When the world finally implodes on itself, I will take it. I will understand that it is my fault for drinking one-too-many bottles of 7up and not noticing that global warming was happening earlier, and it will be my fault for not recycling. And I will know, that cognitively, it is not my fault, that I am one in an ever-growing throng. I will know it somewhere in my head, but I will offer it no credence. You will not understand it. I am guilty, guilty, guilty. 

I was 7 when I stole 500 naira from my mum’s bag so I would not be the only weird kid in school, the only one not wearing the T-shirt for the World Sanitation Day. I asked, but she said no, so I took the note, and waited. For a week, 10 days, fighting back such unspeakable disgust with myself, to see if she would notice. She did not. I paid for the shirt on the last day, and holding the tangible evidence of what I had done, the uncleanness that had touched my fingertips, I felt the big mama of guilties. I threw the shirt in the bin before I even climbed upstairs to the flat. I had done a terrible thing. 

That Friday, I was the only child who did not wear the shirt. I stuck out like a sore thumb. I confessed when I got home, that night. Dirty, dirty, dirty. I had done an unclean thing. It was wrong. I do not like to do the wrong thing, not to anything. Anyone. Even when they do not know. Even when they do not notice. 

After the pandemic, a therapist mentioned the term OCD to me, and mentioned that he suspected that it was relationship OCD. Of course it wasn’t. I said as much. I knew ADHD, Bipolar, was coming to terms with Autism. That was enough slices. We were incompatible, the therapist and I. A month or so later, a different professional told me about Moral OCD after a few sessions. I asked why, and we spoke to my mother, about my compulsions with my clothes, and how I believed the other ones felt bad when I wore my favourite clothes too much, or paid any of them too much attention. How I would lie, and hurry back to correct it, how even being present to witness harm could be fine one minute and have me believing I had exacted it the next. 

I left the session incensed and telling the therapist to find another job because I was not interested in god, and google linked it to religiosity. I told myself for weeks, “I don’t have moral OCD. She was just considering it.” I still kept going to the sessions though. 

There is more, but of course, this is why I laugh when anyone says, “You have such a poor relationship with guilt.” 

No, actually. Our relationship is going great. We are doing so well. We will pick out rings in a week, to get married. Our relationship is so great that we are codependent, and when you see her, you have seen me. Even in rooms where she is not invited. She will follow me. 

For some reason, she doesn't trust me to handle things myself, to be responsible for the right things; she will sit on the bed while I pick out clothes and remind me that I am hurting the feelings of the pile of green shirts, because I wore one of them the day before, and they were together, so since they are sisters, I have chosen a favourite if I do not wear them all. 

She will push me, prod me, in conversations, until I am honest. I will say how I feel, what I think, what I have observed, all that. And god! I have tried to ignore her before, but she just nags. She will tell me that even though I was as gentle as I possibly could be when asking for a need to be met, there was a gentler way, and I have caused harm. 

She will tell me that it is my fault that my roommate is allergic to pineapples, even though I did not squeeze them down her throat, and I asked, even though I got up to get her an antihistamine IMMEDIATELY. 

Responsibility is the reason I apologise even when I am hurt, and I mean it too, vibrating in place with the confusing wash of searingly hot pain and crippling responsibility. I have a scar on my right calf right now, from the silencer of a motorbike reversing and bumping into me. I apologised at the same time he apologised, and he looked at me like I was a strange thing. It did feel like my fault though. He was reversing. I was also standing with my back to him, but I shouldn’t have been standing there, and if I wasn’t, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the guilt of scarring me. 

I’m sure he doesn’t even remember. I hear myself now, and I sound stupid. His bike suffered no harm. I did. 

Guilt does not even accurately describe this, it’s like having an over-calibrated moral compass. 

Causing harm feels to me like I have violated something as powerful as the gods that humans serve. Which is funny, because I don’t think I always knew responsibility like this, I just thought I was very sensitive. 

I take most blames. I do. I feel responsible for my brothers and how they act, and how my parents act and any consequence. If my mother is sharp during an argument, I think it is because of me, even though the professionals tell me that she is the adult and has 100% control over her actions. 

You don’t even have to work hard to convince me. I may know the truth, but I also know that if I wasn’t there, to serve as a link, or tether, or catalyst, nothing bad would have happened. It is my fault. 

I feel responsibility for the discomfort of change, for life happening, other people. Everything I can directly impact. Does that make sense? 

