Multiple award-winning Actor, Producer, and Director, Shan George, sits with Chude Jideonwo, host of #WithChude and founder of Joy, Inc. to discuss her attempted suicide, a tough marriage, and her mother’s 10-year illness.
Sharing on the interview, Shan shared about moving to Calabar in 2015, 4 years after her mother’s illness began and refused to get better. “My mom was always complaining, every day, that she didn’t want to stay in Lagos. She wanted to go home. It became so bad that she wasn’t allowing me to sleep.” It was also around this time that her rent expired, a situation caused by the amount of money spent on her mom’s increasing hospital bills. “So, I carried all the remaining things — after I had sold most of it — and carried myself and my mom to Calabar,” she told Chude Jideonwo.
These experiences and the lack of a sense of hope drove her to a suicidal point. “One of my visitors, a long time ago, brought shaving powder, and I wanted to put it in the water and drink. I told my mother that I wanted to kill myself — because I’m tired, I’m frustrated. My mother said, Okay, you’re not going alone. We have to go together. My mother said, yeah, bring it,” she said. Her mother collected the intended suicide material from her, promising that they would take it together once it’s morning. The first call she received the next morning, however, was from someone she had met in the past, who eventually sent her 1.5 million naira. “Let’s say that’s how God brought me back to life because I already died,” she added.
She responded to rumours in the media about being a single mother and that of multiple husbands. She said, “I was never a single mother because [the children’s] father did everything a father should do. Their father called, conversed, talked about the kids, the bills, and we both practically took care of the kids. They spend time with him, and sometimes, they spend time with me. We had no issues. We had a very cordial relationship concerning the kids.” In response to the rumour of over 10 husbands, she added, “My own is that can people bring the wedding pictures, or will I get married without pictures? At least, one of them. Okay, what are even the names of these husbands?”
When asked about marriage, the actor who now runs a film academy in Calabar said, “The thing about my marriage, and why my marriage didn’t work out is because when I was going to get married, I gave a condition — that I wanted to go to the university. Being brought up in a humble background, back home in the village, my mum didn’t have money, she managed to send me to secondary school, and there was really no money to go to the university. Then, I met my husband, I married my husband, and started having kids.”
The plan to return to the university thing never worked out even after her kids. Then one day she left. “Just like that, one day, I woke up in the morning, I told my husband that I was going to the market, and I just left.
Watch the excerpts from the interview here:
