Dear reader,

I hope you have had a fantastic month! Autumn is in full swing now. The world, my world, is falling leaves, pumpkin spice everything and cosy nights. I love autumn.

For bake club in the issue, there’s an easy to make cookie recipe for a perfect autumn treat that you’ll find yourself reaching for over and over again.

Read the rest of Postcards from the In-Between- Issue III, here.

Postcards from the In-Between III

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I would like to hear your thought on this issue, and I hope you can share with a friend or two.

Till I write to you again,

From Rock Bottom,

With Love.

My first introduction to Toni Morrison was Bluest Eye, her debut novel. I would like to say that there was a method to the selection process of picking this book first from her impressive oeuvre. I would like to say that I read a lot of reviews and did a lot of research, but what really happened is that I walked into my local Waterstones, had a nice chat with the guy behind the counter about Toni Morrison, the then upcoming Wuthering Heights movie, what we can glean about the state of the world from the literary zeitgeist, and left with Bluest Eye and Beloved.

( I would come to find out, the hard way, might I add, that it’s helpful to research the best entry point for authors with a lot of published work so as to ease yourself into their style.I picked up Brothers Karamazo first out of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and I’m in a battle for my life with that one.)

Bluest Eye was (throws hands in the air, tries and fails to form a coherent speech) a phenomenal read. Perhaps I’ll do a review when I’m capable of articulating my thoughts better. But I will discuss the premise of Beloved as it set off the string of mental events that lead to this essay.

Beloved is about a black woman that was born into slavery, grew up and fell in love in it. She had three kids and when she was pregnant with the fourth, she and the man she loved, also enslaved, decided to make a break for it. Against all odds, she made it out alive- she and the baby she had to deliver whilst escaping. Her lover did not.

This brave woman built a life from scratch and devoted herself entirely to her children. And then one day, somebody ran into the house to deliver the news that the people who enslaved her were in town and on their way to pick her up- her and the kids. Her children were more valuable to the slavers, even more so than she was and she knew that. Rather than allowing her children to become enslaved, she attempted to kill them. Only one of them, a toddler whom she had named Beloved, did not survive this.

As you might imagine, this made me uncomfortable. The rest of the book was a masterclass in telling the most uncomfortable story without vilifying or justifying anyone’s actions. It was brilliant. Toni Morrison offered no tidy or moral conclusion to this tale, she simply presented me with a situation and left me to chew on it. My biggest takeaway from the book is learning how to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and emotions. Toni Morrison taught me that discomfort is not always a problem that requires a solution. Sometimes, it’s an invitation to step outside yourself and think about something differently.

Why are you reading about my experience reading a deeply traumatising book?

The media circus- and it is a circus as it’s mostly comprised of no-integrity journalism that preys on people for clout and algorithmic relevance- has been awash for the past couple of months with different stories. Sad stories that are reported with more focus on sensationalism than anything else. As is the desired outcome, lots of people have taken to their social media platforms to passionately share their opinions about these stories.

I have read a lot of takes on some of the popular cases that have made the media rounds in the past couple of months and you know what I’ve noticed? Lots of people cannot handle uncomfortable thoughts.

And nuance is a thing never heard of by many.

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ -Hamlet, Shakespeare

It’s a big space, this world, and we all have different moral frameworks that we live our lives by, be it religion, culture, or personal codes of conduct. In order to coexist peacefully with others, a necessary survival skill is the ability to hold two contrasting ideas/emotions/truths/opinions and sift through the information provided without throwing a tantrum.

The path of least resistance is growing defensive or throwing around logical fallacies when faced with an uncomfortable thought that completely shatters your world view. It requires no critical thinking or empathy, which is why it is shallow, limiting and offers no emotional growth.

For example, I could say:

“Postpartum depression really is scary and not well researched. You can’t make such bold claims about what women dealing with it can or can’t do just because you have never experienced it.”

And someone could respond with:

“Oh, so you support children being killed by their mothers because of postpartum depression??????”

That’s a strawman fallacy.

Or I could say:

“Women are more likely to die from misogyny than men are from misandry.”

And someone could respond with:

“You have no way of knowing that. When did you become a career detective? You’re just a man hater.”

That’s an ad hominem attack, because instead of engaging with the argument, the person launches a personal attack on the speaker.

Or I could say:

“Women suffer through xxxx”

And someone asks, “What about men?!”

That’s whataboutism, a type of red herring.

Or saying:

“Using AI to generate slop for trends is wreaking havoc to the environment.”

And someone says:

“But you use AI too, what are you complaining about?”

That is a tu quoque that avoids the claim by accusing the first party of hypocrisy. Their hypocrisy does not in fact diminish the merit of the claim. But a wagging finger must wag!

With logical fallacies, the topic of discussion is cheapened as a result of one party’s inability to engage critically because they are scared of their world view getting shattered.

But we live in a big big world and with the exception of deliberate, insidious evil, there should be room for everyone. There should be room for empathy, consideration, and a willingness to see outside our point of view.

Without this, we simply cannot grow as people.

So I guess you can say it’s both a moral and biological imperative that we think about things critically. Even the difficult and uncomfortable topics. Especially those ones.

The next time you’re faced with a point of view that’s different from what you’re used to and you find yourself heading towards your path of least resistance, stop for a minute to think about why you feel so challenged by the new information.

Ask yourself why your fight or flight mode has been activated.

Ask yourself if you’re being empathetic, if you’re truly considering the nuances around the topic.

It’s not self betrayal to have other thoughts outside what you’re used to or to change your mind when faced with a better and more compelling argument.

Self betrayal is denying yourself mental and emotional growth because you would rather cling to your old world view than let yourself be curious about what’s out there.

Dearest Reader,

I would usually start these things with this part, but I did not want to disturb your reading process. If you managed to get through the first part of this, you’re a rockstar! Another thing I would be sending this time of the month is my digital magazine, but to get that to your screen this month would have required me to compromise on quality and I’d rather not do that.

I apologise, you’ll get the continuation of the Jollof Rice Chronicles in the next issue.

The month has stretched and bent me, but autumn is here and I can enjoy heated blankets and crunchy leaves. For me, that feels like a reward from the universe.

I do hope you had a great September. And if you didn’t, we can begin again, in October, and hope for the best.

Till I write to you again,

From Rock bottom,

With Love.

If you caught the first issue of this digital magazine, then you know I created this to be read on your e-reader, away from the distractions of the World Wide Web.

Download and enjoy!

The Age Of Neoliberalism A Digital Zine

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P.S. If you would buy me a cup of coffee in real life, then please consider being a paid subscriber. You would be helping me breathe life to the plans I have for this magazine.

I hope you enjoy this month’s issue. And share with a friend (pretty please!)

For your time, always,

From Rock bottom,

With Love.

Dear Reader,

I hope this missive finds you well. I have received great feedback since I put out the first issue of my digital magazine and I’m grateful for the love and support.

We’re getting off another heatwave in the UK and at different moments, I have felt like I was being spun around on a spit like a rotisserie chicken. Needless to say, I am SO ready for autumn! (My most insincere apology to the summer babies reading this.)

I’ve had my morning coffee- a homemade vanilla latte (vanilla lattes are only great when you make the vanilla syrup yourself, FYI), I have the fan blasting away and Superstore playing in the background. Somebody in my building is cooking what smells like concoction rice and fish and I miss the home I no longer have.

Grab your beverage of choice, I would like to invite you to a party.

You are cordially invited to Narcissus’s pool party!

It is going to be loads of fun. Every square inch is a reflective surface through which you can admire and dissect yourself in equal measure. You can get up close and personal with yourself. Look, your abs are amazing, who else has hair shinier than yours? Admiration for your looks and physical attributes will follow you everywhere you turn. Your very own fan club comes with the package.

And if you are into shame kink, you will be given room to strip yourself bare and pick at every single one of your perceived flaws. Private shaming rooms with full length mirror are available, but if you want an audience while you do this, kindly inform us and we’ll set that up for you.

The best part is that you don’t have to talk to other people if you don’t want to. Except of course to point out how fat the other person has gotten, or talk about your looks and body tirelessly. After all, our bodies are the most important and only interesting parts of our existence.

There will also be an arena for bloodletting where randomly selected individuals will be called on stage and collectively, we tear them apart. Only with words, of course. Please register if you’ll like to participate in this event as there is limited seating available. Everyone is required to wear a mask, we’re sure you understand.

We also have studios where you can simulate an audience that will love nothing more than to hear you talk about yourself as much as you want. A recording of your session will be sent after the event for your personal collection.

