The sixth weird but absolutely normal thing about me is...

I have only been properly in love once

I wont deny up to this point I would have denied this fact but in all earnestness I have only ever been in love with one person. Don’t get me wrong I love a lot of people, some of them maybe a bit too much for my own good, some of them friends of mine, some family, some people I have been in relationships with but I cant say I have been IN love with any of them. Emphasis on the 'IN'.

Some of y’all will at this point ask what the difference between loving someone and being IN love with someone is, well, the first distinction I always make is the fact that falling IN love with someone is a conscious decision, loving someone isn’t. You love your mother pretty much from when you are born, you cant control that. You love your friends and even when they piss you off to the absolute max you still do. Being IN love is slightly different, its a much more intense phenomenon. You tend to be IN love when you consciously decide to be with that person through thick or thin. When you know there will be difficulties and you decide to love them regardless and would do so even if the person don’t reciprocate the feeling. You make a decision to be there for that person and care for them. Its the decision to want to be near them and in some cases to share your body with them (even though you obviously not in love with everyone you sleep with).

Loving someone is different, you usually love someone because they have been nice to you or showed you some affection etc., its a natural reaction which I in no way will dispute and can happen 'by accident', however, you can easily love someone from a distance. You don’t necessarily have to see them all the time, I love my mother eternally but to be quite honest I prefer her at a distance and in small doses. Don’t change the fact that I love her and I cant stop doing so because once you love someone you always will. Deciding to be IN love with someone usually means that we feel the need to do so with the person around. When you love someone you expect them to know, when you IN love with someone you want to demonstrate it, at all times.

We tend slip and slide between being IN love with our partners and just loving them, I guess we have to periodically remind ourselves as to why we made that decision which is why I say its a conscious decision. If it were something that just happens then we wouldn’t fall out of love and be able to fall back into love with someone but we don’t tend to acknowledge that it involves our input. Sometimes we cant fall back IN love with someone in which case you were most likely just infatuated with the person, which really is just your hormones and logic playing tricks on your poor heart.

To make my point a bit easier I shall give examples, hopefully you will spot the differences.

So my first ever proper relationship was deep. We met, we kissed, we moved in together lol jk it wasn’t that quick but it did happen fast. The first time I met him I wasn’t all that attracted to him but I warmed to him eventually. As things got more serious I would spend time at his' and he at mine (I lived alone at that time and so did he) after a while it became tiresome and we decided to move in together. We both knew we loved each other, there was no question about that, the problem was that we both thought we were IN love with each other. We had quite a few issues, mainly concerning each other. Living together at that age was hard but we pulled through those things. The main issue was the fact that when you love someone you want them to be perfect, for themselves. You want them to do the best they can, you want them to succeed. When you love someone you still have time to think about whether the bills have been paid. When you are IN love none of that matters, all you care about is the person. As imperfect as they are you love em like that because all you want is to love them. Its probably what starts issues in most relationships, when it comes to the time where you have to renew your committed decision to be in love with the person, you still love them but then start to see the cracks in the wall and for a while you tend to quaver but usually you start seeing the things that made you want to be with them in the first place and things are back on track.

If you weren’t IN love in the first place however then these things tend to put a strain on the relationship. In my case it was my fathers death that gave everything the boot. At that point I was just like fuck it, I don’t WANT to do this and that was it. Now the problem is you don’t stop loving someone so up till now I cant (not that I want to) get him out of my life. We tried to get things going again a few times but it just wont work.

To my second scenario, a few years after my father died I met this guy (happened to be the previously talked about ex's friend but I wont go into detail) he was nice and that but he wasn’t really the kind I would be friends with normally. We got to know each other and after a while, after I had spent the day with him, I sat myself down and thought to myself. I want to be IN love with this person. I want to treat him like a king and shower him with affection, for no apparent reason. If I hadn’t made that decision I never would have had any feelings for him. As a matter of fact it turned out he had a girlfriend from before we met which in my book makes him an indecisive dickhead but I still decided I wanted to love him (stupid decision but that’s not the point, the fact that its not logical don’t change the fact that we decide to do it) so we were together for a few months and then it was time to move away to uni. I was still seeing him and he told me he was in love with me and that am bound to be his baby mama (like really?) and ish but at that point I decided that its pointless so I fell out of love with him then and there. I decided I didn’t want to care for him any more. Simple!

