Nostalgia (prompt)

Date: Wednesday. 30th of March, 2022. 

So @Theblackdoll tagged me in a nostalgia prompt which I was so excited to participate in. It involves putting up old pictures and reminiscing on the memories that were created when the picture was taken. After going through my photos, I realised I didn't have a lot especially older photos. I believe they are on my Google drive but there are lots of photos there and I don't know if I can search by date.

If anyone knows how to search for photos backed up to Google drive by date or any other filter, please tell me in the comments, I'll be grateful.

Well, since I don't have old photos to share, I'll just share old memories.

• Childhood

One thing that really sucks about my childhood is that I have no pictures from it. They were all damaged. The earliest pictures I think I have now are from the university. Even though there are no pictures, I still have my memory at least. One of the things I miss about childhood was the lack of responsibility and opportunity to just play without having to worry about money, paying bills, getting food, transportation etc. These were all someone else's burden to carry; my parents. At childhood, parents think for you, they anticipate your needs and provide for them to the best of their abilities. Now, as adults, parents can still support but your responsibilities are yours and the consequences are also yours.

• Primary School

Well, this is also childhood but I have some good memories of primary school. I remember playing with my friends during the break time. I was a quiet child but sometimes, I enjoyed playing with my friends and having fun. I found the educational aspect of primary school really easy so I topped my class a lot. I remember I was a very slow writer lol. My class teacher always found herself waiting for me to finish writing. But my slow writing streak eventually ended when my friends and I started a competition we called "first to finish". The game involved writing really fast and finishing just as soon as our teacher finished writing. The first person to finish writing will be named the winner. The downside to this was the fact that the teacher could make mistakes and wipe it off which will result to those of us writing in the same as her to cancel in our books. The notes on the board were usually not so long, but for primary school it felt like we had written a whole lot haha. After playing this game for a while, I started increasing my writing speed and sometimes even came first. I must say that helped me a lot even though my handwriting was a mess at the time.

• Junior Secondary School

Due to my academic performance, I was able to start secondary school before my primary school classmates. It wasn't as challenging as I feared but being in a new environment meant that I had to retreat into myself. I hardly talked to people because I didn't know what to say. The art of socialising was an alien concept to me haha. I, however, managed to make friends and luckily for me, my closest friend from primary started secondary school same year as me and in the same class. Because of her, I didn't always feel alone and she was the one who would tell me the guys that wanted to talk to me because I was too socially blind to notice they had been trying to get my attention haha. I attended two different schools for junior secondary. One was a day school; a regular school where we went to school in the morning and returned home in the afternoon. While the other was a boarding school (day & boarding but mostly boarding). I spent a year in the day school and the rest of my secondary was completed in boarding school.

• Secondary School

I was still in the boarding school, learning how to navigate life without my oa9and learning to be responsible. It was exciting until I learnt about the senior students haha. People above you in class can send you in errands irrespective of your age, social status, whoever your parents may be etc. This was always weird whenever a senior who was a bully fail their promotion exam and had to repeat the class, thereby being classmates with the juniors the were once mean to. Even though senior students sent their juniors on errands, they were not always mean while some were actual bullies. With time, I learnt how to escape the bullies.

One disappointing thing about living in a boarding house was that I didn't encounter any of the bogus supernatural stories people used to tell. People usually had rumours about supernatural or ghostly entities haunting boarding schools. I was scared but the adventurous part of me was a bit thrilled. It sucked to find out the stories were fake. Some people even go out of their way to embellish regular occurrences to make it look like something was going on. However, I did witness an encounter different from the regular tales people used to tell.

One morning, we all woke up to our bunk beds bring pushed to one end of the hall and packed together. This happened with every occupant still sleeping in it. Our lockers were left open with people's provisions (cereals, milk, chocolate, snacks etc) stolen. The general concensus was that they had used juju to sedate everyone while they carried out their plans. But there is the possibility that they used actual physical products (like plants or gases) to kinda knock everyone out.

Thanks for for reading!!