"Elan wakes up worrying too much..."
There is this weight-like pressure that Nigerian parents force on their first born kids (which can be a good thing most of the time, especially when it's sole objective is to pass responsibility across), but I don't know think we like to speak on the downside of this pressure. Anxiety.
Elan has been battling with chronic anxiety right from the age of 7. The kind of anxiety that he couldn't even speak to anyone about because he feared they'd see him as inadequate or plain silly for a complaining about the pressure his parents had been placing on him for years.
Sometimes, he told himself that it was a good thing, that it was a drive that would enable him work harder and eventually make his parents and younger siblings super proud, but Nigeria didn't sign an agreement with him and everything he tried to do either ended up pointless or useless. In fact, one one the things that compounded to his anxiety was the fact that his younger brother always seemed to be the one who made the smart decisions. He didn't ever talk about this—and sometimes, he never even liked to think about it, but when he couldn't help it, it broke him to pieces, especially when he knew that it wasn't the poor boy's fault for always knowing how to figure things out.
He turned to his brother on the bed and his lips curved into a weak smile at the innocent expression on his younger brother's face.
He just wanted to make money. That's what he felt he needed to get rid of the anxiety.
'I'm sure when I have my money—to be a first born will be a cakewalk.' He told himself one day while working on his assignment; he told me while trying to copy mine because he'd probably been worrying too much to concentrate on his school work.
People saw Elan as the chilled guy. The guy who had no worries. The guy who you could slap and get away with it, but what they didn't know was that the guy had grown numb with worry. Elan looked like worry and for some weird reasons girls were attracted to it but their funny part was that he still didn't care.
"Is it not money they'll still end up asking for?" He responded to me one evening when I pointed out a girl in our class who was shamelessly checking him out.
"One would look at you and think you were suffering," I smiled back in response and that was the weird truth because he wasn't suffering. He had everything—but a calm mind.
"My father's money is not my money," he would usually say. "I have 5 younger siblings and they'll all look up to me financially very soon," he said with a sight and I wanted to do desperately ask if whether they were paralyzed or if his parents had been diagnosed with terminal diseases (because I didn't understand why he would think his siblings would need him In the future when they weren't paralyzed and when his parents weren't dying anytime soon). I just kept my mouth shut to avoid sounding insensitive, plus he looked like he was pretty convinced with his ideology of life.
He rose up from his bed and started playing Rema's Calm Down. Music was the only temporary solution to his constant worrying (he liked to tell himself, because I didn't get the point of saying music was your escape card when you still worried whilst listening to it, but I guess it made sense to him).
He started doing a couple of push-ups when he heard his Dad's muffled tone from the thin wall between them. He stopped working out and stopped the music to listen to his father's conversation and from what he could gather from the conversation he knew that his father's siblings were calling him concerning his father's (Elan's grandfather) burial.
His father was also the first born and first boy in the family so the responsibility usually fell on him all the time. Elan still had his eyes closed to the wall when he felt someone touch him.
"Why are you listening on daddy's conversation?" Ivan his younger brother asked with sleepy eyes.
He waved him off and continued listening to his father complain about a family member that was giving them trouble with the burial arrangement. It almost seemed to Ivan like his elder brother was busy taking lessons on life—he just didn't understand why he chose to take it from someone else's book when he had his own life laid out for him.
"Just reduce the song, you're disturbing me—6 o'clock in the morning and you're already awake, it's only you that know what you're thinking about." Ivan hissed before disappearing into his dirty duvet that hadn't been laundered since it was given to him by their grandmother.
Elan threw his brother a look that said, "ignorant cow" before sticking his ear close to the wall. Ivan didn't understand what it meant to be a first born...he didn't know the pressure of being a first child. His thoughts and not mine.
After he had finally gathered all the negativity he needed to gather from his father's private conversation and fueled himself up with the unnecessary pressure he didn't need in his life, did a few more work out routines—with his earphones on this time, no one liked Ivan's fury.
He was completing his workout routine when Rema's Rave and Roses album stopped playing and as a notification from my humble self came in.
TEMI: ELAN YOU SAID I SHOULD WAKE YOU UP! WAKE UP OO! THE BUS ARRIVES IN AN HOUR!
ELAN: I BEAT YOU TO IT.
TEMI: YOU HAVE STARTED WORRYING ABI?
ELAN: BYE, WITCH!
He hit the send button and took a couple of breath to calm himself down before walking into the bathroom to begin another episode of worrying about things he couldn't change while he had his bath.
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the kids are depressed
Teen Fiction"The Kids are depressed" is a story of 20 Nigerian teenagers navigating through emotional and mental trauma