I hope you get the gist of what am saying. Am just tired of people telling me they cant leave abusive partners because they are IN love with them. Well, if you were then stop it and if you actually love him, unconditionally like a friend or family member then you should be able to do so from a distance. The most important thing Is your safety.

OK so that’s my take on it, I might be totally wrong I am more than willing for anyone to correct me but out of experience, this is how I understand love. But maybe I am not the right person to talk about this subject, after all most of my friends know me as a heartless gold-digger, which I am far from. As I said I have never been with anyone I didn’t love, the fact that I am not IN love with them might sound odd to some people but I just weren’t and to be honest I cant see myself actually making that open eyed decision to devote my whole self to them. I don’t think anyone is worth that sacrifice. You can have my body for all I care, after all, we all have needs but I cant see myself deciding to to do anything and everything for a person. That doesn’t change the fact that I treat a man like a king. I cook, I clean, I look pretty and make him happy all I ask is that he treats me like a queen in return. I just happen to have been with men that think showering me with gifts was the way to show I mattered to them and I didn’t object. If that’s a crime...sue me! Lol I have never let anyone treat me badly, abuse me or done anything I usually wouldn’t do just because they look after me or even asked for any of the things I received for that matter. I’ve just been me and that happened to get me certain privileges shrugs. Am sure gold-diggers actually have to put in a bit more effort than that and in all honesty, if I really intended on gold-digging I would have had a baby for one of them FOB drug/419 boys at clubs...might not have my student loan then lol.

Anyway yeah, so that’s why I have only been IN love once, because I havent been willing to do it again. Besides statistically people dont really fall in love till they are in their late 20s anyway.

So it might be a little weird, but its perfectly normal ;P

the fifth weird but normal thing about me is...

I cry way too much (and am not afraid to admit it). Lol

yes, I admit it, I am one big cry baby. Some friends of mine may be surprised but I am.

To be honest I only cry when I am frustrated or helpless rather than when I am upset or hurt.

Its kinda funny because when I am upset or fell lonely, I starve myself instead. Crazy huh, actually it ain’t, just like myself there are thousands of young women (and guys actually) that either lose appetite or eat excessively when upset. And to be honest I feel the need to point out Some have very deep issues such as depression and other mental disorders and find it very hard to cope. People tend to think that loosing appetite has to do with the fact that our body is too busy being upset to think of food but actually the weird thing about it is what goes on in some people's heads when going through an emotional crisis.

When I’m at my lowest, I feel like I need to be punished for feeling sorry for myself. I feel like being upset alone is making my problems worse and that I am a failure for letting emotions get in the way of things I do. Obviously that then makes things worse and I get even more upset but my point is that sometimes people aren’t just not eating because they are not hungry but there’s this little voice that tells you that you don’t deserve food, that you don’t deserve friends, you don’t deserve someone to care about you. A lot of the time I can hear my stomach rumbling and my head would would spin from dehydration and I’d ignore it. In some cases this is how eating disorders start off for a lot of young people. I for example get upset much more than people think but its just harder to detect when I put on a brave face so imagine having days on end where you don't eat and imagine that happening very frequently. Some people don’t have anyone to jolt them out of their misery (even if just temporarily) and at least make them pretend like they are OK (trust me, it makes such a difference just making someone pretend they are OK for a little while, it makes them remember what it like to be happy and sometimes they might even attempt to really enjoy themselves).

I, however, have kinda come to realise that (or re-realise lol) that certain things just wont help. Yes I do still tend to stay in bed for ages on end without food or socialising with anyone when I am upset but I am learning that even if my mind is telling me to punish my flesh I need to take that chance to feed my spirit. That’s the times I need Jesus the most...and that’s where the crying comes in. as I said, from a young age I never used to cry a lot unless I was in actual physical pain, or totally helpless and frustrated and I still do, but now I cry to god. You know how when people give immobile and unwell people those little bells so they can bring attention to themselves when they can do something themselves, (I never got that privilege, in an African household you better still have the strength to scream or get up and do it yourself otherwise you ain’t getting nothing done lol) well that’s what crying does. Its me telling god that I cant do it, that am helpless and that I need him.