Come with an empty stomach! Thanks to our sponsors, we are sparing no expense when it comes to food, drinks and entertainment. There will be wine and chocolate fountains and an all you can eat buffet. For maximum enjoyment, you will be completely insulated from the outside world and entirely divorced from reality, so we ask that you leave your cellphones at home. You will be provided with meta glasses to document the event.

Mirrors will be provided, as previously stated, but you can bring an extra. In fact, we expect nothing less!

We can’t wait to host you. Bring your worst self and let’s have the best time ever!

Thank you for reading! I’m working on taking myself seriously as a creative and existing as more than a concept-which is something I would prefer- is beginning to seem antithetical to that ambition. Dammit.

My digital magazine is just one way I’m giving life to that ambition. If you haven’t read the first issue, please catch up! The second issue will go live by the end of the month, in sha Allah.

Till I write to you again, my lovelies. Get out of your head and out of your own way.

From Rock bottom,

With Love.

Want to read the rest of this digital magazine the way I intended it to be read? Please download and enjoy on your ebook reader, away from the distractions of the internet (hopefully).

Postcards From The In Between Issue I

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I hope you enjoy the experience of reading this as much as I enjoyed creating it.

For your time, always,

From Rock bottom,

With Love.

Issue I coming soon…

Dearest reader,

I hope this missive finds you well. I’m writing this in bed as I’m up earlier than I planned and the world outside is already too bright and loud for the time of day. Usually, I’m stuck in bed because I physically can’t get out, but today is a good day. Today I’m slowing down to enjoy the sound of the birds chirping rather noisily outside my window and of course, to write to you.

Pull up a chair, friends and strangers, let’s have a chat.

I quit my job very recently. What this means is that I suddenly have a lot of free time and a personal mandate to fix my nervous system through rest. By the second day, I realised that I sucked at slowing down. I spent my 20s deeply ingrained in hustle culture. If you did as well then you probably understand the guilt that comes from simply putting your feet up and slowing down.

We live in the age of social media where every problem you have has been experienced by someone else who has shared their ‘top tips’ on how to get out of it. And because the entire wellness industry was built on the foundation of self-optimisation and self-care, it was not so difficult to find ways to fix this.

How do I get myself to slow down and enjoy my free time?

How do I indulge in self-care without guilt?

You want to start living intentionally. You begin your day by journalling. Next you want to have a colourfully plated high protein breakfast after which you take all your fancy, highly curated supplements. Then you probably want to do some chores in a cute lounge set because what you wear, even at home sets the tone for how you feel the rest of the day. After that, you can either light your favourite candle and wear your LED mask, or you can go for Pilates, in yet another very cute set and grab matcha after. Don’t forget to post awesome pictures to show other people just how invested you are in your health and self-care, after all, your body is a temple and it should be treated as such.

This sounds aspirational, wholesome even, until you realise that you’re supposed to do it a specific way to get the best out of it. In order to ‘self-care max’, you need to be locked in in a way that has a bill at the end of it. Self-care has become an elitist club with a steep membership, and that’s where it gets problematic. The wellness-industrial complex has taken simple practices that predate influencer culture- like matcha and Pilates and curated unattainable lifestyles out of them and then sold them back to us as the ideal. The most basic routine has been aestheticised and monitised and you realise just how genius(insidious) it is when you see the hold it has over people. We’re seeing things like financial FOMO and burn out from trying to keep up with these trends.

What we are witnessing is not self-care but a performance of it. You are not spending time with yourself in the newest hotspot in town (which looks like every other place because of the homogenisation of everything, but that’s another conversation), you’re doing a song and dance that involves taking aesthetically pleasing pictures for the gram and then posting these pictures with #selflove and waiting for the stream of validation that comes in form of likes and comments. Only then does it feel like you’ve truly had a self-care day.

As unsettling as that sounds, it’s a reflection of where we are. We perform everything, even our own wellness. Do you even love yourself if you don’t have at least ten products in your night routine alone and that scented candle(very expensive) that’s supposed to ground you and help reconnect with your inner self? It stopped being self-care a long time ago. What it really is is hyper-consumerism camouflaged as a wellness movement that was never designed to benefit us.

What we need is to touch grass and reacquaint ourselves with the simpler pleasures of life and my God, there is an abundance of them!

A cup of tea in your favourite mug that has tea lines because you keep reaching for it. Time spent with friends that don’t ask you to be anything but yourself. Video call with your long distance friend that was supposed to be a quick call but ends up being two hours long. A long walk on a fine day, your favourite podcast or ebook blasting in your ears. Cooking for the people you love. Trying a new recipe. Netflix and chill with your favourite grocery store snacks. Trying a new hobby, new sport. Just…touch grass!

It will be disingenuous of me not to admit that I love a good Pilates class, scented candles and all those other things. However, I have learnt the difference between the things I actually enjoy and the things I have been programmed to desire because they are trending. For me, the difference is this: can I show up as I am without needing to look ‘cute’? And would I still enjoy it without an audience?

That’s where the line is for me.

It’s worth noting that self-care is something you do for yourself, with whatever resources are easily available to you. It should benefit you. Just you. It doesn’t have to look ‘right’ or fit a certain aesthetic. It’s not just another trend, it’s a lifestyle and as such should not be a game of trying to keep up or ‘belong’ with a class of people. The moment it starts feeling like a performance or competition, it’s no longer self care.

De-influence yourself, okay? It’s very freeing and kinder to your nervous system than the new age wellness that is being peddled by influencers.

Touch grass, dear reader. Please for the love of God, go outside and touch grass. There are free and affordable things you can do to self-care max and I promise you, they work!

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. As always, I don’t take your attention for granted.

Until I write to you again, be gentle with yourself.

From Rock bottom,

With Love.

xxx

Dearest reader,

You will be receiving this later than you ought to and I apologise for that. The truth is, this is one entry I didn’t want to write. Not because it’s especially sad or anything like that. I just did not want to write. I haven’t wanted to do anything for a while and for the most part of May, I didn’t. Or more accurately, I couldn’t.

But I know that abandoning my Substack and my little essays will end up on the list of things that I have to grieve and I’m not looking forward to growing that list. If you’re here, pull up a chat, let’s have a chat.

I went on a trip with some friends recently and we encountered a different problem at every stage of the journey. First, a connecting train was cancelled, then the rail replacement didn’t show up on time, all of this on a sweltering day. We finally arrived at our destination and received our welcome in form of more issues.

However, we were all on that trip to escape reality and we desperately needed said reality not to catch up with us. So we made it work somehow, patched up all the metaphoric holes and locked the bad things outside. In the end, we had the best time.

Later, we were all lounging in the living area of the lodge, back door opened, revealing the most stunning sunset over the countryside. One of my friends remarked on the evolution of problems and how things just constantly crop up. A casual remark, but they reached right into me and turned on a few lightbulbs that had slowly gone out through the month of May.

Earlier in the month, I had ordered some letter writing stationary from this charming looking store in Italy I found online. My friend had sent me a letter while she was travelling through Europe and it was beautiful and thoughtful. I was excited to write her back. My stationaries arrived, but the person that opened the package was different from the one who placed the order. I said to my friend that I didn’t have anything good to write to her anymore, so I’d wait it out.

But problems evolve from an aggressive chihuahua that’s all bark and no bite to a drugged up XL bully. I kept waiting for a better time to write and it just never came. Eventually, I wrote the damn letter, bad stuff and all. But to dilute it, I included polaroids of some great memories I have had in recent times.

I don’t know where I am going with this- I have not planned for some life lesson to tie this up, except that I wanted to write. I wanted to write something, even though my brain is uncooperative and every single word has felt like nails being dragged on a board.

Here are a few happy memories to dilute this letter.

The downside of the human condition is the continuous presence of problems. In different forms and impact levels. We can easily surmount some, ignore some, even dance around with some or be some. If we’re unlucky, we might experience the kind that brings up to our knees. I don’t think there’s anyway to get around this (I hate to be so glum).

But we also have great capacity to experience good things- laughter, friendship, love, nature, delicious food, good TV, cake, cake, coffee, warm cinnamon rolls, cake! These things can be our anchor while we wait for the problem to evolve back into something manageable or barely noticeable.

Thank you for reading this. Even I don’t know what this was.

From (truly) Rock bottom,

With Love.

Dearest reader,

I really had a chat with an amazing photographer and she asked me to describe where I am using a season, and I went with Spring- that liminal space where the world is waking itself up from the long slumber of winter and preparing for summer. Spring is heavy with the warm anticipation for a summer that you know is coming.

This Spring has been especially symbolic because it has been fickle, mercurial even. One minute it’s bright and sunny and the next day the clouds look like they have never heard of a sun (what is this sun you speak of?). I too, have felt like that in this Spring that I have found myself in. But summer is coming, and I hope it comes soon.

