THE IP MAG

Hi, I'm Sam,  I don’t think I will be the first to raise my hands when the question “ who’s athletic here?” Is thrown in a room I happen to find myself in but in the same vein, with more explanations given, I won’t be the last to raise my hands either. I occasionally exercise but the constant mode of exercise I partake in is strolling. I try to achieve at least 10k steps a day. Some days I don’t get to my target and some days I go way above my goal, it all depends on the kind of day I’m having. One mode of exercise or sporting activity that I’m not sure anyone is really going to find me partake in is field tracks. I don’t particularly think I enjoy running but it’s something everyone has got to learn to not be bad at considering the part of the world we live in. But one thing I do enjoy with watching people or Olympians partake in that sport is the fact that there is a finish line to be reached. No matter what type of field track that is going on, the finish line is som...

Hi, I'm Sam,  I think it’s safe to say now that I’ve spent my late twenties having realizations and somehow finding summaries to my lifestyle growing up. To some degree I can describe in one or few words the kind of son, brother, cousin or friend I’ve been from a toddler till this point in my life. I’ve had the honor of having different people occupying different positions in my life tell me about me from their point of view of from the view of someone else close to me that they’ve paid rapt attention to. Sometimes I find it easy to agree to the description of me and sometimes I’m intrigued in both good and bad ways and sometimes I fight and argue their summarization. But one thing that has never changed and even though I never realized this then was that all of them were very correct to a certain degree and more than fifty percent correct, I was just blind to the parts I didn’t see and agree with and the parts I agreed to didn’t really make up a very large percentage o...

Hi, I'm Sam,   We never forget experiences and one of the things I find very difficult to forget is my interactions with people. This goes both ways though, the way I act towards people and the way they act towards me. The memory sticks whether it was good or bad. In some of the bad cases, I try to make excuses for others that maybe they're not having a good day or maybe someone else has hurt them to act a certain way towards me in a manner that I do not deserve. I have even gone as far as trying to put the blame on myself trying to query my tone in the questions or words I said or my facial expression, just anything to not acknowledge that the way the person acted towards me was not on them but somehow on me.  In recent years, people's interactions with me has somehow been similar. It's almost as if I can anticipate the milestones and with each action or reaction, I take a mental note of what stage in our interaction the person is and I can go ahead to fore...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  I asked my best friend for ideas on how to live and he said "Enjoy Everyday and Every moment" and now I am trying to find a way to put that into everyday for the next 365 days. I told him the advice sounds so simple and straightforward and for the first few moments after he sent that message I tried not to overthink it but how will I create a content calendar for myself for the next 365 days without breaking it down to make sense and use it to plan ahead. In that planning and analyzing, there is every chance that I might begin to overthink and end up feeling overwhelmed that I make a mess of a simple advice given with the purest of intentions and expected to be carried out in the simplest way possible. Sometimes the problem is not with what we have to do but how we decide to approach what we have to do. Our individual lives and experiences aid in figuring out how to approach what we have to do. You might decide to jump into it thinking so much ...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  I've always wondered what angle to think about marriages and weddings. I love it for others but sometimes people say everything changes when you get married and they still say people don't change even when you marry them and this is always in a case of a character flaw, so then what really changes after wedding and in marriage? It's a good thing to love someone so deeply that you'd love to take it a step further but I don't completely subscribe to that mentality because we still witness people go through the long and stressful process of wedding planning just to take a step further with someone they do not completely love and someone they would end up tolerating and stepping out on in the marriage and I'm really curious to know what their thought about that really is because I have tried and maybe the experiences I've come to live or hear of hasn't done a fine job in letting me imagine and explain scenarios that makes sense...

