Rebel 2022. Official Cover Illustration For Sir Pappy Newsletter.
Rebel: The Mania Of Anxiety.
“They say that trauma affects not only the brain, but the body too…”
An explosion, a scream - hers, mine. Oyin’s cries. An echo. The reflection of fire in her eyes. My legs a gallop to safety.
Essay.
The Abrahams have seven children of different age groups. Pre-teen, teenage, and adult children. Temi, one of their daughters, is my age mate. We went to the same high school and were in the same class. Temi was in the art class, and I was in the science class.
I admired the Abrahams because they had gifted children, and I liked to be around them. I thought I could learn a thing or two from them or perhaps covet their gifts by association. They were family friends. One day, I used Rachel Abraham, an older sister to Temi as an excuse to go to their house.
All my life I have known what it is to be shy, and it didn’t help that I needed to be around other people. I was determined to act like the other kids or more precisely, hide because I have always known that I was different. I chose to be a wallflower, a background thing, and yet self-conscious of my every move.
It was the Blackberry era, and my grandmother had sent me one from Lagos through my mother. In the home of the Abrahams, I became one with the couch on which I sat. I was a piece of rigid furniture that had eyes; busy on my phone like the rest of the kids, I had my first panic attack in their house. I was fifteen. I now forget what led up to it but the feeling of that memory stays with me. It was an attack in my mind that manifested physically as a pain in my chest.
This is why in the spark of something as beautiful as a Sunday morning, I can be generally stunned into anxiety. There are ugly things not said that can surround the unknown - the war in Ukraine - terrorists in Mali, news of that boy taken to rehab, a primary school bombing in Kano State, an explosion in Kogi State, the oil refinery in Aba, the religious stampede in Port-Harcourt, news of the PDP primary elections, the massacre during Sunday mass, news of the APC primary elections.
“Higher”, the fifth track by Nigerian artist Temilade Openiyi, from her EP, “For Broken Ears” is a three-minute and sixteen seconds plunge into melancholy. It is impassioned, yet transcending. “Tell me why you're crying now/ kini big deal?” Tems sings in the first line of the track. The lyric is both a dirge and a question that belittles pain. The song gives a sense of ascending into a triad realm - peace, longing, and hope. You can hear these themes and feel them as the background voices echo “Higher / Higher / Higher.”
In Owo, where the faithful worshippers gathered, the pages of the Bible got soaked in blood. The temple became a synonym for a gravesite. I wonder if the choir was singing when the ricochet of bullets tore through their throats. A cacophony. A suspended Hallelujah. Screams. Manic panic, mass hysteria. The congregation of shock and confusion, and the name of Jesus punctuated by triggered shots into eternal blackness.
“When I found you on the ground you were dying / Now you come into my yard uninvited,” Tems sings in another line from Higher.
Narrating how the incident happened, Benjamin Ozulumba, a 49-year-old timber merchant, told Vanguard: “When we were about to close, we just heard gunshots within the compound of the church. Before we knew it, they started shooting everybody and they threw dynamites. I was shot in the leg. I lost my mother in the attack, she was over 70 years old.”
The composition of Higher is a naked harmony of simple keyboard keys, bass guitars, and a stark voice that calls you in so deeply. At some point it feels like an immersion—I have made it my repeat song when everything feels chaotic. Ironically, it is a chaotic song with the opposite effect—this song is about death, a cry for help.
I first heard Tems in my second year at the University. I was in my hostel with my roommate, Demilade. My music taste is largely influenced by him. Demilade made us listen to a lot of alternative sounds including Show Dem Camp and the others while we sat idly in our room, read our lecture notes, cleaned the room, or got ready for classes. We lived in what is possibly the most remote school environment. It is about forty-five minutes to one hour away from Ilorin. Malete, with the worst network reception, trees alive with bats, hot sultry days, its freezing harmattan nights, and thick foggy mornings. We had just made a pot of our regular spaghetti; we were eating and trying not to make much of our miserable experience that semester. It was either that or rice mixed with tomato paste and scotch bonnet peppers, popularly known as ‘ata rodo’. When Demilade played Mr. Rebel, it resonated. I felt a budding rebelliousness in my spirit.
Perhaps, this was because I had just entered my rebellious phase. My church attendance was on a steady decline in the months leading to that moment in Malete, where I had searched for God in a school fellowship where I was an usher and a bible study teacher. I had found my way through a commitment to become one of the fellowship executives.
