I remember vaguely that
she was lying on the bed reading a book with many pages. She seemed to be
concentrating. I asked her, “Aunty what is this book you are reading”? She
replied “the Bible”. “What is the Bible”? I asked. It is “God’s word” she
responded. I must have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. That was my first
conscious encounter with religion.
All previous encounters had been passive,
unconscious, and insignificant. I took personal interest in this Bible and
began to read it. I was deeply fascinated as I found a new transcendent
consciousness which I never really experienced before. However, I was soon to
abandon this new found interest being a child. I picked it up again at the age
of 12 when my foster parents began to couple their attendance at an orthodox
church (Catholic) with a Pentecostal church. A new wave of Pentecostalism was
sweeping Nigeria, gaining a critical mass since the late 1970s through the early
1980s. In the year 1989, I became a born again Christian, a brand of
Christianity that grew in power and numbers like wild fire in the dry season in
Nigeria. Having a simple and sincere disposition I followed the teachings of
this religion.
When I attained puberty I struggled with sexual desire, feelings
of guilt, and self-repression. My impression was that the human was vile and
corruptible, as was reinforced by repeated sermons. I pursued morality without
a basic awareness of what is, but to please God in order to get a reward, which
was immediate blessings and ultimately heaven, and to avoid punishments or
curses, with the worst being eternal damnation in hell. As I began to grow
older, approaching adolescence, I sought for my own personal experience of the
stories I read about in the Bible. Miracles of the age to come, the
supernatural, and eschatology became obsessions. I knew that I had no
experiential knowledge of these things. I wanted evidence to validate my
dogmatic reality--a reality that was capricious and based on only what I had
read and heard from humans like myself. I had to. I had no alternative. It was
the only worldview I had and it was becoming unstable and troubled with doubt.
But how could I doubt it? How dare I reject my worldview? Instead, I looked for
evidence to support and reinforce it more.
“It is now clear to me that most mental illnesses can be
regarded as tools of personal growth, magnifying our most deep rooted beliefs
and fears similar to how the “common” ego reflects our insecurities. In both
cases, we are being shown our self-sabotaging perceptions as an opportunity to
re-empower ourselves to transcend them.” Elina St-Onge
From the age of 22 to 33
I had about 4 active episodes of schizophrenia, the final episode lasting for 2
years. I saw hell in the real sense of the word. My sufferings and horrors in
their magnitude make me stand in awe of the human mind and its power. In the
interims of sanity I became a free thinker, or possibly an atheist, with no
faith-belief any more.
At first it was extremely scary. How could I live this
life by myself if there was no God to help me? I was completely inadequate and
my mind was poorly developed.
“Many people assume that the mind develops
naturally as we grow older, but it does not; unless specifically educated, it
remains an uncoordinated infant, even while the physical body matures.”
Leichtman & Japikse
I didn’t know reality, so how could I master
circumstance? The question of facing adulthood came to me during my National
Youth Service when I was away from home and had to fend for myself. I saw
myself as I really was and knew I had nothing to offer society after spending 5
years in the university. An experience that I would call in retrospect
selfconsciousness or self-awareness. Once the socio-religious forces had been
broken, the self 2 which had hitherto been in obscurity could be seen in its
shrivelled state. In this awareness I chose to find a way.
“People attain worth
and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions
require courage.” Rollo May
And yes, I did find my first self-help literature –
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership authored by John C. Maxwell. I learnt my
first lessons of the laws of life in that book. As I began to test these
principles, I saw results! I was beginning to gain control. I could lead; I
could make things happen! The quest for self-improvement and self-determination
imbued my soul. I devoured self-help literature voraciously as I began to grow
in confidence and self-mastery. I felt indescribable joy in my new reality.
However, my battle with schizophrenia persisted because I didn’t stick to my
medication, as it hadn’t dawned on me yet that I really had a condition. In the
interludes of sanity, I was extremely successful in my career, growing fast and
achieving things I could never have imagined and then I would break down again.
Yet even at this, in those brief interludes of sanity I had successfully been
able to map reality, understand the laws of life, and achieve mastery. So in the
last traumatic experience that lasted 2 years, where I lost everything I had
managed to build over the years, and ended up in poverty and depression, I
started all over from the scratch. With the blue print already available in my
consciousness, I simply changed my circumstances in 2 years.
