FOR THE FUTURE OPRAH WINFREYS...

Oprah Winfrey
Source:Twitter

This piece could easily have been titled For the future Joyce Meyers since these two great women have similar growing-up stories to tell. But I’m sticking with Oprah Winfrey for two reasons- she’s black (yeah this is my own flavour of racism, sue me if you can *tongue out*) and she just clocked the beautiful age of 60 two days ago so what better time to pay her a tribute than now? But I admire Joyce Meyer a great deal, her books are always a favourite read and I look forward to writing about her (or her book) someday.

We all know Oprah Winfrey, don’t we? The 2^nd richest black woman alive (our own Folorunsho Alakija overtook her as the richest black woman late last year), the richest black American in the 20^th century, one of the most influential woman in the world, etc. etc. are what most of us know her for. Some of us may also know that she was raped at the age of 9. But very few know that she birthed a son (who died shortly afterwards) when she was 14, she had a mum who didn’t care very much about her but shipped her off from time to time to go and live with her grandma, she had a lot of emotionally abusive relationships wherein the guys made her believe she was extremely lucky to have them and she didn’t believe in herself and was soooo low on confidence. All these were Oprah before she decided she was tired of the status quo, dared the odds, took her destiny in her own hands and gained fame- and consequently, wealth.

There are a lot of ladies out there in the pre-famous Oprah situation now. Some of us are in very physically or emotionally abusive relationships with douche bags that we know will still dump us anyways, but we are hanging in there with the hope that things will turn around  for the better one day; some of us only see ourselves as good housewife candidates and so try to be present at every vigil, crusade, conference and seminar where the subject of meeting/hooking our destined husbands in treated and prayed about; some of us don’t even see ourselves as good or beautiful enough to be married by any man so we don’t bother ourselves too much about looking good- “after all no guy will notice me.”- but just concentrate our efforts on something we feel we’ll be better at, like being over-active in church or rapidly advancing in our careers. Bottom line is that we are not very happy or fulfilled in the façade we are putting up with right now. We wish to be in beautiful relationships with real guys who treat us as the queens we are; we would like to follow that career path we like and do them Masters and PhDs while we are it; we prefer the headache of fasting and praying to choose the right man from a queue of suitors and we would most certainly prefer the beauty and satisfaction of having the best of both marriage and career lives. So what are we doing about these wishes naa? Abi we are still sitting down in one corner waiting for a miracle to happen? Get your acts together girl, these wishes come to those who go out and do something about them.

There’s this beautiful lady I know who has been in a very chaotic relationship. It would have been better if the guy (who always behaved like he was a God-sent gift to women) treated her less than a woman rather than less than a human. But for some reasons which I still haven’t been able to decipher, this lady stuck to the guy like a bug while he emotionally abused her at will. As a result, the lady’s confidence wasn’t anything to write home about and she constantly looked down on herself. After a recent outing where the guy totally ignored her but instead focused on his friends-male and female alike, she immediately suffered some very serious depression while we (her friends) rallied frantically to provide as much love, care and consolation as possible. So you can imagine my surprise and elation when I asked her recently about our ‘sent-from-heaven’ friend and she said she’d broken up with him, deleted his numbers and messages and blocked him on BBM, Facebook and WhatsApp. At first I thought, “Na today? You’ve done that before naa but went back to him when he muttered a very silly apology.” But her next words planted the seed of writing this piece in my mind. She said “Chima you know I don’t have very many friends and I don’t even like to have many friends, the few I have are okay for me and they treat me like gold. So why should I be in a relationship with a guy I wouldn’t even consider as a friend in the first place? I thought deeply about it yesterday and it didn’t make a single sense to me.” I was like, “Wowwww, my friend is finally reasoning like the smart lady that she is.” We all expected her to be downcast for a long time but under three days of that humiliating experience, she was shining, smiling brightly and back to her charming self again. My friend handed over the key to her happiness and fulfilment to a douche bag and now she’s taken it back from him and living her life to the fullest. She’s finally concentrating on her job, starting up her pet project and going on dates. She’ll kill me for this but she has finally started seriously considering that cute dude that has been on her matter for almost two years now. I’m already hearing the wedding bells ring, haha.

You too can dear. Oprah Winfrey did, my friend did so why can’t (or rather, why shouldn’t) you? We can’t keep allowing the opinion or behaviour of others- who incidentally, may be friends, lovers or family- tie us down. We gotta loosen that tag of under-achiever, not-smart-enough, not-beautiful-enough people or society place on us and be what we want to be. I was chatting recently with a colleague when I mentioned that I wanted to do my masters in IT Security and he was like, “Hahaha…why do you want to do IT Security? It’s a manly thing and you’ll look too geeky doing it.” I swiftly countered him with, “But ladies that wear coveralls and helmets and go to the rig are not seen as doing a manly job because it brings in the dough right?” Of course that effectively silenced him and he later revealed to me that he wanted to study the same IT Security but didn’t register in time therefore he had to settle for another course. Please never forget to remember this always: people who have never done or don’t succeed at a thing will always discourage you from doing it, it will be wise to hear them out but still follow the leading of your heart like Oprah did.

No successful person had success thrown down to him or her from the skies; they worked hard at it in spite of the ‘well-meaning’ discouraging voices around them. They made tasty lemonades out of the nasty lemons life threw at them. We celebrate them now and wish to be like them but we wouldn’t get there if we stay within our comfort zone, believing that what we have now is the best there’s ever gonna be. You are in an abusive relationship and hoping things will get better? Kindly pick the remaining shreds of your dignity and leave, sparing him neither a second glance nor thought. But please don’t hate him because the effort you’ll put into that will be way more than just forgiving him and moving on. You got a dream project? Go right out there and execute it. I’m not saying it’ll be easy; I’m only prodding you to steadily give it a try, falling and rising as many times as will be necessary to get the job done. After all, what have you got to lose? You are the novice and people don’t expect you to win anyways. But if you start living out the real you without any façade, you’ll attract your type- both friends and suitors.

 I decided quite a while ago that I won’t let people’s negative opinion of the good things I wish to do deter me from doing them, I have tried to a large extent to shut out the negative voices around telling me that I won’t succeed, and I am succeeding. I’m a looooong way from getting there, but I’m glad I’m no longer in the hesitation or procrastination stage. So, dear future Oprah Winfrey, the time is now. The world is waiting for you to manifest what has been reposed in you by the Creator, so what are you waiting for? Step out and get going biko. I’ll see you at the top, deal?