Aspire To Perspire Series — Blogging
By: Firecracker Toyeen
Tags: Blogger, How I Started, Blogging, Writing, Beginner

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of blogs I used to read faithfully every morning before I did any work even before I checked my email. When I first resumed at A, I asked my boss what the resumption time was and he asked what resumption time meant. I told him it was the time everyone was supposed to show up at work. He replied saying he had never heard it before and A didn’t have an official resumption time. You were just expected to be at work between 10 am and 4 pm so you could be available for meetings and you could work from home if you chose.

On my first day at work, I resumed at 8 am and the office was mostly empty save for 1 or 2 people (who I would later find out had long commutes so they resumed very early and also closed very early) until around 9–9.30 am when other people started trooping in. I remember being so shocked because back home in Lagos, I used to get to work before 6 am because I commuted to work with a friend and we usually left early around 5.30 am. I have also had to stay as late as 10 pm at work too sometimes before being picked up as he usually closed late from work. So you can imagine my shock when people wouldn’t resume until 10 am and by 5.30–6.00 pm, most people would have gone home. Instead of me to find out how they were getting all their work done within this short time frame, I assumed it meant our work required little time and I went to go and fara we my colleagues and also started resuming at 10 am not knowing that most of them worked till as late as 11.00 pm after they went home.

Let me quickly say something I learned from this experience — if you don’t take your values and culture into a new environment, you would end up adopting the values and culture of the new environment. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the values and culture of the environment are positive and worth-emulating, but it becomes dangerous when they are negative or are not well-suited to you. I learned from the movie, “the Shawshank redemption” how a person can go into a very negative environment like a prison which usually ends up institutionalizing its occupants and still maintain his own culture and values in the environment such that the environment did not change him — instead he began to positively impact the environment and change it for the better. That’s my favorite movie of all time btw. It’s a 1994 movie and I watched it when I was 16 and freshly graduated from Secondary school. It has had such a profound impact on me since then that hasn’t left me 18 years later. I have seen it once or twice after the first time, and it still blew my mind. You should check it out if you’ve never seen it.

Anyway, I resumed early around 8–8.30 am for the first month of working at A while I still took the bus to work. However, after I bought my car, I adapted to the late resumption time. Since I could now afford to resume at 10 am and I was a nightcrawler, to begin with, I started staying up so much later at night. Late nights meant late mornings and I wouldn’t wake up until as late as 9 am or even 10 am sometimes. At that late hour, all I could do was stumble into the bathroom immediately I woke up, brush my teeth, shower, and drive to the office immediately after dressing up. There was no time to pray or read the Bible or worship or even eat breakfast.

You would think I would get to work as soon as I arrived at the office right? Wrong! I had a morning routine (just found out there was a name for this earlier this year) that included getting coffee and bagel from the kitchen and settling down to read blogs. I had a list of blogs that I had to finish reading the latest updates on before doing any work or even checking my work email. It was kind of an “afise” (addiction). These are the blogs I had to read faithfully every morning;

1. bellanaija.com

My main attraction to this blog where the features — stories or articles sent in by contributors. I had a few favorite authors including Atoke, glory, and Isio whose articles I always looked forward to reading first before reading other people’s write-ups. After reading all the latest features, I would now skim through the rest of the website to read other categories such as news or weddings. I have gotten over the excitement of writing for BN now, but having my first post published on their site was literally surreal. Never in a million years did I think that I could write an article worth publishing on their site that would be read by their global audience like me.

2. lindaikeji.com

This one still surprises me to date because lindaikeji.com was never my style of a blog. In fact, I didn’t even know about the site until 2011 I think when a colleague showed me an old video where some African men had done a choreography routine that Beyonce had copied and used in her latest video. I don’t even remember going to the site again until after I traveled. It may have just been me living abroad that led me to do things that I never did in Nigeria simply because those things had a way of making me feel connected to Nigeria. Examples of such actives include; reading Lindaikeji blog, cooking different varieties of Nigerian food, eating with my fingers (the last time I ate swallow with my fingers was before I resumed at shagamu where we were mandated to eat with cutlery), watching Yoruba movies. No offense to her blog but the grammar in the articles and comments used to kill me but that didn’t stop me from reading it faithfully every morning.

