HABITS
Today I woke up at 5 a.m. Not because of the sound of my alarm that I didn’t set telling me that it is morning already, but because of the dreamlike Imaginations I have in my sleep where I do everything that I’m supposed to do in real life but haven’t gotten around doing them thanks to my not so good friend, “Procrastination”. But I didn’t leave my bed or take the cozy cover off my body. Infact, I stayed in bed till 8 a.m. listening to music and scrolling through my Instagram feed.
I never really used to stay in bed that long after waking up. Infact when I was in secondary school, i got out of bed almost immediately I woke up and I’ll be everywhere else but my bed. But I got admission into the University when I was 18 and my first roommate never left her bed unless she had an important class to attend. She lays in bed all day, replying whatsapp messages and only gets up for either bathroom breaks or food which she will bring back to her bed and eat without brushing her teeth.
We didn’t get along well and I didn’t like her but I started spending more time in bed, too tired to get up and go shower or even brush my teeth. I stay in bed till I start feeling the not so gentle jabs of hunger in my tummy then I decide that I had no other choice than to prepare a quick breakfast and satisfy my hunger without brushing my teeth.
And just like that, I learned a character and made it a habit for over a year. This little trip down memory lane made me realize how much impact the people we come in contact with indirectly or directly have in our lives. It starts with the little things like how you pout your lips when you’re sad to how you fry your eggs to the big things like how you dress and express emotions. This made me start thinking about everything I do or did in the past that was influenced by someone else.
I dotted my I’s with circles and wrote my D’s in angles because Onyinyechi in secondary school had a HANNAH MONTANA book where Miley Cyrus, the actress that plays HANNAH MONTANA writes in different hand writings and Onyinyechi felt that the handwriting with the I’s dotted with circles were cool so I decided that if she thinks they are cool then they are definitely cool. That is how the circle dotted I’s became a part of my handwriting for over 7 years of my life till I became too lazy to complete the circle so now it’s a comma. The angled D’s left earlier than that but it had a good run.
I said “BOOM” whenever I wanted to say something my listener might not be expecting or when I got to the best part of my story and i remotely learned this from my friends in my 2nd year in the University. Should’ve been something I only say when talking to my friends but I started saying it to outsiders who didn’t understand the need for the extra razzmatazz. Their reactions whenever I said the word contributed to the early departure of the word from my vocabulary.
I yawned and stretched on my bed wondering if this will be one of those mornings where I spend most of my time thinking about Irrelevant things then I moved my braids away from my back and spread it across my pillow so I don’t lay down on it and I realized that this little act too was learned from my first roommate in the University who spoke about how she could go to bed with large and long braids without tying it up or wearing a hair bonnet.
Why am I writing this? Well, it’s because I find it fascinating how the little habit you believe go un-noticed is being emulated by the girl that lives across the street that you don’t even know exist but she has watched you exhibit this character over and over again and has unconsciously emulated it and made it a habit.
Triumph says “I love you to the moon and back” to express how much he loves someone and I started saying it too because there is a great distance between the earth and the moon and back again so if I say I love someone to the moon and back then the love must be great.
A friend once called me a carefree person because I do whatever I want without caring about what people will say, as long as I’m comfortable and it makes me happy then I’m good. But I learned this from Valerie who shaved half of her hair to do a hair style Rihanna had on in 2010 because she really wanted to and didn’t care about the fact that so many people on the road gave her nasty looks and called her “crazy”. She still walked around with her head held high and took pictures to show off her beautiful hair before shaving it all off.
Cynthia never fails to remind us how beautiful she is and even gets into arguments with people to prove her beauty. Did I learn this? Yes! Will I get into arguments with people to prove my beauty? No!
Favour is never shy to speak up and show you who she really is. She will yell at a stranger who thinks it’s okay to call a girl ashawo because of a disagreement and she would spend all day in the room in her birthday suit, strutting around the room comfortably. I can’t strut around the room comfortably in my birthday suit but I can definitely yell at a stranger who thinks it’s okay to call a woman ashawo because of a disagreement.
We learn little habits from strangers unconsciously like I learned a hair styling technique from a girl that walked into the cyber café with two braid in front her head and the rest up in a ponytail.
I write this for the unknown boy who thinks his walls are high and his believes impenetrable but doesn’t realize that he stopped wearing his favorite striped T-shirts and switched to just black Tees because a boy in his class wears only black Tees.
It doesn’t matter the kind of relationship that exist between two individuals before learning can take place. It’s not just what we’ve been through that makes us who we are but who we’ve come in contact with.
So maybe one day, when you hold the door for a stranger, remember you learned this from another stranger who held the door for you when you walked into your apartment complex in a bad mood after a bad day at work.