It took me a while to grasp the whole concept of having to tell god you need him before he can really help you. For a long time I have just been quiet expecting him to come and sort my life out if its really his will and I wont lie, my prayer life is ridiculously patchy and I still haven’t been to church (willingly) for a while but rather than brood over things and let my soul grieve I actually show him how desperate I am. And to be honest if you ever going to show anyone that you are desperate for anything then you might as well let it be god, considering that he is the only one that can really help you. And I guess the funny thing is that it actually works, apart from the fact that its a good way to make yourself fall asleep at night, god actually hears your cries even if you say nothing.

So to conclude, yes, I am one big old cry baby. I cry at every little thing that hurts or upsets but not in front of people but for the help of the single person that can actually come to my aid and its a much better solution than other things I have tried to soothe my hurt or alleviate my frustration and I am not the only one that thinks its a great way to relieve some stress as even atheists will testify to it (even though they may have other theories as to why it helps).

And that is why being a cry baby may be slightly weird, but perfectly normal ;)

The fourth weird but normal thing about me is...

nothing makes me wanna sing more than when am worshipping god.

I know its such a religious cliché but I don’t even care.

I even have a little story to support my theory...

when I was doing my GCSE I chose music as one of my subject (obviously oblivious to the fact that I actually would have to play some kind of instrument at some point :s) so it was required of me to present a musical piece every few weeks or so and every week I sang a song out of the song books we kept at school depending on what topic or style we had to adhere to.

I wasn’t completely atrocious but I wasn’t singing 'anywhere near as good and powerful as my chest capacity should allow me' quoting the words of my singing coach. My pitch range is never gonna be enormous but we all knew I could do much better than what I was doing and my coach would continuously ask me to sing from my stomach ….like really? :s

I know that’ss what all coaches say but I justdidn’t’t get, I wareleasingg all the strength in my lungs when singing (almost suffocated on a high note once lol) but it justwasn’tt working.

So one time we had the assignment of composing ABABCA structured piece and I used one of my old compositions that I wrote. At first I was going to use a song called 'baby' which I wrote when I was like 14, lyrically it was good although the rhythm was a bit repetitive but it would have done fine but at some point halfway through editing the song I decided to use a different song I hadn’t titled but thinking about it now 'I’ll follow you' would have been appropriate. It was pretty much me telling god that I’ll trust him in everything I’ll do and I wrote it in a time I really needed to follow something because I was going off on a ridiculous path. So the day of performance came and I stood to sing this song...and hit every note perfectly. Obviously, I wrote the song to suit my vocal ability but I sang the song with such passion and strength tat at some point all I saw was my music class staring back at me surprised and me singing and smiling awkwardly not knowing whether to be pleased or be embarrassed. Then I started to think to myself, maybe my voice isn’t meant for secular music, strange, but that seems to be the matter of the fact. Don’t get me wrong I still listen to secular music and will sing along but when it comes to actually performing songs, I haven’t sang a song in public that wasn’t appropriate since that day.

All nice and good but then there was another problem. When my father died, I more or less lost interest in everything that meant something to me. I wanted to be a singer from when I was little, people were calling me up to come for choir practice at church and I just wasn’t up for it. For a long while I wouldn’t even sing along in my seat during church service. I just didn’t see the point in singing any more. To be honest, thinking about it, I probably wasn’t doing it for him from the get go, I think I just used church as a platform for people to see what I could do which I now know was wrong. I started to sing again on special occasions because praise has always been the most effective way I knew how to thank god and I started enjoying singing again but I couldn’t do it on a daily basis. Possibly the devil saw I was at least trying to get back to doing what god wanted me to and started throwing tribulations my way and I stumbled. Stumbled hard. To be frank with you all, I haven’t willingly gone to church in over a year. I just had this feeling of gods mercies not applying to me because of things I have done and gone through. But then the other day I had a crisis, a bad one. I don’t know how god does it but he does something to keep me here and maybe there is a reason why is keeping me here. Anyway I had someone special pray with me and give me a good telling off about the fact that I don’t sing any more and explained to me that I had a choice, either I sing for god, or I sing for the devil, its my choice but either has its consequences. I started realising how much I am depriving myself of by consciously deciding not to sing for him (even if just in my house), deciding not to do the little things I used to do such as pray, tithe, sow seeds etc.

going back over my life, yes I have been through extraordinary BS and it seems that everything I go through just leads to something else bad but I forget to think about the fact that point is I am still here, and even if I haven’t been restored to my former glory, I am on my way there or even aiming at better things.

