Written by Idayat Jinadu
My earliest memories of friendships are of me and the six other kids I grew up with in my neighbourhood. If these memories were lined like books on a shelf or queued like a crowd at the ATM, the first one would be of my friends and I running through the unpaved road of our street. Some of the afternoons after coming back from primary school, we would fling our sandals and socks in unknown crevices of the house, do the same with school uniforms, and run out in just panties or a singlet (depending on what we wore underneath our uniforms to school that day) and begin our Olympics, running relay races on the street. I always finished last except for the times I ran alongside my younger sister, who was slower than I was. One time, one of us fell while running, and her entire body became bruised; she could barely walk. Yet, the next afternoon, she was there on the street with us, getting ready to run. Some afternoons, instead of running, we would roll black tyres from Okada that we got from god-knows-where (I can’t remember) down the same street. I finished in the top three for rolling tyres; I was fast with them!
The second memory would be of fetching water from the community well. My friends and I would carry buckets and run to the well, next to which a small stream ran. At the edges of the stream, there were several holes where crabs lived, and sometimes the crabs would come out, and we would pick them. Other times, we would dip our hands into the holes to pull out the crabs. We did it fearlessly until we witnessed an older boy from the next street, whom we were familiar with but didn’t play with, dip one of his hands into the hole. He pulled it out frantically with a yell in that instance. Blood trickled from a small but deep cut on his hand; the crab he was trying to capture defended itself and cut him with its pincer, which we called scissors. Since then, we became careful and approached the crabs with fear. Sometimes, we would wear rubber gloves to pick them. God, they were delicious. My mom would roast them over a charcoal fire and other times, boil them until they turned brown. There was nothing more pleasant than crunching the legs and scissors of a crab.
The third memory would be playing Ice and Water or Police and Thief with my friends. We used the house of two of us who were brothers. I was always caught. I turned into Ice the most often, and the police arrested me several times when I roleplayed as the thief.
The fourth memory would be when we would pour sugar on top of an evaporated peak milk tin, add kerosene to it, and light it on fire. In a second, it would harden, and then we would proceed to lick it. We called it Ekana Abacha (Abacha’s nail)—I don’t remember where the name came from but I know everyone picked it up. God. Looking back now, that was awful. How did we not fall sick?
Like that, the memories line up. Walking to school and walking back home in groups, uprooting cocoyam in other people’s farms to roast (we didn’t understand the word ‘stealing’ then), looking for snails in uncompleted fences after rain fell, playing in the moonlight, playing football, the time a lizard clawed my face, plucking cashews, fights, playing JACKPOT with my partner who didn’t see all the signs I made till I was called a suspect, acting like mummy and daddy and wasting my mom’s makeup to look like my role, going to the river to catch fish and washing clothes every Sunday, and on and on. Till the last day everyone came out to play but neither of us knew it would be the last.
I have these wonderful moments and memories of childhood friendship. Even though at that time, we didn’t particularly refer to each other as friends, we were friends. I was recently telling my mom that one thing I am grateful for is that I grew up in a neighbourhood where all the kids could play together. We were not caged; we would leave the house in the morning on weekends and come back in the evening dirty from head to toe from exploring the uncompleted buildings in the neighbourhood.
Then I grew up.
In 2016, I was fresh out of secondary school and expecting to gain admission into the university. I did. I had an immediate issue with accommodation: I paid the hostel fees thinking I would be automatically given a space in the school hostel, but it turned out I was required to take the receipt to student affairs to book a space for myself. I was relaxed at home, thinking I had a hostel ready, when my friend, with whom I attended secondary school and also gained admission into university, called me to say that space had finished in the hostel and asked where I was. I searched for tears in my eyes but couldn’t find any when I realised my foolishness.
I eventually got private accommodation outside of the school campus. It was a nice and comfortable hostel and was referred to as the best in the entire student area. I got a beautiful room there. Then, I left it to stay with friends in the school hostel that I had missed the opportunity to occupy.
And there began my journey of adult friendships.
I started staying in the school hostel with friends, leaving my comfortable hostel behind. In my defence, I wasn’t entirely familiar with the people at my hostel and couldn’t befriend them, including my roommate, who always had visitors. However, to be honest, this defence is weak because one of the points of going to university is the endless exploration of relationships. Instead, I stuck with my friend in the school hostel and befriended her friends too.
Let me mention that I stutter. I don’t remember stuttering as a child, but I recall stuttering as a teenager, and this continued into young adulthood. It also impacted my adult friendships.
As a person who stutters, there is a quiet expectation from people that I shouldn’t be loud. After all, stuttering is a disability and should be a source of shame to the individual. However, my father had raised me to be loud and opinionated. He bought books for me as a young girl and would eagerly ask me what I learnt from each book, how I perceived the characters in them, and who my favourite characters were. This upbringing made me a person who enjoyed talking about her experiences and her feelings and a person who assumed everyone, like her father, was interested in the things she had to say about the books she had read.
I still remember my shock the first time I was called talkative in a boarding house during my secondary school education. I was talking in the way I talked to my father at home, and I was told to keep shut. I had never been told I talked too much, let alone being told to keep shut. That experience is one of my first instances of shame. It was also a bit unusual for a person to stutter and talk too much; I guess it added to their determination to shut me up.
