Allow me to reintroduce myself!

Kenechukwu Michael Eze, I doubt you will ever hear a more ‘Igbo’ set of names, I am from Udi LGA somewhere in the hills in Enugu State, I have four siblings and I occasionally study law at the University of Nigeria.

I like to convince myself that maybe I am good at this writing thing, I do it for money, so why not do it for myself? I read in a book that the more a human being repeats an action, the more the neurons that facilitate that action get stronger and it is easier to effortlessly reproduce the action, long story short practice makes better and I want to be better at a lot of things, so I will start with this.

I spend a lot of time wondering what I was doing with my life before 2020, that was the year when I finally got in touch with my emotions, not the kind of emotions that make you write a chapbook about your ex-lover, that was me in 2017, I mean the kind of emotions that teach you how to be truly self-conscious, I have spent a lot of my life moving around and never really stopping, 2020 made me stop and with that pause came true self-awareness.

I began to understand the true burden of knowledge, beyond the fact that I could now engage in more enlightened arguments with Chuka, Dabere, and Tochi, I deeply understood how a drop in a company’s share price could cost an individual their job, how human lives could become statistics analyzed with Microsoft excel and plotted out on a graph, the combined burden of all the knowledge I had amassed ignorantly over the years finally began to mean something.

These days I make a conscious effort to monitor the knowledge I expose myself to, as much as reading more scientific study’s and reports by the OECD will make me a smarter man, it takes something out that can never truly be replaced.

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

• Ecclesiastes 1:18

Regardless of the downsides to amassing knowledge, I am grateful for clarity, at least I am sure that I do not want to be just a lawyer, being a capitalist slave has taught me several things about the legal job market, things that would most certainly not please my LLB homeboys.

I spend most mornings jogging like Rocky Balboa, my friends often wonder why it is important that I run 15km as often as I can, if you have a crippling fear of limitations in the way that I do, you will constantly find yourself doing difficult things just to prove to yourself that you can do it, it is how I earn street credibility from my mind, I am at the point where I believe my mind has a mind of its own, I constantly negotiate with myself to perform tasks that may or may not be beneficial to me and others around me, it may also be early symptoms of dementia, I just know that it has helped me be productive.

Poetry on the other hand comes easy to me because explaining emotions in paragraphs is hard, doing it with finesse is even harder, so I can just tell you that my body is a boat built to ferry grief from Festac to Ikeja and you would instantly connect because you once cried in the back of your Uber while stuck in Lagos traffic.

On other days I watch anime and read manga, if you ever plan on starting I strongly recommend Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, I also constantly obsess over inspiring sentences I find in movies, series, and novels.

My daily life is a combination of a conscious effort to be a “certified top boy” in the words of Dabere while still retaining my humanity by listening to I Said What I Said by Jolla and FK, of all the things I hope for, I desire that I can achieve my dreams without losing sight of the most important things in life, which is the people I love, my friends and family. I will end this by leaving you with one of my favorite quotes, I hope it grants you comfort.

“There is only one time that is important

Now.

It is the only time when we have any power.”

-Tolstoy

Rest In Peace Tobe.