Acting out of character

Let's face it, we humans are perfect and we sometimes do things that are in contrast with our nature just to achieve a certain goal. You can call it desperation or whatever but it does happen and just like most things in the world, there are good and bad sides to this. Sometimes, acting out of character helps us to achieve something good, and the good thing is when what we do isn't illegal or morally wrong. Other times, some people have engaged in illegal activities just to achieve a goal, even when they don't usually do such activities.

That's like when you see someone being paraded for a crime and you keep hearing people saying "But this boy isn't like this, I'm shocked." And actually in most cases, desperation and greed made such persons go out of their nature. Over the years, I have acted out of character a couple of times just to achieve certain goals, and sometimes I even ended up permanently changing my personality even after achieving the intended goal. As I said earlier, these things can either happen in a good way or a bad way and I'm going to be speaking about an experience with both, starting with the good.

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The good way

From 2018 to 2020, I was very active on social media (specifically WhatsApp and Twitter) and this actually made me quite popular among my classmates as the person with the most online presence. My WhatsApp status was always flooded with memes, funny videos and the latest social media gossip. If anything is trending on social media, I am one of the persons who could give you the entire juicy details as if I personally witnessed it 😅

This became worse during the COVID-19 lockdown when schools were shut down and I had all the time in the world for social media. The Big Brother Naija reality show that aired that year, I knew everything that happened in the show without actually watching any of it on TV, because I got all the gossip from Twitter and Instagram which I always shared with my "fans" on Whatsapp. Then one day, I decided to start taking life seriously and I began learning coding.

I was still active on social media but my frequency reduced. I still visited Twitter, updated my WhatsApp status daily and chatted on the various groups I am in. But one day, I realized that spending time on social media wouldn't help me achieve my goal of learning coding quickly, so what did I do? I shut it all done. I uninstalled Twitter and Whatsapp for over 5 months, and people were shocked. I received calls from some friends wondering what happened and some said they thought my phone had been stolen or I had died because those were the only thing that could keep me away from social media.

I was actually surprised that I could stay away from social media that long and it totally helped me improve my coding skills because the time I could have wasted on those apps, I channelled it into coding. I eventually got back on Whatsapp when schools reopened but things weren't the same anymore. I totally lost interest in using it and was no longer active in the groups I used to be in. As for my WhatsApp status, it has been almost 2 years since I last did any updates, and that's definitely weird to some people who knew how crazy my status updates were.

Sometimes, I will come across some of my classmates and they will always remind me of how I used to be active back in 100 level, and then they will ask what happened to me 😅 I sacrificed that life for something better and I never looked back. These days, I barely open my WhatsApp unless I get a message from someone. As for Twitter (now X), I hardly visit there anymore unless I get a notification about an interesting post or I have something specific to do.

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The bad way

Y'all know exam malpractice, right? I'm talking about cheating during an exam, whether by checking for answers with a phone, book or a piece of paper with answers written on it. Yeah that one, I hate it and I always criticize people who do it. I have never done it throughout my school years and aside from it being morally wrong, I am also afraid of the consequences if I get caught. I maintained this character until something happened in my final year at the university.

There's this particular entrepreneur course which was mandatory for all final year students in my faculty and it was even a borrowed course from another department. I barely attended the classes because it was always full (over 600 students) and luckily, the lecturers never bothered to take attendance. One day, I decided to skip the class as usual but my friends told me that there would be a test that day and it was over 30 marks. I had no option but to go for the test even though I wasn't prepared.

To tell you how serious this test was, the lecturer printed question papers for everyone and used a very big hall for it. Everyone sat down on individual seats in zigzag from, it felt like we were writing an exam. I looked at the questions and instantly realized I would score zero on that test. I saw people using their phones to write the test and at that instant, I remembered I had forgotten to keep my phone in my bag which was outside the hall, my phone was right in my pocket! There were just 2 lecturers supervising the test, which made it very easy to cheat.

I had the PDF of the course material on my phone and that was what I used to write the test. I came out of the hall after the test was over and my friends were discussing people who were using their phones to cheat, I kept quiet. It wasn't my proudest moment and till today, none of them knew about the fact that I cheated on that test (unless they came across this article) Despite using my phone to write the test, I still got 18 out of 30. I successfully avoided malpractice from my first year but fell for it when I got to the final year, that's what desperation can do to anybody.

Thanks for reading

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