I am the type to twirl near the cliff of insanity just to see if I would take a tumble.
What is sanity, anyway?

Let me tell you a story. When I was in JSS3, my cousins held an intervention for me. It was meant to be a helpful session to address my perceived anger issues and unwarranted aggression. I felt betrayed. Then ganged up on. Then angry!

Why did you all decide to corner me and talk about something you claimed was bad?

I was pained as I listened to them list traits and instances where I had displaced aggression towards them. The word aggression was seared deep into my mind that day because, at every turn, Taiye, the ringleader, kept repeating it like he had just read it in a book and needed to keep using it so he wouldn’t forget.

I also remember that, at some point, the conversation tilted toward my father and Germany and Belgium. That was one of the earliest instances of friends or family staging an intervention for me.

Another had happened earlier in JSS1, when again, a Taiye (a different one; not my cousin this time but a classmate and a bully who tormented me ceaselessly for three years) led the charge. I eventually left my first school, but she still found ways to torment me. Now that I think of it, I’ve never had smooth relationships with twins.

She and some other girls in JSS1 staged an intervention, claiming I didn’t come to their class (JSS1A) frequently enough, and because of that, they would stop being my friends. I was asked to apologize, and I vehemently refused. Even as an 11-year-old with barely any knowledge of how life worked, I still knew it didn’t make sense to apologize for not coming often to class to gist and play with you???

My refusal led to what I always term my first introduction to malice. Oh yes, I never forgot. That was the first time I was made to feel like a pariah, treated like I barely existed by my so-called friends. This was all spearheaded by Taiye, who rallied them and told them not to speak to me.

So, I watched from the sidelines on the school playground as they performed a choreographed dance to Roll It by P-Square. I felt betrayed because we had been rehearsing No Scrubs by TLC together. When the ice eventually broke, I can’t remember. But that moment planted something in me: confrontations, conversations, interventions—these things now put me on edge. They make me assume the other party is coming from a place of premeditated malice and already has one foot out the door.

“Kaothar, we need to talk” wouldn’t just make me spiral. It would give me a blinding headache. I’d immediately start wondering if that was the end of the association.

Then, in my urge to fight it, I would go into defensive mode or scramble for something effusive to say or do—anything to stop the other party from casting me aside.

Ha. Good old people pleasing.

Anyway, what all this led to, this and other similar situations, was me cherry-picking, opening myself up, and sifting through my perceived flaws to try to work through them. Constantly checking in on myself. Trying to set myself straight.

What did those years of self-actualization do to me?

I became a robot.

Recently, I began to hear the familiar buzz and the incoming noise of another round of intervention. Majorly abstract statements of this and that. In fact, some of what is being said isn’t even what I did.

How can I be responsible for you thinking I’m sad when I’m not? For thinking I’m giving off an attitude when I was simply thinking of what to eat when I get home?

I told the harbinger of unsavoury news to chuck it up wherever they wanna chuck it.

Yes, I am a bad woman. Yes, I am a wicked woman. Yes, I have bad behaviour. Yes, my attitude stinks.

Now leave me alone.

No more will I let people’s assumptions of what I am define me. Of course I’m not perfect, but you cannot make me scrap myself off of everything that makes me me because of what you believe.

I realize some of these buzzes are projections of how people think of their environment and themselves, and very little has to do with me.

Abeg leave me make I dey craze myself dey go.

Na me go be the first to bad? Shuuuuu.

No more. I have decided to embrace the insanity wholly. No more fighting it. Let it all burst at the seams and come undone. Let it all burn and let me laugh wickedly as the cinders blow in the air. I have had enough. Let others deal with my chaos too.