I managed to catch you just in time for this month’s missive. Pull up a chair, get comfortable, we have a lot to discuss.

I was casually doomscrolling on a fine day when I came across a call for creatives to take part in a photo book that merges AR and photography. I didn’t know what any of that would look like, but I was in a state of unrelenting ennui and it seemed intriguing, so I signed up and immediately forgot about it (as I’m wont to do).

A few weeks and several emails later, I walked into Rayh’s studio (said amazing photographer), still with zero understanding of what I was going to do. I was introduced to her work before my interview session and I remember thinking “Okay, WOW!”. Rayh tells’s people’s stories with pictures that move and talk- literally- in a seamless blend of creativity and technology that I wasn’t previously aware of.

I was amazed. That wasn’t even the best part of our session.

She asked me questions about my creativity, my creative process and what being a creative means to me. It wasn’t the easiest thing, answering those questions and I felt unearthed. Those questions-and the artist- held up a mirror in front of me and asked, no, demanded that I took a good look at myself. At the artist within that goes on long sabbatical breaks. My session with Rayh felt like a spiritual awakening.

I felt something that day and I’m going to share it with you. You- yes, you- that is struggling with your identity as an artist, in whatever form. You that is scared of being perceived. You who thinks your art needs to be perfect to be worthwhile, You who won’t even call yourself an artist because you’re not making a living from it. You that has starved your creative side for so long in a bid to survive this increasingly artless, joyless world. I’m talking to you.

You see, the thing about being an artist is that you can’t be any other way. The more you suppress that side of yourself, usually out of necessity for survival, the more incomplete you feel. The more adrift from yourself you become. It’s exhausting, but you probably know that. Don’t you?

This other part of you is left to starve because you don’t want to starve. There are bills to pay, after all. But you cannot survive as half a being, at least, not a survival that creates any real impact or that is even satisfying. I strongly believe that the creative gift is an amanah, something sacred we’ve been entrusted with, and we owe it to ourselves to find an outlet for it.

I know, by God, I know how hard it is to create any meaningful work when everyday is a struggle against forces bigger than yourself. But not to fight back in our own little ways? That is one of the biggest forms of self betrayal I can think of. That’s how we end up in a beige, colourless world devoid of art, colour, and whimsy.

Just picture your world without all the beautiful stories you encounter everyday. The ones that inspire you, encourage you, soothe you, entertain you and even the ones that unsettle you. All of them reminding you that you’re alive, that you’re a person that’s capable of feeling something. That’s what art does, what the artist does…and what you can do.

A common fallacy that creative types are prone to falling for (and as a perfectionist, I’m really subbing myself here) is the thought that if it’s not perfect, then it’s not worth doing. But how do you even measure perfection in something so subjective? Who made the rules? The same people who decide what books should be banned from schools? Or the ones that picked the most boring, unimaginative colour as the colour of the year? Or the ones that pick which work gets published based on what’s trending and most marketable?

What the hell is perfection when emotions, the very thing that drives good art, are anything but perfect?

As creatives, we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that our work needs to be perfect to be worthwhile. I understand the hypocrisy of saying this as the gremlins in my head are choking on their laughter as I type this, but it is what I know to be true. It is something I know I have to overcome if I ever want to keep writing and creating in the ways I know how to.

There is a paradigm shift happening and I believe storytelling is the last line of defence we have. So, my brothers and sisters in art, shall we rise to the occassion?

And no, you cannot lose your creativity. It’s not a purse you misplace or that that get’s snatched on a busy street. It could buried under layers of apathy, attrition, neglect and rust. But when you reach for it, it will come.

You don’t have to be a big shot to call yourself a creative. You don’t need a huge following, or anyone really, to be a creative. It’s just you and the work you want to create. Just you.

So, hi! My name is Lara. I sometimes delay writing my monthly essays out of fear that I have forgotten how to write. I have multiple drafts lying abandoned because of said fear and I sometimes won’t even call myself a writer when that is, in fact, the truest expression of my being.

I am working on that. On my fear of being perceived. On my issues with perfection. It’s nice to meet you!

I hope you can get over your fear of a blank page- of beginnings, especially rusty ones-and take the first step towards creative expression. It doesn’t need to win an award, you just need to enjoy doing it.

If I still have your attention, thank you for having this chat with me. I hope this serves as a reminder to return to your art. And if you know an artist that is struggling, please share this with them.

Till I write to you again, I hope your summer comes soon, and that is more beautiful than you imagined.

With Love,

From Rockbottom.

(P.s. In case you missed it earlier, here is a link to Rayh’s work.

My dearest reader,

At the start of the year, I decided to create a back to school style syllabus for topics I was interested in and do a presentation at the end of every month. The topic for January was Under the Sea and the syllabus was PERFECT!

In came capitalism. Things changed at work- for the worse and I’ve had to move everything else around to preserve an illusion of sanity. I’m writing this to you on a Tuesday, on my couch at home with SpongeBob playing in the background. I called in sick at work and I’m having a me day. Pull up a chair, let’s catch up.

Under the Sea, my learning syllabus for January explores life under the seas and oceans of the world. I am both fascinated and terrified of the oceanic world (we should all be, if you ask me) and learning about it goes beyond mere curiosity to me, and I’ll explain that as we go.

I have struggled with purpose for over a year now, and by that I mean that I have often felt a deeply terrifying feeling that something went amiss and I’m not supposed to be here, and that if I were to cease being here, then the universe would reset and go back to being how it’s supposed to be. I believed that at some point in time, I took the wrong turn and set off a chain reaction and the maths is simply not math-ing.

If you’ve ever felt like this, then you probably know that it’s an awful way to be. I’m solution-oriented (even though it hardly works, sike!), so finding a way to make sense of what I was feeling- either finding validity in it or an alternate line of argument-became as important as breathing.

I’m not exactly sure what led me on this current path, but I think it was an episode of The Blindboy Podcast where he talked about the behaviour of starlings in Limerick city and how it tells a story. Summarily, when the sun sets every day, the starlings fly in a noisy flock that darkens the skyline and you can literally track the days getting shorter because the time the starlings move everyday at sunset changes everyday.

I found this really interesting, how certain aspects of nature, parts that I have no hand in or even knowledge of determines the behaviour of birds. This led me down a rabbit hole of the ecosystem- above and below. I’m not going to bore you now with the specifics of the things that stood out to me but I will say this:

Nature exists in a delicate balance where the oceanic world influences our weather- rainfall, heat, storms and our world influences it in turn and it goes on and on, a perfectly designed system. Nothing is amiss, nothing is accidental- the predators are important to curb the population of their prey which when left unchecked could lead to disruptive overfeeding, underwater temperature change determines how hot summer gets for some European country and a slight change in this balance (insert global warming) means a change in the planet’s mood, resulting in all sorts of tantrums. Everything has a purpose, down to the leaf that has to fall in autumn.

Then there is me. Me that exists in this perfectly designed ecosystem. Me whose actions influence it. Me that breathes out carbon dioxide that the trees use for photosynthesis. Me that breathes in the oxygen they discard. Me that is an integral part of this balance. Surely, surely, that is not by accident, right?

This right here is my internal monologue. And if I don’t exist by accident then I have a purpose. It’s nothing emotional or sentimental- I am part of an ecosystem, THE ecosystem, therefore I have a function; therefore, my existence is not accidental. Learning about nature has been life affirming. Sometimes, the answer you are looking for exists in the world around you. It’s a beautiful tapestry filled with answers and something as silly as watching fish do a mating dance (this is incredibly hilarious!) can shake something loose in your brain.

It is not the grand revelation I was hoping for, the movie kind where I suddenly find meaning and purpose and I go on to become a CEO or some corny turn of event like that. But I feel grounded in the knowledge of the perfect synchronicity of the world around me and knowing that I am an active participant in that. If I’m still here, then I’m supposed to be and everything else will make sense along the way.

Am I advocating that we all become more conscious of nature and the world around us? Yes, yes I am. Not only does it tell us the stories we need to hear- about survival and resilience, it makes us conscious of our actions- at least it should. Everything we put out there has an impact, from pollution to kindness, and you don’t know how far it’s going to travel. You drop an empty bottle of water at the beach, the waves carry it, it travels for miles and a poor fish gets stuck in it (that’s one Nemo that’s not going back home, dammit!) We should all be climate advocates, unless of course you’ve found a new planet to live on, in which case you can just wait for your ship to arrive.

If you’re interested in my syllabus and learning journey, let me know. I could possibly include those in future letters to you.

