I love Snapchat for one very specific reason.

It remembers things I don’t.

Every now and then, it pulls something from years ago and puts it in front of me like, Hey, remember this? Remember this person? Remember who you were?

And sometimes I laugh.

Sometimes I cringe.

Sometimes I stare at the screen for a little too long.

Recently, I was going through my old phone and reading some of my old notes and entries.

Some of them were actually good.

Some of them were definitely written by a younger version of me.

And some of them made me wonder, Why did I write this like someone was going to read it?

Because even though these were supposed to be my private thoughts, some of them felt performative.

Not necessarily fake.

Just… performed.

Like I wasn’t only documenting what I felt. I was presenting it.

I was showing an audience what was supposed to be intimate.

And then Snapchat made it worse.

I started seeing old screenshots of texts, old relationship memories, old videos, old little moments that I had completely forgotten about.

You know those things where you’re basically saying, Remove your eyes from my relationship.

And looking at them now, I almost laugh because I think, girl, you were the one putting the relationship in everybody’s face.

You can’t tell people to stop looking while continuously giving them something to look at.

And I think that was my problem.

I became a performer.

Not the kind that gets on a stage.

The kind that performs love.

I wanted people to know I was loved.

I wanted people to know I was in love.

I wanted people to know that, yes, this man loved me.

And maybe that’s where it gets complicated.

Because I could genuinely be in love with someone and still be performing that love for everyone else.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

I wasn’t necessarily lying.

I was just constantly proving.

Someone would think, Oh, maybe she isn’t loved that much.

And I’d almost think, Oh really? Watch this.

Someone would wonder something about my relationship, and suddenly I had something to prove.

Look.

See?

He loves me.

I love him.

We’re good.

We’re happy.

Everything is fine.

And the more I did it, the more I realized something uncomfortable.

If you don’t give people anything to work with, there really isn’t much they can do.

People can come looking.

They can dig.

They can speculate.

But if you give them nothing, eventually there is nothing to find.

I think privacy works like that.

But I wasn’t doing that.

I was telling people to mind their business while simultaneously handing them pieces of mine.

And then I would get exhausted.

Because imagine spending so much energy proving to people that your relationship is good that you barely have any energy left to actually be inside the relationship.

Imagine having a partner and spending more time thinking about how the relationship looks than how the relationship feels.

That is where I think I got it wrong.

I was sometimes so busy showcasing the relationship that I forgot the person I was actually supposed to be loving.

Because what does it matter if everyone knows your boyfriend loves you if you don’t know how he feels?

What does it matter if everyone sees the flowers if you don’t know whether he understands you?

What does it matter if you can post the birthday gift if you haven’t had the conversations that make you feel safe with each other?

There is a difference between being seen loving someone and actually loving them.

And sometimes I think we don’t even notice when the audience becomes part of the relationship.

Take Valentine’s Day.

Your partner doesn’t do anything.

There are two very different ways you can be disappointed.

You could think, I wish he remembered me.

Or you could think, I wish he remembered me so I could show my friends that he remembered me.

Those sound similar until you really sit with them.

One is about the person you love.

The other is about the audience watching your love.

And I realized that sometimes I had been caring about the second one more than I wanted to admit.

Then I realized something else.

Even trying to perform privacy is still a form of performance.

You know the posts.

“My relationship is private. You guys don’t know anything.”

And maybe you genuinely mean it.

Maybe you really don’t care what anyone thinks.

But the second you announce that your relationship is private, you’ve given people information.

Now they know there is a relationship.

They know you care enough about its privacy to announce the privacy.

And suddenly, someone who wasn’t thinking about you at all might think,

Oh.

So there’s something there.

Interesting.

And now they are watching.

Not because they cared before.

Because you told them there was something worth watching.

That is the funny thing about people.

Sometimes you can create curiosity simply by announcing that there is nothing to be curious about.

And I think that is one of the things I understand differently now.

Not everything is deliberate.

Sometimes you’re just doing things.

You’re posting something because you’re happy.

You’re writing something because you’re emotional.

You’re sharing something because it feels cute.

You’re defending your relationship because you feel like someone is judging it.

You don’t necessarily sit there thinking about the ten things that might happen because of one little action.

But actions have aftermath.

And sometimes it is not the intention behind what you did that creates the mess.

It is what the action gives other people permission to imagine.

I think that’s where things get thin.

And messy.

Because once you’ve created an audience, they have their own expectations.

They want updates.

They want proof.

They want to know if you’re still together.

They notice when the posts stop.

They notice when the birthday doesn’t get posted.

They notice when the person disappears.

And suddenly, something that was supposed to belong to two people has become a story other people are following.

Then love has an audience.

And the audience always needs another performance.

One post isn’t enough.

One gesture isn’t enough.

One screenshot isn’t enough.

You keep proving.

And proving.

And proving.

Until you don’t even know whether you’re enjoying the relationship or defending it.

Looking back at some of my old writing now, I don’t think I was fake.

I think I was young.

I wanted my feelings to feel real, and sometimes I looked outside myself for proof that they were.

If people could see that I was loved, then maybe I could feel loved.

If I could write something beautiful about him, then maybe what we had was beautiful.

If everyone thought we were happy, then maybe we were.

If I could show them that he cared, then nobody could question whether I mattered to him.

But love doesn’t need witnesses.

And I think that is one of the biggest things I’ve had to unlearn.

Something doesn’t become more real because more people can see it.

And something doesn’t become less real because nobody does.

Some of the most meaningful parts of a relationship are completely uninteresting to an audience.

The conversation nobody hears.

The apology nobody sees.

The boundary nobody knows you set.

The way you understand your partner’s silence.

The ordinary Tuesday night.

The inside joke that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else.

The way you know something is wrong before they say it.

The things that never make it to Snapchat.

Those things might actually be the relationship.

And maybe that is what growing up has looked like for me.

Not becoming less loving.

Not becoming colder.

Just becoming less interested in proving that I am loved.

I don’t need to convince anyone anymore.

I don’t need to win an argument with an audience that was never part of the relationship.

I don’t need to turn every feeling into content.

I don’t need to show people that someone loves me for me to know that they do.

And I don’t need to show people that I love someone for the love to have existed.

I can just love someone.

Quietly.

Privately.

In a way they can actually feel.

Maybe that’s the difference between performing love and experiencing it.

When you’re performing, you’re always looking at the audience.

When you’re actually in love, you can finally turn around and look at the person.

And I think I’m finally learning to do that.

I think I grew up believing I was smart.

Not because my parents sat me down and told me I had to be the smartest child in the room. They actually weren’t those parents.

There were no dramatic punishments for failing an exam. No switching off the television. No withholding sweets. No “until you pass, you are not going anywhere.”

DSTV was still getting paid.

Cartoons were still being watched until 7 p.m.

Life continued.

Even the day before an important exam.

And maybe that was part of the problem.

Or maybe it was part of the gift.

I remember primary school very vividly. Primary five, specifically.

There was this school called Royal Academy. I remember it because it was the secondary school attached to Family Worship Center, and I remember my dad taking me there to write an entrance exam.

The day before the exam, my mum was doing what mothers do.

“Go and read your books. You have an important exam tomorrow.”

And my dad, completely unbothered, said something along the lines of,

“Leave my princess alone. She will pass. She’s a smart girl.”

Then he took me outside.

I went to play on my swing.

He pushed me.

He took me out for ice cream.

Meanwhile, my mother was somewhere behind us shaking her head like, Hmm. This child.

And I did not open a single book.

Not because I was rebelling.

I genuinely believed I didn’t need to.

I had been going to school since primary one. What could they possibly ask me that I didn’t know?

I was smart.

Or at least, I thought I was.

So I went to that exam the next day, answered the questions, and walked out feeling pretty confident.

It didn’t feel difficult.

I felt like I had done my absolute best.

My dad was waiting outside like all the other parents, and he took me to Drumsticks.

If you remember Drumsticks, then you know.

The chicken was good.

He bought me chicken and ice cream, and then took me back to church to meet my mum.

A few days later, the results came out.

They pasted the names of the students who passed on the wall outside the church.

I remember my dad standing there, going through all those papers.

One.

Two.

Three.

He kept looking.

Over twenty sheets of paper.

He was looking for his princess.

My name wasn’t there.

I don’t remember my dad shouting.

I don’t remember him getting angry.

I don’t even remember him saying anything.

But I remember his face.

And for the first time in my life, I felt like I had disappointed him.

The irony was that before we went to check the results, he had stopped somewhere and bought me one of those milkshakes from Southern Fried Chicken.

The kind of milkshake I still remember the taste of.

I was drinking it happily on our way to check the results .

Then I saw that my name wasn’t there.

Suddenly, the milkshake had no taste.

Nothing had happened to the milkshake.

I had just lost my appetite.

We went back to church, and my dad left me with my mum to tell her the news.

I told her.

She looked at me.

Then she looked at my milkshake.

She didn’t have to say anything.

Her eyes had already said enough.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

I had other entrance exams to write.

There was a particular school everyone wanted to get into. My mum collected applications for three schools: yoyola College, Naowa and The yale college in Ibadan.

And guess what?

Your girl passed all three.

I remember how nervous I was waiting for those results.

My dad wanted to get me something before one of the exams and I told him no.

I didn’t want him to jinx me.

And somehow, that experience created the strangest little superstition in my head.

I don’t eat before exams.

Till today.

If you know me and you ever say, “Divine, let’s get something to eat before your exam,” the answer is probably no.

Because somewhere in my brain, eating before an exam became associated with failing.

One milkshake.

One failed entrance exam.

And somehow my brain decided there was a connection.

But the bigger thing I carried from that period wasn’t the superstition.

It was the identity.

I became the lazy smart girl.

You know the type.

The person who barely reads but still passes.

Not necessarily first in class. Not necessarily the person everyone is fighting for number one with.