Been reading the bible from top to end when I got to Noah story I realised that when god flooded the earth it look 150 days for the rain to stop so at that point the actual danger had been survived, however it took almost as much time as it stopped to rain for the flood to subside. Noah and his family were stuck in the ark for months, probably anxious to get out, but had to wait for all the water to dry up in order not to jeopardise the lives of any of the creatures on the ark as his whole mission was to keep them safe so that they could multiply. Sometimes it will take just as long if not longer for god to restore us to what we were before (or whatever he wants us to be) because he needs to make sure that everything is settled properly (the flood needs to completely recede) before he can let you go safely knowing you can be comfortable in the new state he will put you in.

anyway that’s just me going off on a tangent, basically I have realised that maybe I am the one making things difficult by expecting everything to go back to normal at once. Maybe I just need to go back to the things I enjoy doing, including praising god, and just wait till he thinks am ready to step out of my ark and start cultivating my life again.

And that is why only being good at singing gospel may be weird, but perfectly normal ;)

The third absolutely normal but weird thin about me... I miss my father more than anything even though I was raised in a single parent family headed by my mother

well I guess I should start of with the fact that growing up, I never saw my father dying as a possibility of life. Yes everyone died at some point but obviously when I was very young I never saw it as something I would have to deal with. Getting older then I realised that anything could happen at any time and that maybe I should prepare myself for what would happen if my MOTHER died. I don’t really know if it was because her death would leave me with no caregiver or the fact that I knew my mother had health issues anyway. Whatever it was I just thought that the death I would have to deal with if any would be my mother's. My father dying was as I said before, impossible. He never got ill, he looked weirdly young for his age and he had over a dozen children to be there for. Why would he die? Maybe I also thought that the fact that I hardly saw him would make it easier for me. It didn’t.

Between the years of 2005 and 2007 my father fell ill on several occasions and was sent in and out of hospital. Apparently he asked of me a lot but I refused to call him, firstly because I hardly had anything to say to him, secondly because in my head he probably only had malaria and will be good in no time and thirdly and most stupidly of all things I wasn’t talking to him because he criticised my SATS results. Since 2005 I adamantly refused to talk to my father about anything at all including school stuff until I either was able to get straight As or I died, whichever came first. To be honest I was quite happy with the Bs and occasional Cs I was getting. I knew I was smart but I had my weak points, besides that growing up I never really saw myself as a high and mighty career woman, I just wanted to marry a nice guy have a few kids a nice house, maybe a turtle (I shall specify in later posts) and be happy. As a matter of fact until my father died I actually thought there might be a possibility of me being/ or planning to get married by 20 (obviously that ship has sailed now) but I knew that there was no way my family would be satisfied just with me being 'happy' so I actually considered going to uni and made it an option. To me either I got married and my happy family or I had a career, there was no middle point and to be honest after the speech I got from my father over my level 6.8 in my maths SATS exam my dreams kinda started to falter a little. I still wanted to live a life where I would be a young mother and be able to spend all day with my kids but then there was what my dad wanted for me, or rather what I thought he wanted.

Anyway that’s just a little background on why I wasn’t talking to him. I finished my GCSE mocks in the summer of 2005 and they were up to no standard my father would accept so I continued to refuse all contact with him though he would beg my sister to make me call him. I never did.

Even when I started getting news that he was getting worse I still didn’t call, too ashamed to face him and still holding on to the fact that my daddy cant die and there will be more than enough time to get my telling offs. Then came February 2007, I was attending an all night service at church, prior to which I had been told that my dad was getting worse by the day. I still didn’t call but by the end of the service I burst into tears when I felt this unreal, not physical pain in my chest. I asked my pastor to pray for him and I could not stop crying through the entire prayer.

