Friend of a Friend is a short series exploring modern and evolving concepts of love and relationships as uniquely defined by members of the FEMME MAG community. Compassing the voices of this collective, we sat down with some FEMME MAG friends to bring this set of conversations on dating, relationships and love in our modern world from a friend, to a friend.
Speaking with Ore Olusola, I felt an immediate importance in her words on self-love and intentional mental health practices that was particularly relevant to the traditional steely resilience of Nigerian people. Her introspection and understanding of herself seemed so natural, however, she importantly shares the necessity of the process and the tools that helped her along the way in our interview below.
Could you tell us a bit about how you practice self-love?
Well … I think what sometimes blocks me from self-love is expressing myself. Because when you love yourself you should put your needs out there. I’ve gotten better at it but that’s something that used to really hold me back. I wouldn’t draw boundaries and I wouldn’t be vocal about things. And if you love yourself you should put yourself first and be able to [carve out space] for yourself. There was that but when I learned to love myself more, I had to force myself to do those things, for myself.
“A selfie I took on a day I was feeling down. Taking this picture cheered me up for some reason.”
So, your self-love feeds into how you love others?
I don’t know… it’s lessened it and made it more [so] in a way. In the sense that, when you don’t love yourself sometimes you put other people’s problems above yours and then you also have a tendency to overvalue what other people do or say. So, I think self-love helped me to not pay too much attention to what other people are doing. I wouldn’t say I love them less but it’s just not on that level where they take priority. I love them but in healthier ways.
Did you grow into your self-love practices?
Growing up, I never really had them [parents] specifically tell me to [love yourself]. Maybe they just thought it goes without saying. So, I definitely grew into it. I had to decide. It was actually a personal decision because I had a breakdown. A very public breakdown at a party and, it was the next day, I told myself I have to get out of this because I don’t want the rest of my life to be like this. And since then I’ve been consistently pushing and trying to make sure I do better in that aspect.
“Then there’s me (back of my head) in a park on a really good day.”
When you say it was a conscious effort, were there things that you actively applied to your life or was it just a mental shift?
When I was a teenager, I probably kept trying that whole mental thing, but I don’t think it really works because the brain is like… I have a therapist and what he told me in our first meeting is that the brain needs to be put into a pattern for it to get used to something. [Something] I got from my therapist is to constantly try and think positively and constantly try and compliment yourself in your head, which I thought was weird, but it actually works. Every day in the morning you just tell yourself positive things. It makes you believe what you’re saying. So that’s my framework for self-love. Trying to not be too hard on myself. I’m a human being, we make mistakes, but we still move on from it.
What has your experience of therapy in Nigeria been like?
I’m lucky enough to have kind of grown up without that sense of “oh, this [therapy] is for these kinds of people.” My dad works for a suicide prevention centre, so it was easy for me to open up to them about depression and they’re the ones who insisted I get a therapist. So, it’s also part of what I said earlier of making decisions to be better. You have to accept that something is wrong. Even if you’re not dealing with a major clinical mental issue, you know something is wrong and you want to fix it so you go to someone who you think can do that. And the thing is, I don’t think it necessarily has to be a therapist. It can also be like just people around you that you know care about you because they would see a lot of things that you don’t or notice a lot of habits that you would be used to and won’t notice.
Is there anything you wish someone told you about love or being loved and loving others?
I wouldn’t say a specific thing that I wish they told me but [something] I wish was more talked about generally but growing up I always felt like I was the only one who had to deal with mental health. You just feel alone. It was later on I realised that basically everyone goes through this. Even people that you would never think. Everybody has to deal with that.
How have you carved out your thoughts on love as you’ve gotten older?
I would say that it’s experiences because, like I said, I had to decide for myself and it’s just the realisation that you can’t be happy if you don’t do these things. You can’t be happy if you don’t change things. If you keep doing the same [detrimental] thing over and over again nothing is going to change so obviously you have to do something about it.
“This just reminds me that even though I’m a woman I deserve to put myself first.”
Is there anything you wish our Nigerian society at large or older generations better understood about the way love works in your opinion?
I wish they were more explorative. I feel like they definitely deal with mental health as well, but they just think you’re supposed to go on with life like that. Even, not [just] for us but for them, I wish they would see that it’s really important to actually work on it. A lot of them are miserable and bitter and that’s why they treat us the way they treat us because they’re still bitter about things that happened to them. I wish they knew there was more to the facades of life. And I wish they were able to teach us that as well.