Thank you for sitting and chatting with me. I hope you can look at the world around you and realise your importance in it. We might be tiny specks in existence, but we’ve got mass!

Till I write to you again, keep swimming.

From rockbottom, with love.

xo

My dearest reader,

I apologise for not writing to you in so long. I truly appreciate everyone that has reached out to ask why I haven’t been writing, I don’t take the attention you pay to my work for granted. Writing is deeply personal for me, and whether I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, I invariably put too much of myself into the words. I don’t know how to be any other way and for that past few months, the I struggled with the desire to simply vanish.

Somehow I didn’t, so I guess, happy new year? I hope this new year is kinder to you than the last.

I have written an essay, something that’s a bit different from what I have shared here so far ( and certainly longer) but I hope you find some meaning in it.

My first awareness of my body as something lacking occurred when I was fourteen and a family friend compared my boobs to a picture of a naked woman on his phone. I called him stupid when I caught him and he gave me a proper beating.

For many women, our first awareness of our bodies is as vessels for someone else’s desires. It has to look a certain way, be a certain shape to be considered as a worthy vessel for those desires. And we wanted to be desired, to be one of the chosen ones.

I grew up on a rather unhealthy diet of reality TV shows- Keeping up with the Kardashians, Dr 90201, The Girls next Door, Fashion Police- if there was a show on E! and my parents were not home, then I would be watching it. They were thoroughly entertaining and I gained a lot of valuable insight. Like the fact that my brows were too unruly to be considered beautiful, not having abs was just a no no, anything above a 27-inch waist was absolutely disgusting and the single indubitable fact that my purpose as a woman was to be desired. What did I do with this valuable information? I started using hair relaxers on my brows to straighten them out, I started dieting at fifteen and I hated my body because it fell short of all of these standards that were obviously constitutional.

Everyday, I would sit in front of the television and make a list of all the ways I was failing at being a woman and then go online to find fixes. My body became a project and I could not stand failure-academically and corporeally. Thus began the ever evolving quest for perfection. The female body needs to be perfect to be worthy and if it doesn’t come perfect( don’t kid yourself, it never does), then it needs to be pinched, tucked, shredded, waxed, plucked and coloured until it arrives at whatever perfection looked like at that point in time.

I would come to find out that perfection is an evolving concept and we had to be Darwin’s finches. You wake up one day and the parts of yourself you tried to fix were ‘what’s trending’. The full brows are perfect, plump lips are to die for and being curvy is the ideal feminine trait. For a few glorious seasons, you had what every other woman should covet, you’re one of the lucky ones! The tides will ebb and flow and after a while, the council sits and decides that the previous standards are to be decommissioned and it was time for a new era in feminine beauty. You become a VCR when the world has moved on to DVD players.

This cycle would repeat itself so many times and I would keep chasing after the ideal, slowly laying the bricks for what would later be called body dysmorphia.

What did all of these matter to a teenager, you might ask. Comparison is the thief of joy, they say, but for me, it was the basis on which everything I did was measured.

‘Is that person better than you? Why weren’t you first in class?’ ‘Girls your age are already wearing a bra.’ ‘You are getting bigger, what did you change?’

In between being compared to other people and previous versions of myself, I fell short of something and that feeling is indescribable. I desperately wanted to be the standard, not the one that’s compared to it. If there was an ideal body weight and physique for a woman, then I wanted to look like that.

It really was that simple and it would take me several years to unlearn this.

I am now a grown woman who understands that the feminine ideal is a manufactured concept. I understand that I live in a society where the price of participation as a woman is self-loathing. It wants women to play dress-up like store bought-dolls, reshaped to suit whatever aesthetics line the pockets of the powers that be. If I’m confident in the way I look, then I wouldn’t need to spend so much money on products, cosmetic procedures, slimming or padding bodysuits( depending on what’s trending) and medications that promise things they never deliver. I would not be so insecure that I would spend money on every new wellness trend, every new whatever that ensures that I too belong in the league of chosen women.

I know, deep in my heart that I’m not the problem, that whatever body I wake up in every day is perfect. But that knowledge has not changed anything for me, not really. I avoid taking pictures and making memories because I’m still worried about falling short of something. This time around, my comparison is with my past self.

I’ve been advised to practice self-love but I find this rather shallow. Not the advice, which is sound, but self-love itself. I struggle with it and it’s not out of some inherent dislike for who I am- I rather like myself, actually, but for reasons I can’t fathom, I simply can’t stand the person that stares back at me in the mirror. What I’ve realised is that self-love alone cannot exist in a society designed to make you hate yourself in order to participate in its capitalist ecosystem. I simply can’t ignore the fact that the fashion industry keeps changing the sizing of clothes so one week I’m a size 12 and the next I can’t fit into size 14 jeans. I can’t ignore the fact that there’s something called a ‘skinny trend’ and ‘pilates body’ and the wellness industry is actively fatphobic to get you to buy supplements that task your kidney into making expensive urine. I would like to not be affected by these things, truly. But I am and I don’t know how to mask that well enough.

I’m not the impressionable teenager I used to be and I’ve worked very hard at deinfluencing myself, which I have found to be a better alternative to wellness era self- love. This is the part of this essay where I write about accepting my body the way it is, what with everything I know now. Sadly, that’s not the case. This is one of those cases where awareness has not fixed the existing damage. So like always, I’m still a work in progress.

The only difference this time is my motivation. Self-love is incomplete without awareness and resistance. Beauty standards are deeply oppressive and like all systems of oppression, they only benefit those who put the system in place. It doesn’t benefit women in any way- it certainly doesn’t benefit me. I think about how all the times I didn’t want to take pictures with my loved ones because I hated how my face looked, or the times my friends have torn themselves apart over their looks and it makes me angry. I used to be sad about these things but now, now I’m enraged. Beauty standards are sold to us as female empowerment, but it is a poorly disguised moth infested cashmere sweater.

Self-love as resistance is the most empowering thing I have done for myself. Everything I do for my body is filtered through this lens with the question, ‘Why am I doing this?’. My current diet and workout regimen has evolved from wanting to be skinny because that’s what’s considered ideal into something that suits my needs. There is the occasional relapse but I recognise that I can’t change a lifetime of mental wiring by simply unfollowing fitness influencers and self-reassurance.

Another thing I am doing is decentering my physical appearance. The way my body looks has nothing to do with my innate value as a person, nor does it detract from my intelligence and creativity. It’s dirty work- slow and deeply uncomfortable, this ongoing project, but I’m deserving of it. I deserve to exist happily in every version of my body simply because it’s mine.

We all deserve that.

Thank you for making it this far!

Until I write to you again, hold yourself gently.

From Rock Bottom, with love.

Hello, fellow traveller,

Summer is coming to an end and autumn is creeping in shyly. The days are getting shorter, the deplorable hotness of summer is giving way to colder weather, and leaves are turning brown at the edges. The world around me is about to explode into gorgeous shades of brown and orange and I simply can’t wait!

I’m writing this from my bedroom floor, surrounded by pillows and a duvet. It’s a bit messy, but that’s the level from which I can operate today and I’m trying to embrace that. What I want to share with you is directed towards very specific people. Whether or not you’re not one of those people, I would still like for you to join me on this little journey. Grab a drink, get comfortable and let’s get into it.

“To immigrants and exiles everywhere,
the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless,
And to the trees we left behind,
rooted in our memories ...”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

I left home almost three years ago in search of a better life. I packed 20 something years of my life into three bags and convinced myself that I was ready for what was coming. It was me, my dreams, hopes, faith, the prayers of everyone that supported me and my sheer determination against the new place I was going. That was all I needed- or so I convinced myself. That would be enough and soon, I would make a home in a strange land.

It’s been three years, almost, and I’ve forgotten what ‘home’ means. The one I left behind, I have been told repeatedly that I can’t return, not for any permanent period of time; I have been told that I wouldn’t recognise it; I have been told that I wouldn’t be able to live there, not anymore. And here, the place I came to make a home, my home, the place that was supposed to be the rich soil in which I can plant myself and bloom has done everything it can to tell me that I’m not welcome here and that this cannot be my home. It has chewed me up and spat me out in an endless cycle.

What I have been for three years is an uprooted tree that has been replanted in several soils and has been rejected by those soils. One of the most poignant pieces of poetry I’ve read is Warsan Shire’s Home where she wrote:

no one leaves home unless home chases you

fire under feet

hot blood in your belly

it’s not something you ever thought of doing

until the blade burnt threats into

your neck

and even then you carried the anthem under

your breath

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back

What it means to be an immigrant in a country that doesn’t want you is that you are living in a state of constant anxiety asking yourself: “What if I can’t stay here? Where will I go next?” It is that you lose your sense of identity until the person staring back at you is a complete stranger and you don’t even know how they got there. It is that you have extremely limited choices- work, where you live- because you have to go where the opportunities are. You left your home to chase a dream, only to get out of bed every day knowing that you will be sacrificing that dream for survival.

