Veteran Nigerian rapper, MI Abaga, and his wife, Eniola Mafe, have opened up about their struggles with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders, characterized by attention difficulty, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. It often begins in childhood and can persist into adulthood.
During a recent interview on Aproko Doctor podcast, the couple explained that one way they cope with ADHD is by building the habit of communicating and understanding.
Eniola revealed that she had been diagnosed with ADHD since she was 19, and that it had affected her during her school years.
“It’s not something you can just cut out. It’s actually who you are. It’s how you think, accept the world, rejection, and everything.
“It was about realizing that all the things that didn’t seem to make sense about me… it affected me in school. My inability to gather thoughts.” She said.
MI Abaga also shared his experience, saying, “For me, my childhood was just that I loved music. It was tough for me to read in class, probably because I wasn’t paying attention. If I was really interested in something like art, I would excel really well, while my schoolwork was suffering for it.”
He went on to say that he didn’t connect the dots until he was in college and realized that ADHD was a part of his journey in life.
“By the time I went to college, I figured out that the ADHD thing was me and I still couldn’t connect the two dots together. I think the first time that I really got a sense of how much it can control a person was in our relationship, when Eni would explain.
“And I googled it and it was almost like a weight off my shoulder. I can look back at some of those things differently now that it was always going to be part of my journey in life.
“To me, it’s both the thing that has given me so much, because it is where I go to like create, and at the same time, it’s the part of me that I want to understand the most,” he said.
