About me (2005 version)

Here is my very first blogpost of a few years ago. I wrote it for a short-lived blog that I started a few days before my marriage. It's pretty weird to see both how little and how much I've changed.

My wife and I got married in 2005

My name is Ada, short for Adaobi. I’m a black woman, I'm 38 years old and in 8 days I’m going to be legally married to my girlfriend of 10 years Maria. So I’m a lesbian and I could be living in the Netherlands or Belgium as these are the only two countries in the world right now where same-sex couples can legally marry. Thank God it’s the Netherlands, I like it here!

I was born in Nigeria at the beginning of the Biafran civil war. Probably in 1967 but it might have been 1968; birth certificates weren’t really a top priority in those days of war, slaughter and famine. As a baby I almost died of malnutrition and when I was about two years old I was sent to Holland to recover and never really left again. And here’s some irony for you, looking at me now you'd never guess I was almost starved to death as I’m quite a large woman now. All this war crap left me with a big hole in my soul, which I tried to fill with food. Can’t be done, I know that now.

Since the September 11 attacks all my memories of the war in Biafra came flooding back. So you didn’t know that people could remember stuff from when they were a baby? Well, neither did I. Problem is, those memories are what they call pre-verbal and they surface in the form of horrible fear, psychosomatic pain, and deep depression and are almost impossible to shake. Yup, post-traumatic stress disorder is a bitch.

The thing I want to do most is write. It took me years to admit to myself that I really wanted to be a writer and then months and months of working through the fear before I finally started writing. And I’m still terrified.
I want to write a children’s story for adults about survivor guilt. Sounds pretentious? You bet it is! Every time I want to resume working on an outline, my head tells me what a crap idea it is. The story has got all kinds of supernatural elements and is probably too cheesy for words but I still want to write it one day. Why? Because my heart tells me this is what I need to do. And sometimes your heart knows better what you need than your head. I hope to God one day I’ll have the courage to write it all down.

Well, that’s it for today. Oh, one more thing that will probably come up a lot in the next few days. I totally love George Michael. Yes, I know he’s gay. To me George has been and ever will be a great role model. His long and tortuous journey to accept himself and his sexuality are an inspiration to me exactly because it wasn't easy. He’s always been very honest about his struggles too. None of that: "and then I realised I was gay and all was right again in my world" kind of bullshit.

These last couple of weeks my George Michael CD’s have been on constant repeat. I don’t think I could have gotten through all the fear, doubt and pain that seems to be inevitably linked with planning a same-sex marriage if his music hadn’t been there for me. I think his new CD Patience should be a coming-out gift to every gay man or woman, it’s that great.

That’s all for now. Tomorrow I’ll tell you a bit about my first real girl-crush. Thanks for listening.