But comfortably top three, top four.

Good enough to never really panic.

Good enough to convince yourself that you don’t need to work that hard.

Because if things get serious, you’ll just become serious and pass.

At least, that was what I thought.

And honestly, for a while, it worked.

Until university.

I carried that same identity into 100 level.

Then I failed a course.

I remember how confused I was.

How could I fail?

I cried to my best friend.

I cried to anybody who would listen.

“How the hell did I fail this course?”

It wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

I was the smart girl.

And I remember thinking about that stupid superstition too.

I think I had eaten before that exam.

Of course.

So my brain added another piece of evidence to its very scientific theory that eating before an exam meant failure.

But then something else happened.

I studied for another test.

Properly.

I read like my life depended on it.

I didn’t eat before the test.

I did everything I thought the “smart girl” was supposed to do.

And I still didn’t pass.

I was devastated.

Then I found out that almost everyone had failed.

Suddenly, I felt a little better.

Not because I had passed.

But because apparently I wasn’t uniquely stupid.

And somewhere in all of that, I started to understand something.

Maybe being smart wasn’t the same thing as things coming easily to me.

Maybe I had spent so much time being proud of being naturally good at things that I never really learned how to sit down and struggle with them.

I had confused intelligence with ease.

If I understood something quickly, I was smart.

If I didn’t need to study much, I was smart.

If I could get a good grade without killing myself over it, I was smart.

But what happened when something didn’t come easily?

What happened when being smart wasn’t enough?

I had to learn how to work.

From 200 level onwards, I think I slowly made a choice.

I could remain the girl who was supposed to be smart.

Or I could become the girl who worked hard and was smart.

I chose the second one.

And it changed the way I saw myself.

I stopped seeing effort as proof that I wasn’t intelligent enough.

I stopped thinking that if I had to read something three times, maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought.

I started understanding that sometimes you can be good at something and still have to work for it.

Sometimes you can be smart and still fail.

Sometimes you can study hard and still fail.

Sometimes you can barely study and somehow pass.

None of those things are a complete definition of you.

I don’t think my dad was wrong when he told me I was smart.

He was my dad.

He believed in me.

He saw something in me and wanted me to know it too.

But somewhere along the way, I turned his belief into a responsibility.

I thought being smart meant I shouldn’t struggle.

That if I really understood something, I shouldn’t have to work too hard for it.

That failing meant maybe I wasn’t as smart as everyone thought.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I think I am allowed to be both.

The girl who understands things quickly.

And the girl who has to sit down and read.

The girl who is naturally good at something.

And the girl who has to work her ass off for it.

Maybe that is a much better kind of smart.

And somewhere, I hope my dad would still say,

“She will pass.She’s a smart girl.”

We are about to enter October, and somehow this year is slowly, or should I say frighteningly quickly, coming to an end.

But honestly, this year is not fast enough for me.

I entered this year very hopeful. I even wrote a letter to my future self on December 31st. Sometimes I go back to my Notes app and read it, and ironically, I don’t think my past self would be very proud of her future self.

I wrote so many things I thought would have happened by now. Things I thought would have ended by now. Things I thought I would have figured out.

And somehow, I still found myself in some of those same situations.

Sometimes even worse ones.

This year did not play out like I imagined at all.

I know every year we say, “This year was horrible,” but for me, this year was actually horrible.

First of all, I lost the most priceless person in my life.

I lost my dad.

Nobody prepares you for the loss of a parent. Nobody really tells you what it feels like to continue living when someone who was supposed to be there for so many of your future milestones is suddenly not there anymore.

I graduated this year too, which is a very good thing.

But it’s strange when some of the biggest things in your life happen in the same year as one of the worst things that has ever happened to you.

I graduated.

I lost my dad.

I achieved things.

I grieved.

I had moments where I was genuinely happy, and then there were moments where I remembered the person I would have wanted to share those moments with.

I don’t think I’ve said enough about losing my dad. But then again, I don’t know how much is enough.

Sometimes I feel like rambling about the same thing will eventually make people tired.

And maybe it does.

But grief doesn’t really care if people are tired of hearing about it.

So sometimes I just write everything in my Notes app and leave it there.

I also imagined myself with a stable job by now.

I thought I would have figured that part out. Instead, I’m still sending applications, still waiting, still trying to figure out what exactly I’m doing with my life.

But I’ve also achieved things this year that I don’t think I would have imagined achieving.

There were things I started shortly after my dad died that I probably wouldn’t have had the courage, or even the reason, to start otherwise.

Some of those things brought me visibility. They made me more confident. They made me realise that I can actually put myself out there.

It’s a very strange thing to say, but my dad’s death opened some doors for me.

Not that anything could make losing him worth it.

It couldn’t.

But life is strange.

You can lose something devastating and still find yourself gaining something somewhere else.

You can be grieving and growing at the same time.

And I think I grew a lot this year.

I became more honest.

I’ve always been someone who leaves a lot of things unsaid. I think about things, feel things, overthink things, and then sometimes just decide not to say anything.

But something changed this year.

Maybe losing someone important made me realise how little time we actually have.

Maybe I just got tired of keeping everything inside.

Now sometimes I just think, fuck it.

Yes, I feel this way.

Yes, that hurt me.

No, I don’t want this.

Yes, I want that.

I’m just going to tell you the truth.

And honestly, I love that version of me.

I love honest Oyin.

I love bold Oyin.

I love clarified Oyin.

I love the woman I’m becoming.

Next year, I’ll be 24.

And yes, my frontal lobe apparently doesn’t fully develop until 25, so technically I still have one more year to blame my questionable decisions on biology. 😂

But honestly, I don’t want to carry the same qualities I’ve been carrying since I was 18 into 24.

There are things I’ve outgrown.

There are things I don’t want anymore.

There are parts of myself I want to leave behind.

I want to be more honest.

More confident.

More intentional.

More willing to say what I mean and mean what I say.

And I think I’m already becoming that person.

The one thing I wish I had done more this year was get closer to God.

That is probably the one thing I look back on and think, hmm, Oyin, you could have done better here.

But I don’t think that story is finished.

Maybe before this year ends, I’ll find my way back in a way that feels more intentional.

Maybe I’ll write another end-of-year article in December and realise that some of the things I was worried about in September worked themselves out.

Who knows?

That’s the annoying thing about life.

We never really know.

2026, you were not the year I imagined.

You were actually pretty horrible.

But you were also the year I became more honest.

The year I became more visible.

The year I became more confident.

The year I graduated.

The year I lost my dad.

The year I learned that grief and growth can exist at the same time.

The year I met a version of myself that I actually like.

So, I really hope 2027 is better.

For me.

For my family.

For everyone who had a horrible year.

I really hope 2027 is kinder to us.

Because if it isn’t, I just might go crazy. 😂

But jokes aside, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking about the year I thought I was going to have.

I want to live the year that actually comes.

I want to see what happens when I stop trying to force my life to look like the picture I had in my head.

I want to see who I become next.

And maybe that is the strangest thing about this year.

It didn’t give me the life I imagined.

But somehow, it gave me a version of myself I didn’t know I needed.

And honestly?

I think I like her.

September is Suicide Prevention Month, and I think I should have spoken about it sooner.

I don’t know why I didn’t.

Maybe because suicide is one of those things that feels easier to talk about after it has already happened. After someone is gone. After there is a name, a face, a story attached to it. After everyone starts asking, “How did we not know?”

I’ve thought about that question a lot.

Because sometimes, the person you lose is the person everyone thought was fine.

Sometimes it’s the friend who laughs the loudest.

The friend who is always joking.

The friend who is always active in the group chat, sending TikToks and making everyone laugh.

Sometimes it’s the friend who keeps asking you to hang out.

And you say, “Another time.”

Sometimes it’s the friend who reaches out first, and you don’t think much of it because they’re always the one reaching out.

You don’t realise that sometimes, people don’t know how to say I need you.

So they say, Come over.

They send you a TikTok.

They ask what you’re doing.

They call.

They keep themselves around people.

And you think they’re just being themselves.

I think we have this very specific image of what someone who is depressed is supposed to look like.

Quiet.

Withdrawn.

Always crying.

Obviously unhappy.

But people are much more complicated than that.

Someone can be genuinely funny and still be hurting.

Someone can laugh and still be struggling.

Someone can have a room full of people around them and still feel incredibly alone.

Happiness doesn’t always mean that there is no sadness underneath it.

Sometimes people simply become very good at carrying things quietly.

I learnt that in 2018.

Someone from my church died by suicide.

Her name was Angel.

I didn’t know her closely, but I knew her. We attended the same church, and she was around people I knew. She was bubbly. She was involved. She was part of the church community.

She was just… there.

And then one morning, she wasn’t.

I remember a video of her drinking Sniper going around.

I remember how horrified everyone was.

I remember people posting her pictures, writing RIP, trying to make sense of something none of us understood.

And I remember that some people made jokes about it.

That part has always bothered me.

Someone had died, and somehow there were still people who could turn it into something funny.

But beyond the shock, there was this other feeling that stayed with me.

We didn’t know why.

Even now, I don’t think most of us know why.

We didn’t know what she was going through.

We didn’t know what she went home to after leaving church.

We didn’t know what was happening in her mind while she was sitting with people, talking, laughing and being part of everything.

We knew Angel as she appeared to us.

And maybe that was never the whole Angel.

That’s the strange thing about knowing people.

We only ever know the parts they let us see.

We can know someone’s jokes without knowing their sadness.

We can know their favourite songs without knowing what keeps them awake at night.

We can know that they’re always the first person to suggest going out without knowing how much they hate being alone.

And I think that’s why I’ve become more conscious of checking on people.

Not because I think every happy person is secretly struggling.

Not because every invitation to hang out is some hidden cry for help.

But because sometimes we are too quick to assume that people are okay simply because they look okay.

