'Mystery Girl'

A lot of my friends find hard to believe I ever suffered depression. If you meet me now, you’ll probably concur with them.

My main problem then was my self esteem. I looked at a lot of people with an eye of complexity and found it easy to feel inferior around people.

As a child I was never deprived of my basic needs but somehow I grew up to see every other person’s possession as a need. I had a serious war going on inside me as every part of me battled for acceptance.

Initially I thought introversion was a quick solution to this problem. I considered that if I kept to myself, people will get interested in me [that's one really stupid thought]. As much as the decision kept me out of trouble in school, it stole my entire school and early teenage experience from me. Like I never thought, people were afraid of me and a lot of people found me boring but it still didn’t keep me from playing the ‘mystery girl’ [favour usifo will understand this].

It was in keeping to myself that I started writing poems and like you would expect, every one of those poems were about things I didn’t have, feelings I very much wished to express and people I admired. My poems had this passion of anger and hatred coated with the words. I always felt deprived of something, yet I wasn’t sure of what it was.

One many occasions I planned to run away from home because I thought my parents loved me too much that even when they knew I was a jerk, they were ready to stand by me. I felt it was my job to save them the stress and get out of their lives for good. On days I felt a little in place I wrote letters to myself describing how much I hated myself and live itself.

One person kept me going and gave me a reason to live all through this period. It was God and even up till now it is God still. I don’t understand why he kept encouraging me when my problem was as a result of a decision I made myself but all the same He is the only person I was at peace with. I found rest whenever I prayed and an unexplainable happiness in his presence at all times. Everyday I read the bible it talked to me and referred to my situation like it was all that mattered.

Only very few Christians around me understood God well. Many of them went to church because there was no where else to be on Sunday morning. The few that knew what they were into had a certain beauty that radiated from them. They took life easy and bordered little about their problems and when I asked them why they took life very easy they simply said ‘cast your cares upon the lord and he will give you rest’ or ‘all things work together for the good of they that believe in God’. I also noticed that when I tried to annoy them a little, they never expressed the magnitude of anger I expected them to. There was something special about them and the experience I was having with God at that time confirmed his existence.

I realized that all that was written in the bible was true and I even experienced some the miracles it talked about in my life. As soon as I accepted to know God, everything about me changed. I started to love more and feel loved, I begun to have real friends, when I felt troubled I just told God about it and I felt better, depression left me, I started loving everyone in my family and life became worth living.

Knowing God has not erased all the challenges and problems in my life rather it has given me all that I need to get pass them. Trying to understand God is an endless task but if you let Him teach you about Himself, then you will be able to know Him better. No one knows you better than you know yourself. Even if your confused about yourself like I was [you may still think am confused if you know me now], no one knows how deep that confusion is better then you know.

I still don’t understand God perfectly yet but the little I know is so big I don’t even know how to explain it enough. We know God, not by our wisdom but by the so called foolishness we preach [first corinthians 1vs 21]

I rest my case…