Dear Twenty-Something Thousand of You,

Facebook tells me I now have more than twenty thousand followers. Here’s my love letter to you all who are now within the range of my ramblings.

Intro.

First, let me reintroduce myself.

My name is Victor Daniel. First name Victor, last name Daniel. This is my real name, and it reflects so on all relevant documents. I do not like the name because of the monotonous sound of it, and I have often expressed my preference for a native first-name. But I did not name myself, and since my parents were not creative enough to coin a better sounding name, I have come to be known as Victor Daniel, or Victordaniel, pronounced as one name by idiots I went to secondary school with.

My father is Mr. Femi Daniel, and he knows me as a lawyer. My Facebook friends know me as a writer, and my girlfriend thinks I am a cute, squishy ball of awesomeness. I am all of these things, but sometimes, I am also an anxious, cynical and consistently semi-depressed piece of shit.

I’m skinny, my nose is big, my teeth aren’t very white, and my hairline recedes. These details are very important, and it is important for me to tell you first. This is because I will post pictures where some of the most unflattering physical features are obvious, and you will be pressed to make a joke about how I look even though we are not close, and you don’t send me money, and we don’t swap saliva. Do not do it.

10 years ago, I wasn’t much of these things. I was a less-than-remarkable teenager, freshly thrust into the bedlam of the university world, hopping on all the trend ships that sailed. Facebook was one of them. Kenny helped with setting up the profile, my name was Daniel Oluwaseyi Victor and Theo Walcott was my profile picture. What I did not know back then was that the trajectory of my life was going to be defined largely by a social network whose blue & white interface was too complicated for me at the time.

Coming of Age.

I was a wallflower. That was all I could be. My social skills were so abysmal, my friends had to set me up on a date with this girl they thought was into me. It was an utter disaster, because myself and the girl sat in front of her room waiting for who would say the next stupid shit. I bloomed late, and didn’t have my first real kiss until I was pushing 20.

In 2011 I fell in love for the first time. It was with a course mate. She put me in a triangle and shattered my heart into little, shiny shards. I didn’t even get a peck for all that heartache. That would be the last time in a long time that I would let myself feel that way about anyone who had a physical proximity with me.

I had my first relationship in 2012 with a girl I met on Facebook. We did a lot of sexting before we broke up. She was 3 years older but she did not know. I would randomly bump into her for the first time ever, 8 years later, here in Abuja.

The next year I met someone else and we took things to the next level. She served me nudes and I drowned in the sheer ecstasy of seeing a naked, adult body. She was also much older, and she too, did not know. But she was also far away from me. We did what we did for six months then had a fight over trivia stuff and broke up. We would resume being friends again a couple of years later, less than a month away from her death.

2014 came, and I’d started finding my voice. My content was considered dope and my friend list started to swell. The girls came too, and somehow I scored a girlfriend who, for a change, was within the same geographical location with me. We fucked the second time we met, on the night of my 20th birthday. Certain events have blunted my memory of all the things that happened with that relationship afterwards, but it is worthy of note that Facebook helped me get rid of my virginity long after my friends thought I had actually become sexually active.

Writing.

I did not use to be a very expressive person, physically. Back then, I didn’t have much of a life anyway. So, like most people my age, I found my voice on the platform where I didn’t have to be shy about saying anything. I’ve always been a thinker. You should see my mind, all the bizarre shit that goes in there. I needed somewhere to put all that chaos into. So Facebook became, for me, a temple for self-expression. I spent the first three years of my Facebook just saying all the corny bullshit my mind could conceive. It didn’t seem to me that anyone was reading. I just wrote. I wasn’t posting for anyone, I was posting for me.

I had always had the writing in me. Back in Divine Academy I was the only student submitting original contents for our yearly magazines. I had become attracted to stories, and had been fascinated by the many ways through which stories were conveyed. As a teenager I was reading everything that I could read, listening fiercely to Eminem — because my life sucked and he could tell — and was talking shit about whatever I wanted.

At first, nobody was listening. But then suddenly, people started paying attention. I have since come to the understanding of what is, perhaps, the most fundamental rule of building a social following — consistency.

In October 2015, having managed to accrue a reasonable followership on Facebook, I was moved to write my first fiction. Some story I hardly remember now. The reception was important for me, because it spurred in me the motivation to do something I had always known that I could, but was too afraid to try. It’s been five years now, and I have watched myself grow through the art, regardless of how inefficient I may have been sometimes.

For those that have asked, I did not set out to build an audience. That was never the plan. The plan was to simply be. It was in the process of being, that I was found out, and was considered interesting enough to follow, and got followed, before I was ever good enough to lay a decent paragraph on a prose.

CeLeBRiTy.

I recognize the condescension with which this term is used in the context of describing some Facebook dudes with a bunch of likes who probably don’t have much going on for them in real life. I am sometimes constrained to downplay how much influence the phenomenon of social media popularity has had on me. But realistically, it does feel good, this “Facebook celebrity” life. Don’t let anyone with a faux sense of modesty tell you otherwise.

On a grand scale, having ten thousand followers on your Facebook account doesn’t mean shit when you realize there are as much as 23 million Nigerians on Facebook. But then you have a social media presence known to ten thousand humans. That’s the population of an entire town. That is some social currency you have there.

