What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

I am the first born of four children. I come from an awesome family, my parents are great and my siblings have my heart. I love my family dearly. While growing up, I was a very quiet child, I never gave my parents any trouble or reasons to be concerned. Being the first born, I had the responsibility of  being a role model. I took this responsibility very seriously and mounted so much pressure on myself from a young age. My goal was to be "little miss perfect".

My childhood was filled with a lot of grey areas, i was extremely confused about a lot of things. My parents did a pretty good job with raising me, they gave me moral principles to follow and of course infused the Nigerian culture in me. They also brought me up in the way of The Lord, I mean we practically slept at church (come to think of it, we actually slept at church sometimes, lol ).

The main source of my confusion was a result of  never having an answer to the "What will you like to be when you grow up?" question, I mean I just didn't know! And of course with Nigerian parents, a doctor, or a lawyer was the only acceptable answer. But I didn't want to be a doctor, I hated hospitals...every time I went to an hospital or was around someone that was sick I felt so sad, all I wanted to do was to help them get better quick. And being a lawyer seemed sooooooooo boring! (No offense to all my doctors and lawyers out there, I got love for ya'll!)

So what did I want to do when I grew up? I just knew that I had this burden for helping people who couldn't help themselves, people that have giving up on life, people that have been rejected and despised by others, people who were hopeless, lonely, lost, afraid, etc. I also knew that I wanted to be my own BOSS, saw pictures of myself in my head sitting in my lavishly furnished executive office, calling all the shots! But after my lengthy research, I couldn't find any profession to satisfy my yearning. I wanted to help people entirely, not fix one part and leave the rest broken...and there's where my dilemma lied, all professions seemed to fix different aspects but never the whole being.

During my teenage years, I wrote a lot of poetry. It was one of the things that came to me easily, I never realized that I was good at it. I just wrote as the inspiration came, I found some of these poems a few years ago and discovered that from my teenage years until my college days my poems were centered on the topic "Self Discovery". I was so eager to discover what I was on Earth for. I was surrounded by so many friends and family that knew what they wanted to be, they were determined and driven yet I was just there, going through the motions, I was unfulfilled.

I grew up in a neighborhood that was stricken with poverty, high school drop outs, crime, teenage parents, and drug addicts. At first glance, these issues weren't glaring in my community because it just seemed to be the normal way or life. 

Plus my parents did an excellent job with shielding us for all the negativity, we were instructed to never mingle with the other children in the neighborhood, our only friends were the children of the two Nigerian families that attended our church and also lived near by. Of course being children, we managed to mingle a bit but thankfully it was never to our detriment. However, some of the other children in the neighborhood got offended, it led to various confrontations because they felt that we thought we were better than them. The truth was that were afraid of the discipline of our Nigerian parents!

Being the firstborn was tough, I didn't have anyone to look up to and give me advice. I had to figure it out on my own. There were certainly no role models in my community and church wasn't any better. I was so confused about the discrepancy between how the bible instructed us to live and what I saw at church. So I felt alone, confused, and different from others. I was very quiet, timid, shy, unhappy, angry and insecure. My self esteem was horribly low...I thought my nose was too big, my shoe size was massive...my hair was short and unhealthy...my face was fat...my skin was unevenly toned...and the list goes on.

Also, my mother and I didn't have a good relationship when I was younger. She was very strict and mounted heaps of pressure on me because I was the oldest. If I did something wrong, I dreaded the things she would say. Her words hurt more than her spankings (we get along now and I now understand that she only wanted the best for me).

But you know what the good news is?!?!

I found Jesus and I found ME! I discovered my purpose in Jesus! And My Life Changed!

You're Blessed!

-Bunmi

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