Melancholy and Me

Adedolapo Olisa
7 min readMay 1, 2023

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I am about to admit to my hiatus being related to extended periods of happiness. I am also going to attempt to decipher what sadness looks like today. Lastly, I am now sure that I could easily be single at 40.

But first, a pic for medium:

Why am I sad?

There was a season of my life when I led

Myself to believe that I was undesirable. It was a very important season of my life and it might have just concluded. I plunged into a wide range of emotions. I felt discontent with life. I blew all my problems out of proportion. I focused on who I wasn’t, what I didn’t Have, who got away and who I will never become. The most cynical “WH” and dangerous part of that face was believing that WHoever God was, didn’t serve me.

I’m still healing from that clusterPUCK of emotions and the sheer loss that comes with it but I step into this new season of gratitude with a big giant elephant in my room of thoughts. The elephant of being single digit. I’m still just Mister or I guess Master Dolapo.

In the past year or two, I have:

  • Visited Nigeria and seen my dad
  • Visited my brother in Canada and finally tasted Canadian air.
  • Registered my business in the US
  • Gotten my green card
  • Gotten in an accident and bought an SUV that makes me feel like a big man. Still a 2002 though, but the exterior gives me confidence to drive into a billionaire’s nest and not feel like a fresh grad.
  • Transformed at work into a leader not just in my delusional mind but my title and responsibilities indicate so.
  • Paid off my big debt which relatively was still small but in my eyes on my neck felt like a huge weight.
  • Changed churches. I know this because my tithe destination has changed. I can’t say that my affinity has but my routine has but my community hasn’t followed suit.

So maybe I will go into each of those things at a later time. If you want the on juicy details, comment what u want me to write on next or highlight. But the reason I rattled off that list isn’t because I want to brag. Those aren’t achievements. There is no money attached to any of those things. If anything they cost me money.

However those are big rocks, boulders mentally that I have had to navigate for 10 years. They have sipped out of my writing at various points.

So you can imagine why I have been happy lately. There is this saying I go by though:

If you are not tackling the most pressing problem, any problem you tackle is a distraction.

Another way of saying it is that, it’s essential to identify what your limiting factor is, always; and while you make progress of everything else, invest primarily on the war against THAT limiting factor.

My limiting factor is a wife.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Ugghhhhh!!!!!!

Sheeessshhhh!!!!!!!!!

I hate that. I hate admitting that. I hate writing that. I hate realizing that. I hate the feeling of that.

I hate that because I hate need. I don’t mind wants, but need, I hate it.

I need a wife. I don’t want one, I need one. And I know how it sounds. I know what we are conditioned to believe.

This season, it’s all about independence. The married people tell us that it’s a crap show. Why get married when you can keep all your coins, and get sex with different women on demand.

The single women are consuming content about how to be single and wait for Holy Usher to come around. And even Holy Usher still needs vetting because we gotta

make sure he isn’t gay.

The whole thing is confusing, it’s a big giant farce. But I am not pinning this on the world; I want to have a dialog with myself.

I have met 3–5 amazing women in the last two years. And the one constant is a double edged sword.

  • They are amazing humans.
  • But …

Two things can be true. And in my case these things are always true. There is always a butt. A but(t), I mean but that doesn’t go away.

My yardstick is summarized in three words — godly, sexy, smart.

There is always something missing. Or something that good enough. Even now, I realize it’s not so much that it isn’t good enough, it’s often that one characteristics is so high that the least feels so low in comparison.

I “met” this lady that is drop dead beautiful by every definition of the world. She is from my tribe, very young and very ambitious. She is freaking smart, and godly! The thing is that she is a 9.5 on godly, 9 on smart; but she is a 7 on sexy. If instead you change sexy to beauty, she would be a 9. But sexy is the word for a reason.

I want someone that I wanna bang. Someone I think about banging. Someone I cannot wait to finish wedding ceremony to go see off camera.

In other words, she has a booty, it’s just petite.

The point of sharing that isn’t because I like to rate women. I am sharing because I have a legitimate problem. When I find found her, my heart lept for joy. I had that feeling I have longed for since one Raisa, Iykyk. That feeling where I am attracted to someone and it’s not because their booty led the way. The sexual energy didn’t flood the engine of my mind. Maybe the beauty did but that is a worse evil.

The problem is while we are getting to know each other, very early. I cashed an old cheque that I had planned before we ever met. I met up with an IG friend while I was in Canada and I had plans to go back and see her. I bought the ticket and everything before we met. So here I am with her hanging out and having an amazing time.

The Canada lady is sexy on a 9. She has the small frame and big ass that I like. And I am lost in lust. So much so that I haven’t really been able to see ahead of me to engage my new RayRay.

Every moment I share in Canada, is clouded by questions and fears and torment that love doesn’t spare me of.

See when I envision myself as a man. I envisioned a man that loved one woman, married her, kept his dick inside only her panties and no wandering desire for any other woman. I grew up a serial monogamist for reasons I have documented in other post.

My vision of myself is of a faithful man that loves his wife and raised the most beautifully athletic kids in customs of my faith and my tribe.

The problem is, the only thing I hold onto about my tribe is the language. Everything else seems to be washing away or negotiable. I would gladly give up whatever it means to be Yoruba for whatever it means to be happily married.

I wish it stopped there. Because I will do the same thing for my faith. I have no idea what my faith is anymore. I have lost the dogma that drove my routines of my faith. And I feel very much in a wilderness still very eager to commune with God if I can ever find him truly, sincerely but very much open to being lost if it comes from my true self.

That church that I started attending is a Calvinist church. And one of the gift it has given me is the immersion into the full Sovereignty of God.

Inasmuch as I need to prove my faith by my works, I am also very comfortable proving whatever faith I have by my works.

Let’s unpack, the biggest travesty of this Bible verse:

But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. — James 2:18

I believe strongly that the emphasis of this verse isn’t perfect works. It isn’t show me your perfect work so that I know you have faith in MY God. The core idea of this verse is to remind us that what we do has an anchor in what we believe. Also what we do isn’t measured by people’s reaction or judgment of its depth or height.

What we do IS what we believe and what we believe is what we do.

Restated:

Why we do, what we do, what we believe are not separate entities before God.

Abraham never killed his son. To kill Isaac would have been the loudest action. But God knew he would. He knew his thoughts. So louder than following through, he saw what he had done in his mind; he saw his conviction, he saw his priorities, he saw what he believed.

So for me, I want to live a consistent life. A life where what I think, what I believe is what I act out. My motivations are clear, my doubts are even clearer, my surrender is clear and my withdrawals too!

In other words, I am engaged by the reality that I came to Canada anyway to see if I will resist the lust because I felt an ember of love. Instead, the ember of love is smothered by lust and I now look at the ass in front of me as the ass I wanna enjoy forever.

Am I exaggerating? Maybe. But I am very much staring at my vision of who THIS man is. And it looks nothing like who I thought I was working towards.

So I question my faith. I question the hierarchy of my faith and my tribe. Is it time to tweak my vision statement. Should I swap the place of my tribe from my faith? Or is this is just a period like a mirror showing me how far I have deviated from my faith.

Time will tell but I will not play God. I will release whatever loss comes from penning my reality, and invite my creator to shape me in His Sovereignty.

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Adedolapo Olisa
Adedolapo Olisa

Written by Adedolapo Olisa

I’m an aspiring story teller that is learning to let stories tell their own morals. You’ll find me where Faith-Tech-Art meet.