When people realise that I attended a military school at some point in my life, they'll look at me twice and wonder if I was trying to be the joker for the day. "You don't look like you really did," many would say to me. In reality, if they could live vicariously through me and my experiences being in military school, they'd understand how I can be assertive most times.
Physique and physical strength are what people expect of people who have anything to do with the military. It takes true understanding and first-hand experiences sometimes to realise that there is a lot that goes on mentally by being in the military or under the military.
When I joined the military secondary school a few years ago, where I would then graduate from and move to a university, I knew that I had just entered hell on earth. There were a lot of things I observed that were so different from the civilian lifestyle that I was used to.
For one, seniority was taken to a whole other level. It wasn't to be played with, and everyone reverenced the concept of seniority, even if it was just between immediate students of different levels. Seniors could deliver disciplinary measures to their juniors.
Just like anything else in this life, seniority can and is often abused. It transcended into simple things like food and other personal possessions, where a senior could just extort their junior(s) of their own things.
I was in my penultimate year when I encountered the most infuriating senior that I had encountered. Scratch that, actually—because there were actually many seniors like that, and ranking them would be a challenge. Considering that I was in SS2, I really shouldn't have been frustrated to the point that I had to stand up for myself one night, which wasn't a thing that juniors could just do.
In the military, or at least the military school that I attended, you could have yourself punished for reporting a senior. Or, instead, the senior would be punished severely, but not for the reason that you'd expect. The senior gets punished for allowing you to breathe enough to come report them. Boy, oh boy, you can imagine the level of suffering that would follow. For that reason, juniors usually bear the pain and suffering until they become seniors themselves.
Moving on, this particular senior was known for his bullying and extortion. He assumed me to be some rich kid, as I looked very much like one. Apparently, I wasn't, and I wasn't gullible enough to just hand my things to some nincompoop without aim and direction for his life. He was determined to frustrate me, seeing that I wasn't bulging and obliging to his demands.
He would demand that I bring certain amounts of money to him sometimes. It usually was about 500 naira then. That was my lunch allowance for five days. On other days, he'd ask me to bring my only piece of meat that I would have gotten from lunch at the school cafeteria. He had other requests too, all of which I never obliged.
I got into trouble with him a lot. He'd call me into some corner and beat me. I was pretty headstrong and stingy with my money too, so I embraced the pain and humiliation every damn time. I knew that obliging to one request always meant that there would be more to follow, and it would only get harder to get out of the ruckus, so I kept managing through until the day when enough was enough arrived.
It seemed like he had had enough of my antics one day. I often dodged him, especially during the day. The entire school was on the assembly line for something that had to do with our interhouse sports then. The entire school, but this guy wanted to use that opportunity to finish me in one corner. He asked me to go wait for him in his room when he randomly found me on the assembly ground after dodging him for so long. I left the parade ground, but I didn't go to the stoopid room.
I wasn't stupid. Going to his den with no one else around meant that I was on a suicide mission. So I aborted and fled to somewhere else to yet again dodge him. That's when he decided that he was going to destroy him, all because it was all too embarrassing for a senior to be dodged the way he was by some puny junior, in fact.
That day was the last day of school, and we were all meant to pack our luggage and leave for Christmas at home that day. He found me again at night, and that's when we had our royal rumble.
We always had this thing we called "rounds" that was mandatory. It was held every night, and it was at that time that we would do head counts. I couldn't afford to be absent, so we were all out of our rooms, gathered on the lawn in the hostel for the head count. He found me, called me to a corner, and asked me to wait for him in an empty room that led to the bathrooms.
I dared not disobey him in front of his colleagues, as that would mean a death sentence for me. They would have gathered to beat me if I had disobeyed, and there was no officer around to count us yet. The room he sent me to was yet another death sentence, as he was going to beat the hell out of me.
From slap to slap and kick to kick, he knocked me down to the floor. Then he used a very dense and large plank to hit me several times. After having too many to handle, I summoned courage and stood up to him. I raised my voice at him, then I ran out as quickly as possible; otherwise, I would have been caught by his colleagues present in that room, and that would have made things worse for me. I wasn't afraid, and so I went straight to report him to the second highest-ranking officer in the school.
It turned out that this guy didn't even have the heart to face the repercussions of his actions. In other words, he was so much of a scaredy cat that he began to beg me when he caught up with me. In my head, I was like, "Oh, wow."
Ever since that day, he has never come close to me. He never bugged me about my possessions and money. The fact that I "changed it for him" and had the courage to report him was enough of a repellent to keep him off till he graduated and I became a senior myself.
Many experiences like this—some even way worse—toughened up my mind and helped me build confidence in myself. I had to fight myself somehow, and I learned to continue to do so for myself. I was never presumptuous, but I also wasn't fazed by intimidating personalities. So, no, it isn't by physique that one's level of self-esteem and confidence should be measured.
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