The Acceptance - by Oluwatobi Kolawole

I thought my decisions would always be short-lived, but the future is already right before me. "The body, as it daydreams, goes towards the earth that belongs to it, from the other earth that does not." (Juan Ramon Jimenez)My issue with penning down stories is that there is never the right place to start. It’s easy to think about the perfect story, but a plot that presents it as remarkable is one plight that my adult life hasn’t found a solution for. And it’s obvious. I pulled down a book I once self-published in 2024 because I thought it was horseshit, and that’s me playing it softly. It’s a stake, aimed as a direct projectile at my heart, and the effort I put into it. I pulled it down. I could no longer earn from it. I couldn’t take it off my mind as I saw myself as a fraud with every good and better book I read, and myself getting paid time and time again. The height of it, even though I think otherwise, was when I pulled down my Medium page, which had about two hundred articles in it. The early days come at me, how I wrote without restraints for a cause that promised deeper pockets. The thread of consistency ran from 2024 till some weeks back. I sometimes think it was a false positive in retrospect, but people say no experience is lost. That a win is always a win. Now the money is gone. The excitement too. I bled out too much, and for too long, for the circa nine hundred followers that deemed me worthy of being read. Perhaps, something not about pain? Articles not about suffering from the outcome of doing a job you don’t want to do for too long? Or maybe an article that sounds like all the hurt in the world finally ended, and the sun finally comes out after the horrors of the previous years. Perhaps something that suggests I’m now stable enough to make only good decisions. The responses I got were cold, and also, moot for all the scenarios that should have titled my judgment. Some even said I didn’t care about anyone’s opinion of what I did. People need the things you write. Not sure what part of me suggested that I was trying to solve other people’s problems. There could be someone out there who is just holding on because your writing gives them a sense of solidarity and a feeling that they aren’t alone. Just go and read James Baldwin’s books or those of other famous authors. I’m already bent backwards bad enough to help someone else stay on their feet. It never lands as the encouragement it is intended to be. It sounds like a request to choose selflessness towards an imaginary audience that doesn’t even know my real name. Of course, I don’t bear the name I give myself on a lot of writing platforms. With writing, either by reason of the art that attracts me the most or the science that fascinates my naive mind, I need emotions to pull from. Dare I say, all the good things in the world never spur me to write. It’s always in the crack that disappointments and dissatisfaction create within the minute eternity that we all are that creative juices decide to flow out through. It almost feels like happy days are to be experienced without any act of penning down, but the wells of despair that come from bad days are the prominent drivers for outstanding think pieces. The good days never come free. Somewhere in the fine print, a bad day worth writing about is already being scheduled. And the bad days have some type of range. Speaking of relationships, I don’t think there is anyone who walked away from me who ever had to regret it. Not that I haven’t made progress with myself from where I used to be, but the progress I’ve made isn’t in the metric that most people look for. I see it when they give me words of advice. The passion they speak with, and the fluency of well-chosen vocabulary. They are speaking from a script that doesn’t have me in mind. The advice is mostly for someone else. An acquaintance asked me once, as we sat to get cocktails some weeks back, if I ever cried listening to songs. I gave an affirmation, and the next guess was that it was during a breakup phase, and I interjected and said it wasn’t. I couldn’t place it easily on her in the way I explained that good songs were lyrical stories about real people, and that sometimes, someone has lived a life you now live, and has made a song about it. To explain would be to punish her. I kept the lid of my opinions tighter than when she first asked. People find out these things eventually. It’s difficult to explain how a piece of literature can move a person like me. With the passive expression of a soulless person that my personality reveals on the surface, it comes as a revelation that some books leave me in pain for days. I started considering physical journals. I had bled too much for an audience I know nothing about, and that was part of what took Medium away. For all the expansive vocabulary I poured into situations I haven’t healed from, I still couldn’t tell what I was really after — the attention, the spotlight, or just a place to point people to whenever they said I was weird. I think the life I want is different. And to everyone, including my former self, it’s strange. Strange enough to decide against the use of WhatsApp, the last popular messaging application to let go of, since digital integration first found its way into my life through a Facebook account in 2008-2009. When I gave up Twitter some years ago, the fear of missing out haunted me for about two hours, and then it left me alone. These applications don’t even have the intensity of putting one in a chokehold. Instagram had nothing on me. For a minute, I considered Snapchat, after the acquaintance I spoke about earlier — let’s say her name was Imelda — told me to download it because of her. The idea crumbled swiftly because access to one was access to all. I didn’t want that. The sieving. Having to ignore others. The pop-ups of plenty of notifications. Not just for Snapchat, but also for other platforms where many opinions come at you. Of the humor, I can bear. I think the comment section of everything that has gone viral in this world is a better comedy scene than anything produced as a movie. The real juice is right there. The witty sarcasm. The dark humorist and the unforgiving voice of misogyny and misandry. The internet is like me; only extremes exist. Outside the humor, the saliva in my throat dries out, and I need that wine of sanity to remind myself that I was once alone, and no matter the fear that comes with not knowing everything contemporaneously, I’m assured that I’d find out anyway. I celebrated Manchester United signing the midfielder from Atalanta days after Fabrizio Romano had announced the ‘Here we go!’. My colleagues were throwing the ‘since when?’ at me while rolling their eyes. The caveman lifestyle holds me down. My best songs are oldies now. Not the oldies of the 90s, but more recent oldies. Some days, I jam Naeto C. I keep telling myself that nothing can take away the feeling that came with listening to Wizkid or Olamide’s first album. I still love the hunger and passion they sang with. I sing along too. Nostalgia comes with those lyrics. I remember how my classmate and I would sing Street Credibility effortlessly, and how Ibinabo would rap Eminem’s part in his song with Lil Wayne: No Love. Nothing beats those feelings. My loyalty stays with those artists in their earliest years. Yesterday, I asked a colleague if she remembered The Matrix. She said she didn’t know what that was. You know them by the things they know these days. You know them by the memories they can share with you. As I stood up to explain the theatrics that got me glued, the memories rushed back. I remembered how I mimicked Neo Anderson’s fight moves a day after I saw that movie. I so wanted to learn Kung Fu. Today, the CGI — or whatever they call it — used in The Matrix now irritates me. Technology has made me think less of those movies. Neo didn’t fight a thousand agents wearing neat suits. That made me sad. And maybe everything that makes me sad now is the gradual undoing of myself in the presence of things that haven’t changed. I keep hitting myself with the thought that I should have done this earlier, and I don’t know if that’s even true. My pessimism enters places before I do, and it pulls the chair out for me to sit as I once again start the telling of a story without knowing the best point to start from. Author’s Note I want to get back to writing consistently again. But I also want to write happy things. This isn’t one of what I thought this would end up as. If you got to this point, then know that I smiled back at you. The World Cup starts today. My money is on South Africa scoring the first goal again, as they did in 2010. I hope Peter Drury is ready to give me goosebumps. I want to be ready for anything this tournament would bring. Even if Portugal doesn’t win it, I’d understand.

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