Hi, I'm Sam, Don't get it twisted that love is a beautiful thing. Some feelings are better felt and expressed than described. As complete as the English dictionary might seem, it is possible to lack words to describe some feelings at the initial stage but as some point down the line I begin to use scenarios and examples to describe certain emotions and to me that is way better than using one word which has its meaning etched in the pages of a dictionary.  The biggest trick my mind has consistently played on me is to make me questions every love gesture I receive. I mean it does make sense to question certain gestures and audit it irrespective of who it's coming from but my mind questions the legit and illegitimate ones and then goes a step further to take actions that will jeopardize the legit gestures from legit avenues. At some point the feeling of being unworthy of certain expressions becomes the least of my problems because i find myself constantly fighting...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  It feels so good to know, admit to myself and finally say that I do not feel any bit of urge to keep performing for an audience that is not even paying attention and I would still not perform even if they were. Someone said that everyone is completely aware of what they're doing, they may not be honest about their intentions to others but within themselves they know exactly why they do what they do, they just hope that the other person is not smart enough to figure it out or they hope the other person is not interested in doing anything about it. Just like a talking stage, I really do believe everyone takes records of their interaction with people and they use the record to ultimately decide how to act toward each person. That way they're informed as to what part of themselves they bring to certain people and what parts of themselves they need to strip or hide to properly exist around certain people. This is a skill I think i like, I try to often ...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  I was 16 when I started wishing I could drive, before that I was just there to enjoy rides but what I enjoyed the most was the opportunity to be driven without much thought to where we were going to. At some point my dad seriously considered changing my name because he felt like the name had an effect on me. For better clarification, my igbo name is "Chisom" which translates to "God follows me", so my dad was convinced that the name was the reason i wanted to follow everyone everywhere instead of just letting God do the following. To think I really enjoyed being driven around but I didn't like the idea that my movement also meant that someone else had movement, so I thought it was a huge disturbance. Despite the fact the person was doing his job, It still didn't sit right with me that I had to drag someone around and it didn't help that my movement were not very important. The thoughts of driving started to cree...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  I consider it extremely important to remind myself that not everything is about me and no one thinks about me as much as I do. With that in mind, I have to try as much as I can to remove myself from so many scenarios that I think has so much to do with me but actually has nothing to do with me no matter how much I try to convince myself that it does. Thinking that something has a lot to do with me when it doesn't isn't about having a main character syndrome, I believe it comes from trying to be in control and trying to fix what probably isn't broken. If I can make it about me then I can work on the list I have given myself in an attempt to make things better and be better than I think it is in the present. Sometimes I blame this on being someone who absorbs energy. If I think the situation is about me then I can channel my energy into making it better so that I don't sit idle waiting for it to fix itself. But in so many scenarios, I've...

Hi, I'm Sam,   I didn't learn how to take accountability for the right reason. When things go the wrong way as a result of my actions or decisions, I will always be the first to acknowledge that I am the root cause and not the person who had to react to what I did. Someone else might see it as me being the bigger person to realize what had happened and take responsibility and that is completely what it is now but it didn't start of that way. In the beginning of my "accountability", I simply took accountability so that people would just shut up or simply just say nice things to encourage me because I've done the other thing they would've done which was to point out where and where I did wrong to result to the present situation. It will only take someone who has a really hard time reading the room to still try to point out my wrongs while I'm actively blaming myself while trying to take accountability for my actions. If the person can read th...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  It's very easy to brag about always trying your best to be in control of so many aspects of life even though so many things will try to remind you that always being in control is not always how things go. So the pride taken when things are indeed under your control is warranted and not at all out of place. I have finally come to understand it when people say " your comfort zone will kill you ". The first time I heard it, I legit thought they were being dramatic and unreasonable but like always, when you get to a point, you realize why people come to certain conclusions to the issues of life. Take me for instance. I believe I've come to that jarring point and I must confess, it's not a good feeling at all. I have done a terrible job at not realizing that I've been in my comfort zone for far too long and I have been labeling my comfort zone with different names instead of acknowledging it for exactly what it is and trying to get m...

