Favvy_Okwans🖤

Yesterday, my sister died. You see, I must have written about the worst day of my life before, but you see this experience? It tops them all. When I got the call, for a moment, I couldn't quite pick an expression between shock and sadness. I was somewhere in the middle, struggling to comprehend what I had just heard. All I could do was cry, scream and pray. I believe in miracles, and I thought, God could surely show up, yeah? Surely, this couldn't be how her story ended. Surely, there was still room for a miracle. I cried through the night and even this morning as I packed a few things and prepared to go home. On the bus ride from school to my father's house, I had so much going on in my mind. I was worried they would bury her before I got home. I really wanted to see her one more time. I began to panic when I couldn't remember what she had saved my number as. I know she calls me "love of my life" and "Yebo" and "Bubu", but for some reason,...

Hurt, panic attacks, margarine and arson. Once upon a time,  there was a kingdom where summer never ended.  A kingdom of golden afternoons, beautiful people, fairytales and cocktails.  A place where everything seemed almost too exquisite to be real, where love was abundant, laughter came easily,  and the world was kind enough to make forever seem believable. There lived a princess, surrounded by the finest heirs of the kingdom.  Her cousins, her family, her first love.  They were young, beautiful and seemingly invincible.  They had an entire summer to themselves, and, in their own little world, an entire lifetime. Until one day, the kingdom went up in flames. The beautiful houses, the familiar faces, the laughter that once filled its halls. Everything consumed by fire. Everyone lost, save for the princess. And so she awoke. Not into another fairytale,  but into the cruel,  unadorned reality of what remained.  A mind fractured by trauma, ...

I attended a meeting today. It was the JCIN UNIBEN intending members' final training and examination. Anyways, it was really fun and interesting, and I had a genuinely nice time. However, the meeting dragged on longer and longer. I was getting tired of sitting, so ready to get home, but it just wouldn't end. By the time it finally did, I had almost forgotten that I'd had a great time. All I could think about on my way home was how exhausted I was. And that's the thing about extremities. Just as King Solomon tells us in Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for everything. Even good things, when taken too far or done in excess, can become unpleasant. Sometimes, the very things we enjoy can become burdens when we don't know when to stop. Good things need limits too. Sometimes, knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to start. Because there is a point where something good, when overdone, begins to lose the very goodness that made it worth having in ...

I just realised that there are people whose words or actions I can barely remember, but I never forget how they made me feel. The way we make people feel is far more important than what we say to them. They may not remember our words, but you see the way we make them feel? That can be difficult to forget. I came across someone in my department today. I don't know this person, but I knew we had spoken only once, during the period of last semester's exams. The crazy thing is, I don't remember what he did or what he said. He must have made a silly comment or something. I sha have no memory of it, but I just had this feeling I couldn't shake off. An "I don't like this person" feeling. Like I could remember how whatever he did made me feel, even if I couldn't remember what exactly he did. How weird is that? This made me pause and ask myself: How do I meet people? What experience do I leave people with when they get to meet me? Psychologically, w...

The only way through is to go through it. Gbammmmmmm! There's no escaping this current phase. No matter how tired you are, no matter how unhappy you are at this point, the only way out of it is by going through it. Yesss, you'll have to, you can't run away from growth or from dealing with stuff. So, the earlier we get to the point where we no longer wallow in self-pity, but quickly pick up what's left and forge ahead, the faster we get through it. Because it does get better. In the words of my friend, "Na only time e go take." And might I add, time and the zeal to keep going, regardless of how you feel in the meantime. Dearest reader, whatever it is you're going through, I hope you find the courage to keep going. You don't have to have it all figured out, and you don't have to feel strong every day. Just don't give up on yourself, take what you can from this phase, learn what you need to learn, and keep moving. One day, you'll look back and...

The Bible doesn't always preach ease, the children of God went through shege too. In the words of Pastor Iren, where in the Bible did you get the idea that just because you love Jesus, your life is going to be a bed of roses? Did you get that from Christ? We sometimes approach Christianity with the expectation that because we've chosen to walk with God, life should become significantly easier. We want an easy passage through life simply because we do the church thing. But when you look at the lives of people who walked with God by biblical standards, you'll find that many of them went through a lot. What stood out wasn't that they were exempted from life's difficulties, but that they had God. They weren't doing life alone. Even Jesus said, "In this world you will have tribulation." Not that you might, or that it is a possibility, but that you will. Remember that the next time you begin to feel that life is being unfair to you simply because you're ...