Sometimes checking on someone can be as ordinary as sending them a reel.

Asking, “How are you?”

Sending a stupid meme.

Calling because you haven’t heard from them.

Saying, “Come over.”

You don’t necessarily need to have some deep conversation.

Sometimes you just remind someone that they exist in your world.

And I know we’re all busy.

Everyone has their own problems.

Everyone is trying to figure something out.

But sometimes I think about how much time we spend scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, and how little it takes to send one person a message.

There is also something uncomfortable about how difficult it can be to find help when someone is finally ready to ask for it.

I’ve seen Nigerians share stories of trying to reach suicide and mental-health helplines and not getting through. One girl even shared her experience on TikTok, saying she had tried calling for help and couldn’t get through. And hers isn’t the only story I’ve seen.

I don’t say that to discourage anyone from seeking help.

Quite the opposite.

I think it makes it even more important that we build communities where asking for help doesn’t have to be someone’s last resort.

Where someone can say, I’m not okay, and not feel like they’re being dramatic.

Where we don’t wait until someone is gone before we start talking about how much they meant to us.

I think about Angel sometimes.

Not because I knew her deeply.

I didn’t.

And maybe that’s exactly why I remember her.

Because I knew her enough to know that she was there, but not enough to know what was happening inside her.

For a while after she died, people posted her every year.

Then a year passed.

Then another.

Eventually, the posts became fewer.

People moved on.

That’s what life does.

It keeps moving.

And I don’t think that’s anyone’s fault. We grow older. We make new memories. Life gets busy.

But sometimes I wonder about the people we lose and how quickly the world moves from this person was here to I remember when this person was here.

I don’t want this to be a sad September post.

I just think September is a good time to remember that people are more complicated than what they show us.

The friend who laughs all the time is still a whole person.

The friend who is always surrounded by people can still feel lonely.

The friend who keeps reaching out can still need someone to reach back.

And maybe we don’t always need a reason to check on the people we love.

Sometimes, we can just check.

Because they’re here.

Because we love them.

Because we don’t know everything they’re carrying.

And because, ultimately, I’d rather someone think I was being unnecessarily caring than wonder later if I could have been a little more present.

So, this September, I’m thinking about Angel.

And about all the people whose stories we never fully knew.

And about the friends we think we know completely, when really, we only know the parts they’ve chosen to show us.

Maybe that’s enough reason to be a little softer with people.

To check in.

To stay a little longer.

To answer the message.

To send the TikTok.

To say, I love you.

While they’re still here.

I was wearing an outfit I still haven’t taken off since the day my father died.

I didn’t plan to write this today. I didn’t plan to wear it either. But somehow, the two have met , grief and memory , on the same body.

We had taken him to the hospital because he was unresponsive at home. And even though I tried to convince myself it would be fine, something in me knew. I could not find peace. When he woke up after the drips and the blood, I still couldn’t take my eyes off him. I sat with him until 1 a.m.

Then he ushered me to the car.

I called his name multiple times before he answered. I said, “Daddy, I’m going to the car.”

He said, “Go now. Go and rest. Your mum is here with me.”

So I went.

I remember scrolling through TikTok in the car and seeing a man of eighty with his daughter, celebrating his birthday. And I prayed in that moment: Lord, let my dad reach eighty too.

Sleep caught me around 3:30 or 4 a.m.

My father died at 4:30.

I remember finally settling into sleep, thinking, it’s already four. Nothing can go wrong again.

And then came the banging on the car window.

My mum was frantic. I didn’t understand what was happening until she said it:

“Oyin, your dad is dead.”

I didn’t know what to think. Or do. I had heard about death before. Relatives. Family friends. But none of it had ever landed like this. Because this was my father. My hero.

Another man was in the private room of two my dad was at and he was snoring. His son was beside him. And I felt something I didn’t expect.

Anger.

Why is he snoring? Why can’t my dad snore too? Why is his chest still moving and my dad’s is still?

I cried when they said they were moving him to the mortuary. That’s when everything I had been holding came out.

Our neighbor who followed us the day before told me to be strong. That I shouldn’t cry.

And I remember thinking: is this not the moment to cry? My father is dead. My hero is gone. And you’re asking me to be strong?

So I swallowed it. I signed papers. I forced myself to be still. I told myself I was a strong girl.

But the tears didn’t stop existing. They just moved inward.

Before he died, I had a dream.

He was thin , thinner than I had ever seen him, but he was smiling. He stood far off, watching me from a distance. Not speaking. Not moving. Just present.

I didn’t understand it then.

But I think I do now.

He was saying goodbye in the only way he could. Quietly. Without alarming me. The way he always did things.

He showed himself to me as though to say: I am still here. I see you.

And maybe that was enough.

They don’t tell you that grief is not just sadness.

It’s memory. It’s longing. It’s the strange comfort of a dream where he was still there, smiling at you from a distance, saying nothing, but saying everything.

It looks like laughing at a joke and immediately asking yourself why you laughed.

It looks like friends tiptoeing around you because they don’t know what to say.

It looks like being invited out and feeling guilty for wanting to go.

It looks like crying indoors and laughing outdoors. Not because you’re pretending. But because that’s just what the body does now.

I remember the burial. I was supposed to read his biography but I couldn’t. All I could see was the coffin. All I could hear was the weight of finality. Someone else read it in my place.

I still wonder if I let him down. I still wonder if he knows I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

I remember during the burial preparation, all that I had ordered for his birthday came. And I felt so much anger. I wanted to burn all of it. The clothes. The plans. The hope. I was angry at myself. Angry at God. Angry at everyone.

How do you prepare for a birthday and end up planning a burial?

I didn’t know where to place the rage, so I placed it everywhere.

I remember him in everything.

When Michael Jackson comes on and he isn’t there to do the silly breakdance we always laughed through.

When I sing my stupid songs and he isn’t there to jokingly say, “Abeg, make we hear word o.”

When I want something and he isn’t there to complain first and still do it anyway.

When I think about my graduation in November and realize he won’t be sitting in the crowd.

He used to call me his princess.

He would say, “Anything my princess wants comes first.”

And he meant it.

He put me before himself so nothing would harm his princess.

So now, where is my hero?

Gone. But not dead. At least, not in my mouth.

I say he’s sleeping. A peaceful sleep. And maybe that’s the only comfort I can hold: that he’s not in pain anymore.

Maybe that’s what my father’s death has taught me most about presence.

That it is not always what you say or do.

Sometimes it is just being there.

And I don’t think he ever stopped watching over his princess.

I don’t think he ever will.

He is still here.

At least, that’s what I choose to believe.

Nigeria taught us racism before we ever left Nigeria.

Well, maybe not racism in the strictest sense.

But Nigeria taught many of us what it feels like to be judged for something about ourselves that we didn’t choose.

Sometimes it’s your skin.

Sometimes it’s your tribe.

Sometimes it’s the state you’re from.

Sometimes it’s the language you speak.

The categories change, but the lesson can be the same:

There is something about you that makes you less desirable than someone else.

And I think colourism is one of the easiest examples of this.

I am chocolate brown.

And I’ve never really thought of myself as extremely dark, but when I think about some of the ways people have spoken about my skin, I’ve realised that in a society where lightness is constantly associated with beauty, almost every shade of brown can be made to feel “dark.”

I remember being in secondary school and a boy in my class looked at me for a long time before asking,

“Why are you just so black?”

I didn’t cry.

But I remember being extremely sad.

And this was around the same time I was going through puberty. I had acne. I had dark marks. I was already becoming increasingly conscious of my appearance.

So I started using lightening soaps and creams.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

I wanted to get rid of my dark marks.

That was the reasonable explanation.

But if I’m being honest, there was another agenda underneath it.

I also wanted to be lighter.

I didn’t have to say it out loud for it to be true.

Because when people started telling me,

“You’ve gotten lighter.”

“Your skin is so pretty.”

I felt happy.

And looking back, that tells me something.

I had started associating being lighter with being prettier.

Nobody had to sit me down and teach me that.

I had already learned it.

And colourism doesn’t always sound like an insult.

Sometimes it sounds like a compliment.

I remember being in the market once when someone approached me and said,

“Please, never bleach your skin. You have very pretty skin.”

And I was genuinely happy.

Not because I needed validation from a stranger.

But because it felt good for someone to look at my skin and appreciate it without attaching a condition to it.

Another time, someone told me I was “very pretty for a black girl.”

He probably thought he was complimenting me.

But that sentence stayed with me.

Because why does the compliment need the qualification?

Why does my beauty have to be surprising because of my skin colour?

I’ve also been approached by men who were interested in me and somehow managed to make my skin colour part of the conversation.

I remember walking around Lagos Island once when one of those touts was trying to toast me.

I ignored him.

And he said something along the lines of, “I’m even toasting you and you’re doing yanga ? See how you’re black sef.”

As though his willingness to approach me was supposed to be a favour.

As though I should be grateful that someone found me attractive despite my skin.

And I remember thinking:

Why is my skin being treated like something I should compensate for?

Why should attention from a man become proof that I’m beautiful enough?

I think that’s where colourism becomes more dangerous than simply someone saying something rude.

It starts changing the way you see yourself.

You begin wondering whether you’re actually less attractive.

Whether people would approach you more if you were lighter.

Whether you’d look better in certain colours.

Whether your pictures would look better.

Whether you’d be more desirable.

And eventually, you stop needing other people to insult you.

You start doing the work yourself.

You look in the mirror and compare.

You look at another girl and wonder why her skin looks better.

You start thinking maybe if you were just a little lighter, you’d finally feel beautiful.

That’s the part I think we don’t talk about enough.

Colourism doesn’t only exist in the comments people make about you.

Sometimes it eventually becomes a voice in your own head.

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And it’s everywhere.

It’s in the beauty industry.

It’s in the products marketed to us.

