First Gentleman with Wilson Orhiunu
Email: babawill2000@gmail.com Twitter: @Babawilly
Nobody wants to suffer, yet inconvenience is unavoidable. As a child growing up I was always told to meet setbacks with fortitude, especially at the start of long journeys. The same applied to my peers who all received that deceptively benign admonition, ‘don’t disgrace me outside’ before embarking on trips with parents. That phrase is what made you smile as you sat visiting someone who you had been told not to use their toilets despite the fact that your full bladder was about to explode, for in ‘don’t disgrace me outside’ lies an instruction, mingled with a slight caution, and spiced with a threat.
There is another phrase that tells you the threat within the aforementioned phrase has been detonated. It is the lethal whisper in your ear, ‘wait till we get home’. In the seventies, there was not a Nigerian parent that lacked capacity to make good on their threats, so we learnt to smile through the storms.
Sometimes, you sat there in a heap of starving protoplasm, forgotten, as parents chat for hours in a house where ‘you must not eat’. You get offered food and smile politely as you decline, saying your ‘no’ with great intensity. A weak ‘no’ that gets transformed into a ‘yes’ by your hosts means that your will get the ‘wait till we get home’ look while nibbling on your Cabin biscuit (no wonder that childhood obesity was a rarity in those days).
We have all been conditioned not to ‘cry like a baby’ in public but to take things in our stride. ‘Don’t let them see you sweat’ or ‘don’t let them see you cry’ is what we get told and we proceed to live our lives this way. That surely means that we become actors ‘outside’ by hiding our true emotions which are reserved for ‘inside’. That could mean that the world outside could see an individual seemingly unfazed by adversity while the close relatives watch every evening as the same individual gets home, steps out of character and crumbles into a quivering emotional mess.
Many look at great actors in this great theatre of life and wish to be them for they seem to smile through stressful situations. That is akin to wishing that Roger Moore was with you in Lagos when the armed robbers burst in through the back door. You soon learn that Khaki no bi leather and acting is not real life. I recall a proverb – no bi everything wey fly na plane (not everything airborne is an aeroplane). So, it is with smiling in the face of difficulties. It could be a disease for instance. Overwhelmed with insurmountable odds, some stay calm and laugh but a look in their eyes shows that they are not as relaxed as they seem.
Laughing can be pathological as in the case with people suffering from Gelastic seizures where a sudden outbreak of giggling occurs due to the presence of a brain tumour. This is rare and I only mention this ailment to prove my point. A laugh means nothing when one is trying to access how well someone else is coping. The fact that you have never seen a person cry does not tell you a thing about what they do when they are alone.
The same applies to those who you have never seen sweating about anything – the types who get labelled, ‘cool, calm and collected’. Personally, I take these sorts of people to be great actors. They hide their stress well. They must have grown up under Lagos-based parents who snuffed the ‘sweating about things’ out of them. They will suffer; they will smile but will not sweat. They will bottle up all the heat in their hearts till they explode. These are the ones who say, ‘I need to be strong for everyone else’. Na who send them message?
Ironically in the illness, Ectodermal Dysplasia some sufferers are unable to sweat. In hot conditions they are unable to regulate their temperatures and overheat. Their dry eyes limit the tears they are able to shed. Someone with this condition told me he is ever dousing his skin with water in hot conditions. This illness is mentioned only as an analogy. Letting out sweat which in turn evaporates on the skin and is converted to steam (water vapour) is a process that cools the body down (letting off steam). If too much heat is kept in, while trying to look cool when we are indeed boiling up, the resultant stress might lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance abuse. There are some world leaders famed for smiling and always looking cool. The wrinkles and premature greying of their hair tell a different story.
In summary, it might be helpful once in a while to forget what your parents taught you and cry outside, shed tears in public and stop acting cool when you are overheating. That way you get some relief and by the time you get home your family will have no need to pick up any pieces. Suffering and smiling can be bad for your health.
