TUTUS AND TEARS
In my case, I was afraid to offend God and I was even more afraid of people questioning my loyalty to God and constantly telling me how my thoughts and feelings were an extension of my pride and ingratitude.
I love dance and I particularly love ballet. No, I am not a ballet dancer and I have not danced a step of ballet in my life. To be fair, I am an average dancer, when it comes to Traditional African dances and simple choreographed routines but ask me to freestyle or do complicated hip hop steps and I almost become a bumbling idiot. However, it was ballet that showed me my emptiness and how much I was hurting in my life; something was intrinsically wrong with me. I know the problem by name now (shout out to BPD and depression) but I certainly didn’t know what was wrong at the time.
I discovered ballet at a time in my life when I was doing great — or at least, that’s how it seemed. To the outsider looking in but even also to myself, I was part of a church that truly felt like a family, my relationship with my biological family was good, not great by any standard but only because we were not raised to be vulnerable with each other and I lived in Lekki at the time; I was doing amazing in school, my grades weren’t slipping and I was still class representative. I was in a place where I was expected to automatically be happy, content and grateful but yet this period of my life was when I learned, firsthand, that depression is not always loud, dark and menacing. Sometimes, it’s a quiet little feeling that seems friendly enough not to disrupt your daily life and is not threatening enough to make you so uncomfortable that you are aware of your life imploding. You really just slip into a new normal without even knowing it. Well, until you do.
I was searching for something but to be honest, I didn’t even know that I was searching or ultimately, what I was searching for. I was desperate to be happy so I started looking for it in everyone and everything. I know now that happiness is a journey, not a destination but back then it felt like there was a wall standing between me and true, undeniable happiness and there just wasn’t any way around that wall. I was restless and something deep inside me was calling for fulfillment. I particularly remember telling someone that I had become bored and needed some excitement in my life and the person, without missing a beat, told me that Jesus had stopped being enough for me and that is why I was bored. I retreated into my shell because I didn’t want to have to prove that I still loved God, His son and all the 24 elders in heaven but still, the emptiness grew, and my listlessness parading as ‘boredom’ persisted. It was really frustrating because before I joined the church, there were several things I could do to make the boredom go away and feel happy albeit temporarily like party and other things that happen in parties but I won’t be sharing (amen?); being part of the church meant that I couldn’t do those things anymore and sources of entertainment provided by the church just wasn’t cutting it. I felt like a filthy sinner all the time ‘struggling’ at a life that seemed impossible for me to attain. Once in a while, the feelings would dissipate and I’d feel like I was living in my purpose but I went back, ultimately, to those feelings I quite detested. Constantly feeling empty is one of the system files that come with BPD — you know, those ones that you can never delete no matter how much space it takes up on your phone but I didn’t know that at the time; I kept thinking that I was in sin, always ‘confessing’ ingratitude and discontentment among other things yet I was only sick. Crying became a constant for me and I could never really get past the feeling that I was failing at church and failing at life.
Damn. I was blaming and hating myself for things I had no control over.
Well, I kept looking and I eventually stumbled upon Jordan Matter’s YouTube channel (amazing content guys, for real). He is a photographer who makes videos of ballerinas, dancers, contortionists, etc. doing cool things in random or pre planned places. I saw videos upon videos of beautiful young girls in tutus and pointe shoes striking difficult yet flexible poses in these videos and guess what, they looked happy.
Gosh, they all looked so happy dancing, leaping, twirling that I was in awe. A new world had opened for me. Somewhere in my subconscious, I then attributed happiness to ability and physicality, in this case dancing and gymnastics, so I decided on impulse (another system file — thank you BPD), that I was going to be a ballerina to be as happy as every ballerina who ever lived. It was already too late for me to be a gymnast but I was going to become a dance prodigy who started late but took on the world. That decision then brought an onslaught of verbal and emotional attacks on myself; one minute I told myself that it was never too late to start a dream or achieve a goal and then next minute I was telling myself how much of a failure I was, how this new ‘dream’ was impossible to achieve and how, because I wasn’t a dancer, I had missed my chance at life. Then I spiraled. On some days, I was dreaming of tutus and pointe shoes, on other days I was crying because I didn’t understand how to achieve the posture for 2nd position that the dance instructor was explaining on YouTube.
Looking back now, the truth is that I didn’t care about being a ballerina at all; yes, I love ballet because it’s an amazing art form built from pain and discipline and yes, I wanted to feel special because I could push my body to limits that a lot of people couldn’t thereby achieving eternal happiness but no, I didn’t want to be a ballerina. I had only wanted to be as happy as those ballerinas in Jordan’s videos; always smiling, always laughing, always flawless. I should have known that something more was wrong but at the beginning, MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES CAN BE SUBTLE. Shortly after this time, I got my diagnosis but only just now, over a year and a half later is it all coming together and making sense to me.
The point? Pay attention to yourself. Those nagging, reoccurring thoughts or emotions at the back of your mind is not just there for decoration and it really doesn’t matter if you are in a position in life where you are expected to feel a certain way; be true to how you actually feel. Those people aren’t the ones to bear the brunt of the emotional pain and uncertainty that takes over your life when you choose to be dishonest with yourself.
In my case, I was afraid to offend God and I was even more afraid of people questioning my loyalty to God and constantly telling me how my thoughts and feelings were an extension of my pride and ingratitude. I literally cannot count how many times I was called ungrateful even at times when I opened up about my suicidal thoughts. Think about it; what are you afraid of and what are you avoiding by not acknowledging and taking care of your mental health? Truth is, in the end, only you can truly walk the path of healing, just as only you can bear your pain. Alone.
Change something. Speak up. Ask for help. I promise, you’ll be the better for it.