I am not telling you all this to throw a pity party, I am writing this for my fellow immigrants- the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless and the exiles. I am writing this for everyone that is still looking for a place to call theirs, in whatever form that is. I am writing to let you know that you are not alone and there is nothing wrong with you.

Sharing your troubles as an immigrant is rather difficult, and that is why a lot of us are isolated and lonely. When you talk to the people you left behind, you either get snarky responses like ‘Come back home then, why are you complaining?’ or they just don’t understand. And when you share it with your fellow travellers here, they might find it difficult to understand the isolation and loss you are describing because we all experience isolation and loss in different ways and not everyone is open minded or even self aware enough to understand these nuances.

So I am writing to you- you who dream big. You who struggle because the weight of sacrificing your dreams for survival is becoming too heavy to bear. You who don’t feel like you belong anywhere in the world. You who have lost sight of yourself in any number of ways. You who are constantly anxious, with the stomach ache to show for it. You who have been kicked into the abyss so many times that you now live there. I need you to know that you are not failing—we are not failing. You are not ‘weak’ because the reality of your current life is making you sad. Trees can’t thrive in bad soil and right now, the soil we’ve found ourselves in is not very friendly to our growth and that is not a personal failure.

I want to tell you that all this won’t be for naught and that we’ll be fine and all those platitudes, but the truth is that I don’t know. I wake up everyday with a knot in my stomach that just keeps getting worse and I’m a walking anxious mess. But what I can tell you for sure is that you are not alone. There are people who understand you, people who understand loss of identity, people who understand the culture shock you’ve dealt with, people who grieve for every dream they have konked over the head with a spade in order to pay rent. You will find fellow immigrants like you who are also searching and it won’t feel that lonely anymore. You need to find them because now more than ever, you need a community.

It is my hope that things change, that the weather turns and we can thrive where we are. And if it doesn’t, I hope new doors open up for us. I hope we all find a place we can call ours someday, a place that feels like home in every sense of that word. I hope we get to know the stranger in the mirror and regain our sense of self. But till then, my fellow travellers, please be gentle with yourselves.

If you have made it to this point, thank you for the gift of your attention. This was rather difficult to write. It feels like peeling off your outer covering and showing a bunch of strangers all your unhealed scars. Or like getting a Pap smear. But I hope you took something away from this.

From Rockbottom,

With Love.

July passed like a nightmare and I’m still waiting for the pinch that’ll wake me up. Summer is supposed to be the most beautiful part of the year. Nature is in full bloom, the days are longer and brighter. Everything is sun drenched in possibilities. Summer days are supposed to be for doing and summer nights are for dreaming new dreams because you know the sun is just around the corner. Summer is for living on a full charge and if you’re not doing that, you are wasting your summer…your youth…your time. But that’s a lot of ‘supposed to be’, and things hardly are as they are ’supposed to be’.

Hi. How has your summer been? Mine has been a collection of angst with old, unwanted memories resurfacing and watching still, while the world burns. I’m not discussing all of that, however, just a subset of it.

Think of this as a phone call, get comfy, grab a drink, let’s talk.

During a rather unfortunate episode of doomscrolling and moving from ‘hey uhuhuhu is this illegal?’ to ‘I woke up in a new Bugatti…’ to ‘xxx number of people have been shot dead in Gaza today’ to the most unhinged meme that I could share with only three people because my sense of humour is messed up, I remembered something from a couple of years ago.

My mum was really sick for a while and my dad and I spent an unholy amount of time walking the halls of the A&E department at this hospital. On one of our nightly shifts, I spent some time talking to two A&E doctors, just chatting shit really, both of them trying to make me laugh and momentarily forget that there were people groaning around us from pain you can’t imagine. Now, you’re probably wondering why doctors on duty were chatting instead of working. I didn’t think about it then if I’m being honest, I was just grateful for the distraction. I understand now, however why they seemed unmoved by the chaos around them and were comfortable just existing in that space, on their on terms.

Desensitisation.

Desensitisation is a crucial part of the human condition. It’s not something you can slap a pretty definition on or even explain in the most humane way, but it’s one of the threads that makes the intricate complex fabric that’s our humanity. Unfortunately, we cannot pull that thread out or cut it off.

You know what it is, you’ve felt it. It’s the reduced amount of tears you cry as you witness a group of people being killed off. It’s the complete lack of feeling when you hear that another village in your backyard has been massacred overnight. It’s the way you quickly scroll away from a post about children the same skin colour as you being subjected to work at mines so you can have a diamond engagement ring. You’re not a bad person. None of that makes you a bad person. You’re just tired of seeing bad shit everyday, and besides, what can you do about any of it?

The need to protect ourselves from bad stuff is vital to our survival. We don’t want to see the bad things happening. We don’t want to focus on them, we’d rather focus on things we can change- on things we have a modicum of control over. We become desensitised so we can get through our day without a mental breakdown. We become desensitised so that we can enjoy the memes and the new Instagram trends without becoming a weepy mess. Who can blame us? What can we do about any of that bad shit anyway?

So while the world burns around us, we have our heads safely buried in the sand. We don’t engage, we don’t spare it a thought, it doesn’t affect us, why bother?

What fucking privilege we enjoy. We are so very lucky.

To tell you the truth, I got desensitised for a minute there. I didn’t stop caring about the things I cared about, they just stopped bothering me as much. To quote the late Andrea Gibson, ‘It’s no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society.’ You wonder why your jaw is so tightly clenched, why you wake up with a feeling of doom deep in your stomach that surfaces at the slightest inconvenience you face. You wonder why summer has lost its appeal and everything feels pointless. You live in a world that’s been designed to make you feel like if you don’t belong among the 1% then nothing you do matters. Your entire being is rejecting that, and that’s why you feel so shitty all the time.

I was catapulted back to that hospital ward, allowing myself to get distracted by cute doctors while everything else smelled like antiseptic and the breath of death.

I did not want to be there, so I’ve had to remind myself of the things that matter to me. I had to remind myself that no matter how many times I see certain things, they are never going to be okay and I’m never going to get used to them. I made a mental list of the things that matter to me and kind of recited them over and over, like a mantra, so I don’t lose them.

No, I don’t feel better. But I breathe better, if that makes sense. And I understand that this is an exercise in assuaging my own guilt about not being able to make the kind of impactful change I want to make but you can’t show up to do the work if your head is buried in the sand permanently.

And yes, you have to care about something outside yourself and your own interests. Perhaps none of the things happening right now affects you and your loved ones, but I’ve found that these things often cause a chain reaction whose ripples ends up getting felt by everyone else. It can always be you. That’s just the principle of the thing. So wake up, dear one. You’ve had a nice time taking a mental health break. Wake up, the world is still burning, you need to grab a hose and start putting out a fire.

I understand that this topic is an uncomfortable conversation to have. I took several breaks while writing this to head-bang a little to Toxicity and to perform a haunting rendition (not the good kind) of I Dreamed a Dream. I’m a serial emotion avoider. But I can’t always hide…we can’t always hide.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for the lending me your ears. I hope I made you uncomfortable, in the most loving way, of course. Rest when you need to, avoid the world, focus on yourself and your loved ones, chase a dream, or two. These are important pursuits. But don’t forget, don’t forget that there’s a world outside that’s crumpling and if all you can do is to bear witness and hold the story in your heart, then do that.

From Rockbottom,

With Love.

Hello fellow traveller,

It’s been several odd days since I’ve written to you-I hope you have not forgotten our monthly missives. I wanted to write to you, of course I wanted to, but I missed the first one and it got easier to keep making excuses not to write.

I don’t want to recount any of those excuses. But maybe you can forgive me? Maybe, maybe-for old times’ sake-you can pull a chair up to my table and have a chat with an old friend?

How you feeling, sweetheart?
Are you moving on?
Are you sleeping okay?
Or do the nights go on and on?
I hope you're eating well
I hope you're staying strong…

I’m writing to you from my couch, my laptop tentatively balanced on my outstretched legs. My fingers fly across the keyboard- not because I’m eager to say something, but because I’m trying to write quickly before trepidation sets in and I stop. Just like with the other two letter you never got.

In the background, Passenger plays, while the TV is paused on a scene from my current comfort watch, Resident Alien.

The air outside is still and warm-a typical summer night. It is also ripe with angst, unlived potential and a deep aching for meaning.