I guess that was the beginning of the end. I don’t really know all the details of my dads illness because he was in Ghana the whole time but in the months between February and June I felt like utter shit. I would pick up the phone to call him and drop it again I would wake up at night crying for no apparent reason, I was thinking about my father 24/7 and as a result got very close to flunking my GCSEs but I didn’t, I got my 10 A*-Cs and decided to bury the hatchet and reconcile with my daddy. Somehow I thought 'now he must be proud of me somehow'. True because at that point he had already passed away and I guess dead people don’t keep grudges. I finished my exams at the beginning of June at which point he was already gone for weeks, but no body told me. The only thing that gave it away was this pulling feeling I had towards him everyday to call him, to buy him stuff as a peace offering. Funnily enough everyone else knew, even my little cousins but did a really good job at hiding it from me.

On the 27^th of June (the morning after my prom) my mother gathered my aunt and her family in their living room, in my head it was because they wanted to hear gist about my prom. Silly huh?

Well nothing could have prepared me for what was coming. My mothers long, ridiculous speech that gave everything away from the start (though I was still trying to deny it), the pain of being lied to for over a month, everything I had worked for being for absolutely nothing. I almost attacked my mother, calling her a liar. It wasn’t true, to me it just wasn’t true. I would have screamed and kicked if my boyfriend at that time hadn’t been a 6'4'' heap of a human being and retained my every move.

For me it was over, everything was gone. Everything I wanted was useless now. Why get married if he cant walk me down the isle, shout at people during the preparations, get jolly with his friends at my traditional wedding and be proud but still make heat under my husbands ass, what’s the point of having kids if he wont be there to buy them dresses that look like they belong on a porcelain doll and wont be there to watch them destroy my furniture cz he thinks kids should be left to explore.

What of the memories of him taking us to the beach and restaurants etc. What’s the point of owning nice houses and have money and a career if I wont here him complain about how he cant operate the expensive TV or how the house help didn’t prepare his food appropriately, what’s the point if he’s not there for me to buy him cars, loan him money ill never ask back or go to trips with him I really don’t enjoy but I do anyway because I know he just wants to show me off. I lost all reason to all the things I lived for and to be honest I still haven’t found a substitute motivation.

His funeral came by and I didn’t attend because it was in Ghana and my mother thought it wise not to take me. To be honest I wanted to go but was scared of accepting he was gone, if I had seen him I’d have to believe it and I refused to. I have never set a foot on his grave site in the whole four years of his death and am not sure I want to.

Sometimes I really dislike the way hate and love go together, I want so much to detest him for leaving me and not even saying goodbye, not even letting me know he was going so I could be on the first plane down to be with him in his last moments like some of my siblings got to. I hate him because he made me want to be such a great person to make him proud and then just left, I hate him coz he took away part of my identity. I lived life being ' wofa yaw's daughter' and now am nothing.

But still I love him, I would do anything to be with him, would give anything to have him here because if it wasn’t him, I wouldn’t have grown up being who I am. I wouldn’t have grown up loving where i'm from, speaking the language of my ancestors, I wouldn’t have half of the confidence I once had, I wouldn’t have been so proud to be nothing else but just what I am. He loved me, probably much more than I even recall, he would have given the world to keep me if there was the slightest chance I was to get lost.. he would have been there if I had let him.

So somehow I guess its understandable why I miss my father above anything else

and its weirdly normal to do so.

The second absolutely normal, but weird thing about me... my real name is sweetie

yes I know, as usual I presume my readers are split in opinions. Most of you must still think am crazy and the rest just think its cute...NO! Like really, there is nothing worse than being called sweetie. Not only do I think its very huge sign of lack creativity on my mothers part but I also resent the fact that me being named as such was a complete and utter accident, an accident which I shall gladly narrate to you...

OK, so my mother had been in hospital for a few days before my birth due to the fact that apparently I was giving her complications, according to a certain doctor I had tied the umbilical cord around my neck and was now on the verge of suffocating and that this was why I wouldn’t keep still in my mothers tummy. To be perfectly honest with you I think I just wanted up and out of there as much as I love my mother she was way too skinny for my liking when she had me and as much as I may not recall my days as a foetus I am quite sure without the extra padding and insulation of a chubby woman (which considering how much my mum loves cooking is really what she should have been) it might possibly have gotten quite cold and bumpy in there so I wanted to explore other options.

Anyway at some point my mum was induced into labour and here I was...the product of both my mother and father, obviously!