It’s in the way people casually describe skin.

It’s in music.

It’s in jokes.

It’s in dating preferences.

It’s in the way people say “fair” or “yellow” as though those words naturally carry something desirable, while “black” or “dark” can be used almost like an insult.

Even recently, a song came out and people were discussing the lyrics because the singer referred to a dark-skinned woman as “black.”

Some people argued that there was nothing wrong with it.

And honestly, I don’t think the problem is simply the word.

The problem is the context we’ve created around it.

If someone prefers light-skinned women, that’s their preference.

If someone finds dark-skinned women more attractive, that’s also their preference.

People are allowed to be attracted to whoever they’re attracted to.

That’s not what bothers me.

What I don’t understand is why appreciating one skin colour so often requires degrading another.

Why does “I like light skin” have to become “dark skin is ugly”?

Why can’t one be beautiful without the other becoming the opposite?

I’ve been thinking about this because of something I read recently.

I was reading about a girl who was so grateful that an attractive man found her beautiful that she was willing to accept almost anything from him.

She didn’t really believe she was beautiful on her own.

His attraction to her became evidence that she was worth something.

And I realised how easy it is to do this with skin colour too.

When you’ve spent years being told, directly or indirectly, that your skin makes you less desirable, attention can feel like confirmation that you’ve finally been accepted into the category of beautiful.

You don’t just enjoy the compliment.

You need it.

Because somewhere inside you, you’re still asking:

Am I actually pretty?

Even recently, I went out with my friends at night and we were taking Polaroids.

A mutual friend looked at me and said,

“Ah, Oyin no go show for am o. You better on flash,”

and laughed.

I laughed too.

Not because it was funny.

I don’t even know why I laughed.

Maybe because sometimes you laugh when you don’t know what else to do with a comment that hurts.

And maybe that’s another thing colourism has taught us.

To turn discomfort into a joke.

To laugh along.

To pretend we don’t care.

To convince ourselves that we’re being too sensitive.

I don’t think the answer is to make people feel guilty for having preferences.

You are allowed to like what you like.

But I think we need to question why our preferences sometimes come with hierarchies.

Why does one skin colour have to represent beauty while another represents something to overcome?

Why do we tell dark-skinned girls they’re beautiful for a dark-skinned girl?

Why do we compliment someone for becoming lighter?

Why is skin lightening so normalised that someone can be actively trying to change their skin and still genuinely believe they’re simply “fixing their dark marks”?

And perhaps most importantly:

What happens when a child hears these things often enough?

Eventually, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her she’s not beautiful.

She already knows.

Or at least, she thinks she does.

It takes a certain kind of confidence to exist comfortably in a body that society has repeatedly told you to change.

To look at your skin and not immediately wonder how it could be improved.

To hear someone say something about your complexion and not let it determine how you feel about yourself that day.

I’m still learning that.

Because even when you know something intellectually, it doesn’t mean you’ve completely unlearned it emotionally.

I can know that my skin is beautiful and still remember the little girl who went home sad because someone asked why she was “so black.”

I can know that my skin doesn’t determine my worth and still understand why being told I look lighter once made me happy.

Both things can be true.

Maybe that’s what unlearning actually looks like.

Not pretending those experiences never affected you.

But recognising them for what they were.

Understanding how they shaped you.

And slowly deciding that they don’t get to decide how you see yourself anymore.

Because my skin was never something I needed to overcome.

I just needed to stop seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

There’s a particular kind of friendship that’s hard to leave.

Not because it’s good.

But because it used to be.

I have a friend I’ve been tolerating for a while now.

And I use the word tolerating very deliberately.

Because that’s what it is. Not enjoying. Not valuing. Tolerating.

But I’ve known him for a long time. And during one of the hardest seasons of my life, he was there. That’s rare. Genuinely rare.

When someone shows up for you during the moments most people avoid, it does something to you.

It makes you loyal beyond the point where loyalty makes sense.

It makes you take what you’re not supposed to take.

And I think that’s the trap nobody talks about.

We talk a lot about toxic friendships and red flags and knowing your worth. But we don’t talk enough about the friendships that are held together entirely by history.

By the memory of who someone was to you.

By the debt you feel you owe them for showing up once.

Because here’s the thing: someone can be good to you in one season and be completely wrong for you in another.

People change.

Or sometimes you change.

And sometimes you realize the person was never who you thought they were. You just needed them too much at the time to see it clearly.

This friend of mine has a way of thinking that would probably get him cancelled if he said some of these things out loud to the wrong crowd.

And yet somehow I’ve been sitting across from these opinions for years, nodding, redirecting, explaining things I shouldn’t have to explain.

Recently, he came to me to complain about a mutual friend.

He’d messaged her to say he was coming to her city. Not specifically to see her,he was already going there for an event, but he wanted to use the opportunity to see her since we hadn’t all seen each other in about six or seven years.

Fine.

Except he also told her she’d need to pay his transport.

She replied:

“Shey you no get money?”

He was completely offended.

He came to me expecting me to agree that her response was out of line.

I didn’t.

I told him it was valid.

Why would you ask someone you barely speak to for money?

Why would you announce that you’re coming to see them and then present the transport bill like an invoice?

She didn’t say she couldn’t afford it. She didn’t insult him. She simply questioned why he was asking her for money.

And honestly, I thought it was a fair question.

But apparently, this was the perfect opportunity to open the Pandora’s box of gender politics.

Suddenly, we were talking about equality.

About how women want equality until men ask them for certain things.

About how he could get married and decide his wife would be a stay-at-home wife whose job would be to cook and clean.

And I was sitting there thinking:

What does any of this have to do with your transport money?

How did we go from “this woman doesn’t want to pay your fare” to “women are hypocrites and I can make my future wife a housewife”?

Do men like this actually still exist?

And then I thought:

Why am I still here?

Because sometimes arguing with certain people is not actually a conversation.

It’s an endurance test.

You make one point and suddenly they’ve constructed an entire courtroom around an argument nobody was having.

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And this wasn’t even the first time.

There was the GoFundMe he sent when his phone spoiled.

I didn’t send anything. I was genuinely low on cash at the time.

He threw that back at me during this argument.

Apparently, he had sent the same GoFundMe to both me and this mutual friend, and neither of us contributed.

The implication was that because I live in Abuja, I must have money.

Because apparently Abuja residents have a secret government stipend I wasn’t informed about.

But even if I had money, so what?

Nobody is obligated to give you money.

Nobody.

Not your friends.

Not your family.

Not the people who care about you.

If I have money and I want to give you some, I can.

If I don’t have money, I don’t.

If I have money but don’t want to give it to you, I am still allowed to say no.

Your disappointment does not create my obligation.

Needing help is human.

Expecting it is entitlement.

And there’s a massive difference between the two.

I remembered another conversation we had that made me realize this wasn’t an isolated opinion.

I once told him that the person I was dating at the time was taking me out on a date.

His first question was;

“So how much are you taking?”

I told him I wasn’t taking any money.

Obviously, I was still going to have my own money because I have sense. I don’t care how much I like someone; I’m not leaving my house without enough money to get myself home and possibly pay my bill if the guy decides to move mad .

But he immediately got defensive.

Why would I assume the man was paying?

I said, because he asked me on the date?

And then came the hypothetical scenarios.

What if his card declines?

What if something happens?

what if he doesn’t have transport fare?

What if he doesn’t have money?

What if—

At some point, I realized we weren’t even talking about my date anymore.

We were talking about his entire philosophy on men, women, money, relationships, responsibility, and apparently the possibility of a man’s card declining.

And that is what exhausts me.

Not disagreement.

I actually like disagreement.

It’s the constant need to turn every simple conversation into a referendum on your worldview.

Sometimes I genuinely want to say:

Can we just discuss the thing I actually said?

I think I’ve kept this friendship alive mostly out of guilt.

Guilt for the season he was good to me.

Guilt for the ways I feel like I still owe him something.

Because when someone has been there for you at your lowest, it can feel almost cruel to admit that you don’t particularly like who they are anymore.

But gratitude is not the same as obligation.

Being grateful for what someone did for you in the past doesn’t mean you have to accept who they are today.

It doesn’t mean you have to sit through opinions that make your skin crawl.

It doesn’t mean you have to keep explaining yourself to someone who has already decided what he thinks.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you owe someone unlimited access to you because they were once kind to you.

I have a tendency to give people extra grace because of history.

But they were there for me.

But we’ve known each other for years.

But they helped me once.

And yes.

I remember.

I will probably always be grateful.

But gratitude is not a lifetime subscription to my tolerance.

Some friendships expire.

Not dramatically.

Not with a big argument or a clear ending.

They just quietly become something you’re maintaining out of memory rather than meaning.

And maybe that’s what has happened here.

Maybe I’ve been holding onto the person he was to me instead of paying attention to the person he is now.

I don’t think he’s a bad person.

I think he’s a person whose thinking stopped growing somewhere along the way.

And I’ve outgrown the version of me that had the patience for it.

Maybe that’s okay.

Maybe outgrowing people isn’t a betrayal of the history you shared.

Maybe it’s just growth.

Because sometimes the most exhausting thing isn’t realizing someone is wrong for you.

It’s realizing how much time you’ve spent trying to explain to them why.

And at some point, you have to stop.

Not because you’ve finally convinced them.

But because you finally realize you don’t need to.

Growth doesn’t always get to bring everyone along.

I think I’ve always had a second life happening inside my head.

When I was little, I genuinely believed my teddy bears could talk to me.

Not in a scary Toy Story kind of way. I knew they were teddy bears. But in my head, they had personalities. They had things to say. Sometimes I’d have entire conversations with them.

And apparently, teddy bears weren’t the only ones with opinions.

When my mum sent me to spread clothes, even the pegs had personalities. I’d imagine them complaining about not being used, or wondering why I kept choosing the same colours.