Cause I'm fine and then I'm not
I'm spinning 'round and I can't stop
I can't do this alone
For time flies then it's so slow
I'm up and down like a yo-yo
I can't do it on my own

Do you ever just wake up one morning and feel like you’ve been cut off from the centre of your being and just left to float around aimlessly?

Unmoored.

That’s how I would describe it. Like everything that once made sense in your world- the very reason behind your convictions, your hopes, your desires, dreams and wishes…everything- all just severed from you, completely inaccessible no matter how hard you try to reach it. So you float. A ballon in space.

Do you ever feel unmoored?

I used to have this recurrent dream where I would be under the night sky, except that it was really close to me-the sky that is- and the stars all formed different shapes and I could make them out and touch them if I wanted to. In that dream, I could feel how tiny my existence was and it was terrifying. That feeling always escaped the nebulous barrier between dream and wakefulness. I could not look at the night sky for a really long time.

Now, I’m a balloon, drifting around under that vast sky, untethered, intangible.

But that’s my inside world.

And I’ve come to realise: it doesn’t matter how tumultuous your inner world is, the outside world just doesn’t give a flying fuck. It wants you to show up. Punch your time card. Call your mother. Feed your cat. Stroke your boss’s ego (or your boyfriend’s or your girlfriend’s). It wants you to look a certain way-God forbid you let yourself go, you disgusting slob. It wants you to put on a damn good show everyday right up until you take your final bow and the curtains drop.

And I've tried, and I can't pull the sword from the stone…

We are all playing parts, aren’t we? In this never-ending production with an infinite budget, we’re all playing a part and it’s getting harder to memorise the lines. Harder to wear the costumes. Harder to fall into character when the curtain rises.

Unmoored.

I don’t know if you feel this way or if you’ve ever felt this way. I have, for a while now, for too long, really and I would once more like to feel solid ground beneath me. I would like to feel like my life is mine, like my body has mass, like it takes up space and that it matters. Like I matter.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Thank you for sitting with me, for listening to my words. I really hoped that my next letter to you would be a lot more cheerful, filled with hopeful sentiments- but here we are.

Oh, I’m not completely without hope, because while I don’t feel connected to it myself, other people are carrying it and holding very tightly to it for me.

It’s comforting.

There’s a quiet defiance in continuing to participate in this theatre of being-frayed costume and all. I don’t know the source of that defiance or even the why, except that it is there and everything I can’t hold is being held for me by loving hands. So don’t worry about me.

I hope you have loving hands to hold on to your things. I hope that if you ever feel unmoored, you find your quiet defiance to keep going until your feet touches firm ground. And when you land, I hope you find waiting for you everything you need to become the best version of yourself.

Till I write to you again, my friend- Keep going.

From Rock bottom, with love.

Song in italics- Sword from the Stone, Passenger.

Hi,

I hope this missive finds you tucked in a deep pocket of sunshine. And if it doesn’t, I truly hope one is on its way to you. Ramadan has just ended, and I’m dealing with a lot of feelings, the absence of certain feelings, and the thought of things I’m supposed to be feeling. All in all, March went better than I expected it to. It wasn’t the breath of fresh air I wanted, or even the moment of pause I envisaged, but it was something I don’t yet have the word for, but which I needed.

I’m writing to you from my couch (I’m slowly realizing that I’m not a desk writer). It’s a no-work Monday, and I don’t have to deal with anything I don’t want to deal with. I’m waiting for my tea to be brought to me, and my heart doesn’t feel like it’s drowning in a pool of the blood it pumped. What better time to write, I say? I’m going to be doing something a little different today, so get comfortable as I walk you through a path in my brain that has seen a lot of foot traffic recently.

I work in customer service, and I spend a huge chunk of my day talking to people who sound very different from me. My name is Omolara, and most people call me Lara, which I really like, you see. But I found myself introducing myself as Lara, the English version, when I take a call. That was fine for a while, I told myself I was doing it because I wanted them to understand me. I wanted my accent to sound acceptable to them, starting from the way I said my name. Except that when I called myself that which wasn’t really my name, I felt myself shrink, and it always left a nasty taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my stomach. I didn’t like my work personality, I didn’t like the woman that said her name that way. That wasn’t my name, and I didn’t like that other version of myself. I felt my sense of self gradually corroding, I would stutter when I talked because I wasn’t sure I sounded ‘right’.

I’m disgustingly self-critical, so this started me on a path of finding out why the way I said my name affected me as much.

So, what is in a name?

“Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.”

-Nicola Yoon, The sun is also a star

Where I’m from, your parents agonise over what to name you because they believe those names have a hand in shaping your life. They won’t name you after a family member that was considered a disgrace to the family so you don’t follow in that person’s footsteps. Every name is a story, a prayer, a wish, they are not just randomly selected words.

Olaoluwakiitan-God’s wealth never ends; Adimchinobi-I’m in God’s heart; Yagazie-May it go well with you; Oluwamandara-God performs wonders; Oluwatumilara-God has given me ease; Ayomikun-my joy is full.

These names are our first source of identity in a strange world, one of the first things that’s truly ours. They carry a lot of weight, and as we pave our way through life, our names are our unique red dot on the map- a cultural anchor.

Have you ever had someone recite a panegyric using your name and the names of your ancestors? Do you recall how that felt? It’s just names, along with their attribute and virtues, and it moved me to tears. That’s how powerful a name is. Something that bears that much weight should surely not be contorted to fit an imposed identity. Our names are very important, and we have a responsibility to ourselves to ensure that they are given the level of respect they deserve. This starts from how we say it- to ourselves and others. It might seem like the easier alternative, deleting a few syllables, rounding out the sounds, and using an ‘easily pronounceable’ version of our names. But it takes something from us. It’s a self-perpetuated erasure of our identity, and it has ripple effects on multiple aspects of our lives.

It’s a different type of self-betrayal to change the shape of your name to suit a mould that was not made for you, and it typically falls to people from marginalised societies to change the form of their name or adopt a more acceptable name to fit in. But they are from a line of people with their own unique and interesting cultures and languages, and every name attests to that. The corrosion of tradition and identity begins when we don’t give our names the reverence they deserve.

So, what’s your name?

I laboured over whether or not to write about this as it’s not what I would usually write to you about. But this is a topic that has been gnawing at the core of my consciousness, and in the spirit of staying true to myself in these letters, I decided to talk to you about it. I introduce myself as Lara now, the correct way, and sometimes, I say Omolara. I do this not to virtue signal or start a faux movement but to remind myself every single day who I am and where I’m from. To remind myself that my history and the history of my people- the pain, the joy, the humour, all of it- matters and that I will have some of that to give to those that come after me. It’s my quiet act of resistance, and it boosts my self-confidence.

I hope you get to live to the full potential of your name. I hope you wear it like a badge of honour and say it with pride no matter what part of the world you find yourself.

Thank you for walking this path with me, my friend. Till I write to you again, don’t forget who the f**** you are.

From Rock Bottom,

With Love.

Hello( If you’re like me and you’re of the opinion that time is subjective and have decided to start 2025 whenever you damn well like, then Happy New Year!)

I should have written to you much sooner than this, and for that I apologise. In the spirit of accountability, you will be getting two letters this month. Let’s pretend we’re still in January, shall we? I have a lot to catch you up on.

I’m currently writing in a cafe that’s inside a bookshop, surrounded by strangers having their little conversations over cups of coffee, catching up with friends and my favourite ones; the ones held in a trance by a book, one foot in this world and the other in a completely different dimension. I have just stepped out of a somewhat similar dimension myself, having just closed an incredible book to write to you. My vision is a bit glassy, the side effect of yanking myself out of a book too fast, while my brain struggles to comprehend the mundane world around me. My bones are weary, and for the first time in a while, it’s a good kind of weary. It feels like I’m high-what better time to write than this?

I’m having a caramel latte, one of those with the cute milk flower thingy. Grab a beverage and tuck in; let’s catch up.

I rang in the year watching fireworks from a bridge, drenched by rain, surrounded by people I love, a goofy smile stretched across my face. I felt light, serene even. I don’t remember a Jan. 1st that I haven’t felt dread coiled at the base of my spine- until this one. I didn’t give myself the space to overthink it at that moment- I leaned into it, did a countdown with strangers, and clapped with glee when the fireworks went off.

I want to tell you that something amazing happened to me that shifted the course of my life and put me in such an agreeable mood. God, I so want to tell you that! As a matter of fact, I was struggling with both my physical and mental health, and I certainly didn’t feel celebratory. Why the hell was I so excited, then?

