The one with the text…

The year before my dad died, a friend of mine went to see my mother about marrying me. The guy had said it several times that he would see my mother first, then go to the village to see my father. I didn’t pay any attention because he was never even an option. In fact, if God himself had come to me in a dream and told me that this my friend was pregnant and the baby was the son of God, I still wouldn’t have considered him. That’s how much of a non-option he was.

Anyway, he didn’t tell me he had seen my mother until after he came back from his trip. He narrated his encounter with her and the whole time, I couldn’t stop laughing. He concluded sombrely, “She said I shouldn’t try it. And that if I step foot into your father’s compound, he will shoot me from the gate.”

At that time, me and my dad were still mending our relationship. We had come a long way from the days when he would threaten to publicly disown me in The Guardian or The Vanguard newspaper. We went from not speaking for long periods of time, to regular phone calls just to find out how the other person was doing. It wasn’t perfect because sometimes, the conversations got intense and the words used were still abrasive, but it was something. So when my dad died, I immediately felt very exposed. I developed (and still have) an irrational fear that one man somewhere will marry me and treat me badly because there’s no one to shoot him. I didn’t realise that I had a certain sense of protection, until I lost it.

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Did I tell you guys about the one where I got dumped some weeks before the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial? It was a very unpleasant dumping. It was by text… so for a long time afterwards, I had the words of the text. I read, and re-read, and chewed on those words. I took screenshots and deleted them. The text was three long paragraphs and included a bonus screenshot of a conversation with his friend in which his friend warned him to “steer away” from me. By the second day, I knew the words of the text by heart. I no longer had to check my phone to read it. The highlight was the part where he said I’d brought nothing but drama and toxicity to his life. To be honest, the text didn’t shock me because before then, he had hinted at it. He used to tell me about internet articles he was reading to learn to deal with the narcissist in his life.

Anyway, maybe it’s because of age, but I’ve developed a remarkable ability to recover from stuff like this so I knew I’d be fine. However, in the first week, I spent countless hours on websites reading about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and taking online personality quizzes. I first did the ‘3-minutes Narcissistic Personality Disorder Self-Assessment (instant results)’ quiz and I passed. The result was simple; You are not a narcissist. Still, I’ve watched enough Dr Phil to know that a diagnosis is never that easy. No right-minded potential narcissist would take that kind of quiz seriously. First of all, it had only 10 questions! Secondly, the result was just five words.

So I took more and more tests with longer, more specific questions. I fell into an abyss of quizzes and Reddit think pieces. I took ‘Toxic personality’ quizzes. I took the “Are you his peace or pieces?” quiz… “Do you take care of deez nutz or do you drive him nuts?” quiz. The only quiz I failed that was inconclusive was the “Are you neurotic?” quiz and I will tell you why later.

The good thing was, I didn’t have any major school work going on at the time, so I had ample time to brood. I spent the time taking care of my plants and went out twice to buy more plants till there was no more space for plants. I started watching The Office (the American one) and became obsessed with the cast of the show. It was just me, my plants and my quizzes. I eventually stopped taking the quizzes when one of the results read; “Be more confident and love yourself more.” Also, I saw where he posted ‘heart eyes’ emoji on some other girl’s IG post so it all made sense.

Some weeks later, the Amber/Johnny trial started and I felt so relieved. I watched clips of the trial, watched both Amber and Johnny testify, I read the horror stories and I realised that on a batshit crazy scale of one to ten, (with 1 being Pam Beasley/Sandra Bullock/Reese Witherspoon and ten being Amber Heard), I’m on a solid 6.5! Crazy-ish, but with mad cooking skills that will make up for it. Bottom line, there is yet hope for me!

I think I’m a decent girlfriend. I know how to take good care of my man. My love language is industrial-strength adhesive quality time and wifey shit acts of service. I just need to learn to communicate my needs/expectations better and maybe not cling like a koala bear. Hence the inconclusive result of the Neurotic quiz (but let’s not dwell on that).

This started off as a Father’s Day post, then I somehow veered off course and landed here. Who knows? Maybe my dad is watching over me from heaven and still shooting men to protect me. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Other than that, I’ve been fine. I’m done with lectures and exams and I’ve started work on my dissertation. It’s a lab based project so I spend long days in a dark lab, treating skin cells. I’m working on the effect of a strain of bacteria on the expression of a particular protein in skin. It’s been very interesting. I’m becoming more and more confident in the lab to the point where I no longer need supervision.

One month ago, I was “The Contaminator”. I was touching sterile equipment without gloves, leaving my skin cells exposed, wearing the same lab coat to different labs. One time, out of excitement, I removed an entire batch of cells from the incubator and carried them to “show” my supervisor. She was in another lab down the corridor. The poor woman saw me walking towards her with the bottles, grinning from ear to ear like an idiot, and she looked like she was about to cry. I was expecting a round of applause for my exceptional cell-culturing ability. I figured the tears in her eyes were tears of profound joy, or maybe pride. Then she said in the calmest voice (because she is the sweetest, most patient person on this earth), “Ngozi, you know we can no longer use these cells right? They are most likely contaminated now”.

“Don’t worry!,” I said, “I covered the cells with the blood of Jesus this morning.”

I jest!

Anyway, I had to start the experiment from scratch. Since then, it’s been fine. I am a bit slow with my work, but that is because I am being overly cautious about contaminating stuff. Some days are interesting, some days are monotonous.

My birthday is in a few days and it’s a big one! I am actually excited about it, but it’s going to be a very quiet day. I initially had big plans to travel to an exotic resort somewhere to celebrate, but I’ve had to postpone all that till after I’ve handed in my dissertation. I don’t mind at all. I thought of at least doing the customary birthday photoshoot but I kept procrastinating it and now there’s no time to do it before my birthday. Besides, what law says we MUST do a birthday photoshoot when we turn 40???

I am excited because this is the official age where we are allowed to stop giving a rat’s ass about what other people think right?

I gotta go. I’ll say hi again on my birthday.

Thank you for reading my blog…