Decembizzy

Jingle Jingle

Would you rather have the rush of December or the despondence of June?

As I write this the entirety of the Nigerian creative space is frenziedly trying to tie up knots. As the end of the year draws near, we’re all trying to meet up deadlines and prove to ourselves and loved ones that we’re not failures and we chose the right path.

December particularly has always been a difficult month for me; the year’s report card, and mine has never been stellar. If anything my failures tend to stick out more, I remember this one December I spent a significant amount of time inebriated and crying because of some insecure reason I’m not sure I remember nor want to, but that’s just to paint a picture.

I’m not sure I even liked December until I became an adult, and started to make a reasonable amount of money for myself; it always reminded me how much of a dependant I was; how everything was so rushed and superficial; how consumerist we were as a nation; how ephemeral life is and could be; how sad those lives seemed that we had to use this one month to excuse the sadnesses of the year…

Everything happens in December; things change but stay the same, and as I, and a multitude of persons rush, nay struggle, to put a nice little ribbon on our 2025 existences—shared and individual—I find myself at an impasse: Do I give a damn or not?

My identity has sort of been ‘structed on the idea that I am free-giving in my ability to not care, to navigate the world as though unaffected, and while this may be true in some regard, I find it to be hopelessly, unfortunately inapplicable in this one. How do you not care when people are taking about auditors and audits and EOTY this and that and all you have to show for your 365 days are your measly dealings? your cheap tiny affectations and your ‘not-so-little’ achievements? How do you not care when it feels like you are out of league in a sport you didn’t even know you were playing?

I went to a party once, a few years ago, that I’m not ashamed to say I wouldn’t have gone to if I hadn’t started making money. It was a ‘reunion’ of my old school mates (high school if you’re American, Secondary if you’re normal) and although everyone had a good time for it was quite the soiree, a part of me seemed to believe that that could only occur because a significant proportion didn’t have to look over their shoulders wondering if someone were sizing them up, or down.

The post-high school rhetoric is an exhaustive and exhausted one—we all want to know what happened to the other person after graduation and such and such—but the mere fact that we were all in such precarious positions in all our lives made it seem more ecstatic, the party that is. We all needed a fresh breath of air after what had seemed like a long dusty year that no one seemed to bother how much someone else was making or what they were doing with their live. I know I didn’t. We did but no one seemed to care in the moment.

December makes me sad, or at least it used to; it used to be the culmination of all my fears, sadness, pain and insecurity; confusion not included, that’s for September and October, but as this particular December rolls along and over us all, I’m pleased to say I don’t care, let the balls jingle

P.S:

I wrote this in one take, almost at the same time it took you to receive and read it, Happy Holidays, don’t do drugs 💜