I read this article from the International OCD Foundation on Moral Scrupulousity, and I am pointedly ignoring the part that implies I am a good person and screaming that everyone just reads. 

I think we have a picture.

Recently, I fell out with someone I carried love for. And by ‘carried’, I do mean carried. Willingly. With choice. It wasn’t some thing that happened to me, and I take full responsibility for the love. I put it there. They were many things, positive and negative, and you know what? I am too. They were just human, and on some days, I think the ‘human’ jacket was too tight, and buttons popped, and their ‘human’ morphed. Into something else. Something I needed to run from. To fear, because it would make my buttons pop in response. 

Which is insane, when you consider that I am long limbed and huge and things do not terrify me often. 

It was — and I have used this exact phrasing to them — hard to come back from. 

It was a situation of Rock meeting Hard Place, and my usual instinct was to Fawn. I learned from this person that everybody in my life was a liar because I was apparently not affectionate or expressive. I wanted to fix it. 

I did feel responsible, you know. My presence was the catalyst. If I just wasn’t there, the morphing would not have happened. I was the reason I had claw marks on my skin, in my eyes, in the places where it hurt. 

They had noticed the grooves where my heart hurt the most, knew the wounds that ran deepest (ironically about this stupid scrupulosity) and they had dug in. They were in shock, so they lashed out. 

It was okay. It was fine. We seemed to both understand why I needed time away. Why I needed painkillers, a shot, why I wore gloves the next time I came to visit. Why I was guarded. 

Pause, listen:

In angry rebellion and bullish resentment, I felt no guilt for what I had done to earn the attack; asking someone who was better versed in the language of their love the better way to love them, since I felt like I was doing all of it wrong. There is documentation of this, and I am sobbing and shaking, and you can hear my distress and the car horns as I walk on the road and ask for help because I was starting to feel like a hug-needing cactus. Prickly and hard. Unlovable. And I don’t know what you have heard of this thing that plagues me, but it immediately became my responsibility to fix myself. Modify myself. And I went to someone I trusted to have help and information on what to do regarding them, how to fix it, so I was back at holdable level. They may not see it this way, and that is okay. We know I will not lie, you and I. 

As we were. 

They seemed to understand the reason for protective gear. Until one day, that was an affront too, and we needed to talk about this mountain of a thing. Removing the abstract, my gear was boundaries, defending myself, and as gently as I could, as a wounded animal who was still stuck in an acute fight response, tell them the truth. 

My favourite self management tool—with all of these alphabets that affect my mood and my life and my being—is a fifteen minute pause. Which is hard, in the middle of the battle, when you’re on tenterhooks. There is adrenaline, and you don’t know which of the Fs you will take. I come with a warning label, to not snap me out of anything before I am ready. They tell you the same of a wounded dog, to be careful how you interact with it, to let it come to you. I did not get that. I did not get that. It did not matter how I asked for it. I did not get that. And the more I dwelled on how my needs were being avoided for someone else’s wants, the more I settled on why I was wounded in the first place, the more I wanted a fight. I was spoiling for one. 

Fifteen minutes were all I needed to get it under control, to apply empathy as a balm, and self soothe with each interaction. And I would try to take them, but I would be put on a call. Actually no, I would get on the calls, against my own protests, both verbal and otherwise. Before I was ready. Be attacked by assumptions that questioned the very facts. Remember; Scrupulousity. I hate dishonesty, lying, lies. I hate not being listened to as I tell the truth. It repulses me. 

Repulsion and the need for distance would war with my anger, and anger would win, because it takes me fifteen minutes. Anger would lead me to meltdowns, because it was an overstimulating mental environment. And I do understand. I get it. It is not an excuse, and I am sorry for even lashing out at all. I know better, so I should have done better. But god. I would not wish such dizzying emotions on anyone in the history of anywhere ever. I would scream, and hit myself and my head, until my thighs were sore, until the ocular migraines and the self inflicted headaches were different. I just couldn’t understand it. Why did I deserve to be wounded when I was bending myself to make you feel loved? I have geriatric bones! (okay well I don’t but something something side effects of medication)

So I would scream. Volume would change, but I did not become unkind. I became sharp, the prickly thing I feared at first, like barbed wire. I don’t remember a lot, but I remember needing to take notes of what was being said on the calls, to ruminate over, to settle in. To respond to. I wanted to be sure that my eyes were seeing what I was hearing. And it was so unkind. 

