My new normal was cemented last week. I am officially an adult, not a teenager in their late twenties. Even if I want to pretend otherwise, my aching knees are quick to bring me back to reality. The mundane and the banal are legitimately a norm for me now. If my life were a television show, it wouldn’t make it past the pilot episode. Or if it did, it would be like a news report; read in a deadpan voice by a very serious looking newscaster. 

In theory, not much happened last Monday, but there were some things I had to do. My mother travelled for a week, so I had to look after the house. I also had to start studying for my exams. And that was the beginning of my problems. So bee-tee-dubs, I hate my life, and these are the things I specifically hate about it. 

1. Gaining full-time employment at a job I despise. 

2. Starting work at said job in a new department. 

3. Becoming a full-time student at a school I also despise while simultaneously being a full-time employee at a job I still hate. 

So now I’m studying for exams while worrying about my duties at work as if life is not already irritating enough. For anyone reading this, under no circumstances should you ever become mentally ill in a Nigerian household, because then you will have to drop out of university and return to your family house, and then your emotionally stunted but well-meaning parents will try and rectify this by getting you a government job in a media company, where you will spend the next five years, then subsequently have you enrolled in a private university, even though you only just dropped out of school and failed three courses in a row, all during the height of a global pandemic. But I digress. 

So on Monday, my mother travelled to the village and I had to start preparing for exams. Mind you, because I despise the aforementioned school (make no mistake, I do not want to understate how much I hate the school), I had put off studying, exam clearance and printing out my exam timetable till that Monday. What a shock I got when I realized I had three papers back to back in three days. I had to rush to my study centre to do exam clearance (basically print out documents I already had so they could be stamped and laminated), print out two copies of my timetable and looked for online copies of past questions. I also had to run to an internet café to quickly draft out a leave of absence letter for work explaining I would be writing exams. Did I mention how much I hate my job? 

So I started studying for my first paper. Intro to Syntactic Models? God abeg. Wetin be lexeme sef? Why should I care about syntagmemes? How that one tek consign me? What is my business with morphology? I still don’t know what these things are. Also, I still had to run around to get toiletries and look for ice at the nearest corner-shop to put in our freezer because Band A/NEPA tariff wahala want to kill us in this country. 

All these things are feasible. It’s just when I’m done running errands, and I get a chance to sit down, or I’m trying to sleep at night, I think about all these things. I think about the day I’ve had, the week I’ve had, the month I’ve had, the year I’m having, and then I begin to think about the next day, the next week, month, year, and I start to get worried. It feels like I’ve been stuck in a hole and I don’t even know when I fell in. Every time I try to climb out, it gets deeper or shit just falls on my face. And the scary part is: I’m getting used to it.