3. oneplustheone.com

This was a Christian blog owned and run by Ayo Thompson (now Ayo Mario Ese) when she lived in the UK before she moved back to Nigeria. Her posts were mostly about Christian relationships and she had two popular series where she interviewed Christian couples who; remained celibate until their wedding titled “waiting and loving it” and had a good marriage titled “married and loving it”. She stopped blogging shortly after she moved back to Nigeria though as she’s gone on to bigger things and is now married. I really miss her blog sha and more than a year later, I would still check the blog from time to time to see if she had published new posts.

4. temiville.com

This was also a Christian blog owned by a Temi who was also single and living in the UK at the time I stumbled on the blog. She later moved back to Nigeria, got married, began a law career, and has also stopped blogging. (Is it me or is there a pattern here where female bloggers stop blogging after they move back to Nigeria and get married?). Anyway, she wrote stories that always had a biblical message or a biblical lesson. I enjoyed reading her stories and shared some of them with my friends. I also miss her blog, and just like I did for oneplustheone, I used to go there years later to check if she had any new posts.

5. inthemidstofher.com

This was also a Christian blog run by a female doctor. She was an anonymous blogger at the time but has now come out of the closet (that just sounds wrong right?). She was married and used to write about practical tips on how to have a marriage based on God’s word. I found her blog when she was interviewed by Ayo of oneplustheone.com in one of her series. She had a series called “dear inthe” where she answered questions sent in by people. She always gave very candid and no-holds-barred, wise counsel. I definitely learned a lot from her blog. Unlike the other 2 bloggers above, she still blogs but no longer writes. Her posts are now in form of podcasts and as I like to read not listen to podcasts, I no longer follow her blog. I once asked her on Instagram if she could transcribe her posts for readers like me but she gave me ela oju Kan and never responded.

6. princessofzion.com

This was yet another Christian blog run by a female who lived in the UK and as at her last post was about to move back to Nigeria. (I am just now wondering why it was only Christian blogs run by females I used to read — perhaps I was searching for something without even knowing it). I can’t remember what exactly she wrote about but I loved her blog and to date, I have closure issues because she used to update the blog with posts about her life and suddenly stopped doing that in the middle of her move back to Nigeria. I have always wondered what happened to her and I hope she’s safe because the abruptness with which she stopped writing made me fear that she may no longer be alive.

7. eziaha.com

She is also a Christian, female blogger, who writes about her walk with God. I also found her page from an interview she gave on the oneplustheone.com blog. She still blogs in addition to the other things she does, but I seldom check her blog now because there’s too much to read and very little time.

Because I had read all these blogs faithfully for many years, when I eventually decided to set up a blog, I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. The first version of the blog was a far cry from my vision but try as I may, I couldn’t make the changes I wanted. God bless my amazing friend, chinenye, whose friendship is the only good thing that came out of my NYSC job, who helped me revamp the blog for free oh imagine (bet I’m already gathering her money small small because she deserves plenty of money for all my requests that she always responds to). It’s not yet where I want it to be but it’s getting there steadily. I know I may not get to blog for as long as I want to because life just might happen but for now, I really enjoy doing it and since I have paid for hosting it for 3 years, I hope to get value for my money and do it for the next three years at least.

There are so many thoughts in my head that need to find expression in written form and I started the blog so I could pour them out as Instagram had become too restrictive and editors of magazines like BN could reject a post I sent them.

The moral of this epistle is that I had been enjoying other people’s blogs for the longest time without knowing that the seed to create the same which is now being enjoyed by other people was in me and lying dormant until earlier this year.

I also love technology a great deal more than the average individual I believe, and hopefully, in the nearest future, I would be writing a similar post about the web/mobile app I would have created and all the previous web/mobile apps that have been greatly beneficial to me.

Firecracker Toyeen