So I began to choose my safe spaces by how they react to my stutter and my talkativeness.
At the early stage of my adult friendships at the university, I was happy. The friends I made at the school hostel never made me feel like I stuttered. I felt seen. I felt like I belonged. I thought I had found a community. Then the problems started. Because I felt safe with them, as they accommodated my stutter, I went back to embodying the girl who read a lot, knew a lot, and had much to say.
This became an issue. My friends began saying I knew too much and made them feel dumb whenever I talked.
I was torn, as I had grown addicted to the safety I found with them. In fact, I was codependent on it (my father was shocked when I told him I was preparing for my matriculation not in the hostel he and my mother paid for but in a school hostel with friends I had been squatting with; his words were, “Idayat, these people would disrespect you,” and I disregarded his words because I was young, naive, and foolish). So because I didn’t want to lose these friends, as I didn’t think I could stutter freely elsewhere, I decided to shrink myself to accommodate how they felt about my brilliance. I became conscious of the things I said and how I said them; I didn’t want to make my friends feel dumb. I could stutter without shame in their presence, and I thought it was good enough.
Then I met a new friend.
We were only classmates who knew one another’s faces and names at first. Then one day, in 200 level, we were all waiting in class for a lecturer who didn’t seem like he would arrive, and I was hungry. There was a place not far from the class where I could get food, but I didn’t want to go alone. So, I turned to the nearest person beside me and asked if she could, please, follow me. I was surprised she said yes, and I was happy too. We went to eat and became semi-friends. The lecturer later showed up, and after the class, we met and talked and talked. I talked a lot with her. Afterwards, we became friends. I didn’t have to shrink myself around her. She never accused me of making her feel dumb when I shared things I had read about; in fact, she encouraged me to tell her more, and I could stutter freely in her presence.
This new friendship transformed me in ways I wasn’t even aware of. I could be myself so much that I saw the difference between love and mere accommodation for the first time in my life. This resulted in gaining a sense of boundaries and a new layer of self-worth I didn’t know I needed.
For the friends I had to shrink myself for, having boundaries that didn’t cater to their needs became a problem, and they informed me. They said I was proud and too full of myself. In retrospect, they could see that I was gaining a sense of self outside them. Before I knew it, I was back to square one. They could take me back because of the attachment I had for them from the time when I thought I would be cast out for being a stutterer; they let me in. So I couldn’t get past that act; I kept feeling like I was indebted to them.
For a long time, I was caught in between. On one side, I didn’t need to shrink myself and was free to stutter. On the other hand, I was shrinking myself because I thought I owed it to those people because they were the first to accept me.
Even radical feminism, which came like a Messiah into my life and freed me from toxicity, internalised misogyny, and all of the baggage, didn’t quite free me from that particular baggage of debt. I had to excruciatingly do so by myself, with the strength from feminism and the support of the wonderful women who are great friends to me.
Currently, I am 24 years old and I look forward to becoming 25 by June 16th. I used to be nervous about getting older because I thought staying young was the best way to be a person. I was constantly sad on my birthdays and didn’t look forward to the new year I was privileged to have been given. Looking back, I now know the reason I felt those ways on my birthdays is that I didn’t understand the concept of growth. I didn’t know what growth meant. I had shrunk myself so much that the thought of coming out for the sun subconsciously saddened me.
I didn’t understand that to be a person, a whole person, is to shed old skin and give space for new ones. It is to understand and accept that I don’t owe anyone anything for simply seeing me as a person. It is to understand that my first mistake was that I assumed I had to be taken in, I had to be accepted, I had to be seen by another and validated by another before I could do so for myself. It is to understand that while sometimes good enough is good enough, when it comes to matters of self, development, care, growth, and self-acceptance, good enough is not good enough; it has to meet the required standard of excellence.
I’m grown now, and I am still growing. I am excited to be 25 because I am looking forward to how much more grown I will be and to the person I will become. I have friends with whom I can be vulnerable (when I was heartbroken, I had A to call and cry with). I have friends with whom I can be undoubtedly happy. I have friends who always see me from the good side. I have friends who don’t mock my love for K-pop and Taylor Swift. I love them all, my friends.
I also know how to leave friendships now. Yes, they were nice to me and made me feel good, but I don’t have to feel indebted to that. I was nice to them too; I see my positive impact in their lives as well. When I detect that I have to try extra hard to be your friend without help from your side, I leave. I delete numbers and I move on. We were good together and you will always be a bright spot in my past. I value my emotions now and I pay extra attention to how I feel. No, you are not allowed to treat me this way.
I won’t pretend either that I’m not flawed and that my flaws haven’t forced an end to some of my past friendships. I regret my actions and wish I could have done better, and I have apologised. I know not to repeat such actions in the future.
I am happy to keep growing and to keep discovering my capacity to love and be loved.
About the Author
Idayat Jinadu is a brand strategist and PhD student working on the culture of waste disposal and its effect on environmental security for her dissertation. She is inspired by impact and wants to create things that matter for people who need them to be free, liberated, and who they truly want to be. She is on the writing track for the 2025 Adventures Creators Programme.
