I met this guy at a seminar I attended in my school and he asked for my number. After that, we had a brief discussion and I found that he was in my faculty, so it seemed that we could at least be cordial with each other. So began our communication, and unfortunately, the stress back and forth. It began with incessant calls—he would call and wouldn’t stop calling until I picked. Then the WhatsApp drama started, I couldn’t be online and not chat with him. As in, there would be whole paragraphs of messages. And if I hesitated in replying, he would immediately switch to calling.
I kept brushing it off as nothing, until he started appearing in places I said I would be. From church to a common canteen, if I made any mention of the place in the conversations we had, I would see him there. Omo! I don’t need to tell you that that was when the red flags became glaring. Whenever I tried to talk to him about it, he always brushed it off, saying he was trying to know me. None of my concerns got through to him, so I started to limit our interactions. I felt that would ease the separation and we would soon settle to becoming old acquaintances but that was not to be.
The last straw was when he started posting weird messages on my social media pages. He would also upload both our pictures together almost daily with annoying captions and tagging me to it. Hmm. That was when I knew my niceness was being taken for granted, I felt walls closing around me and I realised something was going to have to give. That day, I blocked him everywhere: phone and social media. Still, he kept coming to all my favorite hangout spots. Sis, I even had to go low-key in my faculty, skirting through lectures, ducking my head in public, not waiting to hang out in the department. Thankfully, after sometime, I realized that I rarely saw him. Finally, that chaotic chapter closed.
The whole incident taught me a lot about how being silent in certain situations might be enabling. I had chosen being nice at the detriment of my inner peace that I let things go on as long as it did. Sometimes we need to go through extreme measures to escape a person, especially when all previous communication has not yielded any result. It is dangerous to indulge in erratic behaviour, especially from men. Please, choose your peace of mind.