What Would Happen If You Said Every Unhinged Thing That Came to Your Head? Not in the extreme sense of saying whatever comes to mind without regard for anyone else, oo. But what if you actually expressed yourself more often instead of constantly shrinking yourself so you don't inconvenience someone else? There's consideration, even in speech. However, there's an extreme where we try so hard to be a little less too much, for the sake of other people's feelings, that we end up not expressing ourselves at all. A friend of mine was waiting for me to finish a meeting so we could go home together. I thought the meeting would be brief, and it was supposed to be, but it ended up taking much longer than expected. Eventually, she said she was leaving, and I let her. Meanwhile, the whole reason she had waited that long was so we could walk home together. When I messaged her after getting home, she calmly told me she didn't like that, after waiting for me for so lon...

There's something that was said in church yesterday that was quite comical, but when you think about it, it really isn't. The pastor said something along the lines of, identifying as a Christian and believing the stories in the Bible is already an act of foolishness, so you might as well continue in that foolishness. Think about it, the same person who believes that the Red Sea parted for the children of Israel, that the waters stood like walls and the Egyptians were drowned in it. The same person who believes that manna fell from heaven for the Israelites to eat for forty years. The same person who believes that a young boy defeated a giant with a stone, that a man survived being thrown into a den of lions, and that another spent three days in the belly of a fish. Now, that same person hears about the extraordinary things God is doing in people's lives today and suddenly becomes skeptical? Interesting, isn't it? I think sometimes we forget that the God we r...

I came across this quote today, and I haven't stopped thinking about it. "Consume so much that it literally spills out of you."  And honestly, I think this is one of the most important things I've had to learn about being a creative. Sometimes, we become so obsessed with creating that we forget the importance of consuming. We want to write, but we aren't reading, we want to make art, but we aren't allowing ourselves to experience art. We want to have something meaningful to say, but we aren't making room for new thoughts, ideas, perspectives and experiences. And then we wonder why creating feels like such a struggle. You see, I don't think creativity is always about finding something within yourself to bring to life. Sometimes, it's about allowing yourself to be exposed to so much that something eventually comes alive within you. Read books, listen to people, have conversations, watch films, study things that interest you, explore things that don...

There's this thing my coach would always say. He'd go, "Never idolize anybody." He would even jokingly call me an idol worshipper. I got the gist, but I don't think I fully understood the implications until recently, when he said it again. This time, I honestly understood what he meant. There's a meme I've seen several times on my status today. I even reshared it. It read, "Human beings will disappoint you, including me." It was funny, but it was also true. You see, even the best of us, or rather, at our very best, we're still human beings, and that makes us deeply and truly flawed. And that's exactly why we must, as much as possible, never idolize people. It's okay to admire, respect, look up to and love people greatly. There's, however, a pretty thin line between doing these things and idolizing someone. A line so thin that you might not even realise when you've crossed it. When you place people on pedestals they...

I finally edited a video I'd procrastinated on for so long, and mehn, I could finally breatheeee. The relief I felt was unmatched. And I discovered something: the problem was never my ability to edit videos. It was fear. I was so scared that it crippled me. I was initially excited to edit, but then I encountered a major issue. One I knew very well how to fix, but somehow, I kept stalling. Days turned into a week, and with each passing day, it became increasingly difficult to pick up my phone and just do the damn thing. You see, yesterday, I promised myself I was going to get it done, but things got in the way. So, when I woke up this morning, I decided to do something crazy. I was going to give myself an ultimatum: no food until the video was ready. For somebody who loves food, guyyyy, it was VERY difficult. Before 12 pm, I was already hungry, and the video barely looked ready. But I sat there and kept going until 6 pm, when the video was finally ready. And honestly, I felt grand. ...

The scariest form of evil is the evil that presents itself as good. There's nothing that gets me more angry than self-righteous evil. If these people were outrightly evil, perhaps they would be easier to deal with. But no, they can be the kindest people you meet, the most considerate, the most patient, the most understanding. They can embody all the qualities you admire, until one day, they reveal a side of themselves that makes you question everything you thought you knew about them. And honestly, it's disappointing to discover layers of vice in people you hold in high esteem. It's even worse when these are people you have looked up to, people whose character you have used as a reference point for what is good and right. But perhaps the way to guard against that disappointment is to have a higher reference point. A standard that exists beyond human beings, one that doesn't change simply because the people you admire turn out to be different from who you thought they we...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you're allowed to have feelings about the things you look forward to, even when you understand why they didn't happen. You know that situation where you're looking forward to something, and then it doesn't happen because something comes up? Whatever came up is understandable, and you genuinely get it, but you still feel some kind of way about the whole situation. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about, and I'm here to tell you that it's valid! You're allowed to feel that way. Understanding doesn't make disappointment hurt any less. It gives you perspective, yes, but our very humanness means we have feelings, and they shouldn't be suppressed. They can be communicated, but never suppressed. Sometimes, we go through disappointments and pretend to act like it's all chill simply because we understand why things happened the way they did. But understanding why doesn't annul what happened. Un...

