The Quiet Witness

The Quiet Witness Daily thoughts, lessons, and reflections.

CARRY ME GO BACK TO THE 80’sNa this Christmas I remember.No be the one wey need planning or pressure.Nothing too much, j...
17/12/2025

CARRY ME GO BACK TO THE 80’s

Na this Christmas I remember.
No be the one wey need planning or pressure.
Nothing too much, just enough make person feel loved.

Rice for tray.
Fried plantain, just enough to share.
Red stew wey dey stain finger.
Cold malt wey dey sweat for bottle.

No filter. No forced smile.
Just family voices dey overlap,
radio dey play for background,
and that feeling say you dey safe, full, and seen.

Na so Christmas be.
Simple. Warm. Real.
The kind wey you no dey outgrow
na adulthood dey make you dey find am again.

I miss that Christmas wey feel like home.
That nostalgia… na the real Christmas wey I want.
Photo credit Cooks

17/10/2025

I love this.

14/10/2025

In the next 52days, I will declare 52days of completion beginning from tonight/today. He that has began the good works in me, will complete it.

Amen


13/10/2025

Cont'd
THE WEIGHT OF BEING THE ADA

There were days I wanted to fight back.
One afternoon, when the bell rang, I didn’t go home immediately.
I walked past the school gate and kept walking, my sandals slapping against the hot pavement of *ụzọ anyị.*
I didn’t know where I was going, maybe just away from the noise.
The road smelled like burnt oil and roasted corn.
Hawkers brushed past me, shouting prices.
A keke nearly clipped my arm.
Lagos was moving fast, and I wanted to disappear inside it.
For one brief moment, I felt free, child again and unaccountable- like the air didn’t need permission to touch me.
Then guilt found me, heavy and familiar, whispering, "Ada, bịa n’ụlọ.”
Her voice carried down the street, sharp, familiar, impossible to ignore.
I froze.

So I turned back, carrying the scent of rebellion in my palms - sweet and short-lived.
That night, I lay awake listening to the hum of traffic and thought about what it meant to be the Ada, how I was expected to hold everything together without breaking.
I realized then that I’d spent years being everything for everyone, yet nothing for myself.
Sometimes I stayed behind after school, pretending to finish notes, just to feel a silence that belonged to me.
And maybe that’s what it means to be the Ada: to master strength so deeply, you forget softness ever existed.

But the thing about silence is, it never really disappears.
It just waits.
It follows you, grows with you, and one day, it demands to be heard.
That’s when adulthood found me, not as freedom, but as a mirror.




゚

13/10/2025

The Weight of Being the Ada

Growing up as the Ada means learning responsibility before identity, your name itself comes with rules.
You become the second mother, the quiet listener, the unappointed peacemaker.
You don’t make mistakes that others can copy.
You’re told to “set an example,” even when you’re still learning who you are.
While others my age learned friendship and freedom, I was learning control, how to smile through unease, how to hold tears like secrets, how to survive being misunderstood.
I was expected to know better.
So I did what Adas do best: I learned to stay quiet.

There were days my throat burned with unsaid words.
Nights I prayed for just one space where my name didn’t mean *ịrụ ọrụ.*
I wanted to scream, to cry, to whisper *“I’m not okay.”*
But Adas don’t do that.
Adas endure.

At school, I was present but never seen.
I answered questions, topped exams, even smiled when teachers praised me.
But deep down, I was tired; tired of pretending I didn’t mind when classmates laughed together after lessons.
Tired of explaining why I couldn’t stay behind after school or visit friends (not like I had any, though).
Tired of being the one who always “understood.”
My laughter never echoed past the classroom walls.
I had learned to exist quietly, to never take up too much space.
At home, space was sacred.
Every breath, every sound, every word carried consequence.
I used to press a pillow over my ears and whisper to my sisters, “Shhh, they’ll stop soon.”
But they didn’t stop.
The noise just grew smaller with time not because peace came, but because we learned to stop reacting.

゚

13/10/2025

Contd

No friends. No social life. No room for questions. Just a 360 circle of wake up, survive, repeat.
They didn’t mean harm. They were simply repeating what they were taught, and in their attempt to protect us, they passed down the same trauma they were running from not realizing we were also absorbing their silence, their pain, and their fears.

There was love, but it wasn’t spoken, It was cooked into meals, stitched into our clothes, and hidden in long sighs after arguments.
The quarrels at home were constant, loud enough to etch themselves in memory. People think children don’t notice but we do.
Even when our eyes are closed, pretending to sleep, our ears do not rest. Children don’t sleep through chaos, they memorize it.
If you’re a parent struggling in a small room filled with children, remember: they see EVERYTHING, they watch, they learn, they repeat.
That’s how trauma travels not through blood, but through silence, fear, and the things we pretend children don’t understand.

Being the Ada meant being strong...always strong.
But strength can be a prison when no one teaches you softness.
Now, as an adult, I still struggle to socialize, to feel comfortable in spaces where laughter comes easily.
It’s not that I don’t want to; I just never learned how.

That was my world.
And so, I learned early that life was "duty," not "discovery."
Maybe that’s where my story truly begins not in perfection, but in unlearning.
Because sometimes, being the Ada isn’t about carrying the family, it’s about finally putting the weight down.
BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WEIGHT BECOMES THE ONLY THING YOU KNOW HOW TO HOLD?


13/10/2025

Thank you Holy Spirit


12/10/2025

Thank you Jesus 🙏



11/10/2025

We start on Monday �

11/10/2025

I am entering the new!
God has heard and helped me 🙏
Thank you Jesus.



What Trauma Really Is!Trauma isn’t only about what happened; it’s about what stayed inside you long after it ended.It’s ...
10/10/2025

What Trauma Really Is!
Trauma isn’t only about what happened; it’s about what stayed inside you long after it ended.
It’s when the mind and body remain in “survival mode” alert, guarded, defensive even when danger has passed.
For someone who grew up in a home of struggle, arguments, suppression, or emotional neglect, the trauma shows later as:
* difficulty connecting socially or emotionally,
* fear of failure or disappointing others,
* the habit of over-functioning, always being *strong* because you had to be.

So cut me some slack when people say, *“A good relationship is when the past doesn’t affect the future.”*
The truth is OUR PAST ALWAYS AFFECTS US.😔
But the goal isn’t to erase it like Iya Boys usually says; it’s to understand and transform it so it no longer controls our decisions.
In a healthy relationship, you don’t pretend the past didn’t happen, you simply stop letting it dictate how you love, how you trust, how you react, how you live.
So yes, *the secret of the future lies in the past* , but it only becomes a “secret weapon” when you’ve faced that past not when you run from it.
And that takes us to *BEING THE ADA*.

---
They say the past should not define the future, but how do you escape from something that raised you?
People talk about healing like it’s a one time thing as if saying *“I’m fine now”* means the echoes stop.
But when you’ve grown up in chaos disguised as normal, the past doesn’t fade, it lingers in your bones.

I wasn’t the first child, but I was the **Ada** the first daughter.
That title carries weight. It’s not just a word; it’s a lifelong assignment you never applied for.
You grow up faster, you learn to swallow tears before they fall, and you master the art of silence because, in your world, peace is a fragile thing.

My parents! God bless their innocence did what they knew. They trained us in the best way they understood life: church, school, hawking on some days, and home.
My childhood was simple, too simple, maybe.

10/10/2025

I will not Give up on God


#2025
Nathaniel Bassey -Official

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Unn Nsukka Enugu State. Nig
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