There was a point in my young life when I felt I was suffering from amnesia and trust me when I say that it was a very scary feeling.
photo by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen
This was during back in high school. You see, in Nigeria, we have JSS1 to JSS3 which basically is known as Junior secondary school and then there is the SS1 to SS2 which also is known as senior secondary school, but before you will be able to cross over from jss to SS, there's something known as Pre Ss1, which basically is the school preparing you for the senior secondary school.
In my school, Pre SS1 wasn't compulsory and what that meant was that you could skip it (which basically meant you skipping a year in school) and return after a year when everyone else was now properly getting into SS1 and that was what I did.
My dad felt that rather than me spending a year to get introduced to a course that I still will be taught in the later years of my schooling life, I rather spend that year learning a skill that could be beneficial to me, especially seeing how we were in a country where there were lesser jobs everyday.
So I did just that, I pulled out of school for a year and tried learning a skill, a choice that didn't end too well for me. You see, during my first few months at my new bosses shop, I found myself suffering from something I could only classify as amnesia because even I couldn't understand what was happening to me at the time.
You see, seeing how I was the only apprentice my boss had at the time, whenever he was going to the market to buy stuff that we needed at the shop, he would ask me to stay back, not because I was good enough to attend to anyone when he wasn't around, but because he wanted me to mentally take note of any and everything happening at his shop when he wasn't around, and that included me telling him the names or description of anyone who came looking for him when he was at the market.
Unfortunately, whenever he went out and someone came looking for him, I found myself struggling to remember the identity of that person when he got back. And as expected, that made my boss hate me because he felt I was a dumb kid with no brains at all. And to be honest, I didn't really blame him for that, because I would be mad too if I was his boss and he didn't remember anything about any of the people who came looking for me when I was out.
Anyways, that amnesia or whatever it was, coupled with the fact that my boss was a very deceitful man, ended my stay at his shop because he didn't want me there anymore and my dad didn't want me learning anything from a man that wasn't trustworthy either.
But for some reason, the six months I spent there has refused to leave my mind because I do feel like a huge reason why my stay there didn't work out was due to me being forgetful and up till now, I still haven't figured out why that happened to me then. It's a mystery that probably will never get solved.
Thankfully, I'm a lot better now and I'm no longer as forgetful as I used to be back then.