This was before a series of demented anxiety hit me. I had started to feel people watching me. I imagined them saying things. They were, but most of it was in my head. Suddenly, I talked myself into believing that I wasn’t standing well while ushering people into the church and I wasn’t teaching bible study well. Anxiety is a ticking bomb, and it can blow up everything. I remember falling sick with a cold that made me miss a few services. I also convinced myself that nobody noticed. Delusion. Before I recovered from that, my pastor in Lagos lost his daughter. I think she slept and never woke up. I am not sure now. A bad cold, depression, and anxiety do not mix well. I fell. It was also the period I started to hate my body too… “People who are anxious are always monitoring their bodies.”
As I write, I am not listening to Temilade Openiyi’s track, Mr. Rebel. I no longer need it to convict me. Last month I got a piercing on both ears. “Rebel, are you there? / Are you still in the darkness?.”
Where am I? Am I still in the darkness? Perhaps. Tems, I do not know. I mean to say that I am not where I was. If you are asking about the darkness, I have learned to sit with it. Can you run away from your mind?
In researching for this essay, I came across a Vogue interview with Kendall Jenner. In the first episode of Open-Minded, in unpacking anxiety, she compares it with the feeling of death, “Sometimes parts of my body will go numb and it can be really, yeah, intense and scary.”
During CNN’s coverage about the Owo attack, it was reported that "The attackers came in motorcycles and started shooting sporadically. At least 28 people were killed," an eye witness said.
The anxiety is spreading like cancer. People are going to pause before they leave their homes or take a walk, go to school, or out of religious habit; the mosque, church, or perhaps Fela’s shrine. While the rest of us used to be nonchalantly removed from these horrors, sadly, daily, it hits closer to home. The psychologist and professor of psychology, Dr. Ramani Durvasula, who talked with Kendall, said it is clinically diagnosed as significant anxiety when people are “more uncomfortable out of the house because dealing with the big unknown makes them physically uncomfortable.”
Anxiety attacks and the process of dying are similar. In both, you are struggling for your life. A victim of the Owo attack identified as Margaret described the fear of death like this, “My life is shattered. My breath is failing, I can’t breathe properly; God please help me. I am getting tired, please nurse help me, don’t allow me to die.”
In the same Vogue interview, Kendall Jenner, speaks of feeling a need “to be rushed to the hospital” because her “heart is failing.” Anxiety is a delusion that sends signals to your brain; it triggers a 'flight-or-fight' response whether or not the danger is about to happen… “I can't breathe and I need someone to help me.”
“If you thought I was disturbed before…” Here, in the opening lines of “Interference” the first song on the EP “For Broken Ears”, Tems speaks to someone who perceives her to be troubled. “Baby boy, I'm gon' disturb you now. / Disturb you / Disturb you / Disturb you / Disturb you.” There is an acceptance of restlessness and a promise to wreak this internal disturbance on this person. It is a threat.
I read the book “The Perks of Being A Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky in the year of my falling. The main character’s name is Charlie. The whole book is about him writing a series of letters to an unnamed person, who he trusts. Charlie has lost the people closest to him. Michael, his best friend died by suicide. His aunt Helen died in an auto crash. She had gone to get him a present on his birthday, which was also Christmas day. He somehow finds a way to convince himself that these tragedies are his fault and things could have been different. When showing up outside, especially in school; he feels alone, bullied, and misunderstood. Eventually, Charlie meets Patrick, a senior in one of his freshman classes. Patrick introduces him to his step-sister Sam who Charlie develops a crush on. They also introduce him to a group of misfits who make him comfortable despite his social anxiety. Around them, he doesn’t feel self-conscious and they don’t make hateful comments about him. In the group, he meets Mary Elizabeth who is quite a rebel. She has a tattoo and belly button ring, she's a teenage American Buddhist. She tells Charlie a bit about Zen and how "it makes you connected to everything in the world." She's the opposite of Charlie, who is detached from reality, and constantly in his head. It is with Elizabeth he explores his sexual identity for the first time. Charlie results in smoking pot, social exclusion, and compulsive masturbation as a way of escapism.
When writing of anxiety as an interference, I know it to be a disturbance of the mind and it upsets every other thing. Nothing is safe; not friends, not faith, thoughts, not even clothes. It is Madness.