I had my first follower in 2015, shortly after I stopped accepting every request that came my way. It’s been five years now and I cannot estimate the value this followership has added to my life. Even when I did not have much going on for me in real life, it felt real good walking around with the confidence of someone who has of thousands of people within the range of his random musings. I have, on countless occasions, randomly walked into a room for the first time and gotten recognized by someone there as Victor Daniel. The Victor Daniel.

I am sometimes fascinated by other people’s fascination with me, but I have since understood the sociological implications of being in public eye. I recognize that I have become an object of interest, and depending on the lens from which you view my person, I am fascinating, irritable, corny, clownish, and maybe even inspiring. Whichever it is, I have been awoken to the consciousness that I am no ordinary kid, and I strut around with the gait of a guy who has superpowers only himself is aware of.

Of course, I did not invent hot water, or jollof rice, so I may not be so special to you, but I have a social currency big enough to establish connections with people I may never have had access to if they did not also find themselves under the coverage of my brilliance (*adjusts shoulder-pad*), and that may have given me an undue advantage over others in a lot of circumstances.

Relations.

It has become extremely difficult for me to establish a solid relationship with people online. On a superficial level, I have friends from Facebook; people I chat with once in a while, who I may sometimes go weeks without having a personal interaction with. Other than this, I do not have a deep-rooted connection with people on Facebook, because I do not participate in the level of conversations needed to establish this sort of relationship. I will explain.

Know this about me: I find chatting extremely tedious, and I would prefer you to keep conversations straight and simple. I enjoy quick banters, though, especially as comments under my posts or stories. Otherwise, I do not have the time, energy or patience to ask about how your day went, or what you’re doing today, or what your hobbies are.

But it wasn’t always like this. I simply grew overwhelmed. My mental energy has been severely depleted, to the extent that repeating redundant tasks such as replying to all individual comments on my posts, or responding to every single message, would have a debilitating effect on my mental health. I’ll tell you about it shortly.

The implication of this is that, even though I have thousands of followers, I have only a few people who would consider me their guy. I know that I am considered proud by a lot of people, and others find me inaccessible, and snobbish, and highhanded. Even though this is not true, and people who know me outside of Facebook can attest to this, I have grown weary of trying to fight this perception of me.

However, I know that when push comes to shove, only people who have a personal connection with you will stand up for you. So while I understand that a lot of people are entertained by my contents, I am not under any illusion about how deep my connection runs with individuals.

This has, in many ways, complicated my intimate relationships too. I find myself taking an attraction to certain women, and having to stretch myself out of my comfort to try to keep the fire on. Sometimes, it works out well enough, and I land myself a girlfriend. But a lot of times, I fail, and whatever was brewing between us quickly dissipates into friendships that has to endure the agony of routine check-ups on WhatsApp.

This is probably why I am extra sensitive about people not responding to my messages with the same energy the few times I try, because I feel like, do you not understand that I am actually trying? Do you not see how much this means for me?

Depression.

The year was 2017 and I couldn’t catch a break. My relationship ended, Law School snubbed me, I was broke as fuck and I was drinking. The world was colourless. I’ve written about this a lot of times. Here’s some of it.

Victor Daniel

My depression changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined, and since 2017 my social relativity has not remained the same. I do not know if I have completely recovered, because there are several debris of that experience I still have lying around in conspicuous layers of my life.

First, I have not recovered from the sudden disinterest I developed for personal engagements. In real life, I’m quiet sociable. I like my solitude, but when I hangout, I talk a lot. Laugh a lot. Make jokes. But the resentment I developed for my phone, I have not been able to recover from. I am afraid of people getting within my personal space, in a way that would need me to talk to them about things that would stretch my mental state. I am beyond certain that this might unsettle the grey part of my existence that I have made numb so I could live normally again. But I try. I swear I do.

Secondly, I am now very reluctant to put so much of my personal struggles on Facebook. I still do, but not in the manner I used to. Facebook reminds me of some of the very personal posts I made back in 2017 and I cringe because, what the corny fuck? So if you ever go through my profile and feel like I am living the good life, this is not true. My life is half shit, half stable. I only let you see the latter.

I have very little interest in posting about serious subjects, or an intellectually simulating discourse, or anything that would motivate a passionate debate. Sometimes I make these types of posts, but most times, I just want to fool around, and this has been a source of concern to some of my friends who think I have a platform big enough to instigate a shift in the country’s status quo (LOL).

I still have addictions precipitated by my depression that I have not gotten rid of. I still have songs that I can no longer listen to, because they remind me of that period of my life, and listening to them may trigger a relapse for me.

Ultimately.

I do not know how much time I have left on Facebook, but I am very much aware of the massive influence being here has had on my life. Thank you for your indulgence. But more than that, I’m putting this here for you to know this bit about me, so you may understand, and possibly tolerate me more.

I am grateful to Facebook for a lot of things, especially for the motivation to create, for the incentives that came with influence, and most importantly, for the gift of you.

Because I love you, and may no longer have the capacity to let you know.

Truly yours,

Victor.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/250254dc7632c291132fbed2530d0913/href">https://medium.com/media/250254dc7632c291132fbed2530d0913/href</a>

Because he gets me, more than I get myself.