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Her Version of Events

2020, Dare to Dream, Her Version of Events, life lessons,

Ore’s Reasons To Stay Alive

I recently read ‘Reasons To Stay Alive’ by Matt Haig and it got me thinking about all the reasons I have to stay alive and I decided to write them all down. Please be gentle with me and do leave a reason or two of yours in the comments. 

Things I Want To Keep Experiencing 

  1. Live worship sessions: From singing off-key during my private worship sessions, to singing with my friends and gathering to singing at church events, I always love and look forward to every worship experience.  
  2. Time with my family: Listening to my brother and sister’s endless banter on who is finer, my dad constantly reminding me I am the shortest child and my mum laughing in the background echoing that all her children are beautifully made. I live for these moments, the reassurance of love I feel in them and the knowing that I have a tribe of people looking out for me. 
  3. Conversations with my Uncle: Here is the weird thing, my almost 60-year-old uncle is one of my best friends. I appreciate our safe space, where we can talk about everything from work to self-created boy drama. He listens, gives his opinion and I always walk away with a course of action. 
  4. Written Word: From novels, poetry and essays to hand written letters P.S. I don’t receive enough hand written letters. Please feel free to send me one.
  5. Dairy-Free Ice Cream/Products: I love ice cream but it always upsets my stomach. Dairy-free ice cream provides me the opportunity to indulge with reckless abandon. 
  6. Sun rise and sun set: I know it is cliché but I love how beautiful the sky looks and the routine of the sun’s rising and setting, two constants regardless of whatever is going right or wrong. 
  7. Walking: I love walking and listening to loud music or having a conversation with anyone that I have successfully dragged on a walk with me. 
  8. Conversations with my friends: I am grateful for the important connections I have made over the course of my life and the safe spaces created from these connections; spaces where I can be myself, share my dark humour and sometimes, find answers to my questions about life. 
  9. Total Woman Conference: My friend and I run a ministry for women. We have a yearly conference and, year on year, it is always the most beautiful experience with the Lord and the ladies who attend. Definitely one of my highest points every year. 

Things I am Yet to Experience 

  1. Falling in love: I know, I should have experienced this by now but, it is what it is. That said, I don’t believe I have ever taken the plunge and let myself go in the knowing of another person and getting known by them in return. 
  2. Traveling: I have this dream that I will wake up one day and buy myself a round trip ticket, hop on a plane and experience food from diverse cultures all over the globe 
  3. Read my bible cover to cover. 
  4. My first book signing event. 
  5. TamTam, Kunte, Kiite, Forekems’ (my cousins) graduation from university and just the opportunity of watching them grow and find their place in life. 
  6. Graduate from a PhD program. 
  7. Share my faith; talk to someone about why I believe in God, His love and truth in bible. 

This list is really important to me because I spent most of my 20s feeling very hopeless; questioning why I was here in the first place. Many, many months were dark and it has been a journey of walking through scriptures and filling my life with a lot of love. 

It feels really good to be able to dream again, to have hope and even have a list of reasons I need to be here and things I’m looking forward to to share.

My biggest take away is that there is always light, some of us just have to search a little harder for it. 

March 20, 2020
2020, 27, Her Version of Events, Playlist,

The List

I have a desire to share my favorite love songs with the world: from the sound track for my primary school crush to my current national anthem, which I need to be banned from because of the insane number of times I have listened to the song on repeat in the last two months.

Please be nice in the comments because I believe the romantic part of Oreoluwa that is always in sleuth mood is about to be unleashed on the world.

Here goes nothing.

  1. All My Life by K-Ci and Jojo – You will have to thank my mum and uncle Demola for introducing me to this song, and music in general. When the realization of having feelings and what not hit me, the lyrics of the song felt like the only thing that captured everything I was feeling in that moment. 
  2. Two is Better Than One by Boys Like Girls – This song is on the Boys Like Girls ‘Love Drunk’ album from 2009. The album has got a song for every stage of love, from the tenderness that comes with falling in love to the heartache of lost love, and it is worth checking out. This song is on the list because I spent most of life believing love, with its component parts, was a fantasy and this song started the process of changing my mind. Shout out to my brother for knowing his way around torrents and downloading the album. 
  3. The Only Exception by Paramore – This song sums up how I feel about relationships; all the walls I have built to shield my Jell-O heart from melting, how I walk out from behind my walls when I am sure a person is an exception to all my many rules and my Jell-O heart is willing to take the risk of melting because it can’t afford to watch this person get away. 
  4. Where I Sleep By Emeli Sandé – “Except this is us and this is love, and this is where I’m home…” I love the idea of having a person I feel completely comfortable with, a person that is home on sunny and rainy days. Because really, everyone needs a home. 
  5. Please Keep Loving Me by James TW – I think James TW is one of the most underrated artists but we will get into that on another day. The song reminds me of all the things that can go wrong because I am who I am but in-spite of those things my heart is on my sleeve and loving is what I hope to keep doing. 
  6. Still Into You by Paramore – Love can start feeling familiar after a while, like a constant that no longer sparks excitement. But this song recounts important moments and captures the feelings in those moments. Maybe we need to stock up on those almost perfect moments to get through the hard ones in between. 
  7. Put It All On Me by Ed Sheeran and Ella Mai – “I need a strong heart and a soft touch”. I enjoy every line of this song and I have listened, sang along and danced to it an embarrassing number of times. It is just about having a home, a place to rest after the world has battered you.
  8. Grow As We Go by Ben Platt – This song reminds me of a line I wrote in my journal a few months ago: ‘’Love is active, it takes up its own life form, always evolving, to treat it as static is to bring about its death’’.  I believe we are evolving individually and life is boring alone, so why not evolve with another? Ben Platt captures this perfectly in this song. 
  9. Happy by Morayo and Johnny Drille –  It is just a happy, feel-good song that usually makes me dance and yes, I dance on very rare occasions. 

