Sometimes I wonder what good is a secret if you can’t tell anyone about it? If you’re the custodian of the secret it is tempting to evaluate if you should be divulging information. Valid reasons include to protect an individual, to prevent financial ruin, to maintain status quo, to save lives, etc. Personally, some close contacts have been entrusting me with a good number of secrets (though I’m not yet bursting at the seams). On one hand the sharer of a secret has eased his/her mental burden by telling me about it. On the other, I have now become entrusted with information that suddenly weighs on my mind. While I don’t plan to leak other people’s secrets in this post I do wish to share mine.

Following my return to Nigeria, I was going through culture shock like I had never known. I had left the UK where systems were working. It wasn’t easy coping with intermittent power supply, for instance. This was the beginning of my regret. I went from feeling independent living by myself in London to feeling like a loafer at my parents’ family home. With the absence of subways and spacious bendy buses I had to take a crash course in driving (and succeeded in crashing my car three times, each time going back to the wheel in a cold sweat). At the family church my parents’ friends kept reminding me that it was time for me to marry. It was also time to and reward my parents with grandchildren. To top it all, at my new place of work in late 2000, I had a target on my head.

To be continued…