Funnily my father wasn't actually there when I was born (I will explain in future posts) even though as tradition goes, it was his responsibility to name me and apparently he had readied a name for me but never showed up in time for when my mother was confronted with the task of registering my birth, and to do that, I needed a name. Fortunately for my mother (unfortunately for me!) she had settled on calling me sweetie because the nurses insisted on telling my mother how cute I was and therefore put sweetie asantewaa on my birth certificate as a temporary solution until she came up with something better. And now here I am 20 years later and it still says sweetie asantewaa on my birth certificate, I acknowledge that Africans (and everyone else nowadays to be honest) never keep to their timing but I’m quite sure 20 years cannot be referred to as temporary.

Its kinda odd because to be frank, my name never bothered me too tough when I was younger as I lived in a country that hardly spoke English and so the oddness of my name was not as obvious because no one immediately assumed its meaning but then I moved to the UK and it was a whole different case. People would hear about me at a new school in a matter of hours because rumours would spread concerning whether my name was real or not. Growing up men would find it an opportunity ever so unmissable to make insinuative jokes. 'so do you taste as sweet as your name?' :/ like really dude? You couldn’t come up with nothing better? But guys are are just a whole different post all together so getting back to my name...I guess it has had its bad and some good sides too. I have raked in a few compliments on account of my name I guess I should seize this opportunity to thank my mother for making it impossible for me to get work as a serious politician without previously erasing my entire identity from birth till now and also for giving me a name that is a great ice breaker when meeting new people. I guess there are a lot of friends I wouldn’t have made if it wasn’t for awkward introductions and just me cracking up about my name in the first place so I cannot complain too much.

Also if I think of some other people's names I am quite glad I got what I got. For example, Gaylord, if there is anyone out there reading this with the name Gaylord I utterly empathise with your pain but even they make something out of it. There are a lot of option, such as nicknames etc.

also I recently learnt that if I was Yoruba I would have, according to tradition, been named abidemi which d name given to someone born in their father's absence. I have always known my father wasn’t there at the point of my birth and he wasn’t there most of the rest of my life but I’m not sure I would want to be labelled like that. To be honest I love the name abidemi and I mean no disrespect but looking at all the other weird names my mother could have gone for (i.e. sheniqua, danisha, ladonna, beyonce, Sunday, precious, godsent etc.) I am quite appreciative of what she settled on, even if it was by 'mistake'.

And that's why being called sweetie is absolutely, weirdly normal.

The first absolutely normal but weird thing about me... I use the phrase 'absolutely normal but weird'.

Under usual terms, this phrase makes no sense at all. To be honest it makes no sense if in unusual terms but that isn’t the essence of the phrase.

OK let me try and clear things up, the majority of you would have read this sentence and asked yourself what mental asylum I have escaped from but, a small minority will have understood that I meant that as odd as this quality of mine might be, its what makes me human and unique as a creation of god. I am probably just as normal as any other human in that I have two hands two ears and a nose (as an African I may or may not have extensively large nostrils but that is not the primary concern here lol), I have a brain that use similar psychological processes on a day to day basis as any other tom dick or harry and I have a similar range of emotions as anyone else. The point I am trying to make however is that the most common thing about every human being, the one thing we all have in common, the singular thing that probably makes so 'human' is the fact that we are all different.

OK to extend my point further I would like to point out that we all have very unique fingerprints, everyone knows that, they are like the bar code of human beings. As a matter of fact if too many of your skin layers were to peel off at once, in the unfortunate case of you placing your hand in a fire and scorching yourself raw to the flesh for example, your new skin would have a different print, the shape of the 'swirls' in your print will stay the same but you will essentially have a new finger print.

We also know that we are made up of strings of DNA which by 'chance' (arguable but I wouldn’t want to alienate any atheists reading my blog) happen to have been arranged like that, surprisingly again, none of these strings are EVER identical and this is why we can understand medical conditions by examining DNA, we can apprehend offenders of the law because of the uniqueness of our DNA. I guess what I am trying to say is that our oddness is exactly what has brought humanity to its grade of civilisation. Its because every human has a unique way of trying to fulfil his or her unique dream.

Being weird is perfectly normal to humanity, that is what our race is based on, we thrive on weirdness. Sometimes it might cause a negative reaction but essentially we are all a little weird so maybe we just need to understand and embrace that fact.

And that is why using the phrase 'absolutely normal, but weird' is very weirdly normal. X