I am sure you have enjoyed the embarrassing debut of my romantic side. Again I ask, please be gentle with her. 

I have included a link to the playlist and also included other songs not listed above that I enjoy listening to!

YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJwhC1-37_4c3SQXPzajoktbRYXObxIRW

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/user/oreoluwaabidoye/playlist/4Ut4FwIPQmknARBc9WqU8N?si=BOb8Y-7oTp6AFxAAvAxd-Q

February 18, 2020
2020, 27, Her Version of Events,

Needless To Say ….

There are two important things you have to do for me while you read this;

  1. Listen to the song Happy Now by Kygo while reading
  2. Please don’t judge me.

I wasn’t a believer in the term broken heart because scientifically it isn’t possible for a person to live to tell a story of a broken heart therefore I couldn’t wrap my mind around the phrase.

However, twice in the last two weeks I have gone from having this piecing pain in my chest to curling up on my rug and crying fat ugly tears; the type that sucks the energy out of you and you can’t but sleep right after.

I have learned to never do this type of crying on an empty stomach and to always have a face towel drenched in cold water on hand for the headache that inevitably follows it.

Needless to say, I fully understand the concept of a broken heart now. I know to cherish all experiences and learn to build from them but this isn’t an experience I would like to relive. I am sure I have learned all the lessons I need to learn from it and I have carefully documented them in my journal, written them on post-it notes and stuck them around my room so I never forget.

Here is the thing, I am responsible for my ‘’broken heart’’. I will attempt to explain how I came to be curled up on the floor, having the life sucked out of me.

It started with a promise for a free meal which turned to 10 follow up meals within two months. I enjoyed the conversations and really, who says no to free food?

By the third month, I found out that my hands fit perfectly in his and I should have know to snatch my hands out of his and run, instead I stayed put convincing myself everything was under control.

In the fourth month, we talked about the all the reasons sharing meals was a bad idea but we left the restaurant that night with the date for our next meal picked. I should have known to decline the next meeting invitation but by that point, all of me lived for sharing 12-piece chicken wing with him.

By the sixth month we fell into a routine: of sharing meals, sharing ideas and sharing our lives with each other. Looking back on how things progressed, there are two important lessons I learnt from those first six months;

  1. When you know the attraction will end in tears, run! Don’t let the warm feeling in the pit of your stomach get the better of you.
  2. Be brutally honest with yourself about the situation and make the hard decisions.

The sharing, eating meals, meeting family went on for the next few months and by the time I was ready to face reality it was too late for my heart, it had already gone and given itself away.

I found myself dreaming of my future with him in it. We went from ‘’my plans’’ to ‘’our plans’’ and from ‘’you’’ to ‘’we’’. I think what made it hard was we actually work well together, complementing each other’s strengths and weakness, it became difficult to run because it started to feel right.

In the fourteenth month, my uncle staged an intervention. He talked to me about physical compatibility and spiritual compatibility. By this time, there was no point pretending ‘we were just friends’, I listened attentively and when he was done talking, I asked, ‘’So what do I do?’’ He didn’t have a ready answer for me, he told me I was between a rock and a hard place and he understood perfectly the turmoil I was going through.

Two things he said stuck with me.

  1. Everything good isn’t Holy.
  2. You need to blend physical attraction and spirituality, one can crowd the other out and blur your vision but for successful long term relationships, there needs to be a blend.

I went into deep reflections asking myself hard questions about my future and all the things I want my life to be filled with. I plotted a timeline for the current course I was on and I didn’t like the places my mind’s eye took me.

My next decision was clear; unlearn back to ‘me’ from ‘us’. It was in the course of unlearning, of detangling, that my heart broke. Its strings had become too attached and weren’t willing to let go, the yanking off that needed to happen broke it into a million pieces.

So, that is how I broke my own heart and spent Christmas tucked safely in bed grieving what was, what could have been and learning to be just me again. I am not quite there yet but the experts of this type of thing say it takes times, I am therefore giving it time.

