NEVER EVER

I have stopped using the phrase Never ever for more than three years now, this is because life has broken me in ways I could never have imagined making me break the oaths I made of myself on various occasions. I've found myself in all forms of vices and especially in a lot of situationships that got me to make tough calls, bend my rules, and compromise my standards and morals. I'm not proud of these things, but in all I try to stay positive and keep moving forward. I try as much as possible to get myself back on track, especially with my morals, I also try as much as possible to learn from situations that made me go against my morals and values and then I make sure the morals I set for myself are not that high.

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I've come to discover a lot of the times I go against my values, the standards are just too high for even me to attain. For example there was a time when I wanted to live by truth and honesty which is good, but then I never knew for me to successfully maintain that standard, I needed to add a level of tolerance. Truth and honesty made me stand out in a lot of things, but it also made me offend a lot of people I should have just tolerated. This made more enemies than friends and I realized when I needed help but had very few people to call. I was in the hostel then during my first year in the higher institution, because I had decided to always live by the truth, I would usually report every single incident that happened in the hostel to the security.

I made friends with the security men, and made a lot of enemies with the students. The time came when I needed help, I had run out of foodstuffs and was going two days without a meal. It was then I realized the standards I had set had cost me a great deal having just one friend in the entire hostel. From that moment on, I stopped reporting things that didn't concern me, and also started tolerating some actions in the hostel. I would not report any action if it were not completely wrong. Sometimes I covered some actions because I understood the reasons behind them, unlike the time I wouldn't want to understand the person involved. One of those scenarios was when one of my roommates brought a girl into the room.

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She had accommodation issues and did not have a place to sleep that night. Even though I had promised myself no girl would ever sleep in my room, I had to bend the rules here as it seems unreasonable to report that situation to the security. Two years later when I started living on my own, I saw a student that was thrown out of her hostel because the school authorities were fishing out students who were owing hostel fees. I wasn't that close to her, but I noticed every other student had where to go but she just sat at the gate for hours… it was obvious she had nowhere to go and according to her, she had called her parents and the only thing they told her was to sort herself out because they weren't having money for her to come home.

It was already evening and I couldn't just watch her stay there, so I tried looking for a place for her to spend the night. I asked almost all my female friends that lived around, but they were already accommodating some of the students that were driven out of the hostel. It was obvious I had to break my vow again in order to help her out and this was just one of the many times I found myself in such a situation. But in all, one thing I can and will never do is act in anger. I've seen anger destroy, I've watched my dad act in anger and did things he regretted, I've acted in anger once and it almost killed my mum. It was then I made the decision never to act in anger. No matter how much someone gets into my skin, I would try to think of one happy moment with them and act with that memory. It's not easy, but it has become part of me.

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 123 EPISODE 1