Pregnant with the Wind

How I got pregnant without even knowing

As I write this, I am heavily pregnant.

I cannot explain how I fell pregnant, I just did without noticing it.

I have over a hundred subscribers reading this just as you read too, so that means, over a hundred people know this truth.

In Africa, we don’t announce our pregnancy, we just show up with a baby bump. In fact, we may even go as far as hiding at home for the entire 9 months until the baby is born.

So, spilling the beans to you, telling over a hundred of you who do not even know me is a risk.

But do you want to know the truth? I can’t keep it secret any longer.

There’s a life inside of me that needs to be fed. This pregnancy keeps getting bigger and bigger and it is tired of hiding.

I’m tired of hiding.

*Whew*

I’m pregnant with a baby value.

Oh you thought it was with a baby? Lol, no, it’s not.

That’s for married folks and I’m not married yet.

Even though I know that people consent to falling pregnant out of wedlock, I don’t subscribe to that belief.

But my beliefs about out-of-wedlock pregnancy is a story for another day.

To be honest, I kind of knew when the fetus was forming inside my stomach, I caused it because instead of opening my legs, I opened my mind.

Let me take you down memory lane.

I had always been an average student and I blame that on my primary 3 class teacher.

Read the story here.

Your grades were what qualified you as an excellent student in school back in the day.

Mathematics was the king of all subjects, and you could never be considered brilliant, except if you got good grades in the subject.

Also, you were considered brilliant if you could easily recite the multiplication table (we called it ‘times table’ back then) off-hand.

Of course I couldn’t recite the ‘times table’ off-hand and I didn’t get good grades in mathematics.

But I was pretty good at sports, I could sing beautifully, and I could read and write perfectly.

But those things didn’t matter. I was always considered average.

I carried my average girl mentality into secondary school and into the University and true to form, intelligence was based on grades.

I had a lot of Cs and Ds in my University days too but because I was already used to the grading style, I really didn’t care.

Things changed when I went for service.

I wrote more about this story here, do check it out now and come back to this post.

The purpose of this post is to urge you to get pregnant as well.

To implore you to, instead of opening your legs, open your minds.

I’m tired of seeing container men and women on social media who go about calling themselves the ‘I’ word without having any content in their containers.

Everyone is building empty barrels just so they can get brand partnerships and collaborations that will garner likes, comments, and shares which eventually translates into money.

I urge you to be different. Choose a different part.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with brand partnerships and collaborations, there’s nothing wrong with being an influencer in your generation.

But something is intrinsically wrong with you if you chase after it for the clout and the applause that comes with it

I have grown so accustomed to listening to sermons and one day, I heard a statement from an apostle.

He said “When others are making noise, get pregnant”.

Let’s talk about sermons for a little bit.

You might be reading this, and you are not a Christian, but as a Christian, sermons and books were those 2 things that broke a barrier in my mind.

There are a few men and women of God that I listen to on a regular basis.

These God-sent people have stepped on snakes and scorpions and have gone through stormy waters.

They are now standing where I want to stand. That’s why I make it a point of duty to listen to them as often as I can.

They got pregnant while others in their generations were making noise.

This is one of the reasons I left LinkedIn. Too many noisy barrels.

Every time you opened the app, you’d see posts from people who clearly still needed to bury their heads in books to acquire knowledge.

Those who needed to attend masterclasses were always talking about hosting masterclasses (wait is this a pun? 😏)

Young people who still needed grooming always positioned themselves as ‘authority figures’ in fields they’d spent less than a year in.

LinkedIn became a place where mediocrity was passed on as authority and even I too fell for it.

I began to share a few ‘authority posts’ too, even though deep down, I knew I only had a fraction of the knowledge I claimed to possess.

Listen, if you are not pregnant with substance, time will tell.

You’ll make noise for a while and then you’ll fizzle out and be replaced by those who know their onions.

Spend time learning, studying, and acquiring knowledge.

Focus on building core values, soft skills, and good work ethics.

I belonged to a Facebook group that taught young people who aimed to be professionals to '“act like one”

Every day, the group admin would share tips and tricks on how we could position ourselves as authority figures.

We were told to get professional headshots, set up a LinkedIn account, and post content that’ll show us as authority figures in the industry.

Before that time, my LinkedIn platform was ‘collecting dust on the shelf’.

But I took their advice (which was pretty good at that time) and I got my headshots taken, I also started to publish consistently on LinkedIn.

After a while, I started to encounter the noisy barrels on LinkedIn.

They were getting a lot of likes and comments on their posts, and the more they did, the more empty content they published.

By empty content, I mean content that didn’t pack enough value, content that spoke highly of them as authority figures but wasn’t helpful to the reader in any way.

Look, until you decide by yourself that you don’t want to be an empty barrel, you will always be one.

I urge you to take a look at yourself and take stock of your self-image.

Who are you, really? And what can you offer the world?

At a point in my life, I realized that I just needed to be different, I needed to be set apart, and I needed to stand out.

Then I set out on the quest to find myself. My self-image was pretty bad at the time and so I knew I had a lot of work to do.

I discovered personal development books and I consumed them voraciously.

From there, I found faith-based books too and went on to read all the ones I could get my hands on.

After books, I got introduced to sermons and the rest is history.

I had an encounter, a barrier broke in my mind and I became a different person.

This change didn’t come without its challenges.

First of all, I had to deal with people who knew the old me.

They had an issue simply believing that I had changed and that I couldn’t relate with them on their level anymore.

I also had to face my parents, who thought I was using all my money to buy books (I wasn’t using all, just a huge chunk of it, 😊).

You see, learning happens at the point of discomfort.

People who see me read books tell me they also want to start reading but they don’t know how to start.

They talk about how reading is time-consuming, how the pages are too many, and so many excuses.

If you are not comfortable with discomfort, you will never grow.

Let me leave you with this: Many people, including yourself, think you’re pretty smart. Truth is, you’re not.

If someone walks up to you and explains to you how and why you’re simply stupid, you’d probably get into a fist fight with them.

But I say again, you are not smart.

Scripture says to not lean on the things you think you know.

It’s simply warning you about the illusion of knowledge-believing that you have the knowledge you need to succeed.

You have not arrived, you are simply pregnant with the wind.