Loving 52 and the stories that tell themselves

My miraculous existence

It is almost stranger than fiction that today marks my 52^nd birthday and this is for many reasons. It is my ninth birthday after cancer and I am still scarily within the timeframe of studies that suggest a precarious survival rate after the condition in which I was diagnosed.

Yet, I feel blessed that each year that I celebrate a birthday is one in which I can only be full of thankfulness and gratitude. Each birthday is for me very important, I mark each of them since 2009 as it would be my last, well aware of my vulnerabilities and still amazed by the grace, the favour and the resilience of the human body to recover where medicine seems to have reached the limits of its favourable interventions.

Emotional upheavals of thrills

It has been a long exhausting year which started with the lovingly sympathetic sharing of my story by my good friend Funmi Iyanda in forAkin on Bravery, Honesty and Thriving, a few days after, the love I thought I had was not ready for my love, it hurt.

Just imagine meeting your sister after 27 years, at The Terminal in Frankfurt, it has been a roller-coaster of emotional upheavals from the marriage of one sister, to the death of our baby sister to the rendezvous with my second sister.

In March, I made a radical career decision, one morning, I walked out of a job I had been doing for three years because I had endured enough of a new manager who over the 6 months of my reporting to him reduced me to nothing through disrespect, discourtesy and worse. He apparently did not last another 6 months after me, I neither applaud nor deride him.

Away but not astray

Since then, I have spent weeks away from home for work flung out to corners all around the United Kingdom, getting involved in challenging projects and meeting interesting people. I could not have planned how the year turned around for me that the greatest recommendation and support for the role I started in November came from one of the colleagues most affected by my departure in March.

I pinch myself at times wondering if any of it is real, considering August was a month where I literally had nothing and there was the sure and the steady rock of a friend like no other who kept me believing in tomorrow and myself. Kola Akinola, this is for you.

I am happy and thankful

In August too, my father found my story, his initial reaction was negative, then after an exchange of some long memories, there was reconciliation and acceptance, he remains one of the most reasonable people I have known in all my life. I have a mother too, that is all I can say for now.

To a point, I am very happy, I could be happier with someone to love and to share moments and experiences with, I need a man.

As I celebrate the number of years as there are full weeks in a year, even in my relapsed religious faith, I am thankful to God, grateful for friends, appreciative of moments, awed by experiences and looking forward to the opportunity to write again of another year of stories worth telling.

Thank you all for being here, being there and being near.