Dera's Diary

In my house, at least whenever my mum is around, CNN is always on at night. My mum likes to stay up to date with what’s happening and enjoys having CNN as background noise (weird, I know). Anyway, I happened to be listening the other day and one of the speakers (he wasn’t one of the normal news presenters) was talking about the Mar a Lago search with Trump. And he said (I paraphrase) ‘this is something we’d expect from third world countries, not from a country practicing the rule of law’, and this chafed a bit. Don’t get me wrong, even in high school, we were thought to think of Nigeria, our country, as a third world country. I remember cramming a list of qualities and characteristics by which you would classify a country as ‘third world’ or ‘developing’. It wasn’t until I came to the UK to study the IB and learnt some more about this and how these classifications leak into the way these countries are treated globally that it began to upset me. I’m not denying the fact that Nigeria a...

I was talking to a friend today and after discovering that we both struggle with this, I figured someone else out there probably does as well. Both of us were bonding over our mutual inability (sometimes) to just enjoy the good times as they happen. We either spend our rest filled, joyful, ordinary moments worrying about times when things will not be as easy, or comparing ourselves to people who seem to be doing and achieving more. This is pretty natural, I think. I've been doing next to nothing this summer, but when I hear about some of the amazing (and yes, productive) things that some of my friends have been doing, I can't help but wonder if I should be doing more as well. I think in some situations, a reminder can be helpful, especially if you DO have things that you should be doing that you have been postpoining and procrastinating. But (and this will probably echo some of my other posts), I think it's a bit too natural to consistently think that you are behind in so...