a national lockdown at a time when the world had finally accepted Covid-19 for it was: a pandemic. Now, it’s been over nine months since we got used to, then grew tired of the so-called “new normal”; living in a constant cycle of lockdowns, spikes in infection rates, and all the politics in-between.
When the clock struck midnight on January 1st 2020, I’d never have imagined ending the year unable to freely socialise with friends, and forced to wear a face mask before stepping out of my house. 2020 has truly been the year that killed spontaneity and if someone had travelled back in 2019 to warn me what was ahead, I’d have waved them away and laughed at what I’d have considered the most ludicrous conspiracy theory.
“You mean the whole world stood still for months because of a virus? LOL, what next? Patience Ozokwor became the ruler of the new world order?”
I published a story in the last days of 2019 that talked about the world being on fire. It was a story I’d first written during the 2014 Ebola outbreak to truly capture how I felt during that period. My world, at that moment, felt like it had truly been set on fire because of a deadly virus and the worsening security situation. Within a few weeks of publishing that story, the world was on fire once more. Both in the literal sense and figuratively. January alone felt like ten years wrapped in one with many life-changing events, not to talk of the peak of a global health crisis awaiting the world in March.
April felt like a dream, where each day rolled into the other with very few semblances of reality that often felt fleeting. I watched the grasses in my estate and the shrubs in my backyard grow the tallest they’d ever been. I watched dirt accumulate on the streets until it was swept away by nature. More than that, I remember the silence and how deafening it was. The world seemed to be standing still and more terrifyingly, I was compelled to make the difficult choice of catching up with myself.
I read Bone for the first time in 2015. A lot of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s words have stayed with me ever since then, but I still keep revisiting the last two lines of ‘the not quite love’ poem. Those lines stood out to me because it humanised the dread I’d felt for so long. It reminded me of the sleepless nights riddled with obsessive thoughts and the occasional heart palpitations that I’d become accustomed to. It felt like I was meeting my anxiety for the first time, in a different form- in the words of another, black ink on white paper. Mere everyday words that the more I read, began to wear a face similar to mine — one I dreaded being confronted with every night. Ever since then, I find myself reciting that line every time I try to describe whatever dread or panic I begin to feel behind closed doors- feelings that have slowly become associated with ‘home’.
When I moved back home in 2017, it became easy to ignore that ‘not quite’ feeling. Too many distractions. Apart from a torturous daily routine that law school subjected me to, I was also surrounded by social events, activities, friends, family and an old friend- Lagos traffic. I didn’t need to be alone unless I wanted to and even then I was always too tired, too busy and overwhelmed, and many times, too inebriated to ‘catch up’ with myself.
Then came 2020.
If 366 days could be reduced into a poem, for many, 2020 would be Nayyirah Waheed’s famous words from Salt: “I don’t pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning”. More than the insanity that was 2020, catching up with myself looked like being paralysed in one position all day long as I plunged deeper into some kind of existential dread until I fell into a somewhat lucid slumber- sleeping but not quite sleeping, but also not quite dreaming as well. I was floating, suspended somewhere between reality and somewhere otherworldly and explaining it away as some form of lucid dreaming would be too kind. Those were the nights and my mornings looked a lot like rolling over to turn off my alarm, feeling more tired than the day before, and still opening my work laptop to respond to emails, acting like some fraction of my world hadn’t ended the night before.
This is when ‘catching up’ started to look a lot like ‘showing up’ and appreciating the moments when I did. When you’re forced to confront the beautiful and the ugly, you tend to learn how to be gentle and forgiving of yourself. You learn to afford yourself the same degree of care you freely pay to others. You finally acknowledge parts of yourself that never quite healed years ago, and you start to wonder how you walked around the world incomplete. How were you able to move freely within inner circles, between social spaces, when parts of you were still shedding and screaming for recompense?
Forgive yourself for that too.
To summarise: 2020 was waking up on some days feeling beautiful, and on other days, feeling like the worst thing since soaked bread. Then, there was the constant ingestion of bad news digging a hole into whatever empathy was left until I felt dead inside. 2020 looked like picking up new habits, dropping them and picking them back up on a later date. 2020 looked a lot like trying to fan out the flames of a small bush fire nearby while your home was being engulfed behind you. But it also looked like standing back and looking on helplessly at the rampaging inferno, waiting to be carried away by the smoke. In the end, 2020 looked a lot like survival.
Forgiveness and survival.
I’m not going to end this by making any grand claims about 2021. Heck, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. I had a list of goals I made for 2020 with 90% of it still unticked. The day after my birthday, I received news that managed to help me tick one thing off that list, but instead of celebrating, I convinced myself that it was a mistake and I wasn’t good enough. For a moment, I deprived myself of that win. I had to forgive myself for that too.
I’m ending this year alone, mostly by choice. For once, I’m not so frightened by my lonesome and whatever thoughts breed in its shadows. I am learning to live with myself, knowing the bad and the ugly and trying to love myself despite it all. Untethered, but still not quite free. In some sense, one can maybe say I’m starting to learn what it means to be truly alive.
