I remember exactly why I took it.

I had just walked out of a meeting where I was convinced I had embarrassed myself in front of the entire organization. I had spent the previous six months trying, perhaps a little too hard, to prove that I deserved to be there, and somehow one question had made me feel as though I had undone all of it.

So I went to the bathroom.

I stayed there for about thirty minutes, crying and replaying the moment in my head. Somewhere between wiping my face and trying to pull myself together, I took a picture.

I have never really understood people who take pictures of themselves crying. Why would you want photographic evidence of a moment when you look and feel terrible?

But that day, I did.

I told myself I would come back to the picture in three or four weeks, when things had changed, and laugh at how dramatic I had been.

What I didn’t know was that I wouldn’t even need three weeks.

At the time, though, I didn’t know any of that. I only knew that I had fucked everything up.

For the previous six months, I had been working a corporate job in public health, trying to figure out what it might look like to move into a field I hadn’t studied. It was the kind of experience that makes you realise how little you know, which I actually liked. There were new things to learn, new systems to understand, new people whose work I admired.

I also really wanted to be good at it.

So I tried to be.

Eventually, I became one of those interns people sent other interns to.

“Talk to Adaugo.”

“Ask Adaugo about that.”

“Let her show you how to do it.”

And I won’t lie, I loved it.

There is a particular pleasure in becoming useful. In knowing that if someone has a question, they might think of you. In realising that you have gone from being the person who needs things explained to the person doing the explaining.

But I think somewhere along the way, I made a small mistake.

I turned being good at something into an identity.

Once people started seeing me as someone who knew what she was doing, I felt responsible for continuing to prove them right.

Maintain the standard.

Or, preferably, exceed it.

There wasn’t much room in that equation for being ordinary.

Towards the end of my internship, I had to give a presentation to the entire organisation. I was supposed to talk about what I had learned, the work I had done, what I had contributed, and what I was taking away from the experience.

I prepared.

I made my slides. I did dry runs. I went through what I wanted to say several times.

I felt prepared.

I was also nervous.

Nervousness has always had an interesting relationship with my brain. The more I care about doing something well, the more likely I am to suddenly forget that I know how to do it.

Still, I presented.

And honestly, I thought I did okay.

Not my best presentation ever. But okay.

Then someone asked me a question.

And I couldn’t answer it properly. Not in the way I knew I could have.

Everyone else moved on.

I hadn’t.

By the time the meeting ended, I had already decided that I had fallen below the standard I had spent six months building.

It is strange how quickly the mind can turn an event into a verdict.

I remember sitting there replaying the question, thinking about what my answer must have said about me. One moment had become more important than all the moments that had come before it.

I remember thinking the ground should just open up and swallow me. Which, looking back, is a ridiculous amount of weight to put on one question.

But this is one of the less glamorous parts of caring deeply about doing well, sometimes the thing you care about becomes the thing you use to punish yourself.

I had done other presentations before.

I had done good work.

People trusted me.

I had spent six months showing up and doing my job.

None of that disappeared because I answered one question badly.

But sitting in that bathroom, it felt like it had.

So I took the picture.

And I told myself that in three or four weeks, I would look at it and laugh.

A few days later, I had an interview for another position.

I almost didn’t want to go. My confidence was still bruised, and part of me had already decided that I probably wouldn’t get it. But I had applied, so I went.

The interview went well.

I went back to work and didn’t think much about it.

Then, the following week, I got an offer.

I remember staring at it for a while.

Less than two weeks earlier, I had been sitting in a bathroom convinced that I had ruined everything. Now something completely unexpected was opening up in front of me.

I didn’t need to know exactly where it was going yet. I just needed the reminder that my life was still moving while I was busy convincing myself it had stopped.

The girl crying in that picture didn’t know any of this.

She didn’t know that the thing she was crying about would soon become almost irrelevant. She didn’t know she was days away from getting good news. She didn’t know she was about to start something new. She didn’t know that, eventually, she would look back at that moment and realize how badly she had misread it.

I wish I could go back to her.

Not because I want to stop her from crying. She was allowed to cry. I think she needed to. I just wish I could sit beside her for a minute and say,

“My dear, calm down.

You have no idea what’s coming.”

Because I know that girl.

I’m still her sometimes.

I’ve noticed that I’m really good at identifying what could have gone better than I am at identifying what went well. Success has a strange way of becoming the new baseline almost immediately. The thing you were proud of yesterday becomes the minimum you are expected to maintain today.

