Happily Never After - by Izrplays

What if there wasn't a happily ever after? What if there was only after? Just after. After the prayers, after the shouting, after the silence in the compound became louder than the generators. After your mummy stopped asking "how was school?" and started asking "why are you always inside?" We grew up on fairy tales that didn't look like us. In those stories, suffering had a deadline. The prince always came. The pain always ended. But here, where I come from — in this Abuja where the sun feels like it's in your backyard, where harmattan sits on your chest like a second skin — we learn early that some stories don't end. They just fade into you. My cousin Diane was supposed to have a happily ever after. She was the brilliant one. First in class, quiet, the one who memorized the entire periodic table before she was twelve. When she got admission to university, my aunties ululated like she had already conquered the world. Nobody saw when she started to shrink. She stopped eating in the hostel because she said the plates were watching her. She stopped sleeping because she said her roommates were whispering about her in a language only she could hear. When she came home for holidays, she wasn't Diane anymore. She was a shadow that flinched. And what did we say? "Your just home sick"" Go and rest, it's not that serious""Kpele my dear" We gave her proverbs when she needed a psychiatrist. We took her to three prayer houses before we took her to one hospital. And the one hospital was two states away, with one doctor who looked as tired as we were. That is the dark truth about happily never after. It's not that people don't want to get better. It's that the road to getting better is blocked by shame, distance, and empty pockets. We like to think mental pain is a white man's problem. That depression is for people on Netflix. But depression lives here too. It lives in the boy who failed JAMB three times and now smokes from morning till night behind the uncompleted building. It lives in the woman who just gave birth and cries every time the baby cries, and everyone tells her she is ungrateful. It lives in the young man who has a 2:1 but has been home for four years submitting CVs that never answer. It lives in me, on days when my own journal feels like a stranger's handwriting. There is a special kind of cruelty in telling a drowning person to pray for air. I am not saying prayer is useless. Faith has held many of us together when everything else fell apart. But faith without help is like roofing a house without walls. You can pray, and you should also be allowed to see a therapist without being called "crazy." So what if there is no happily ever after? What does that leave us with? It leaves us with this: happily _never_ after is not the end. It is the honest middle. The middle where healing is not a straight line. Where some days you are okay, and some days the ticking in your head returns. Where you learn to live _with_ the wound, not just waiting for the wound to disappear. Real change will not come when we all start posting our trauma online. It will come when a girl like Aisha can say "I am not okay" in her own house and not be locked in a room for deliverance. When a school in Makurdi or Sokoto or Enugu has a counsellor who actually listens. When a workplace allows a young man to say "I need a day" without branding him weak. Happily never after means we stop waiting for the perfect ending. We start building a bearable, dignified, honest present. One where real voices — even shaking ones, even whispering ones — can speak and still be allowed to live, to work, to love, and to heal slowly. Maybe that is the only ever after we need.

Other insights from Izrplays

Contributor Points

Points-to-Coupons

Referral Earning