What Do You Look Forward To?
The week has been super busy. The Jollof road team at Zikoko left Nigeria and will be travelling through 14 countries in West Africa by road. Wild, no?
This week, I acknowledged that I survive by having something to look forward to at each point in time. It's like looking forward to the weekend, but deeper and perhaps more fulfilling. I'll use practical examples in case these don't make any sense:
At the start of this week, I started to look forward to Wednesday, Thursday, the weekend and then next Tuesday (a public holiday which I've been looking forward to since September started, lmao.) On Wednesdays, I attend an evening service at Covenant Christian Centre (still shocking because I would never have pictured myself as a weekday-church person six months ago.) I like the service for the worship and praise session, and the sermon, which is usually practical life stuff. Yesterday's was simply about the different ways in which people love, and how it's important not to compare expressions of love. Today, I looked forward to spending the evening at my old office, Ouida for the monthly open mic session. This weekend and Tuesday, I'm looking forward to doing some writing and then hanging out with Tobi.
Sometimes, my sense of anticipation is as simple as looking forward to wearing a certain dress or new shoes and the nice sticky-sweet feeling that new things make me feel — and vain as it might sound — getting compliments about them. Or cleaning my room, arranging my clothes, eating pounded yam after a week of dieting, etc.
Why?
I'm not sure if this is a healthy coping mechanism, but I've identified that it's a coping mechanism, a necessary one. I'm an advocate of staying and existing in present time, feeling all the range of emotions instead of blotting them out and having them resurface as three-head demons in future. I try to do this as much as I can, and I don't think this anticipation negates it. Perhaps only to the extent that the present can be very bloody annoying and keeping your mind on things to come, either in short or long term, can give you the strength to keep things moving. A bit like hope? Sometimes or maybe most times, it's like rewarding myself. If I go through this week of hard work, then I can rest all weekend; if I eat healthy all week, I can treat myself to a chicken pie on Sunday afternoon. When I don't have anything to look forward to (in the near future) I start to panic, lowks. This sorta reminds me of the bad hormonal weekend I had. Only thing I looked forward to was going to see Tobi and venting.
(Right now...)
ASIDE
How weird is it that I like super busy days? It's more of a love-hate thing, because I can't read or write at times like this. My only breaks are sleep and a bit of Twitter. Still, I love them because they allow me focus and measure productivity.
Three stories: Most of our mind can’t tell fact from fiction, a woman explores her first queer relationship in this story and language doesn’t depend on consciousness. XO