A SHIT-FEST THERAPY SESSION

Have you ever been in a situation where it looked like the whole world was up in battle against you?

One of my worst experiences on OAU campus was during my penultimate year. I was the Editor in Chief of my department and at the same time one madly active guy on the class WhatsApp page. Actually, I have always been an active person everywhere I go. I am not the sharpest tool in the shed; but like a parked tractor in the midst of other farming tools, c’mon you can’t say you did not see me.

The year I speak of was 2018 and I made it a point of duty to help my course mates generally improve in their written and spoken English. In short, I became an English Language police.

I criticized those who did not speak the language well; I became a critic for the poets and writers in my department.

I was quick on my feet to point out errors, refute claims and wrong pronunciations, tell people their poetry was shitty with forced rhymes, and give a comment on cliché and secondary-school-student-like stories.

I was, well, more than a grammar police and slowly, a pain in people’s lives.

Honestly, I thought I was doing something good. They all accepted my corrections and reviews. They never complained because my corrections albeit quite apt were excessively blunt. When, I say blunt I do not mean the “your writing is so bad you should never hold a pen again in your life” kind of blunt. I just gave it to people straight and might have used a lot of not-so-soothing words.

I do not know how to butter up people, plus I treated them the way my then mentor did to me. So, it became a part of me; to tell people things straight without thinking about them or how they feel.

Then one day my cup went brimful and started running over. One very calm evening had me sweating in my room, virtually fighting a war with over 450+ class mates.

I had quickly pointed out someone’s error and had done it just the way I used to – blunt with a sprinkle of why-can’t-you-guys-just-stick-to-my-corrections.

Almost the whole class came for my head that evening. You know when you have inflated a balloon so much that it can’t hold any more air, and it just lets everything in it out. Yeah, that was how my classmates let out all their pent up emotions.

It was a shit-fest therapy session. A rare “everybody come and say what you don’t like about Ololade” night. Barrages of insults here and there, people’s blunt confession about me, ridicule spiced with snide remarks, direct confrontations.

Everything was coming from every angle. I was defenseless, even those who wanted to be my ally on the group were brutally decimated. That night was one of the few days I had an honest and not-so-honest conversations and people’s opinions about me were not sugarcoated. I felt sad, bitter, weak, helpless, and at the same time betrayed.

When I later confronted some of them that why do they still come to me for my honest opinions about their works when deep down they were hurt, and may just be using style to curse me inwards.

“Off course, everyone knows you’re good. You have been nominated once as the best writer on OAU campus, and twice in this faculty. You are the EIC, and damm we cannot even count the number of oratory or written competitions you’ve lost none… The point is, you assume everyone to be as good as you. Some of us just started writing, some of us are rekindling the writing spirit, and some of us just needed someone to be very truthful about our works, preferably someone better than us… You are everything we wanted in a critic except the fact that you never considered that maybe the piece is personal to us or the energy we spent writing it. Or that we just wanted people to read us.”

Did I change for the better? Yes. Do I still give unsolicited advice and opinions? Well, you will have to shove your hands down my throat to fetch an unsolicited opinion, I don’t care if your English is worse than you-know-who. Do I still critique works? Yes. I fare better as a critic than a writer.

The moral of this story is that, well, fuck it, I am not sure there is a moral to this story. I just found this draft on my drive from lockdown of 2020, read it and decided I should edit it and have it published.

Anyway, you can be good, be needed, have people around you, be loved, be adored, but do not take these people for granted and occasionally, you may get to hear what they think about you. 2018 is about six years ago.

Do I still remember who said what about me? No. However, I did pick up some lessons, grew thicker skin, changed a bit or tremendously – I really can’t say – and most importantly, I did become a better person. Or thereabout.