When I first walked into B.M. Lawson Senior Secondary, I felt like I had entered a different world.
This was my father's dream school — the school he had always wanted to attend but never could.
I tried to be the good boy I once was: quiet, devout, joining the Fellowship of Christian Students (FCS), believing God would guide me through.
But life had other plans.
It started with a slap.
A boy I barely knew walked up to me one afternoon. No words. No warning. Then — a sharp, stinging slap across my face.
The courtyard went silent.
I froze. My instinct was to do what I had always done:
"I will leave you with God," I whispered.
Biggest mistake of my life.
Because in B.M. Lawson, weakness is noticed. The whispers started immediately:
"Holy boy thinks God will fight for him."
"Soft. He's nothing."
"Let's see how long he lasts."
From that moment, bullying became my constant shadow.
The abuse didn't just break me — it reshaped me.
I stopped laughing freely. I stopped trusting classmates.
I still studied, still solved problems faster than most, but my grades suffered.
I was smarter than my peers — I understood concepts that baffled them — but the constant stress and isolation made it hard to show it in class.
And then there was psoriasis.
It returned full force. Red patches, scales, relentless itching. Some classmates whispered that my skin was "decaying." Others avoided me completely.
It would have been easy to give up. To hide. To vanish.
But I didn't.
Amid the shadows, there was Imsomter.
A friend I had pulled closer to Christ when I was still devout in FCS. He had become a devoted student of faith, trying quietly to pull me back whenever I drifted.
But after the bullying, I had stopped attending FCS. I told him, gently but firmly, "I'm done for now."
Even so, he stayed close.
I remember the nights we shared secretly, away from the stares and whispers:
His parents would smuggle soup for him, and we'd sit together, my own plate of eba in hand, eating in the quiet of the night, talking about God, dreams, and life.
He was more than a friend. He was my ally, my confidant, the one person I could trust when the world seemed against me.
By the time we graduated, we lost contact — but I never forgot him.
School had changed me.
I wasn't the same Light who had excelled in JSS. I had become quieter, sharper, and more cautious.
I struggled academically — assignments and tests felt like mountains. I wasn't in the top 25 of the class, but inside, I knew my mind was different. By the time we wrote JAMB, I realized the truth: most of my peers weren't even close to my level.
I wasn't at the top, but I was ahead of most of them. And that knowledge lit a fire inside me.
Looking back now, I understand what B.M. Lawson truly did:
It didn't just challenge me. It forged me.
The slap. The bullying. The whispers. The isolation. The illness.
It all reshaped me. Made me quieter, more calculated, but smarter and more resilient than I had ever been.
And through it all, there were small sparks of hope — friends like Imsomter, moments of quiet reflection, nights of secret soup and eba, and the steady realization that I could survive anything.
By the time I left Senior Secondary, I wasn't just academically capable.
I was ready.
Ready to step into university.
Ready to face the world.
And ready to start shaping the dreams that would one day become reality.