When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “Money is the only thing that gives you power in this world, especially as a woman,” it was, to me, a beautiful quote, like everything else that comes out of her mouth. But recently, it became more than a beautiful quote. I finally understood it in a way I hadn't before. The kind of understanding that comes from having personally experienced the words, from having felt the stench and understood their meaning on the most basic, human level. It stopped being just a beautiful quote, not because it had lost its beauty, but because it had become so intimate. So intimate that I could taste it at the tip of my tongue. Stretch a little further, and I could grasp it, wrap it around my finger. It was no longer just literature. It was a cruel reality. The quote says power, and you immediately think of something far-fetched, something grand, something reserved for people who sit at the top of the world. But power can be anything. It can be the littlest of th...

"Sometimes, doing the right thing doesn't mean you stop wanting the other thing. It means you learn to live with the wanting." ~ X Light is not the absence of darkness, and in the same way, doing the right thing doesn't mean you stop wanting what you had to leave behind. I read somewhere that the road not taken is always has a way of looking greener, and come to think of it, the mind does this silly thing of making us romanticise what could have been. Like the way my mind wanders to how differently my life would have been if I hadn't made the change of school from UNN when I did. But then, I remember that everything that happened in between led me here, exactly where I'm supposed to be. So, it was the right decision. But every now and then, I want Nsukka. I want my magical city, somewhere that may not even be magical after all o. But the point is, there are good decisions you'll make and still find yourself wanting the other things. It's a human tenden...

I make headshot videos. I've been experimenting with them for the longest time, and it's safe to say I've gotten the hang of it. But recently, I decided I wanted to do more. Not just headshots, but vlog-style videos and full-length content. These were new to me, and honestly, a little difficult. On my first attempt, I had a hard time with the audio. It took me an entire month to finally figure out a way around the problem. Now, on my second attempt, I'm having the same issues again, and it's frustrating because I feel like I should be better at this by now. But apparently, I'm not.  Still, with each attempt, I learn something new. I discover a better way to do things, understand what went wrong, and figure out what I can do differently next time. Maybe the next video won't suck as much, but hey, it is what it is. And I think that's the point. Every experience should leave you better than it met you. Not necessarily because you got everything right, but b...

One of my favourite morning routines is T30. What a way to kickstart one's day! Now, there's this particular T30 that explained something I had previously struggled to understand in the Bible. It was the concept of hardness of heart and the ways it can manifest. "Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, In the day of trial in the wilderness." ~ Hebrews 3:8 This gives the idea of hardness of heart a new perspective. It is not merely about forming resistance against God or outrightly refusing to obey Him. If you know the story being referenced here, how the children of Israel were brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand, how they saw the Red Sea part, and yet, when they experienced a little difficulty in the wilderness, they began asking, "Where is God?" then you'll understand. Hardness of heart is when the evidence of God's past faithfulness loses its influence over our present trust in Him. When a new trial makes us respond as though God has ne...

“Ruptured ectopic pregnancy.” Blinks, eyes open. “3 amps of Pentazocine.” Blinks, eyes close. “Go test for PCV.” Drifts off yet again… --- Yeah, that was me at some point today. You may be wondering how I got into this situation or what the situation really was. Well, it all began this morning, before the sun was ready to wake up, and neither was I. But I had barely slept the night before, so we were up, myself and my household. I was running around, trying to sort out transportation to take my sister to the hospital, ensuring everything was going well and she was being attended to. I was supposed to be on my way back to school today, but I guess the universe had other plans. The long and short of it is that today was honestly a lot. And because my response to stress is crying, I first found a corner and cried before facing everything else the day had in store for me. Here's the interesting part of today. At some point, my sister needed blood. I was an obvious match and decided to ...

And just like that, we've come to the end of this series. Finally  Seven days of talking about a video that probably should not have required this much intellectual labour, but here we are. So, after all the conversations, the hot takes, the dragging, and the many things we've managed to read into a few minutes of footage, what exactly have we learnt? Men dey. Yes, they dey, there are men who are young, rich, generous, and willing to give the women they love a beautiful life. There are also men who are still building, men who have different ideas of love, and men whose pockets may not match their intentions. And women? Well, women are not a monolith either. We have different values, different expectations, and different things we consider important in a relationship. Some women want the soft life, some want to build the soft life with their partners, and some want a combination of both. Some will compromise their values for money, others won't, some men will give you the wo...