I’m nothing if not obsessive in my thoughts, and eventually, I had to figure out what was so different about this Jan 1st. It’s simple, really- I had no plans coming into the year. I had no New Year’s resolution; I made no list that would eventually turn into an instrument of torture and self-loathing. I simply walked into the year with the very distinct and liberating desire to let myself be this year. God, it felt like releasing your stomach after holding it in all day to look good in pictures.

The one thing I asked of myself was to allow myself to embrace rest. That’s the one thing I’m chasing this year-rest. And yes, I want career growth, and yes, I want to be fit again, and I want to market my brand (urg, I hate saying that). Yes, I want to do all that adult stuff and make money (duuh!). But for the love of God, I want to stop being so freaking hard on myself and JUST rest.

Now, rest means a lot of things to different people. For some people, it’s simply getting a good night’s sleep. It’s a lot more complex than that for me. Rest for me is pouring back into myself. Watering my roots and leaning toward the sun. It’s getting back to the things I love- like reading. It’s discovering lost passions and nurturing my inner child. I’m an easily excitable person, and I would clap my hands together in glee and jump around like a child when I’m excited, but over the years, I’ve lost a bit of this, and I WANT. IT. BACK. ,

Rest for me is working out for the right reasons and loving my body in whatever state it wakes up in. It’s deciding to take days off my phone to stay in bed all day; stressing less about going broke, and enjoying whatever comforts I have, limited as they might be. It’s dancing while I clean my house on a Sunday and watching the very rare sunlight let itself into my home like an uninvited, yet welcome visitor. Rest, for me, is finding ways to make being alive a lot more bearable. It’s leaning into my whimsy, curiosities, and slight eccentricity.

Wanna hear a secret?

It’s actually fucking hard.

Resting is hard.

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

How hard can it be to love yourself? How hard can it be to make time to actually enjoy yourself? How hard can it be to do things that make you feel less like a puppet going through motions set by someone else?

Difficult. Arduous. Onerous.

See, I don’t think the system is built for us to be satisfied humans. How else would we ‘grind’ and ‘chase after our desires’? Satisfied people don’t do the capitalist gods any good. (I need you to appreciate how much control it’s taking me not to go into a spiel about this. Just don’t get me started on the topic irl, okay?)

To make matters worse, there is also that relentless, wicked voice in our heads that just won’t let up and consistently whispers hurtful and, oftentimes, hateful rhetorics:

You’re not good enough. You’re a failure. Why bother? It’s never going to happen for you.

How are you supposed to rest when you are being pulled apart like this?

Anyway, that’s the story of how I set out to do just one thing this year, and I’m already failing at it. But I don’t think I’ll stop trying. I’ve had a glimpse, albeit a truncated one, at what it looks and feels like to achieve the state of rest I desire, and let me tell you something: It’s worth fighting for.

I don’t know what plans you have for the year, but I hope they are things that bring you closer to the kind of person you really want to be. After all the lights have gone out and the curtains have been pulled on the performances of everyday life, I hope these things are still what your heart truly desires. Dream and plan, my friend, dream and plan, but remember to make space for yourself in everything you do.

To my fellow wanderers, those who are searching for something but don’t know what just yet; I hope your path reveals itself to you with astonishing brightness. You’re not less because you didn’t start the year with a list of things to achieve. Okay?

This is where I leave you, my dear reader. Thank you for sitting with me. Until I write to you again, live a little, be kind to others and, mostly, yourself.

Yours always.

From rock bottom, with love.

Hi there, fellow sojourner,

I have a thing that I’m trying to make a tradition out of- every new year, I try to send emails to my friends that like that sort of thing. This year, I made a list of those I’d be sending emails to, but we plan, God plans, and God is the best planner. I don’t have more than one letter in me, which is this one I’m sending. I’m bringing you into my New Year tradition, hoping my dear friends also get to read this.

I’m writing from a place that is far away from my body, and I’m struggling to make my way back to me. Someone told me to try a routine and do things I like, so here I am, a girl sitting in front of her computer at her dining table, typing with shaky hands. Pull up a chair, my friend, grab a beverage of choice, and let’s chat.

At the start of the month, I was mildly optimistic, which is a lot for me. I love Decembers, and I was looking forward to enjoying a certain stability in this one. But as these things sometimes go, all my hopes and joys went out for a joyride, lost control of the wheel, and drove off a cliff. It has been a thoroughly agonising last month of a difficult year. This is not a sad story, I promise you. This is a story about love and how it’s the most beautiful and purest thing on this flaming shitball we find ourselves on.

My 2024 wrapped is a short story about how love saved my life this year. Every time I have found myself in a bad place, completely devoid of hope, joy, and laughter, my love flutters in on delicate wings and fills my heart with light. Every time I’ve lost sight of who I am, every time I’ve fallen, every time I’ve stepped through the doors of insanity, my love has been there to rescue me. I have lost a lot this year, but my love has been overly generous.

My love is my life partner, my family, and my friends who have chosen to do life with me. My love is the ‘how are you, Omolaraeni?’, it’s the ‘do you want a cup of tea?’, it’s the calls where no words are said, but everything is conveyed, it’s the ‘I’m praying for you’, it’s the coming over to make me a meal cos I can’t function, it’s the shared cat memes and hilarious reels…it’s the absolute certainty that I’m never alone and I will always have support when I need it.

I tell you, love saved my life this year, and I’m so grateful and so friggin lucky to be loved by these people. If any of you guys are reading this, thank you; you saved my life.

If you take anything away from this letter today, let it be that you NEED to surround yourself with good people.

Okay, okay, enough with this mushy business; I didn’t mean to get overly emotional with you guys.

I saw a meme a few days ago that made me chuckle, and you’ve probably seen it too. It’s an image of some flork characters hiding behind a wall and using a long stick to poke a door labelled ‘2025’. The vibe of that meme is ‘bat shit terrified.’

If you’ve watched every one of the dreams you took into 2024 viciously turn to dust, or you’ve struggled more than you smiled; if you’re worn out and you feel like your hope is on it’s last legs…if you’re like one of those flork characters and you’re scared about the coming year, I need you to know that you’re not alone.

Perhaps you’ve been watching other people’s 2024 IG reels round-up, and you’re feeling like you wasted your year; I need you to go easy on yourself. If all you did this year was put one foot in front of the other, you did an amazing job. It’s maybe not glamorous enough to put in a reel, but it’s one hell of a difficult thing to do, and you did it. If you only survived this year, honey, you should be celebrating. Have you seen the state of the world?

Getting through the year with even a tiny shred of your humanity intact is worth something. So for you, my friend, I hope you recognise your strength and appreciate the work you’ve done to bring yourself where you are now. Don’t deprive yourself of experiencing joy during this period because you think you don’t have anything to be proud of. It might not seem like a lot now, but it’s part of the LEGO pieces that will ultimately build the life you want.

You’ve done well, my friend, you have done well and I hope you have people who tell you how proud of you they are. Perhaps you walked and stumbled this year- I hope you soar in the coming one. May you find more reasons to be joyful, and may your hope return home.

I’m going to leave you with this quote from Gandalf. ‘May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.’

We have come to the end of this missive today and, of course, the final one of the year. Thank you for reading my words; your attention has been one of the good things that came out of this year.

Till I write to you again, remember to celebrate where you are right now with the things you have.

From rock bottom, with love.

Hello from my side of the world,

I’m calling out to you from one end of a string telephone, hoping you have the other end attached to your ear, eager to hear from me as I am to talk to you. Winter arrived like a ghoul dragging darkness and a certain doom behind it. The days have been painfully short, and sunlight has become a scarce commodity. Pick up your string phone and find a comfortable spot for our chat.

I’m writing to you from my couch, but only half of me is here; the other half is desperately fighting to claw its way out of…something. I’m not sure what. Before I write to you, I like to bring my best self- get my head in the right place, like I’m going on a coffee date with a dear friend. But today…today I’ve only just picked up my laptop and started putting words together, hoping the things I want to say meet me along the way on a line or paragraph.

I started a new job towards the end of October, and all month, when my friends ask how I’m doing and how I’m coping with the new job, I chuckle and say, ‘I have a chair!’ and we laugh because they know what I mean. I’m so grateful to have a job where I’m not on my feet for hours and for the fact that I can now laugh at the experience. But at the end of the day, after the sun has been forcefully evicted from the sky and the laughter has long gone cold, a voice reminds me that somewhere along the way, ‘having a chair of my own’ has become my greatest aspiration.