Sometimes I’d imagine the clothes themselves talking while I was hanging them.

This one wanted a blue peg.

That one preferred pink.

Another one was probably offended that I’d chosen the wrong colour.

It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time, it was completely normal to me.

And the strange thing is that I didn’t have to stop whatever I was doing to imagine these things.

I’d be walking around.

Hanging clothes.

Doing chores.

Talking to people.

My lips weren’t moving.

I wasn’t staring into space.

I wasn’t in some kind of trance.

My body was completely present.

My brain, however, was somewhere else entirely.

I think I’ve always had a very active imagination.

Sometimes I’ll be doing something completely ordinary and suddenly I’m somewhere else.

I’ll imagine a conversation that hasn’t happened. I’ll rehearse what I’m going to say to someone. I’ll imagine what they’ll say back.

Sometimes I’ll have an entire argument in my head and come up with the perfect response three hours before the argument even happens.

And sometimes the argument never happens.

Which means I’ve basically been fighting people who don’t even know we’re fighting.

But it’s the same reason I love reading.

I sometimes think people who don’t picture things while reading miss out on an entire part of the experience.

When I read a book, I’m not just reading the words. I’m building the world in my head.

I can see what the room looks like. I picture the characters, their clothes, their expressions, the streets they’re walking through.

Sometimes I’ll have a completely different picture in my head from what the movie adaptation eventually shows.

And when the artwork finally comes out, it almost feels like a new era.

Because now I’m seeing someone else’s version of a world I’ve already spent hours creating in my head.

It’s probably the most interesting thing about me.

Which makes it a little sad that I don’t think I do it as much anymore.

I don’t know exactly when that changed.

Because I still imagine things.

I’ll imagine what my apartment will look like one day. What I’ll wear. Where I’ll live. What my friendships will look like. What my life will feel like when I finally have the things I think I want.

Sometimes I think I’ve already lived several versions of my future in my head.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

Because imagination can make reality feel strangely underwhelming.

You create a version of something in your head where everything happens exactly how you want it to.

The conversation goes perfectly.

The person understands exactly what you meant.

The trip is perfect.

The future version of you is disciplined, confident, successful and somehow never tired.

Then reality happens.

And reality doesn’t have the advantage of being written by you.

People misunderstand you.

Plans change.

Things don’t happen when you want them to.

You don’t always become the person you imagined you’d be.

Nothing can disappoint you when you’re the one controlling the script.

But sometimes I wonder if I’m imaginative or if I’m just really good at escaping.

Because there is comfort in being able to retreat somewhere nobody can interrupt.

Somewhere everything makes sense because I created it.

I’ve had conversations in my head that felt so complete that when the real conversation happens, I’m surprised by how different it is.

I’ve imagined people saying things they’ve never said.

I’ve imagined situations that have never happened.

I’ve imagined versions of myself that don’t exist.

And sometimes I have to remind myself:

That happened in your head.

Not in real life.

I think that’s the strangest thing about having a busy inner world.

You can become so familiar with something that never happened.

Maybe that’s why I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss daydreaming as simply wasting time.

Sometimes your mind is just playing.

Sometimes it’s processing.

Sometimes it’s rehearsing.

Sometimes it’s escaping.

And sometimes, maybe, it’s creating.

The problem probably isn’t having an inner world.

The problem is when the world inside your head becomes so much easier to live in than the one outside it.

Because inside my head, I can change the ending whenever I want.

Real life doesn’t work like that.

Real life is unpredictable and occasionally disappointing.

But it’s also where everything actually happens.

The people in my imagination can’t hug me.

The imaginary conversations can’t replace the real ones.

The future version of me can’t live my life for me.

And as much as I love the little world my mind has created, I don’t want to spend so much time imagining my life that I forget to actually live it.

Maybe the goal isn’t to quiet our minds completely.

Maybe it’s simply learning when to come back.

Because sometimes the most beautiful thing about imagination isn’t that it gives us somewhere else to go.

It’s that it can show us where we want to go next.

And maybe that’s why I miss the girl who could give a peg a personality and spend an entire afternoon living inside a book.

She had a pretty interesting world in her head.

Somewhere along the way, I think we convinced ourselves that there was a right way to love someone.

So when the people in our lives don’t love us the way we expected them to, we immediately start wondering if the love is even real.

Not everyone loves the same way.

Some people were raised in homes where love was said out loud constantly. I love you before bed,I love you on the phone,I love you for no reason at all.

Other people grew up in homes where nobody really said “I love you.”

You just knew.

Your school fees were paid without complaint.

Food was always on the table.

Someone stayed up waiting for you to get home safely.

Nobody said I love you.

But you never once doubted that you were loved.

So which one is more real?

I honestly think social media made this worse.

We’ve developed a checklist for what love is supposed to look like.

He posts you.

She writes you long paragraphs.

He surprises you with flowers.

She remembers every detail of every conversation.

And now we’re comparing our actual relationships to the highlight reels of strangers on the internet.

We’re comparing our behind the scenes to someone else’s best moments.

And I don’t know why we’re always shocked when the perfect TikTok couple breaks up. They were showing you their best moments. Did you think they will set up a camera when they argue ?

And somewhere in the middle of all that comparison, we stop seeing the love that’s already right in front of us.

Your partner might not buy you flowers.

But he knows your entire schedule without being reminded

He might not post you every week.

But you never have to wonder where you stand with him.

She might not be the most affectionate person in the room.

But when your life falls apart, she’s the first person you call.

Because you already know she’ll show up

Why isn’t that enough?

Why does love have to look a certain way to count?

I think the question we should be asking isn’t,

“Does my relationship look like theirs?”

It’s,

“Do I feel loved, seen, chosen, and safe in mine?”

Because if the answer is yes, it doesn’t matter that your story doesn’t look like anyone else’s.

Maybe the healthiest relationships aren’t the ones that look the most like what the internet taught us to want.

Maybe they’re just the ones where both people feel like they belong.

Even if nobody else would understand it from the outside.

Love was never supposed to fit into a mold.

Maybe we just forgot that love doesn’t have to look familiar to be real.

I have almost 2,000 Snapchat streaks.

Do you know how many days I’ve managed to keep a Bible streak?

Fourteen.

Maybe.

And honestly, I think that says something about me.

Because I can remember to send someone a random picture every single day for years, but somehow remembering to spend time with God feels like a task I keep failing at.

I’ve tried to fix it.

I downloaded a Bible app that works like Duolingo. You know how Duolingo will practically harass you when you haven’t practised your Spanish?

“Your streak is about to end.”

“Don’t disappoint Duo.”

This Bible app did the same thing.

I even put the widget on my phone so I couldn’t escape it. Every time I looked at my screen, there was this little animal basically reminding me that I hadn’t read my Bible.

And for the first few days, it worked.

I was determined.

I thought, Finally. This is how I’ll become one of those Christians who reads their Bible every single day.

I think I lasted about fourteen days.

Then one day, I looked at the widget, saw that the animal was angry, and realised…

I genuinely didn’t care.

And that’s when I started wondering:

What exactly is wrong with me?

Is the devil working overtime to stop me from reading the Word of God?

Or is it just me?

Because I genuinely want to know God.

I genuinely want to have a relationship with Him.

But sometimes, I don’t want to open my Bible.

And I think that’s a much harder thing to admit than people realise.

Because social media has made being close to God look so easy.

You see the girls on TikTok and Pinterest with their perfectly highlighted Bibles, colourful tabs and cute journals. You watch Christian girl morning routines on YouTube, and somehow they’re waking up at 5 a.m. and reaching for their Bibles before their phones.

Before their phones.

What do you mean?

Because whether or not my phone is beside me,that’s the first thing I’m picking up.

Let’s be serious.

Even my mum reminds me.

“Go and read your Bible.”

“Have you read your Bible today?”

“Go and read your Bible.”

And I’ll say, “Yes, I’ve read it.”

And technically, I have.

I pray before I read. I ask God for understanding. I open the Bible.

And somehow, I can read three or four chapters in less than ten minutes.

Then I close it.

“Okay, I’m done.”

My mum looks at me.

“Done with what?”

“The Bible.”

“You’ve finished reading the Bible?”

“Yes.”

“What did you learn?”

Silence.

“Okay, quote a verse.”

Even more silence.

And then my mum reminds me,

“It’s not a storybook.”

And I’m like, “I know it’s not a storybook.”

But sometimes I think I’m reading it like one.

Not intentionally.

But I’m reading to finish.

I’m reading so I can say I read my Bible today. I’m reading so I can tick the box and move on to everything else I want to do.

I once made a goal to read the entire New Testament.

I actually finished it.

And you can ask me to quote a verse from any of those books today and I will probably struggle.

Not because I didn’t read it.

I did.

But did I actually absorb it?

Did I think about it?

Did it change the way I lived?

I don’t know.

And I think that’s what bothers me.

Because there is a difference between reading the Word of God and actually spending time in it.

You can read four chapters and remember nothing.

You can pray for thirty minutes while thinking about everything except God.

You can go to church and spend half the sermon fighting sleep.

Why is it that the moment you start praying, your brain suddenly remembers every single thing you’ve ever needed to think about?

You’re praying and suddenly you’re thinking about that embarrassing thing you did three years ago.

You’re praying and remembering that person you haven’t spoken to in six months.

You’re praying and wondering what you’re going to eat later.

And when you’re in church, that’s when the sleep comes.

The kind of sleep you were apparently not capable of experiencing anywhere else.

You could stay awake until 3 a.m. scrolling TikTok.

But the moment the pastor says,

“Let us pray…”

Your eyes become heavy.

Suddenly you’re fighting for your life.

I think social media makes being close to God look so easy because we’re mostly seeing the aesthetic part of it.

We’re not necessarily seeing the days they don’t want to pray.

The days they question God.

The days they feel far away.