Hi, I'm Sam,  There's an igbo saying, " mgbe onye tere, bụ ụtụtu ya " and it translates to " anytime anyone wakes up, is their morning " and just like so many things I heard when I was younger, this didn't really make any sense to me. It's one of those things they say, " you will understand when you get older" and I can honestly say I understand now that I'm older. As you get older, you don't need anyone to explain to you that life is really all about times and seasons and you live an easier, happier life when you understand that and live by that. When you're younger, it is very easy for you to believe that everything will work out at the same time and pace as your best friend who is of the same age and maybe gender as you. You sit and make plans how you will move from one stage to the next and you never really factor in life happening because really at that age you haven't really experienced what life could pos...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  I think at some point in my teenage years, to be cool was my ultimate desire, nothing else really seemed so important to me because they came easily to me but being cool was something I really wanted but somehow struggled with it and didn't know how to be that or even attempt to. I never really had any good reason as to why I wanted to be cool, I just knew that was what I wanted and I needed to get it to experience some sense of accomplishment and feeling of belonging. I couldn't really define what cool was either to me or to someone else but I figured I could pick one person who I thought was undeniably cool and replicated whatever they were doing then somehow I could be considered cool in some ramification. I'm not sure if I ever got to be cool despite my efforts and all but I'm glad the need to be or considered cool left me as fast as it came and as intense as the feeling was, I didn't feel any regret or hurt when it didn't happ...

Hi, I'm Sam,  Sometimes I don't know if I should be happy or sad that I somehow suppress emotions and memories. It's good when there are things I do not wish to remember and I don't have to lie or fight so hard not to remember them but it's sad in the sense that I've not really experienced any deep trauma that would warrant memory suppression but somehow my mind seems to think that no matter how I wish to describe those things as little, it will do me a favor by making sure I do not remember them. While we're here, I might as well blame my inability to remember names or people's faces on my mind choosing to suppress things and make them difficult to be remembered without any concrete memory attached to it.  There are things that I do not remember and when I am forced to remember them in any way, I just wish those things will remain in the past. I do not want them to remain in the past because they're too painful in the past and in the pre...

Hi, I'm Sam,   I will only admit it this one time and never again because I know the story is about to change, I have always had a confusing anxiety towards designs. Any kind of design scares me because I feel it's too much power to have to create something from scratch from your mind and playing around with different tools and elements and decide every little detail about it to the extent that some playfully say, " every mistake in design is a style " which is true in a lot of cases. I've always blamed humility for not wanting to wield that power and people have naturally just expected me to be very good at designs so they either ask for my input in design tasks or just expect me to lead the conversation when it comes to designs. Whenever they come to me, I either give a half-assed response so they don't feel some type of way and also don't bother to come back to me or I send them to someone else because I already do not know what to contribut...

Hi, I'm Sam,   One thing I will argue anytime and any day is that the more you do something, the better you get at it whether intentionally or not. Being present willingly or not and participating in doing something will make you better at that thing in no time that it almost becomes part of your muscle memory. When you've spent most of your formative childhood years moving yearly from one place to another, you won't have any other choice than being good at being the NEW KID and you will get so good at adapting to new environments that the anxiety you once had at being in a new environment and trying to make something out of it becomes anxious of you. I had to equip myself with some tricks that made me less upset about moving from one place when I was just starting to get the rhythm of the place. At the beginning,  adapting to a new environment, finding new routines and creating new normals was so daunting that whenever I find out that we have to move, i don...

Hi, I'm Sam ,  Its beginning to hit me that I will no longer be counted as part of the young ones in any gathering I find myself in lately  because I have gone up in age and this realization is making me question so many things I stood by growing up which I never thought would change and because I've never said those things out loud to the hearing of someone older than I am or even my mate, I've not received any advice with regards to them. The most common advice I get on a regular is that change is constant and I shouldn't be afraid to adapt to the changes. Change is quite easy to adapt to if it is somehow going the way you've planned it to be. You can just conclude that the change which you can see is just a manifestation of your desires and hard work. It can be hard to learn to accept changes even when it doesn't seem like its contained in my plans for growth, I've come to understand that things will always work out for my good even when I can...