Self-Belief Can Work Wonders

I was bent over my reddish-brown desk and engrossed in my work. My blue ballpoint pen worked on the white piece of paper as I wrote a story. After about one hour I lifted my gaze from my desk and asked for an extra sheet.

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For a brief moment, suppressed laughter went round in the spacious room that was our classroom. My classmates had looked up from their work and were looking with surprised eyes at me.

“The great Chinua Achebe,” I think I heard a classmate call out jokingly to me. “You will outwrite everyone and get an A+.”

The crackling voices bounced off the walls of the classroom.

“Yes,” I said. My face was set the same way a judge's face is set when he wants to pass a judgement. “I'm the best when it comes to essay or story writing in the entire SS2 class.”

“No,”

One of my classmates sitting by me disagreed. He had dropped his pen on his desk and fixed a full gaze on my face.

“That would be Bukki,” he continued.

Bukki was one of the most brilliant students in the entire school.

I was resolute in my belief of my being better than everyone when it came to essay and story writing. As resolute as Thomas Edison when he was trying to invent the light bulb.

It was our final term and we were doing justice to an essay in the English subject. As soon as I had received the question paper and accessed the question, I got started right away. And now I needed a second sheet of paper to write more on. That's when a light argument about who's the best literary writer broke out in class. The invigilator wasn't around at the time.

Hours later I submitted my exam sheet and left the classroom. My hopes for the paper I had just written were as high as the blue sky.

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Right from my first year in the Senior Secondary school, I had always believed I had an awesome literary gift. I often imagined myself becoming the foremost literary artist in my country or the world. While others doubted me and threw disbelieving remarks at me I held on firmly to my belief.

Our English Language exam results were finally published. Our English teacher stopped me when we met on the veranda that afternoon and said with a smile resting on his face:

“You wrote a classic essay. It was easily the best among all the essays of the entire SS2.”

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The news spread among my classmates like the smell of gunpowder. They lauded me with all sorts of names. William Golding. The World's Best. Wole Soyinka. I thought I had proven to myself and others the very stuff I was made of.

While others doubted me I believed in myself and by so doing I moved a mountain, so to speak. Sadly, before I left school I had a health issue that negatively affected my literary abilities. I'm no longer a tenth as good as I used to be. But I still believe I will recover from the medical condition and achieve my literary dreams one day.

Thanks for stopping by.