The days they don’t understand what they’re reading.

The days they’re going through something so painful that opening the Bible feels like the last thing they want to do.

And I think that’s important because it’s easy to look at someone else’s relationship with God and feel like you’re failing at yours.

But maybe faith isn’t always aesthetically pleasing.

Sometimes it’s confusing.

Sometimes it’s uncomfortable.

Sometimes it’s you asking questions you don’t even know if you’re allowed to ask.

Sometimes you’re going through something and wondering why God is allowing it to happen.

And I think that’s when faith gets tested the most.

Because it’s easy to believe when everything is going well.

It’s harder when you’re hurting.

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There’s a song that was popular on TikTok some time ago:

“God, I’m split in two.

Part of me wants the world and part of me wants you too.”

I used to sing that song with my whole chest.

Because I understood it.

I’m in my twenties. I want to have fun. I want to go out. I want to experience life.

And sometimes I genuinely wonder how I’m supposed to reconcile that part of me with the part that wants to live for God.

But recently, I’ve started thinking about that song differently.

Because maybe we’re not actually split in two.

Maybe we’re just choosing.

God gives us free will.

He doesn’t force us.

He gives us the choice.

And sometimes I think I use the phrase “I’m torn between God and the world” when, really, I’m just struggling to choose.

And there’s a difference.

Because I can say I want God.

I can say I want to serve Him.

I can say I want to live a life that honours Him.

But then I have to look at my actual habits.

And sometimes my habits don’t make it look like I want those things as much as I say I do.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

It’s easy to say what you want.

It’s harder to look at your life and ask if your actions agree with you.

I sometimes think about this in the most dramatic way possible.

Like, what if the rapture happened while I was at a club?

What exactly would I say?

Would I say,

“God, why didn’t you warn me?”

“Why didn’t you give me more time?”

But He did.

He gave me time.

He gave me the choice.

And if I deliberately chose the world every single time, what exactly would I be blaming Him for?

Maybe I’m overthinking it.

Maybe I’m being dramatic.

But these are genuinely the thoughts that go through my head.

Because I don’t want to be the person who keeps saying,

“One day I’ll take God more seriously.”

One day I’ll pray more.

One day I’ll read my Bible properly.

One day I’ll stop doing this.

One day.

One day.

One day.

And then suddenly, I’ve spent years waiting to become the person I keep saying I want to be.

I don’t think this means I have everything figured out.

I absolutely don’t.

I’m still trying to understand what my faith means to me.

I’m still trying to build discipline.

I’m still trying to understand the Bible beyond just finishing chapters.

I’m still trying to pray without my mind wandering every thirty seconds.

I’m still trying to reconcile the part of me that genuinely wants God with the part of me that still wants the world.

But maybe that’s why I don’t want to pretend I’m further along than I am.

I don’t wake up at 5 a.m. and immediately reach for my Bible.

I don’t have a 365-day Bible streak.

I don’t have every verse memorised.

Sometimes I read three chapters and remember nothing.

Sometimes I don’t read at all.

Sometimes I pray and my mind is everywhere.

Sometimes I go to church and fight sleep.

And sometimes I don’t know what to do with the fact that both things can feel true at the same time.

But I think I’m learning that faith isn’t about pretending that struggle doesn’t exist.

It’s about what you do when it does.

Maybe I don’t need a cute Bible app to guilt me into reading.

Maybe I don’t need to compare my relationship with God to a girl on TikTok who wakes up at 5 a.m.

Maybe I just need to be honest with myself.

Honest about where I am.

Honest about what I want.

Honest about what I’m choosing.

Because if I genuinely want to know God, then at some point, I have to actually make room for Him.

Not just when I’m scared.

Not just when I need something.

Not just when I want to say I’ve read my Bible that day.

But because I actually want to know Him.

And maybe that’s the part I’m still figuring out.

Not how to become the perfect Christian.

But how to stop treating my relationship with God like another thing on my to-do list.

How to stop reading just to say I’ve read.

How to stop praying just to say I’ve prayed.

How to stop thinking that the goal is to look like I have a relationship with God and actually start building one.

Because maybe being close to God isn’t as easy as social media makes it look.

Maybe it’s not supposed to be.

Maybe it’s supposed to require something from me too.

And perhaps that’s the part I can’t blame on the algorithm.

I crave being understood more than I crave being loved.

And I think that says a lot about me as a person.

Because when I really think about it, love isn’t actually that rare.

People love every day.

People love their friends.

Their families.

Their partners.

Sometimes they even love people who continuously hurt them.

Love exists.

Understanding feels much rarer.

I think that’s why I over-explain myself.

If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you’d probably notice it.

I’ll explain what happened.

Then I’ll explain why I reacted the way I did.

Then I’ll explain why I explained it that way.

Not because I like talking.

But because somewhere in my head I’m thinking, “No, that’s not what I meant.”

I hate being misunderstood.

I hate when someone takes what I said and hears something completely different.

I hate having to repeat myself, not because it’s annoying, but because every time I have to explain myself again, it feels like I’ve failed to make someone see what I was trying to say the first time.

Maybe that’s why being understood feels so intimate to me.

It’s someone noticing your “I’m fine” doesn’t sound like your usual “I’m fine.”

It’s someone remembering that random thing you mentioned months ago because they were actually listening.

It’s someone asking, “Are you okay?” before you’ve even realized you’re acting differently.

It’s someone understanding not just your words, but your intentions.

I think misunderstanding is one of the loneliest feelings in the world.

Not because someone disagrees with you.

People are allowed to disagree.

It’s when they completely miss you.

When you know exactly what you’re trying to say, but somehow it never lands.

You keep explaining.

They keep misunderstanding.

Eventually you stop trying.

Not because you’ve run out of words.

But because you’ve run out of hope that they’ll ever understand what you’re trying to say.

I’ve realized you can be deeply loved and still feel incredibly unseen.

Someone can love you with everything they have and still never understand how your mind works.

They can love you and still dismiss the things that matter to you.

Love doesn’t automatically create understanding.

Understanding takes curiosity.

It takes listening.

It takes paying attention.

I still want to be loved.

Of course I do.

But if you asked me to choose, I’d choose understanding.

Because love without understanding can feel lonely.

You can be deeply loved and still feel unseen.

Understanding is different.

It’s the feeling of no longer having to translate yourself.

Of no longer wondering if people are hearing what you’re actually trying to say.

Maybe that’s why I crave being understood more than I crave being loved.

Because being loved tells you that someone cares about you.

Being understood makes you feel like someone truly knows you.

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About four years ago, I jumped out of a moving keke.

I know.

Stay with me.

I was 19, still living in Lagos, and my mum sent me to City Mall in Ikoyi to pick something up. If you remember City Mall back then, you know it was the place to be.

The only problem was I only knew how to get there from our house, not from my auntie’s shop, which is where we were that day.

So I entered a keke.

First time doing it alone, by the way.

I told the driver where I wanted to stop. He nodded. Everything was fine.

Until halfway through the journey, he looked at me and said he wasn’t going to drop me where I’d asked.

I actually laughed.

Because what do you mean you’re not dropping me there?

I thought maybe I’d heard him wrong, so I repeated myself. He repeated himself too.

He wasn’t dropping me there.

At that point my brain just… left the building.

I had no phone. Couldn’t call my mum, couldn’t call anybody. I was the only passenger and the roads were unusually free that day, barely any traffic, just a few shop owners and hospital workers minding their business outside a nearby hospital.

My heart was racing like crazy.

So I did what my terrified 19-year-old brain thought was the only logical thing.

I jumped.

Out of the moving keke.

I Hit the ground hard. Blood everywhere.

And the keke man? Didn’t stop. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t even look back. Just kept driving like nothing had happened.

But honestly, what surprised me more wasn’t even him.

It was everyone else.

There was a hospital literally right opposite where I landed. Shop owners, hospital workers, people walking by, everybody saw what happened.

And everybody carried on.

Nobody came over. Nobody asked if I was okay. Lagos really looked me in the eye and said “you’ll be alright” and kept moving.

I picked myself up and walked all the way back to my auntie’s shop crying.

The moment my mum saw me she panicked completely.My dad took one look, told her to stay at the shop, and rushed me straight to the pharmacy. They cleaned everything up, bandaged me, sent me home.

I still have the scar.

Every now and then I’ll catch a glimpse of it and think about that day.

I still don’t know what that driver meant. Maybe there was an explanation. Maybe there wasn’t. I’ll never know.

What I do know is that 19-year-old me genuinely believed she was in danger. And fear has a funny way of making decisions for you.

Mine just happened to involve jumping out of a moving keke.

I never made it to City Mall that day. The errand remained unfinished.

But I came home with a scar and probably one of the craziest stories I’ll ever tell.

Sometimes I scroll through social media and see people my age buying cars, moving into apartments, getting interviewed, launching businesses, speaking on stages.

And for a split second, I think,

Why not me?

Why am I not there yet?

It’s an ugly thought to admit out loud, but I think most of us have had it.

Then I close the app and go back to my life, and somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s this quiet feeling that maybe I’m not doing enough.

Maybe my life isn’t… impressive enough.

I think we’ve created an invisible hierarchy of success.

At the top are the people everyone knows.

The founders.

The influencers.

The celebrities.

The people going viral.

The ones buying houses before they’re twenty-five.

The ones whose lives make everyone else pause and think, “Wow.”

And then there’s everyone else.

The teacher who’s taught for thirty years.

The woman who opens her shop every morning before sunrise.

The nurse coming home after a twelve-hour shift.

The father quietly paying school fees.

The friend who always remembers to check in when you’re having a hard week.

People whose names will probably never trend.

People who may never be interviewed.

People who are simply… living.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating “ordinary” like it meant “insignificant.”

Maybe that’s why so many of us feel behind.

We’ve started measuring impact by visibility.

If enough people don’t see it, it feels like it doesn’t count.

