C for Mental Health is a consociation of Nigerian students championing student mental health in Nigeria through meaningful discourse, advocacy and community engagement. Newsletters are by students for students!

You know what it means when you’ve dreamt about something your whole life, you’ll fail and still get back up time and time again. You tend to build this resilience towards failure, it’s rather subtle but it builds up after every experience.

Failure pushes you the most and helps with your growth more than anything else. So the story must continue. You’ve carved this vision of your future self into your mind, and you’ve basically worked towards this goal. Failure after failure, you still got back up, you felt as though you were going to give up, but guess what? After a day of sadness and sorrow, you wake up once more to go again. You may argue that it’s possession, while some may say it’s the necessary insanity to do something different. I agree with the latter, but that’s not really the point of this write-up.

It’s that cumulative effect—those hours, weeks, months, and maybe years of building yourself to follow a certain path. You’ve just built yourself to only succeed in that dream of yourself. That little boy is on a mission to conquer the stars and do the impossible.

A racecar driver I never met once said, “If there’s a gap and I don’t take it, then I am no longer a racecar driver.” Probably if it’s something I’ve wanted all my life, why not embrace it and embrace it with everything I have?

I had a conversation with a friend of mine about this journey into the unknown. I shared my sorrows and my burdens with him, I shared my dying flame. He pleaded that I was probably a beacon light to him, that I needed to keep going. I was inspired and I was motivated to keep pushing.

A few weeks later, I spent some time reflecting on who I was and why I was. I genuinely asked myself if my dream could still come true. Had I wasted the opportunity I had? Was it all too late? Would I join the same bus that I have feared all my life, that would say, “Oh, you’re the leaders of tomorrow”? I’ll be honest, I fell into a state of confusion. I wanted to be sad, but I wasn’t sure why, I wasn’t sure how. It was weird, but later on I understood.

A few days later, I read a post about time—that there’s no time limit to trying again, there’s no time limit to when you start your own journey. My great-grandmother told my aunt a proverb which she passed on to me. It goes like this: “When it’s your morning, it’s your morning.”

Out of that utterance of existential truth, I found peace and clarity. I realized that the version I had built up in my head was the only version that would give me peace. Nothing else that I would do would satisfy my unease. No matter how many years I failed, I’d keep going back, I’d try again till I get it—because that’s the version of myself that I want to be.

I don’t know your story, I don’t know where you wanna end up, I don’t know your dream. I only know mine. It’s too late to turn back now. There’s only one way out—I must win. That boy who’s on a mission to change the world must actually fulfill his mission, no matter what.

Hi, I’m Ifeanyi.

I express my struggles through my art, one of them being writing. I write about my struggles and my failures. I hope it’s relatable and you find healing in my words