EMBRACE Your Scars… — Culled from the book, ‘AFROLEON’.
An Episodic Tale of Pain & Recovery.
What’s the point of trying to pretend that we are perfect? One thing that I have learned during my few thirty years of living on this planet is that throughout a person’s lifetime, he or she will have one or more scar-indenting devils to fight through or deal with. It turns out that I have had more than a couple. Where do I start? First off, what kind of scars am I referring to? Although physical scars are sometimes accompanied by emotional scars, not all of them are.
We all have those three to ten marks on our bodies that have remained after an injury of the flesh but don’t necessarily have any particular emotional attributes attached to them. Even if there was some emotional affliction from these injuries, it is usually insignificant and not enough to be considered life-changing. I am however referring to those devils that have imprinted a scar on your subconscious mind; scars with such intense emotional energy that after they occurred, they inherently separated one phase of your life from another.
These are scars that define a change in your being such that after they occurred, your perception of reality and your approach toward others usually gets altered in one way or the other. It could be something like the traumatic experience I just narrated or an unfavorable diagnosis that you miraculously survived. It might not even be physical but still be life-changing, for example losing a close friend or a loved one. The following story is about one major scar or life-altering moment which I fully embraced. In that sense, I was grateful that it happened.
Let me take you on a mind journey back to 2010 while I attempt to lay down the foundations of this mind-body-soul destabilizing incident. I, James Adeboye Oluwajuyitan, was a foreign medical student embedded in a two-bedroom apartment in the not-so-little Russian city of Ukraine, Kharkiv, which was the former capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) while it existed, and also the city where I would go on to complete my graduate and post-graduate education. I had recently relocated from the University’s hostel into a shared living apartment; I previously lived in the hostel for my first two years in Алексеевский район — the district of Alekseevka.
You would think that I would be elated about relocating since residing in an apartment automatically means more freedom, a more comfortable living space to invite your visitors to, and essentially, a much more relaxed and customizable living environment. In hindsight, it probably meant all of that and more.
However, at the time, none of those bright lights were the biggest takeaways for me. No, no, no, not for an unusual creature like me, or should I say the unique creature I considered myself to be for the large part of my early life. Thank goodness I realized that the fact that I am not the same as everyone else is what makes me a unique usual fellow; but yeah, it was a big eye-opener for me to find out I am, for all intents and purposes, normal.
So, talking about the biggest takeaway for me from the shifting of residential habitats, it happened to be the fact that ‘I’, a whole capital letter ‘I’, the younger sibling, had to live in the smaller room. For approximation's sake, let’s state that the ratio of the sizes of the rooms was about three to two.
I should also add that in truth, and from the onset, I was completely against us renting this particular apartment, not only because of the unequal size of the rooms (the lesser room was also in a worse condition and had worse furniture), but primarily due to its global positioning as regards its distance from other essential human activities I would be undergoing in the city of Kharkiv.
The Квартира (Kvatira — Flat) was at Улица Блюхера, 13б (House 13B on Bluchera Street), in Studentska district, which was approximately 8 miles and 31 minutes away from my university (by car), and even farther away from my hostel, where most of my ‘friends’ lived (I put friends in inverted commas because I am not yet ready to discuss that topic; I will touch on it soon enough).
Conversely, employing U-Bahn (subway) stations as the common denominator, this abode was five metro stops from my brother’s University in Pushkinska, and six metro stops from mine (KNMU, short for Kharkiv National Medical University), although at the last stop (metro Universityet), I had to do a switch-over to metro Derzhprom, so for the sake of additional walking distance, let’s say seven stops.
I know it sounds like the house was a fairly similar interval from both our Universities but a key difference here is that my brother was already familiar with this region; he was transitioning from the adjacent region and the next metro stop — Гереов Труда (Gereov Truda) where he had spent his last two years, also living in an apartment. I, on the other hand, was moving all the way from across town.
Interestingly, the peer Derzhprom and Universityet underground railway stations open into Площадь Свободы (Ploshchad Svabody — Freedom Square) which is the center of Kharkiv city and the usual venue for holding popular live band performances or important events like Victory Day and New Year celebrations. Did I mention that in Ukraine, Christmas is observed after New Year on the seventh of January? Even more surprising is the fact that there is a second new year celebration — Ста́рый Но́вый год (Old New Year), commemorated exactly a week after their Christmas, on the fourteenth.
Freedom Square is also one of the more popular spots where inhabitants of the town or tourists frequently convene whenever they go on walks. There used to be a famous statue of Lenin that stood there; it was the largest monument in Ukraine dedicated to Vladimir Lenin up until September 28, 2014, when it was destroyed by activists during a pro-Ukrainian rally.
I believe by now you should have gotten the idea that I wasn’t particularly pleased about living in this Studentska district, and worse still, in this smaller room that housed antique furniture. There was also something about the air in that region that made me very uncomfortable; let's just say it wasn’t the freshest of ‘airs’ for my extremely sensitive nose.
When I was younger, a bully in my nursery class pushed me and while falling, I hit my nose against the edge of a desk. Before I left the hospital, the doctors said my nasal septum was not deviated and that everything was fine. Other doctors I met in the future also said the same thing, but ever since I was a child, I have noticed that I get a running nose way more frequently than everybody else. Even though I can’t prove that my chronic sinusitis is connected to the incident, I strongly feel that there’s something there.
Anyway, I had urged my brother to prolong the apartment search but for whatever reason, he called off the search prematurely and decided to settle on this particular flat. I can’t remember the reason he gave or whether it was something to do with his agent of choice but the bottom line is that not enough effort was put into searching for a flat in a better environment as I knew of people who got flats even in the center for our similar budget. All the same, I wasn’t pleased, and worse still, not for the first time in my life, I didn’t express myself.
Matter-of-factly, I was outraged and completely against this decision to put it mildly, however, as was my usual pattern during those days, I remained silent and essentially suppressed all of my emotions.
A photograph I took with my Nikon camera of a firework show beside the Lenin Monument (it is towards the left bottom corner of the picture). This was during the 2013 Victory Day celebrations (known as День Победы — Dyen Pabedi, and held annually on the 9th of May), a year before it was hulled down by activists.
Studentska region is a major residential area and houses a lot of citizens as well as a good amount of foreigners (mostly Asians), some of which are students, but many more who are instead, hustling to make a living. At least, that’s the way it was during the time that I lived there. Some had shops there and were into stuff like barbing or restaurant businesses.
Okay. So, I realize I am yet to tell you what the issue was. Bear with me, we are getting there. You know what, this actually seems like a good time to mention it. So, yes, in the fourth month of that current winter season, I developed a lumbar disc herniation in my lower spine after I carried two nylon bags full of groceries. A loud ‘Snap!’.