That realisation was jarring. How and when did that happen? You know what else was jarring? I discovered a newly spawned silence in the place previously occupied by all the dreams that had seduced me. It felt like they got bored with me and left, no notes, nothing. What they did leave behind was an ocean of silence. I have been screaming myself raw, trying to get a response, but so far, the silence has been unbreachable. I keep thinking that perhaps they have been escorted over the river Styx; surely they wouldn’t have just left…willingly.

It feels like a heartbreak…like a loss. I no longer know who or what I am with the silence I carry around. Who are we without the voices that seduce us to aim a little higher? Who are we without the vignette of a desired life that plays behind our lids when we close our eyes? Who owns those soulless eyes set in the face of the stranger that bears a striking resemblance to me?

In moments when I try to comfort myself, I think of a dying star. Stars don’t fizzle out like a candle in the wind. Oh no. They explode into a kaleidoscope of colours, in what is considered one of the biggest and most powerful occurrences in the universe- a supernova. It’s beautiful, life-giving, and fucking epic. I sometimes think perhaps this silence…this death could be my supernova. But that’s wishful thinking. Kind of how you hope the object of your unrequited love knocks on your door one quiet Saturday, telling you that life is rubbish without you and you’re the oxygen they need to live.

Wishful thinking- a slow killer, a malignant tumor, a destructive force, a balm to soothe the pain.

My days have been rolling into each other, and my desperate attempts to fill that silence have been exhausting and sometimes mildly embarrassing. What is it with humans and wanting the things that don’t want them? The human condition is messed up because why is my nice little chair not enough? Why do I still desire more, especially the things that go out of their way to go out of my reach?

My dear friend, if you still have your ear pressed to your phone, thank you. I really wanted to have something a lot more interesting to share with you, something uplifting and possibly humorous. That didn’t happen, but I still wanted to write to you. The words have been difficult, rolling out of me like nails dragged down a blackboard. Thank you for picking up when I rang. I hope I have finer tales to tell you the next time we do this, and I hope you have greater ones to share as well.

From Rock bottom, with love.

Hello, precious reader,

It's getting colder and darker in my part of the world, and I'm trying my best not to be held hostage by the gloom that constantly blankets the sky. I hope you are faring better than I am. I hope you have defence mechanisms to deal with the changing weather.

You're getting another letter from me this month because I promised to send two, to make up for the one I missed last month. I'm striving to be the kind of person that keeps their promises, so here we are.

I'm writing from a friend's couch, listening to their stories, telling some of mine in between writing this, and playing a FRIENDS trivia game on the side. I'm super multi-tasking, so writing this might take a while. But I'm having fun, and this is a challenging letter for me to write. Grab a beverage of choice, find somewhere comfortable to tuck in, and let me tell you a little story.

Do you ever have those moments of clarity where you're fully able to confront your demons without distracting yourself with anything? The feelings are raw and painful but also enlightening. I have been having moments like this- I wouldn't say I like it, but I discovered something.

Hi, you can call me Blue, and one of my toxic traits is that I spend my life planning for contingencies, in case my prayers don’t get answered and my dreams don’t come true.

I'm not being melodramatic, I assure you, but I'm a person who likes to prepare for worst-case scenarios. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm prepared for it, it can't be that bad. I can handle it. And boy, have I had a lot to handle? Hope has ghosted me more often than I care to recollect, and looking up to heaven has felt like knocking on the door of an old, abandoned building that's haunted by angry ghosts.

This whole process was supposed to toughen me, I suppose. Make me resilient and better equipped to deal with life and its overly tragic twists and turns. I pray and don't expect to have it answered, and I don't allow myself the luxury of dreaming. It just felt like an exercise in futility and let down.

But I am not resilient. I spend too much time worshipping at the altar of broken dreams. I gather them in my hands, cradle them, rock back and forth, and try desperately to give them CPR. They don't respond, and I keep kneeling at that altar.

It was not working, you see, that path that I was on. It was supposed to be the least painful, but I was lying to myself.

The other path, the one that has hope, dreams, and belief, is hinged on faith, and a large part of faith involves a complete suspension of logic, aka delusion. But it also has more potential for joy. The joy might come after you've been sunk into a deep, dark hole, but it's a possibility that exists. And I like that…a possibility. It's not a lot, but it's something I can hold on to. That maybe, just maybe, these good things can happen for me.

It's difficult; it really is, and the more bad news I get in the mail, the more rejection I add to the overwhelming pile, the more I feel like maybe truly hope is dead and heaven is empty. But I also know hope is a living, breathing thing, and someone up there listens and cares.

It's a tricky line to walk, handling these conflicting beliefs, but I'm doing my best. I'm doing my best to walk the path that offers me more reassurance. That tells me I don't have to cradle dead dreams, that the weight is heavy, and I can leave it for someone else to handle for me. Some days are easier than others, and I hope it gets better.

If you struggle with this, you're not alone. If you're not making as much progress in this balancing act as you'd like, don't be too hard on yourself. And if you're still worshipping at that altar and wondering how everything went wrong, you deserve better. You owe yourself better than a life spent in a cemetery of all the bad things that have ever happened to you, and I hope you find the courage to get up and leave.

This was difficult to write, and I might have pulled my hair a little harder than I should to get all of these out. Thank you for reading my words, and I hope they offer you some kind of comfort, however little.

Till I write to you again, remember that you're worthy of dreams that come true.

From Rock bottom, with love.

Hello there, precious reader,

I hope this email finds you well, and by well, I mean sane. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of a year, and if you have kept yourself sane, or sort of sane, then you’ve done a tremendous job. You should be proud of yourself.

I must apologise for not sending an email before September ended. I was a little unwell, slightly overwhelmed, and a lot stressed. I owe you another letter this month.

I’m typing from my couch, wearing my softest jumper and a pair of fluffy socks. There’s a cup of too-sweet chai tea within my reach. It’s raining outside, and the soft platter of the rain against the window provides a soothing background sound. All the lights are off in my apartment, and I’m at peace. That’s my world as I write to you, and you’re welcome here. Leave your worries at the door and have a sit.

I have been thinking about the path of the least resistance a lot. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a painful part of the growth process or a side effect of spending even more time inside my head than I normally do.

As someone who’s constantly anxious, I tend to overanalyse every social interaction I have, pick it apart, and find faults- imaginary and real. I can tell you now that a lot of them are imaginary, sadly.

Let me paint a clearer picture. If a friend were to give me a strange-sounding response, my immediate thought is that I did something wrong, then I start to think about our recent interactions and run it through several mental algorithms to find the answer to what I did wrong. You can probably relate to this. If you can, you know how mentally draining it is. If you can relate, then you also know that the next response to this is to either get upset or just…shut down.

That right there, that’s the path of least resistance. It’s the easy thing to do. And because easy and right don’t necessarily take the same boat, you feel yourself drifting in unsteady water, unsure how to get back to land. The path of least resistance doesn’t ask you to put in any emotional or mental labour. It doesn’t ask you to ask uncomfortable questions, defend yourself, or make excuses for your friends. It doesn’t ask you to give the benefit of the doubt, nor does it ask you to believe in anything greater than yourself. It just says, as loudly as possible, ‘Run! Hide!!’

I understand the need for self-preservation, and when you’ve had enough reasons to protect yourself from the different blows of life, you kind of want to show up wearing full body armour every day. This is not the letter where I tell you to drop your defenses, but I’m pretty sure you can walk the other road in your armour. You’ll probably make a lot of noise, but we’ll call it a fashion choice.

Jokes apart, the path of least resistance is easy, lazy even, and it’s oh, so lonely and boring. It shows up in all areas of our lives where there’s a choice to be made. I almost didn’t write this letter, for example. I told myself I missed September already, and no one would notice. That might be true, but I owe this to myself, just as much as I owe you, my gentle reader.

You are probably tired and weary on this journey of life, and you’ve now conditioned yourself to take the path of least resistance. I’m so sorry life has taken more from you than it has given. After everything you’ve endured, you deserve a warm place to lay your head, a place filled with love, answered prayers, and dreams that come through. But guess where those things are? Yeah, the other road. That slightly uncomfortable, a little more demanding road. It sucks that the really good things can’t be completely stress-free. Must we toil for everything??? But this is it. This is one of the rules of play, and if you’re playing, honey, you better be playing to win.

So, two roads diverge in a wood; I hope you take the one less travelled. I hope it makes all the difference for you. I also hope that you find the courage you need to take that first step toward the uncertain and unfamiliar. On that road, I hope you find companionship, support, and yourself. And at the end of it all, I hope you find that warm place to lay your head- whatever that means to you.

Till I write to you again. Stay warm, bask in whatever happiness you can lay your hands on, hold your loved ones and romanticise the heck out of your little life.

From Rock bottom, with love.