Reality was constantly moving marks, and the unkindness I had on paper and written down in front of me to process was denied, and I would feel like a lunatic. Insane. Responsible. Guilty. I would go to bed sobbing and wash my face just to wake up in the morning with white streaks down the side of my eyes, my pillow damp. With sweat or tears? Only the pillow could tell.

They kept trying to ‘rekindle’, something they now reference as suffering, because they have no better language for it. The suffering was me enforcing boundaries. Asking for distance. Being firm, for the first time. Listening when they said they didn’t like how they felt with me and advising them to cut me lose because that meant I was bad for them. Consistently asking them to choose themselves because I cannot live with the responsibility of causing harm. I can’t. I can’t. It is so jarring. I don’t know how. 

I cannot handle unkind turbulence. It’s why I am so meticulous about my life and what I allow myself take, and swallow. It is okay if the turbulence is at least soft, or sharp in the brutal way of honesty. It was neither. It was untrue, and rapid fire. 

I owe myself an apology for sustained contact, even past that, for allowing the love I carried and chose to hold for this person to keep me in contact. And I know they were trying, I know. I know that seeing the thing you have harmed in front of you does that, if you have a soul. I have to hope that they were trying. 

Months go by, and now I feel like I am a dictionary for esoteric knowledge, but not even for cool stuff, like cultural knowledge, or swords and Narnia. I am one for human relationships. I am sounding board and mirror, a plushie and a wall in a rage room all at once. Emotional labour is now mine to carry, for other interpersonal relationships, and I walk a grown person through empathy, and consideration. I would go in blind into emotional climates, and after the weathers were calmed, I would provide comfort, soothing, reassurance, etc. 

I was not contacted for joyous news, or life updates. I was merely a sounding board, and that was it. I was on the phone speaking about romantic interests and assuring that love would come again, even if it was not with the current interests. Asking questions to help untangle emotional wires, playing advocate for platonic connection and difficult conversations. 

All while weary. More from habit than necessity. Once bitten, forever shy. Which was apparently infuriating to them. However, they had seen me vulnerable before, and kicked me in the belly. I did not believe they had the tenderness to earn the vulnerability again, not from how they spoke of other people to me, not from how they took vulnerability to be more about them than the person standing there, visibly naked. Aching. Hurting. 

There are hills and crests. I am sure if I think hard, I can think of some high points. Moments I felt seen and considered, and respected, like I did them. I’m thinking, now. 

There was a falling out. I could not speak of a negative experience without them immediately assuming it was about them. I was told I was pointing fingers when I wasn’t, and I found myself permanently in front of a jury, trying to explain myself, defend my speech and my language to make sure they did not feel like a bad person. I have never been more policed, and my mother is an intense smotherer from Ekiti. 

It built. It came to a head, during one such feedback session. I said something that I should have known would not go over well. I should have known, because it is the sort of thing I had backspaced for the entirety of our cognisance of each other, because the first time had led to a blowup. The sort of thing I had taken to asking people around if it was offensive, before backspacing. I was too tired to watch my shoulders, so I spoke. The truth as I knew it. Maybe it could have been kinder. 

I have thought about that for a while now. Maybe it could have been kinder. I should have let well enough be enough, ignored the coaxing that usually happened, not responded at all that day, any of the days. But they asked. They pressed. I gave a simple answer and they pressed about the motivations behind it. It always felt like bait. 

I get called ruthless. And I laugh. I see in a private space they know I am present in, (paraphrasing heavy!) how my corrections are never from a place of love, and how I was spitting on them, and how they would not kill themselves for anyone, and how there was nothing wrong with them. How they didn’t deserve the emotional trauma, and their friends and family love the real them and correct them in love and don’t use it against them especially when they can see they are trying to be better. 

And I looked at the text I sent. I will paste it verbatim, deadass: 

“ [2/1/25, 21:44:45] Desire. 👩🏽‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏾: Yeah. I mean no offense, but I don’t think you will truly see me the way I need anytime soon. Regardless of the sort of connection. And that’s okay. 

I like a certain sort of tethering, and empathy, and it’s not something you seem to be able to give to me. 

I am worth discomfort and stress, because I would undergo it for the people I care about. 🤷🏽‍♀️ I don’t need reciprocity, so I don’t mind giving that experience to you, but I don’t rely on you for my needs to be perceived correctly or wholly. Or at all, actually. At least not at the moment. 