With a faulty and
fairly used lap top and a monthly salary of a little over $200, I made it to
the world’s leading university – the University of Cambridge. But how did I do
it? On being discharged from the Aro Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Abeokuta,
Nigeria, in 2010, I was taken back home to Sagamu where I was living at the
time. Heavily sedated by psychotic drugs, I was deeply depressed and battled
with despair. With no one to support me financially it was critical I took up a
job for myself to survive. Yet there was little I could do, having lost all
zest for living that was characteristic of my life before the illness.
The
easiest job for me to get in the small town, given my current state, was a
teaching position. I went in search of one. I got a job as an entry level
biology teacher but was certainly over qualified with a Master’s degree and
over 9 years’ experience as a professional conservation biologist. I never made
it past 3 months in the school however, as I was fired without warning or
explanations. In truth, I wasn’t teaching but just making 3 recitations before
the students. In my depression all light had gone out of me. I couldn’t find
access to inner strength any more but dreamt of suicide. Thankfully, a year
later, in May 2011 the depression lifted as the dosage of my medication was
reduced. As soon as the depression disappeared the real ‘I’ was reborn! At this
time I secured a teaching position in another school. Fully aware of the laws
of life as I mastered them in prior years of my sanity, I took control of my
destiny under the dire conditions of poverty and limitation I was living in.
“Specifically, leading requires ‘ownership’ of the meanings of personal
responsibility and accountability. It means fully internalizing the human truth
that in your world, nothing happens unless you personally make it happen. You
must understand that the consequences of your action and inaction are like your
children – you create them, they are extensions of you, you are responsible for
them, for you are they, but they live their own lives nevertheless. It is
therefore a ‘fact’ of the structure of human nature that you are responsible
for your world. Dependency and paternalism are cruel illusions. The real world
is made for the autonomous and self-reliant individual”. Peter Koestenbaum
Even
though the teaching job was mediocre, compared to my career aspirations and
ambitions, I put my heart into it and worked with dignity and a heart of
contribution.
“No matter how humble the calling of the individual, how
uninteresting and dull the round of his duties, he should do his best. He
should dignify what he is doing by the mind he puts into it, he should vitalize
what little he has of power or energy or ability or opportunity, in order to
prepare himself to be equal to higher privileges when they come. This will
never lead man to that weak content that is satisfied with whatever falls to
his lot. It will rather fill his mind with that divine discontent that
cheerfully accepts the best – merely as a temporary substitute for something
better”. William George Jordan
I taught my students until 4pm in the evening
and then picked up my virtual volunteer work with an international conservation
organization (Society for Conservation Biology) I had been volunteering with
for years, where I learnt professional skills, discipline, and found voice. I
had strict adherence to this routine: 8am-4pm --- teaching job; 5pm-7pm ----
virtual volunteering.
“To achieve something – to create something; to realize a
dream – one must commit oneself to a schedule for working on it; one must not
waiver from it. There are always excuses. Life is a bottomless pit of
rationalizations and the reasons for not doing something, so one must simply
not allow for any. Regularity is critical to discipline and success; he who
aspires to 4 some achievement must get a rhythm and work schedule going in his
life and keep banging on the drum. Accomplishments are built upon a steady,
incessant accumulation of individual actions”. Tom Lombardo
There was an inner
transformation and a colossal growth of my inner being, so that I knew in
profundity that soon my inner reality would match my outer reality given my
circumstances. And so in late 2011, 2 years after my discharge from the hospital
I applied for a scholarship to study in Europe but didn’t make it. I persisted.
I continued with my routine and worked hard. In 2012, I tried again, this time
applying to the University of Cambridge and another school as encouraged by one
of my mentors - Phoebe Barnard.
Then my reality changed in 2013 when I received
news of the award of three international scholarships, two of which I declined
to accept the most favorable. I accepted a Miriam Rothschild Scholarship to
study Conservation Leadership in the University of Cambridge! Why Conservation
Leadership? Nature and environmental protection to me has been a conduit of
expressing a spiritual longing to contribute to humanity and the planetary
process. A cause larger than myself, working to conserve nature in the
environmental crisis stretches my potentiality and gives my life a basis of
significance and highest means of self-culture. Today spirituality has a new
meaning to me
– “Spirituality tends to be characterised by its more personal,
introspective and existential search for meaning, purpose, truth, identity and
interconnectedness that may or may not include a focus on a
divine/transcendent/God”. Peter Pruzan 5
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