One Sunday, I made a sore attempt to attend the fellowship in Malete after weeks of absenteeism. I left the service five minutes later because I was not comfortable in my clothes. I was utterly disturbed, a feeling that followed me like a shadow from my hostel. I had hoped that it would disappear. Instead, it lingered and I couldn’t survive that service. Again, I felt watched. Stifled. I wanted to escape my body, my thoughts.
In “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower,” in one of Charlie’s anonymous letters, he writes, “I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist.”
Sleeping makes everything bearable. In trying to live, I escaped the church to the comfort of my room, to my bed, and lay there, and cried myself to sleep. I felt sorry for myself. Body shame. When I looked into the mirror, I hissed repeatedly. I was having vivid flashbacks of the things that were said and done to me. It didn’t help that I was bullied in Malete too. I wished I was someone else. Self-hatred. When Charlie gets anxious, he tries “not to think” and wants everything to “stop spinning.”
Another stand-out song from the EP, “For Broken Ears'' is the song ''Free Mind”. It describes what fear and anxiety feel like for Tems. The song opens: “I said, "five in the morning," I wake up to fight…” I often describe the period of my maniac interference along these lines: waking up with severe heart palpitations, sleeping disorders (insomnia or excessive sleep), feeling sick with apprehension, avoiding large crowds, and abnormal social functioning.
I told my mother I planned to leave the fellowship but she begged me to stay. As expected my church attendance did not improve, and neither did my social anxiety. It spread across other places I was expected to show up to. Including school. Sometimes, during lectures. I would start to hyperventilate, and I felt claustrophobic like the room was closing in. I felt fear, felt watched. Anytime I felt this way, I left school for the whole day or didn’t go at all.
Some people noticed. A course-mate approached me one day in a near-empty class where the lecturer did not show up. ‘You’re acting different,” he said. How would I explain to a total stranger that I was battling a disorder? I couldn’t. In a cold voice, and with a face so expressionless, I asked, “How do I normally act?” I knew the truth. Everything was wrong but I had to deflect. It was the only way.
In the course of my interference, a party was organized by a creative party animal nicknamed Kodak. I planned to attend. This was supposed to be my first real party. There was the promise of booze, coloured and distracting lights, drugs, and cheap lap dances. When I got there, it was a crowded place. A party is a place where people let themselves go. A place where you can be yourself without judgment and forget about your worries. Yet, I stood rooted and watched people under colored lights. But like Tems sang in the chorus of Free Mind, my mind was “running to the other side” and when it is “time to live my life” then anxiety “tries to take me out.”
Because I'm six feet and two inches tall, I stood out in the middle of that crazed crowd. I felt seen. The more I thought about how I was expected to participate or dance, the more I became sick to my stomach. Then it began. The panic attacks. My anxiety is an interference that gets in the way. I went outside to get fresh air and never went back inside. “The fear in my mind is a warning. /Praying to the one you rely on, I've been wandering all day. / I try to be fine but I can't be, the noise in my mind wouldn't leave me.”
Dr. Ramani Durvasula, in discussing the symptoms of anxiety with Kendall said, “People who are socially anxious, classically are afraid that not only are people looking at them, that they're criticizing. Judging them. Judging them and that the socially anxious person feel like they're doing judgeable things…”
“It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book,” Charlie narrates in his letters. In this book, Stephen Chbosky addresses Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and how it can trigger social anxiety and other problems. To function properly, the main character resorts to unhealthy coping mechanisms.
A sense of impending doom mounts, when Temilade Openiyi goes on a repetitive chant, “I might be falling deep. / I might be falling deep. /I might be falling deep. / I might be falling deep. You just know when you are about to spiral. This time, it was Senami’s call that triggered my falling. She started with, “I don’t know how to tell you this…” My friend, Nkechi, had died unexpectedly from malaria. That day, I banged my head into the wall repeatedly and with my back on the wall, I slowly fell to the ground. She had complained of a headache, and she never woke up. “Tell me now what you need. I've been going to God. / When I'm all in my mind, I might be falling deep. /Falling deep.”
Like Charlie, I am a wallflower but I am also a rebel with a loud voice. I was fulfilling the words of the prophecy through Tems. I am a wild and living disturbance. Disturbing. Disturbing. Disturbing. I am still Disturbing. In trying to escape the gunmen a victim of the Owo attack said, “On getting to the back yard, I saw a ladder and escaped through the ladder.”
