Tough time doesn't last

One very important thing I have learned about life from a very young age is that it is not a bed of roses and everyone faces difficulties at one point or another. It would be silly of me to ignore the fact that people have gone through and are going through the toughest times of their lives just because I haven't experienced some of the things I have heard. I would say I'm quite fortunate that I haven't experienced some of the things some people have gone through which left me with questions like "How did they survive this? How are they even still functioning properly after such an experience?"

One thing about challenges is that they get tougher as you grow older. When we were kids, we had very little to worry about (our greatest worries were probably about the games to play or the type of snacks to eat) and that's because we depend on our parents for everything but as we grow older and start being independent, we realize that life isn't a bed of roses we thought it was. One of my favourite quotes is "Hope for the best but expect the worst" and it's just a little reminder that life can mess me up at any time and I should be prepared for it.

I have gone through a couple of tough times in my life but the toughest of them all happened just last year during my final months in the university and I have actually talked about this experience before but I didn't mention some of the challenging details involved. So, as it's the norm in all universities, final-year students are to work on their final projects which was something I started saving for from the beginning of the year. I did a rough estimate of what the whole thing would cost and I managed to save up most of the money with my uncle providing the remaining one.

Things were going well at first and I was happy that I didn't spend more than my budget but things took a sour turn when the whole experiment failed (I thought it did). I had to do it again for the second time and this meant using all the money I had at that point. The financial aspect wasn't the only challenging thing, I was also physically and mentally exhausted. I spent 3 days in school without going home at all, just because of the nature of the experiment. The experiment involved the incubation of fish eggs, and I had to take frequent readings and regulate temperatures, especially at night when it gets very cold.

While all these were going on, I was also attending classes during the day and working on assignments. It was during this period my phone got bad and I didn't even have money to fix it. I was so broke that I started powering down my Hive power just so I could have some money with me every week. After patiently waiting for one of those powered-down HP to drop on one certain week, I mistakenly provided a dormant account when selling it on binance and the money got sent there. I tried to transfer it and was told the account wasn't active, that was probably the lowest point of my life.

After calling customer care to see if I could reactivate the account, I was told to visit the nearest bank branch which is in another city (Lagos). There was no food at home, my phone fell in water and was damaged but no money to fix it, I was still spending the night in school because of the second phase of the experiment, I was barely getting up to 2 hours of sleep every night and I kept wondering how I will feed the next day. I couldn't even bring myself to call my parents because my younger sister had just been admitted to the university and they had a lot of fees to pay.

I started checking out loan apps to see if I could borrow some money which is something I really hate but at that point, I was very desperate, I needed to fix my phone. My laptop became my lifesaver at that point and helped me to stay online, which was how I found a solution to my problem. I received an email from my bank that some amount of money had been refunded to my account and that was when I realized it was a failed transaction that happened a couple of months earlier. A friend sent some money to me to help him make some purchases online and one of them failed but there was no reversal from my bank despite contacting customer care several times.

My initial thought was to keep quiet about it and just use the money to solve my problems, 79k ($52) is a big amount and will be very helpful at that point but I just decided to do the right thing and inform my friend. He was very happy about the news and told me to take 14k from it and send the rest to him. That was how I was able to fix my phone and had some money to survive that week until the next powered-down HP arrived. Now, all these challenges I talked about all happened within a week, which I crowned the worst week all through my stay at the university.

In the end, it turned out that the result I got from the first experiment was correct and I thought it was wrong because I never expected the result but the second experiment confirmed it. All the challenges I faced during that week all ended within 2 weeks. One thing I learned from all that experience was that a solution can come up from where you never expected. I was battling my bank for that refund on the failed transaction for over 2 months but the refund came right at the moment when I was facing financial difficulties.

I just kept wondering what I would have done if that hadn't happened and my friend didn't give me that 14k naira which was actually a surprise because I planned to ask him to loan me some money and I would pay back later but he just gifted me some money without me asking. In the end, I just saw it as God looking out for me, he sent help right when I needed it the most and got me out of that tough situation. I always tell myself that there's a solution to every problem but at that point, I wasn't seeing any solution and one just came out of nowhere. Well, thank God I've finally graduated from the university, I honestly didn't enjoy my final days there but I'm glad I made it out successfully.

Thanks for reading

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