WaleAyo's Musings

Ever wondered why people that are in love play silly games like race each other,  dance in the rain,  hose each other till they're soaking wet and still laugh while doing it? Because I've always wondered if I can ever see myself doing crazy stuff like that with anyone, it's downright silly and embarrassing but I think I get it now.  When you're in love you are so incredibly happy that you don't care who knows. Nothing else matters to you but that one person and everything they mean to you.  It's not that you know that they won't hurt you or that they won't laugh at you because they will,  it's that you don't care.  The way they make you feel most of the time makes up for the downs,  they make you feel so so so happy that you just have to take that chance even if it'll last just for a minute, you're willing to feel that good.  You feel so happy,  you feel like a kid again and you trust them so much, you're willing to be that sill...

I know all about pain The kind of pain that doesn't go away The kind that holds on And never leaves The kind that leaves you holding your breath Not sure you will ever breathe again It happened the first time you left The first time you walked out the door And never came back It was like lightening struck And I was left waiting for the thunder And was I right? I was torn Broken Shattered like broken glass Not quite complete again It was like nails on a broken skin Like a walk through fire Not sure I will survive So I look for you in every stranger Find your laughter in every friend But you are not coming back Not today Not ever So here comes the hard part I piece up the broken glass Never quite whole again Thunder is gone The calm after the storm I know I will be fine But darling, I still hope you come back Maybe not today But someday You never felt pain Till your best friend hands you your heart. Waleayo.

"There's a certain kind of impossibility that hurts you" I kind of have no idea what I meant by that but I think I meant that there are some things that are impossible that have the power to cause you so much pain. One of it is the impossibility of changing the past. You ever said something so hurtful that you didn't mean but you cannot go back to 'unsay' it,  so you live with the fact that you caused a loved one pain and that in turn causes you pain? That impossibility hurts you. It hurts you in the sense that when you see your loved ones hurting, you hurt too. For example, I am the first of the grandchildren from the maternal side of the family and sometimes I scold my younger ones to the point where they start crying and I feel so bad, I end up consoling them. Now that is just one example of several. When our loved ones hurt, we hurt too. Now imagine when you are the cause of the hurt then you hurt twice as hard. Too often we become so free with ...

So I have a theory ( just hear me out). I've never been an ambitious person. When I was a kid our teachers used to ask us what we wanted to become, and believe me each child wanted to be the one doctor that would cure cancer or the lawyer that would be known everywhere or become the President of the Federal Republic. My point is there were a lot of big dreams and whenever I said I wanted to become a teacher, ( after they finally saw I wasn't going to give in) everyone assumed I wanted to be like the best teacher in the world. I was like no, actually, I just wanted to be the normal ordinary teacher. And they would give me that " with your grades" look as if it was impossible to just be a teacher ( you know without the hoopla of being the best).   I wanted to be ordinary, to be just an ordinary person like anyone else. I did not care about the big dreams but I never stopped people from dreaming ( I mean someone really has to make an app for downloading food like re...

So today I want to talk about something I consider very important but please permit me to be a bit informal. Here it goes: So I am a very interesting friend. I am the type to call you up everyday, text you "hey... How are you doing?" at least once a day just to be sure you're fine and all. I do it so much I sometimes question if my friends do not find me annoying. Now what that means is that I'm a very involved kind of friend, I don't care so fast but when I care, I care. Now as you might have noticed, I am a writer (just humor me) which means I express my feelings better on paper than in words and I live in a world where texting is the new fab ( that's fabulous if you're wondering). I love to text, I mean no need to call again (yay!). Unless it's your super close friend you literally don't have to call ( I have people on my phone that I've never called). My point is, I text a lot. Now I'm not sure if it's happened to you but...

It's here again About as complicated as it sounds Meaningful yet meaningless A juxtaposition of emotions That can never quite be fully explained Unless it is experienced It's a feeling of never quite being Of stretching And stretching But never quite reaching Of feeling And feeling But never quite enough Until it almost drowns I feel it when I open my mouth In a crowd of strange friends Sometimes I feel it when I have to bleed In a gathering of the injured Yet other times it creeps on me As I smile at a known stranger It's hard to shake off Hard to put into words How do I explain without sounding stupid? How do I own myself without quite comparing? Am I the only one trapped here? Or do you feel it too? The feeling of never being enough The pain of feeling inferior. WaleAyo.

"What I miss the most about you is not your smile or your laugh or your out of this world eyes or your calming voice, not that I really don't miss all that, what I miss the most is that you cared even if it was just for a little while ... " I wrote this at a time when I was in so much pain because a friend hurt me. I realized that too often I had become used to not expecting anything from anyone but someone broke that wall and forced me to reconsider building it again. I basked in the glory that someone could care about Me that wasn't a family member or my best friend. I was shattered to realise that I was right where I started yet again. I am learning though that it takes a certain kind of faith to keep going even after you're shattered, to keep hoping even after you've lost and to hold on to peace even when every bone in your body says no. I am learning not to punish others for your mistakes and to become enough in myself. Do I miss you? Yes Do I m...

I mentioned that I also will be sharing some of my poems and sometimes excerpts from my novel. Today, I want to share one of my recent poems. I really hope you like it. Yesterday, I found who I was Who I am And who I should be Yesterday, I learnt to question To rethink To doubt To be unafraid To be me Yesterday, I stood on the shoulder of a giant And I saw the river The river of endless possibilities And endless pursuits The river of mankind And my place in it I have seen And I have felt I have known And I have wondered But it will be aimless If I have to be forced to express myself Through a language imposed by society A culture that is not mine That will never be I am a fusion of both Never quite foreign Yet not traditional Never quite home Yet no stranger And it will be fruitless to write Of ...