I found weed and cigarettes as a ladder - it was a route to escapism. Although it didn’t last long; I preferred cigarettes. Once or twice a week, I chain-smoked three to four Rothmans. I spaced my smoking out because I was aware that Nicotine addiction is terrible, and I didn’t want to lose control over anything. Sometimes, in the space of three months, I had a stick when everything felt overwhelming. A concerned friend told me I was addicted. “But I am not”, I argued. Nicotine was the calm I needed.
One catchy line from “Free Mind” comes in the chorus of the song when Tems sings, “I try to get by but I'm burning. /And behind my mind, it runs. /All these thoughts have troubled me. /Fighting to give up my pain...”
In 2019, I was on a long break from school, it was before summer. I never smoked at home. That stayed in school. I suffered a major withdrawal between May and June of that year. At the time I didn’t know it but according to an online article, the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal can depend on your level of addiction. In retrospect, I figured the withdrawal was the cause of these symptoms: headaches, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, irritability, depression, and weight gain. In those dark months, I found another unhealthy coping mechanism. Food. Adele. I stuffed all my burning thoughts with it, with her songs.
“Gunmen shot at worshippers trying to run through the only two open sets of doors as the main entrance was locked.” Now we point to the church at Owo and call it gravesite, a waste, or sorrow. On another Sunday, the songs of a church will float into our windows and nothing is safe. Everything is trigger because anxiety is a gun. “And you fall and you run when you see my big guns. / Run around, run away as the rebel comes out.”
I admit, my ears are broken. I am constantly stunned into anxiety when I feel like I am living through it all over again; sights, sounds, smells, the explosion, fireworks or thoughts that remind me of traumatic events in some way.
“We heard a loud explosion and the ceiling fell on us. Even at that, they were still shooting at us. I crawled to the altar only to be bombed there by the attackers,” a victim of the Owo attack narrates.
A Kerosene lantern, 50 liters of petrol, and a Tiger Generator. It is the 8th of May, 2004.
Nineteen years later, and anxiety is not a death sentence anymore. Perhaps, this is the root - My mother undressing us for our evening bath - An explosion. A scream, hers, mine. Oyin’s cries. An echo. The reflection of fire in her eyes. My legs a gallop to safety.
The red flashbacks. The bang in my head I have been trying to quiet. I had run out ahead of her butt-naked, screaming, “Fire. Fire. Fire. My Daddy is in the Fire”.
My mother was behind me. Running. Her newborn, my younger brother in one hand, and her other hand holding the falling Iro from coming undone. Running naked and widowhood can be a synonym. It is a race of shame. The flames were urgent, angry. It followed closely on her heels as though it was trying to escape the confinement of our house on Olokodana street. A running fire? It is almost laughable. What was more dangerous? Our burning house or its vengeful singe?
The running fire had her husband in its belly. My father. And he wasn’t running as fast. Instead, he was still. Still. He stayed in the fire. He had confessed that he didn’t want to come out. Later, at the Ikeja General Hospital, when they broke the news to her, falling straight on her knees like a horse in the heat of a lost battle. She wailed, “Won ti so mi di opo.” They have snatched my covering, my husband. What is left, if not shame?
In a poem, Danez Smith, writes, “We go out for sweets and don’t come back,” and in the CNN report about the attack, “a boy who was selling candy at the entrance” was shot. He would not return home. A few weeks after the fire accident I was alone, trying to take a shit when a 60 watts light bulb exploded, sparking a trauma as hot as those flames. Maybe this is why my love is cold because people always leave. Nothing is permanent. I ran downstairs, outside the gate, down the street, past Mama Stella’s shop but I wasn’t getting candy. I did not return but my memories stay.
“Cry now from the side now, call my name. / Fall down when you see me, you know that. / You know that I won't stay for you.” This is what it is like - to call the names of our dead but they don’t answer. Maybe “dead is the safest” they have “ever been.” I press my ear to the ground. I imagine them whispering back, “I will wait for you, for you. / I will wait for you. / I will wait for you.”
Sir Pappy’s Newsletter Original Art by Shalem Alone. All rights © reserved by Sir Pappy & Shalem Alone.
This was so beautiful read, thank you for blessing us with your gift. And may the souls of the departed ones continue to Rest In Peace
Anxiety is indeed a ticking bomb that can blow up everything. A soul stiring piece. Welldone!