By Ifeoma Akubue-Izundu
Reminiscing is an art. The pleasant kind that you sit on a cushion to perform at the end of the day, the year, academic career or any chapter nearing its end. Then, there’s the less comfortable kind—remembering and recalling—often done on wooden chairs or chipped blocks where the regret of missed opportunities and the ache of underachievement sit heavy on our backs. Sometimes, the pain stings more than memory itself.
Whenever we pause to reflect on our lives, it is most often about our experiences and our dreams; the past and the future. These form our personal stories. And because stories are meant to be told, some of our experiences are the kind we would want to tell while standing on the stage of a big auditorium, with an audience we can’t count cheering us with claps that immerse our souls in pride. While the rest, we desire to keep locked away from the prying eyes and eavesdropping ears of the world.
But what actually happens to the stories we don’t tell? The ones we tuck beneath smiles, skip during conversation with a wave of the hand? The ones we reduce to vague one-sentenced summaries—“It was fine”? Sometimes, the silence, the hurried replies, the one-word responses are products of years of restraints and trainings.
I know a girl, Ihechikara, 15, who once went for counselling from a priest some months to her Sixteenth Birthday. He was a friend to her family so it was easy to tell him she needed an audience with him. Ihechikara had stuttered and nearly choked from withholding the words.
She eventually said she recently had an abortion and needed help because she couldn’t forgive herself. Ihechikara is the one girl you would tell your children to imitate. She is the girl that embodied what a godly child is and should be. Who knew she was the mother of the child that was killed before birth in her womb? I know her too well because she existed in my imagination and was a major character in a short fiction I wrote in my little notebook kept solely for creative writings. Ihechikara never told the story to anyone after she grew up. She needed to maintain a perfect image for herself.
Many of us carry pieces of our guilt—sometimes less consequential and significant than an abortion—tucked away. We either try to silence the guilt or be successful in certain areas that diminish the sin.
I was in a charismatic fellowship where a ‘daddy’, while preaching, talked about how he was sexually loose and distanced from God while a student. However, he found Jesus and his life has been transformed. This isn’t a problem.
To the person I walked home with after the fellowship, I asked, “If I’m in sin and I met Jesus, can’t I share a testimony without waiting for when my life has been transformed all round?” She replied in the negative and said that testimonies were to inspire people and help them deepen their faith and so can only be taken from those who have realised their victory over sin and maximised it.
This is no different from societal operations. The public stage cannot be yours if you have not been found to be one who stands out in a niche. There must be some form of expertise. The stories told are just most often ones considered to have successful ends or likely to evoke pity. This brings me to the newsworthiness of our stories.
Any group of students seated in a classroom for lectures in the Department of Mass Communication, and would keep doing so for the next four years, would be taught about what makes news. The first sentence usually is “Not every event is news.”
That journalistic principle doesn’t just sit in journalism notebooks—it’s a lens through which society filters our stories. These elements that make an event one to be talked about are: significance, oddity, prominence, human interest, timeliness, proximity and conflict. Our personal stories are often judged by similar standards. If it’s not dramatic, chaotic, connected to a prominent person or contains any of the elements, it is ignored.
A recent law graduate of Nnamdi Azikiwe University went viral for not just bagging a first class degree, but also being able to excel at so many other activities which included holding multiple leadership positions, running her business, attending so many conferences and trainings. Her story evokes the question, “How did she do it?” It’s odd, impactful and evokes human emotions.
Another first class graduate of University of Nigeria Nsukka is, however, unknown by the world and relegated to the background and treated like a normal graduate. Another from Nile University is breaking social media and generating revenues from selling his story as a straight 5.0 CGPA student.
What happens to our world-stage experiences when we don’t talk about them? When we don’t tell them? It’s simple: the world defines us. They mould us into what they think we are and put us in the cage they think we fit in.
If one hides a habit and succumbs to the perfect image created by the parents, friends, mentors and whatever authority he is accountable to, he ends up being who they want him to be. Freedom begins from realising who we are.
Maybe the real tragedy isn’t that we failed, but that we buried the stories of our failure so deep, even we stopped believing they happened. Maybe our stories are still worthy of being told, if not to the world, then to ourselves. They deserve the pride of place in our hearts because we own them. We experienced them. Everyone is entitled to crafting their own story.
As you sit on the chipped cement block recalling past events, or sit on the cushion, reminiscing on what was, there are parts that make you smile and parts that make you cringe. You own them all. The difference in your experience and what makes it newsworthy is the angle.
A little girl that loved sitting on my laps to read out her novel once said to me, “I took meat from my mummy’s pot.” I asked her if it was ‘stolen’ or ‘taken’. She affirmed the former. I requested that she go back to her mom and report herself. She shook her head vigorously and teared up. Her mummy was going to flog her. I opted to go with her.
We explained, amidst the barrage of questions and ‘bombastic side eyes’, that the little girl was sorry. The little girl, on our way back to where we usually sat together, told me she would not have done so if I didn’t tell her to because she lacked the courage.
It reminded me of a post I saw on Twitter about the death of Judas Iscariot. It read, “He cared more about his shame than the forgiveness of Christ.”
What births great stories are the angles we think of them from, the little things we did that made the difference—even if just a little.
A delivery man has no story to tell until he opens a LinkedIn account and talks about the frustration of dealing with people and how he still has a smile.
We owe ourselves the right to remember honestly, to tell our stories in full—not just the headline-worthy victories, but the quiet battles and invisible scars. Because some of the most powerful stories aren’t told from stages, but whispered into journals, shared in saloons, or written in tiny little jotters we never publish.
So maybe, reminiscing isn’t just an art. Maybe it’s also rebellion. A refusal to let the world define which stories matter. A quiet insistence that even the stories we don’t tell—the ones buried under shame, fear, or ordinariness—are still stories. Still human. Still ours. And if no one ever claps, if no crowd ever cheers, if the only place they live is in the soft pages of our hearts or the silence of a sleepless night, then, that too is enough. Because we lived them. And that alone makes them worthy.
Ifeoma Akubue-Izundu writes from Awka, Anambra State
