Challenges are part of life and they are just inevitable for anyone who chooses to keep moving forward in life. The level of challenges we face in life might be quite different because all fingers aren't equal. You can be wealthy, famous or even have connections, these things make life easy to an extent but it doesn't completely eradicate challenges.
When many people think of the wealthy ones in the society, they believe that life is perfect for them and they don't have challenges but that's not the case. Although they don't have the same challenges as we do but they do have things they are struggling with as well, not petty things.
My life has been about moving from one challenge to another and this is the case for many youth who want to secure a future for themselves and the people around them. I do tell people that I didn't just become fearless in the face of challenges, I have been broken several times and picking myself up whenever life breaks me helps me get stronger.
Recently, Facebook brought a picture of myself and my friend as a memory and I had to send it to my friend immediately. Upon seeing it, she replied, "Thank God we don't look like what we have been through."
Her response caused me to travel back in time and there were lots of moments that got me really emotional. I remembered a particular time when my brother fell from this giant table we used at the factory back then.
We weren't earning enough to always go home at the end of the day work like every other worker so we opted to always sleep in the factory and only return home on weekends.
It was midnight on that fateful day and we had been through a lot of stress the previous day. We were tired and the sound of something hitting the ground really hard woke me up. I quickly stood from the table and found my brother on the floor still fast asleep.
I couldn't hold back tears that night and just woke him up to get back on the table. I wept throughout the night and insisted that we return home the next day when he was complaining about his shoulder in the morning, I didn't tell him till this minute that he fell from the table.
All those times were really difficult and instead of it to break me, it only made me stronger. Life made me realise that challenges aren't meant to break us but to make us stronger and the funniest part is that the more we avoid them, the more they accumulate and in the end, they become too much to handle at once.
Being jobless after my ND program made life terrible for me, it was a time of my life I didn't foresee. While in school, I believed that getting a job would be easy but I was wrong, I went through a lot but still couldn't get a job.
It became so terrible that I couldn't feed or even pay rent where I was squatting. It wasn't like I didn't get any job but the pay was nothing to write home about so I turned them down. I wasn't ready to do any job that would make me settle for what I shouldn't.
I switched to doing petty jobs, supporting painters and I went as far as doing site work which was okay by me. It wasn't a problem or stress because I had been through that before and it was easy for me to blend in.
I went from that to making small chops at events and was also job hunting, I didn't hesitate to tell anyone I came across that I needed a job. All through this time, my family stood by me and I felt terrible because it should be me taking care of them.
Finally, my struggles paid off and I got a job. I checked my wardrobe and boom, it dawned on me that I didn't have any official clothes so I reached out to my mom who inconvenienced herself to get me prepared for the job.
Things didn't go easy there as I had to face lots of challenges at my place of work because my supervisor felt threatened by the way his team always reached out to me for solutions instead of him. Things escalated to the point where I almost lost my job but the truth prevailed and I got promoted instead.
That time of my life was pretty tough but not giving up helped me conquer the challenges. I learned to never let anything prevent me from pushing forward and the lesson paid off.