By Tope Songonuga
One fateful day in December 1980, I woke up as a bubbly, beautiful and confident 15-year-old with flawless skin.
Later that night, I woke up in a hospital bed with third-degree gas burns on my face, arms, hands and legs.
Ten weeks later, the erstwhile beautiful skin on those parts of my body had grown extra layers of skin from the scar tissue.
This was how keloids became part of the tapestry that makes me who I am today.
With time, I managed to convince myself that the scars on my face and body automatically excluded me from society.
Our world is a planet that places very high premium on physical appearance and would never openly welcome or accept anyone with any form of deformity.
I felt rejected by my peers and had to endure stares and jeers – I still do but these no longer bother me.
This was how I lost more than two decades of my young life to social exclusion: all because of how I had set my mind at the time.
I realised rather late that it was my mindset that had held me hostage.
I had given the world a tacit permission to exclude me from fully participating in society because of how I looked.
This was the story of my life until I was able to identify that my pain has a purpose.
My life’s purpose is to help others to identify how their mindset could be standing in their way and preventing them from living optimally or worse still, unintentionally holding the lives of others to ransom.
I finally got liberated in my late 30s and this led to the vision that manifests today as Mindset Makeover Mission -my pet project.
Additionally, this negative experience is now being positively deployed as the Seeing Hearts Foundation – to help lift indigent and forgotten Visually Impaired Persons out of the intersection of social, digital and financial exclusion into optimal social participation.
At last, my humble self, who had been socially excluded because of my mindset and that of others is now advocating social inclusion for all by equipping, inspiring and encouraging mindset transformation and giving back.
From my experience, social exclusion can have negative psycho-social impact on the individual whom society has left behind.
This can induce depression, anxiety, relational problems, loss of identity, loss of confidence and self-esteem, a lack of academic motivation, loss of cultural affiliations, de-integration from family ties, isolation, deprivation, trauma etc.
The Nigerian society is unfortunately a fertile ground for social exclusion.
This is due to the prevalence of what I’ve termed the ‘9ja Mindset.’
This mindset encompasses focus on competition and comparison, instead of collaboration, with the society predisposed to celebrating the rich but morally bankrupt.
Disability within the Nigerian society, is deemed to be grounds for abandonment, with superficial beauty rated higher than intellectual wealth.
Anyone with any form of ‘deformity’ barely exists as far as the rest of society is concerned.
If you do not fit into the mould, you are automatically excluded from participation in the society; sometimes multi-dimensionally.
Imagine the impact of this burden on the general well-being of the socially-excluded.
It is my conviction that everyone walking the face of this earth has gifts and talents that can be leveraged to improve the world.
My mission is therefore, to advocate for a society where nobody is left behind, where everyone is included and their gifts and talents harnessed positively to add value.
I am on a mission to give back to Nigeria by raising awareness about the power of an individual’s mindset and how to harness and leverage it to improve the collective social experience.
Nigeria, being my fatherland and the setting where my experience of exclusion began, is exactly where that inclusion advocacy journey must begin.
It is for this reason that I will be hosting the ‘Renew Your Mind, Transform Your World’ Mindset Makeover Conference in Nigeria in June this year.
My pain must be gain to someone, somewhere and sometime so that I may die empty.
I strongly believe that together, we can work to create an inclusive society where everybody can thrive, despite their physical appearance, level of ability and capability or socio-economic status.
Social exclusion is a silent killer that must be eradicated from our society.
*Tope Songonuga, an IT Professional, Philanthropist and Social Reformer, lives in the United Kingdom.
