In a world suffering from depression, desperateness and lack of self-belief, I chose to make a difference. I told myself I was going to heal some wounds and preach some hope, so I started the plaques business.
It’s a type of business I had planned on venturing into since my Form six in High-school when I received over five success cards from different sources with the same wording that I didn’t find as motivating as was the intention of gifting a friend a card of the kind.
So I told myself I would make my seasonal cards soon no matter the cost. Of course, there were several challenges with starting such a business as a student, lack of a reasonable amount of funds being one of them and the choice of a suitable workmate another.
One day I shared my ideas with a group of poets on how to earn from one’s writing and that’s when I got a connection from Mal, a friend who had been in the plaques business a couple of years back but paused when she moved to the US. The evening she sent me the number of the guy who used to do her printing, I rushed to town to meet him. And when I looked at my first plaque ever, I smiled, I loved everything about it. So I went ahead and hung it on the wall in my hostel room and everyone who read from it seemed to love it even more, so I started receiving orders for plaques ranging from sizes A4 to A2.
Everyone that ordered said they loved the depth of the words and the message they carried, not to mention the elegance of the plaques owed to the fine wood and magnificent photography at the background of the words. From then till date, I’ve had several friends and new numbers making plaque orders for their mothers and fathers, boyfriends and girlfriends, friends and keepers, family and office spaces and others for themselves. Say, a plaque with a short motivational piece to get them up and running on lazy days, an abstract piece to get their visitors pondering, and others a simply beautiful plaque to beautify their wall for the love of art.
“Depression is a song sang by plain walls and empty tables, so get you a plaque and shed some light unto your alone thoughts”
This being my slogan for the plaques. Through these plaques, I’ve helped several friends and strangers suffering from depression based on my own experiences and imagination of what they could go through. In the few years, I’ve made these plaques, I’ve learned many things and the most vital of all being, words are more powerful than the gun or anything could ever get.
Words take shape in any vessel they deem fit, bloom in all kinds of hearts (dark or bright, as long as they are allowed a sit), sweep the largest of mountains in just a simple sigh. Words do so much more than just communicating; they weave emotions back into the pattern, give birth to one of the sweetest necessities in life: love, ability to express oneself. They enable us to express ourselves. I mean imagine a world without words. Even paintings need silent words to speak, even imagination is a marriage of words and pictures. This is how dreams come to exist.
So with my writing, I chose to create camps of emotional relief with words wrapped in a poetic skin as music. I write for therapy and to give therapy. I write to stretch one’s mind, get you thinking, leave you pondering the unpredictable, give you a reason to doubt everything so you can build your own.
Let’s imagine a world and build it, let’s live our imagination.
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