January 14, 2020
2020, 27, Her Version of Events,

A Decade In A Few Words

Today is December 1st 2019. I think this fact and the nostalgia of the ending decade has finally caught up with me, I find myself reliving memories I will always carry with me, thinking about all the incredible relationships I have formed along the way and the one thing that jolted me awake to the fact that I was living an accidental life. 

I will start my reminiscing of this decade from that one event that woke me up.

At this beginning of this decade, I started a relationship with a person I thought the world of. Young, naïve Ore thought she had found ‘’the one’’. I even made a playlist for us. (I have overcome all my embarrassment so I will share the playlist with you).

I am glad it happened when it did because I walked away with the following realisations; I was living an accidental life, I wasn’t conscious of the effects my decisions were having on my life in the long run and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of life or even a relationship.

I learnt a lot about myself my personality from that experience and I understood that the first step to self-acceptance is embracing all of who I am, including all the ugly parts I don’t like, because the love I get from life is entwined with how I perceive myself.

The relationship ended, like many relationships do, but I’ll never regret any minute of it because it shaped who I am. 

Okay, that is a lie. I regret that I let it drag on when I knew in my heart it was no longer right for me, I could have saved myself unnecessary hurt and pain.

I will get it out quickly; my romantic life was pretty uneventful after this point, just a few situation-ships sprinkled at different points across the decade, you can blame it on me running when things got serious or my insistent need to be interested in people I couldn’t realistically be with. The plan is to attempt to change this in the new decade.

I am grateful for my family. We are a very nerdy bunch and don’t understand the concept of having fun, but we are all constantly rooting for each other. I know regardless of anything that happens in life or how any of my decisions play out, they will always be in my corner. I took this for granted because it was my normal but through the decade, I came to realise that many people don’t have a family support system and it made me treasure mine more. In that same stride I am grateful for friendships, the old ones that feel like they have lasted a lifetime and the new ones that have formed deep roots in the short time. Even when I felt alone and isolated from the rest of the world, I knew they were always waiting to meet me halfway.

*sigh

I wish someone had generally educated me about starting a career. Any information on the topic would have been appreciated. I had the general understanding of getting a job to earn money after university. I should add that my sister and I had a plan to rent an apartment, have it designed Pinterest board style once I got a job, the fact we even conceived this plan shows we knew nothing about the Nigerian Job market and the shock that was waiting after graduation.

I studied Accounting; it was supposed to be a realistic and stable choice for my future, but I struggled to engage with the degree to see myself practicing as an accountant for the rest of my life. I had always kept journals because my grandpa encouraged me to write my thoughts because I say very few words. My journals quickly became an escape from my degree and I gradually became comfortable sharing my opinions with the world which led to me starting my first blog ‘’Our Version of Events’’ (I love Emeli Sande) on Tumblr which evolved into  ‘’The Over Thinker’’ and I have shared inconsistently over the last decade. I enjoying writing and I thought for a minute that I could become a writer. I spent one year after university pursuing this and I learnt that there were a lot of holes in my skills, that it is a serious art form that goes beyond journaling and life didn’t afford me the luxury of developing my skills. I will keep reading to develop myself and hoping for when I can commit a 100% to writing and create a masterpiece.

After my one year of writing and applying to different roles, I started working as a Finance Officer at a Micro Finance Bank. I met and fell hopelessly in love with Microsoft Excel, I can’t understand how I lived before this. I enjoy colour coding my workbooks and learning new formulas. I didn’t really enjoy my job but there was a lot of free time that I spent reading and this made it bearable. At my three-month mark on the job I knew it wasn’t for me and I started applying to new roles not knowing what I wanted to do or be, just that I needed a new challenge.

My search led me to a role at Softcom/ Eyowo that I didn’t know I needed. The role stretched me, opened my mind and brought about growth in my personality and career. It helped me identify the things I loved about how money works in an organisation and hone my skill in a way I never thought possible and I get to go to sleep everyday knowing that the work I do contributes positively to the society.

Some things have stayed constant throughout the decade; like the fact that I want to publish a book one day while I work on that I have chosen to keep sharing on ‘’The Over Thinker’’ (please pray I become consistent). This year we launched a podcast (it feels like I birthed a child), I started writing book reviews on Instagram because there are some things you can never quite shake off, and talking about books, thinking about writing one and sharing my opinions are things that are always going to stay with me. Oh and I moved from Lagos to London, it is the hardest and most exciting thing I have done in my entire life and I will share more on my experience in the coming year.

In the spirit of living intentionally, I am currently working on a list of five things I want to achieve by 2029. It feels weird writing it down but the way the last decade flew by I am sure I will be writing another decade recap in no time. I am thinking deeply about the things that matter to me in the moment and will always matter, those are the only things that will make it on the list. I am hopeful that by December 2029, I shall write in another decade recap that all the things on my list have come true.

Here is to a glorious 2020 and may the odds ever be our favour. 

January 1, 2020
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