But impact has never been that loud.

Sometimes impact is buying food for the little girl standing by the roadside because you noticed she looked hungry.

Sometimes it’s giving money to the almajiri you see every morning.

Sometimes it’s encouraging someone who was ready to give up.

Sometimes it’s being the safe person someone thinks of when life falls apart.

The strange thing is, we’re always looking up.

Looking at the next milestone.

The next achievement.

The next big thing.

We’re so busy chasing a life that looks meaningful that we forget to notice the lives we’ve already touched.

There are probably people who look up to you and you’ve never even realized it.

People who’ve watched the way you carry yourself.

People who’ve remembered something you said years ago.

People whose day became a little lighter because of one small act of kindness you’ll never think twice about.

Not everything that changes a life makes the news.

Not everything that matters gets applauded.

And maybe that’s okay.

I still want the big things.

I want to make it.

I want opportunities.

I want my work to reach millions of people.

There’s nothing wrong with ambition.

But I don’t want to become so obsessed with being seen that I become blind to the ways I’ve already been significant.

Maybe we’re measuring our lives with the wrong ruler.

Because the most important thing you’ll ever do might never earn you a standing ovation.

It might simply live on in another person.

Quietly.

Long after you’ve forgotten it ever happened.

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I was never fat.

I want to say that upfront,not because there’s anything wrong with being fat, but because the irony of what I’m about to tell you only lands if you understand that I was never plus-sized. I was never the girl people worried about. By secondary school, I was slim, healthy, completely ordinary in terms of size.

And yet, for years, the thing I was most afraid of was food.

Yes, I said it.

People don’t usually say things like that out loud, especially not in Nigeria, where we don’t really have the language for conversations about body dysmorphia or eating disorders. But it was true.

I was afraid of food.

I don’t know exactly when it started. It started slowly, the way these things do.

At some point, I stopped seeing myself clearly in the mirror. The girl looking back at me always looked bigger than she was. I’d ask my friends in the middle of conversations,

“Do I look fat today?”

They’d stare at me like I was crazy.

“You look exactly the same.”

“Are you sure?” I’d ask.

Looking back, I realize that was body dysmorphia doing its work.

What you see in the mirror isn’t always what’s actually there.

I’d look at other girls,girls whose bodies looked just like mine and somehow, in my head, I looked bigger. I looked different. The disconnect between reality and what I saw was enormous, and I didn’t have the words for it then.

So I managed it the only way I knew how.

I wouldn’t eat.

Or I’d eat and spend the next day making up for it by eating only once, eating very late, or convincing myself I wasn’t hungry.

Intermittent fasting.

Lemon water.

Exercise, not because it made me feel good, but because it felt like prevention.

Preventing a weight that was never coming.

Preventing a body I was never going to have.

There was nothing I wouldn’t try.

All of it in service of staying slim enough.

Slim enough for what, I couldn’t have told you.

Just… slim enough.

The strange thing about body dysmorphia is that no amount of reassurance ever feels like enough.

People could tell you ten times in one day that you looked fine, and the eleventh thought in your own head would still win.

That’s what made it so exhausting.

The battle wasn’t with other people.

It was with the version of myself I kept seeing in the mirror.

And then there were the family gatherings.

My family has always been vocal about weight. Not maliciously, just in that very Nigerian way where commenting on someone’s body is considered normal conversation.

“You know our family has a reputation. Don’t add weight o.”

“This one, you’re adding weight.”

Those words would send me spiraling.

I’d spend the entire holiday calculating every meal, watching what I ate, telling my mum I wasn’t hungry when she placed food in front of me.

But mothers know.

They always know.

She’d look at me and say,

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? And what if you were fat? What’s wrong with that? Am I not fat?”

Then she’d push the plate toward me.

“Eat. Food will not kill you. It is when you don’t eat that it will kill you.”

Even then, I couldn’t fully hear her.

The fear was louder.

This went on from around JSS2 or JSS3 until I was 20 or 21 years old.

I want you to sit with that.

Years.

Years of my life spent in a quiet war with my own body.

Years of looking in the mirror and not seeing what was actually there.

Then, slowly without some dramatic breakthrough,it started to loosen its grip.

I stopped caring

I’m 23 now.

I eat when I’m hungry.

I eat healthy because I genuinely enjoy it, not because I’m terrified of what will happen if I don’t.

And when I want junk food, I order it.

I eat it.

The world doesn’t end.

I don’t punish myself the next day.

I don’t bargain with my body.

I simply move on.

I exercise now because it makes me feel good, not because I’m trying to earn my food or prevent a body that never existed.

The thoughts still visit sometimes.

But now they feel like old guests instead of permanent residents.

I recognize them for what they are.

And because I recognize them, I don’t have to believe them.

For years, I thought food was the problem.

It wasn’t.

I thought my body was the problem.

It wasn’t.

The problem was that I trusted fear more than my own reflection.

I have always struggled with forgiveness.

Not because I enjoy holding grudges. I actually wish I were the kind of person who could let things go as easily as they came. But that’s never been me.

There’s a verse in the Bible where Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive someone who sins against him. Seven times? Jesus replies, “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” Some translations say “seventy times seven.” Either way, the point is clear.

Keep forgiving.

I’ve always admired that verse.

I’ve also always struggled to live it.

My mum is one of the most forgiving people I know. Someone can hurt her deeply, say terrible things about her, disappear from her life completely. But the moment that same person needs help, she’s there.

No hesitation.

No “Remember what you did to me?”

Just help.

I’ve always wanted to be like that.

Instead, I remember.

Not because I’m trying to. I just do.

I’m the kind of person who still remembers moments from nursery school. Tiny, insignificant moments that everyone else has probably forgotten. So if my brain can hold on to memories from when I was four years old, how exactly is it supposed to forget something that genuinely hurt me?

For the longest time, I thought that meant I wasn’t forgiving people properly.

Because isn’t that what we’re told?

Forgive and forget.

As if the two always come together.

But lately I’ve started wondering if we’ve misunderstood the second part.

Maybe forgetting isn’t about erasing the memory.

Maybe it’s about removing its power.

Maybe forgetting simply means I can look at you without replaying what happened every single time.

I know what you did.

I remember it.

But it no longer controls the way I treat you, the way I sleep at night, or the amount of peace I carry around.

The memory stays.

The resentment doesn’t.

I think that’s the gap forgiveness fills.

Not the gap in our memory.

The gap in our heart.

Because carrying resentment is exhausting.

It’s like carrying a dark cloud everywhere you go, hoping the other person notices how heavy it is, when in reality you’re the one getting rained on.

Forgiveness, then, isn’t pretending nothing happened.

It’s choosing not to let what happened keep happening inside you.

And I don’t think forgiveness always means going back to the way things were.

Some people mistake forgiveness for permission.

I don’t.

I can forgive you and still decide that what happened changed the kind of relationship we’re able to have. Those aren’t contradictions. They’re consequences.

Some doors don’t need to be reopened for your heart to be at peace.

Forgiveness doesn’t always restore access.

Sometimes it simply restores your peace.

I’m still learning.

I’m not my mum yet obviously.

Sometimes I still replay conversations longer than I should.

Sometimes forgiveness feels like a decision I have to make over and over again.

But maybe that’s okay.

Maybe one day I’ll be like my mum. Maybe helping someone who hurt me will come as naturally as breathing.

I’m not there yet.

But I think I’ve finally stopped measuring forgiveness by how much I remember.

Maybe I should measure it by how much peace I have instead.

Maybe forgiveness was never meant to erase the past.

Maybe it was only ever meant to free us from living in it.

I think our hearts know long before our minds are willing to admit it.

Not in some mystical, soulmate, “I had a feeling” kind of way. I mean in the quiet, ordinary moments that don’t seem important until much later.

The text message that suddenly feels different.

The conversation that leaves you unsettled but you tell yourself you’re just overthinking.

The apology that sounds right but somehow doesn’t feel right.

The joke that wasn’t really a joke.

The way your body starts bracing itself before their name even lights up your phone.

Your heart notices first.

Your head arrives months later with a thousand explanations for why your heart was probably being dramatic.

Because that’s what we do.

We negotiate with reality.

We explain away discomfort because certainty is expensive.

Because once you know, you can’t unknow.

And then you have to do something about it.

If you admit the relationship is over, you have to leave.

If you admit your dream isn’t yours anymore, you have to let it go.

If you admit the friendship only exists because you keep carrying it, you have to stop.

Sometimes denial isn’t about not seeing the truth.

It’s about delaying the responsibility that comes with seeing it.

So we bargain.

He’s just busy.

She’s just stressed.

Maybe it’s just a rough patch.

Maybe I’m asking for too much.

Maybe I’m overthinking.

We become lawyers arguing against our own intuition, presenting evidence for a case our hearts quietly stopped believing in months ago.

The strange thing is that our bodies don’t seem interested in the stories we tell ourselves.

Your shoulders tense around certain people.

You rehearse conversations before they happen.

You feel relief when plans get cancelled instead of disappointment.

You start shrinking in places where you once felt safe.

Your heart has been trying to send a message for months.

Your mind just keeps marking it as spam.

I don’t think our instincts are always right.

Fear can sound like intuition.

Anxiety can convince us danger is everywhere.

Past hurt can make us suspicious of people who have done nothing wrong.

But I also think we’ve become so afraid of being “too emotional” that we’ve started distrusting every uncomfortable feeling we have.

Not every feeling deserves to be obeyed.

But every feeling deserves to be examined.

Maybe that’s the difference.

Your heart isn’t always telling you what to do.

Sometimes it’s simply asking you to pay attention.