"I think the toughest thing to realise is that he isn't the earth and sky. That the one person who made you so comfortable, that you were willing to give up living for is not everything. That his quiet  reassurance was perhaps fake or maybe it was not but it still has stopped. It is hard to believe that the one person who felt most like home is not, and that you are not done finding the person to call home. The hardest of all these however is to accept that there is better. That even after finding everything, you have to move on and find something better than everything. It is the scariest, most heartbreaking process of all - accepting that life is about a continuous struggle to overcome disappointments and move on courageously with undiminished hope and confidence to get the better." I wrote this a few weeks ago because it somehow mirrored what I was feeling at that particular time. I think I was probably going through my pictures when I saw something that sparked...

I have the privilege of being a part of an amazing group of poets called Friends in Poetry. Now, I am not much of a poet but every once in a while I try my hands at some form of poetry, so I joined that group to be better at it. Writers usually talk of the muse and their inspiration and stuff like that so our group is not exempted. What usually strikes me though is how good some are at just coming up with these poems at the drop of a hat whereas I will take years to even write a complete stanza. Growing up, I was usually lonely so I tried talking to myself and when that did not work I found solace in books. With a book, I could travel far and near, I could make amazing new friends, experience new adventures and live a thousand lives in one. When I discovered writing, it became my escape. I could express my opinions without anyone raising their eyebrows, I could become whoever whenever; it was an enlightening world. I was sensitive and reflective about all that I was seeing and e...

I am a soft spoken, shy, introverted female. I am not quite sure what that suggests to you but permit me to point out that it means that I have to apologize a lot.  I am told to speak up, stop staying all by yourself, be bold and try to talk to someone and yes work twice as hard for everything. While I could go on and on about how society makes us apologize for being female, I want to dwell on something less well known; how society forces people like me into being apologetic for our sensitivity. Growing up, I remember being told time and time again that I could be insensitive which I think is subjective ( just because I didn't cry when Jack died in Titanic doesn't make me insensitive people!). I can actually be sensitive, I internalize a lot of feelings and words and I find myself with scars from wounds that should long since have healed. The thing about sensitivity is that it is relative to each person and what I have learnt is that you cannot and should not apologize f...

Recently, I watched Chimamanda Adichie's Ted Talk on The Dangers of a Single Story. And while I was struck once again by her carriage and diction, I was drawn to that topic of how we often make of a people's one story, the only story and how that dehumanises the people . I found myself identifying with that principle again and again. As a young girl, growing up in Nigeria, I was always amazed by the pressure we put on those kids who  'know book'. If you were very good at school and your grades were relatively high, your life becomes a constant cycle of beating your own record. While this was not a particularly bad thing, for it helped you to grow, it was sometimes too much pressure. Failure became impossible and failing even one subject could lead to severe depression. You find kids who are too afraid to fail. We make their one story of success the only story about them forgetting to teach them that it is okay to fail as long as you do not stay down. We see them ...

Over the years, I have eventually grown to love myself and my own version of me for there are those with other versions of me in their head. The me without pretense, the me that is not apologetic for being unfeigned and finally, to accept my form of feminism. The inclusive kind of feminism. I am sure I am not the only one who has being at crossroads, I am not the only one who has had to fight to accept who they are becoming and ultimately who they are. Very often we have began to see feminism as a segregated cult of women who hate men, who cannot find husbands and who are not African like Chimamanda  Ngozi Adichie says. We have somehow given it a negative connotation and stopped including other women in it as if we are not actually fighting for those women. We have become lax in our thinking of the word as only one associated with angry women. We forget that equality does not mean preference and that feminism does not exclude men. Too often we assume the fight is already ove...

When I was a child, I wanted to become a teacher, a wife and a mother. Now none of those is any trouble but to look at those roles and say oh it is because she is female will be a great disservice to me for there are so many other reasons for my choice. Anytime I tried to explain it though, adults either tried to change my mind by explaining the poor value of teachers in the society or to accept it as a role that will help me raise a good family. Either way, it was resting on the premise of gender rather than my interest and ability. They were forgetting that those roles are that of a nurturer, a person interested in raising a new generation by impacting knowledge and values that will shape their future lives and in deed the lives of their own children. In limiting it to just my gender, they were  limiting my capacity as a human being to be whoever I want to be and essentially to think independently. In prescribing and following gender roles, we limit the individual as a per...

I have always found myself at cross roads. Why you might ask? Let me start from the very beginning. I'm a complex person with oxymoronic attributes. I'm both gentle and fierce, sweet and difficult, nice and direct. I'm a combination of opposites but you have to know me to know it, for they all work out to make Me. When it comes to feminism, I used to turn away, not because I didn't believe in it but because my idea of it is so different from what I hear of it that I chose to turn away. I love to write, to read and to stay home all day, I hate to cook or be domestic yet I'm no tomboy. I can't play a single sport to save my life, not even if I tried. So you see I was at a crossroad. I was not accepted by my more female friends for I didn't care about shoes or bags or makeup or anything feminine. I was not accepted by the tomboys as I did not particularly understand boys or love sports. Either way, I was a stand out. Mind you, I love everything roman...

Hello and welcome to my blog. I am your host WaleAyo and I will be writing on anything that catches my attention. I am female so you can expect the female perspective. I love to read and I love to write. I am currently a student of Education and English at Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. I am from a family of academics with both parents in the teaching profession. I am the first of two kids and the only female. Basically, I am from a typical middle class family living in Nigeria. Like I mentioned earlier, I love to write and this blog is one way of fulfilling t...