I don’t think you see yourself completely just yet. It’s not a bad thing, tbh. It’s just a thing that is.

[2/1/25, 21:47:31] Desire. 👩🏽‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏾: And it being a thing that is means that I can’t expect you to extend a labour to me that you haven’t extended to yourself. I won’t be able to trust it. 🤷🏽‍♀️”

And I think, huh? I allow it still. I am flustered, and I feel responsible for this ruthlessness. I go off. About how it was a setup and how they tried to cue me into soothing by self deprecating and I wasn’t biting. About how I never wanted to be asked the provoking questions again (that day’s was: ‘do you think i see you? truly’) and how I was treated like a therapist or esoteric dictionary, which was probably why I didn’t feel seen, and how they needed to sit with the fact that every time I gave feedback no matter how true or gentle, it always led to that sort of nastiness. And how they were coddled in my space, because truly, they were.

They responded, but I ignored it all, because I was just so over it. The set ups, provoking emotional responses that left me wrecked. So done. 

I thought I was over it, but I was not, so a couple of days later, I wrote in a shared google doc about it, and I apologised for making them feel like I am ruthless, and asking them to do any work. I promised never to demand being seen again since they thought it was a labour being forced on them. I felt better. Later that same day, there is a heart to heart, and I think we’re okay. 

A few days later, I get notifications, my phone buzzing incessantly. I pick it up, and waiting for me are voice notes. 

I step out to listen, and they say a lot. What stands out to me is this, “I need you to understand that I’m not coming to you with like- I’m not coming to you with any form of anger or venom or anything, […] I think you are unkind. I think you are really unkind like compared— in contrary to what you believe, or what your friends believe, or what people around you or what people on the internet believe.” 

There is more, of course. About how I believe I am always right just because I ‘see’ things (I assume they mean because I am perceptive), and how they do not like how I speak to them in conflict (which is valid, I think. I debate with fact, and I am dogged with it. I understand it. Respect it, even, that they do not like it.) and they reference a debate we had about someone calling an ex an obstacle, where I vehemently pointed out that in a situation that was parallel to it, they had taken offence at unkind verbiage. That the context was different, but the skeleton was the same. They said they felt attacked, and as this was a common theme when I tried to inject empathy for other people into our interactions, I thought nothing of it. 

Funny, they said they wanted to remove me off private spaces and said it like they were placating me by the fact they were not blocking me from their public spaces, and telling me they didn’t hate me, and I didn’t particularly care, because it was fine. I had taken to avoiding aforementioned spaces, because I felt discomfort. I said as much. I also told them it was fine and went about my day. 

I did the same, removed them from my private spaces. And what barrelled into me a few days later as I had my friend go into my account with my login and read to try to decipher how I had been unkind, you know, because of my compulsion to do good, to take responsibility, to apologise, was lines of…interesting speech. I could set unkind up there as a repeating member, and then unwise and petty. 

“Idk what you’re doing but I know you’re just doing everything wrong rn

You brought your friend to read chats between us. Cool. 

And now they’re screen recording and screenshotting

For what?

Like I think you’re very petty, unkind and unwise sometimes

And soft blocking me on main?

How deep can you actually go?

For the record, I hate you 

I wish I never liked your media that day. Or followed you. Or texted you

You’ve made life difficult for me and now you wanna play fucking victim?????

Just stop with all the front and accept that you have problems fr 

Own that shit and change and stop looking for people to defend your bs”

I said wow, what a life.

Everything resembling responsibility snapped. Cut. In the place of guilt I am repulsed, and irritated. The anger possesses me too, sometimes, and so does the sadness and the confusion, but it’s also familiar because it’s not my first rodeo with nastiness from this person. 

Isn’t that something?

I will take global warming. That’s on me. I will take the death of the sun as my fault. The asteroid on the path to hitting Lagos in like 8 years is my fault. I will take that responsibility. I am part of the butterfly effect that caused it. The compulsion will give responsibility to me. It does not give me this one. It doesn’t. I did not earn this. I am trying to find it in me. Not even disordered neurological pathways are giving it to me. 

Is that unkind? I don’t know. Maybe saying it at all is unkind. Writing about it at all. I do not feel like I am being a terrible person here. This is truth; when I cannot tell it kindly, I tell it expansively and spread the surface area. 

it was responsibility, now it’s repulsion. Fascinating.