And I wonder how many of us would’ve saved ourselves months,maybe even years if we’d stopped trying to explain away what we already knew.

women go through a lot. and before anyone starts typing “men go through a lot too” in the comments, let me stop you there.

what i’m talking about isn’t who suffers more. i’m talking about the way women love. some of us don’t fall fast, but when we fall, we fall with our entire chest. all of it. and that’s the problem, because even when the man who fell with us decides to leave, or cheat, or just slowly check out, we’re the ones left standing there trying to figure out how to walk away from something we gave everything to.

we know it’s not right. we know we deserve better. and we still stay.

some of us stay because of embarrassment. nobody wants to be the girl who thought she had it all figured out and didn’t. we built this whole image of having a good man, a good relationship, a good life, and leaving means admitting that image was never real. so we’d rather keep performing it than let anyone see the cracks.

some of us stay because we genuinely don’t know how to be alone. not in a dramatic way, just in the quiet, practical way. there’s a moment in the polygamist where she already knows he’s cheating, has known for a while, and she still goes to his house knowing one of his side chicks is there,to hand him an invitation to their 20th anniversary. she’s already booked the venue. she’s already planning the renewal of vows. and you watch it and think, how is she doing that. but then you remember every time you kept planning a future with someone whose present you already couldn’t trust.

and some of us stay because we’ve convinced ourselves he’ll change. this one is the most dangerous because it’s dressed up as hope. we tell ourselves it’s just a phase, he’s just going through something, he’ll grow out of it. meanwhile we’re the ones doing all the growing, all the shrinking, all the adjusting, while he stays exactly the same.

and then there’s the line that makes my blood boil every single time. “men are polygamous by nature.” like that’s supposed to be the end of the conversation. like we’re just supposed to nod and accept it because some men decided that’s the excuse they’re using this century.

that phrase has done more damage than people realize, because it doesn’t just excuse the men who say it, it quietly tells women that wanting loyalty is asking for too much. it turns a choice into a biological inevitability, and somehow we’re the ones who end up apologizing for expecting better.

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i’m watching the polygamist right now and it’s eye opening in a way i didn’t expect. not because it’s telling me something i didn’t already know, women have always known men cheat, women have always known about the excuses. it’s eye opening because watching it happen to someone else, through someone else’s pain, makes you see your own situation with a clarity you didn’t have while you were inside it.

it’s easy to defend the bare minimum when you’re the one receiving it. it’s a lot harder to defend it when you’re watching another woman accept it on screen and your whole body is screaming leave.

that’s the thing about perspective. sometimes you need to see your story on someone else, in a body that isn’t yours, before you can admit what it actually looks like.

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so yeah. women’s day should be like six times a year. because we are out here doing the heavy lifting of loving, staying, hoping, forgiving, and somehow still showing up the next day. and most of the time nobody even claps for it.

may God protect us all. and may we one day stop calling acceptance love.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I want to start with a cup.

A big mummy of mine once held up an empty cup in front of me and said, look at this. This is what you become if you don’t keep yourself for your husband. The cup was empty. The message was clear. Your body is a vessel and its value depends entirely on what a man receives.

I was a child when I heard that. And I carried it for years before I had the language to say what was wrong with it.

I want to be clear about something before I go further. This was not my parents. My parents raised me differently. But family is wide in Nigeria and the messages come from everywhere, aunties, big mummies, relatives at holiday gatherings. You don’t have to be raised by someone for their words to find you and stick.

Growing up as a Nigerian girl means growing up in training. Not school training, not career training. Training for a man’s house. Training for a man’s comfort. I could be lying on my bed, resting, doing absolutely nothing, and hear, “when you get to your husband’s house is this how you’ll be?Those kind of men go outside”. My rest was a threat to a future marriage. My stillness was a problem to be corrected.

House chores were not taught as life skills. They were wife qualifications. Cooking was not about nourishing yourself. It was about what you would bring to a man’s table one day. Virginity was not a personal or spiritual conviction. It was a gift. Something preserved and handed over. As if my body was always already his, just waiting for the official transfer.

Then came the warnings.

"Don’t be too successful or your husband will feel intimidated."

"Don’t buy a car before him."

"Don’t buy a house before marriage."

"Don’t live alone or people will think you are wayward."

"Don’t earn too much. Don’t outshine. Don’t take up too much space."

Shrink. Shrink. Shrink. All so that a man can feel large.

I want to ask a genuine question. When did men become something to be worshipped? They are human beings. Fully, ordinarily human. And yet an entire system of instruction exists to make sure women do not threaten that humanity with their own.

I am not against marriage. I am not against any of these things in themselves. What I am against is the idea that they only have value in relation to a man. That a woman cooking for herself is just practice. That a woman building her own life before marriage is doing something wrong.

Collect yourself first. Not for him. For you. Know who you are before you hand yourself to anyone. Build your life, your convictions, your peace, for yourself. If you choose to share it with someone later, wonderful. But it was always yours.

The cup my big mummy showed me was empty. But she was wrong about what that meant. An empty cup is not a ruined woman.

It is just a cup that belongs to itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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For the longest time, I told myself I wanted to be a doctor.

It was never really a question. It was just the plan. I would study, I would get in, I would become a doctor, and somewhere in there I would figure out the rest. It felt certain in the way that only things you have never truly examined feel certain.

But let me take you back to where it actually started.

In junior secondary school we had an aptitude test to determine which class we would go into for senior secondary. My results came back as arts and science and tech. Arts ,science and tech. Two options. And honestly? Something in me was drawn to arts. But arts had a reputation at the time. The perception was that the serious students went to science class and arts was for everyone else. And because all my friends were going to science, I followed. I told myself it was because I loved science. I told myself I wanted to be a doctor.

I don’t know how much of that was true and how much of it was just me not wanting to be left behind.

So I went into science class. Chemistry was hard. Everything was hard. But I forced myself through it because the goal was medicine and the goal was fixed. I finished secondary school, wrote JAMB, got into university chose public health to figure out my next step, and even in my third year I was still telling myself that when I was done I would go back and do medicine properly. Public health was just a detour. Medicine was always the destination.

And then I started spending more time in the hospital.

Not as a patient. Just there. Observing. And something started to shift quietly.

I noticed that when I saw very sick patients, my first instinct was not to move toward them. It was to create distance. To think about protection, about what I might pick up, about how to stay safe. I watched doctors move through the wards with a kind of ease I did not feel in my own body. Some without masks, some barely flinching at things that made me uncomfortable. And I thought, is this just caution or is this telling me something?

I also went to the children’s ward. I have always said I love children. Pediatrics felt like the obvious fit. But standing in that ward, looking at sick children, children who did not look the way children look when they are healthy and well, I felt the urge to leave. And that bothered me more than anything else. Because I realized that loving children in the abstract and loving them in their most vulnerable and difficult moments are two completely different things. And a pediatrician needs to be able to do the second one.

I am not sure I can.

So now I am sitting with this question that I have been avoiding for years. Do I actually want to be a doctor or do I want to be called a doctor?

Because those are not the same thing.

One is about the work. The other is about what the title means to the people around you, what it means for your family, what it means when someone asks what you do and you get to say it. I grew up around the expectation that medicine was the goal. And I wonder now how much of my desire was genuinely mine and how much of it was borrowed from everyone around me.

And the 6 to 10 years. When I think about going back to study medicine I use the word sacrifice. And I keep turning that over in my head because I don’t think people who truly want something describe it as sacrifice. I think they describe it as the price. As worth it. As obvious. The fact that it feels like sacrifice to me might be the most honest thing I have said about this whole situation.

I don’t know what I want. I am done with school now and the question is louder than ever because for the first time there is no next step already laid out for me. No next class, no next year, no next exam to prepare for. Just the open question of what I actually want my life to look like.

And I am still trying to figure out if what I want and what I have always been told I should want are the same thing.

I don’t have an answer yet.

But I think asking the question honestly is a start.

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I don’t develop crushes the way most people do.

I can look at someone and think okay, he’s handsome, he’s fine and that’s it. It ends there. The face does nothing for me beyond acknowledgment. No butterflies, no overthinking, no “I wonder if he noticed me.” Just — yes, objectively attractive, moving on.

But then we start talking.

And it doesn’t even have to be every day. It doesn’t have to be the late night conversations people romanticize. It just has to be real. I hear how they speak. I notice how they think. The personality starts to come through and something shifts quietly. Before I know it I am attached , not to their face but to their words. To the way their mind works. To who they are when they are just being themselves.

And that’s when the problem starts.

Because when I get to that stage, the stage where I have fallen for the person and not just the packaging, the attachment is strong. Like genuinely strong. Suddenly I notice when they reply late. I notice when something feels off. I am analyzing things I had no business analyzing three weeks ago. And in the middle of all of that I stop and ask myself, do I actually like this person or am I just attached?

And then I start doing this thing where I try to strip away their character. What if he didn’t talk the way he talks, would I still feel this way? What if his personality was different, would I still be here? And sometimes the answer scares me because I realize the feeling is less about him specifically and more about what he represents. The connection. The conversation. The way it felt to be understood.

So which came first, the like or the attachment? And is there even a difference?

I can count on one hand the number of people I have genuinely liked since secondary school. And I say since secondary school deliberately because in secondary school crushes are normal. He’s the finest boy in class and your heart does what hearts do at that age. That’s just growing up.

But after that? I stopped developing crushes the way other people seemed to. I was too busy looking for myself to be looking for someone else. And even the people I ended up catching feelings for, it was never instant. It was never a moment. It was always gradual. Always built from conversation and time and personality. I grew into the feeling. I didn’t fall into it.

Which makes me wonder, am I even capable of liking someone first? Or do I always attach before I like? And if I always attach before I like, how do I ever know if what I feel is real or if I’m just holding on to the comfort of the connection?

I don’t have an answer. I’ve turned this over in my head enough times to know I’m not going to find one sitting here.

But I’m curious, do you like someone first and then get attached? Or does the attachment come and pull the feelings with it?

Let me know your thoughts because I genuinely need to understand this.