Once people begin to associate you with competence, competence starts to feel less like something you achieved and more like something you owe them.

I’m usually already thinking about the next thing.

The next goal.

The next opportunity.

The next version of myself I am supposed to become.

Honestly, ambition can become a little cruel.

You can spend months accumulating evidence that you are capable and still allow one bad moment to become the most convincing evidence that you aren’t. The good things become background information, while the mistake becomes the headline.

I’m starting to understand that there is a difference between having high standards for yourself and making yourself feel like a failure every time you don’t meet them perfectly.

Sometimes you give a bad presentation, sometimes you don’t answer the question properly, sometimes you walk out of a room and replay the entire thing in your head for the rest of the day.

And sometimes, that’s all it is.

A bad day.

Not a bad life.

On the last day of my internship, my manager said something to me that I think I’ll carry for a very long time. It was a small reminder that the way we see ourselves in a difficult moment is very different from how other people see us.

He had seen the whole six months. I had spent all that time seeing one question.

When we’re in the middle of a difficult moment, we rarely have enough distance to see it for what it is. We experience something painful and immediately try to give it a meaning.

I failed.

I’m not good enough.

I ruined it.

This opportunity is gone.

Everything is falling apart.

But, you’re just standing in the middle of the story.

You don’t know what happens next.

I think that’s what the picture means to me now. It reminds me that I am not always a reliable narrator of my own worst moments.

The girl in that picture thought she knew what was happening.

She thought she had fucked everything up. She hadn’t.

She was just having a very bad day in the middle of a life that was still moving.

I hope I remember that the next time I find myself in another bathroom, convinced that one moment has ruined everything.

There is still a lot of story left and the thing you’re crying about today won’t even make it into the story of your life.

You’ll look back at the version of yourself who thought everything was falling apart and wish you could hug her.

If you’re in that place right now, I hope you give yourself the same grace.

You have no idea what’s coming.

Everyone said the most random things, which still surprises me till this day.

Then, it got to this guy’s turn. He said he used to be a misogynist.

I’m not even going to pretend that I handled that with composure. Because that is not something you hear. Ever. Not because misogynists don’t exist, we know they do, but because I have never in my life seen one acknowledge it out loud, voluntarily, in a room full of colleagues.

And so I clapped for him, because, at least to me, it takes something to look back at who you were, name it, and not flinch.

I asked him “okay, so does that make you a feminist now?“

He said “no”

I looked at him and said I have more questions. We’re talking later.

And we did.

Before I get into it, I want to say a bit about misogyny for a second. Because I think a lot of us hear that word and immediately picture the extreme version (don't get me wrong IT IS EXTREME) The dictionary definition of misogyny is “the hatred of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women or girls”

Ingrained. That word is doing so much work.

I saw a video on TikTok, where a woman was interviewing someone and she asked a very interesting question. A man and his son are driving. They get into a crash. The man dies. The son is rushed to hospital. The doctor looks at him and says, “this is my son” Who is the doctor?

I’m sure your answer was either, does the boy have two fathers? Or maybe it’s his biological father?

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s his mother!

Now, ask yourself, why did you automatically assume the doctor was a man?

That’s what ingrained looks like. It’s not hatred. It doesn’t feel like prejudice. It just feels like the way things are. Like an assumption that's so automatic you don’t even catch yourself making it.

That’s misogyny too. And it’s in more of us than we want to admit.

Back to the conversation.

He grew up partly in a village area with his grandmother. Who ran a clinic and trained midwives and healthcare workers (all women) who would come in and out of the house regularly. And as a young boy, around thirteen, some of those women were sexually abusing him.

I want to pause there. Because he was a child. What happened to him was abuse. And he had no language for it, no framework, no adult who sat him down and said, what is happening to you is not okay and it is not your fault. He just absorbed it.

At fifteen he had a girlfriend, and by the time he was old enough to understand what had been done to him, sex had stopped feeling like anything. It felt like something that happened to him. Something he hadn’t chosen. And that feeling, that loss, that violation, attached itself to the women around him. His girlfriend. His sisters. Women who spoke in class. Women who took up space. He started hating it. He started hating women.

He became a loner. Locked himself away. Barely spoke to his sisters. He absorbed every patriarchal idea that said women should be quiet, should stay in their place, should not be heard. And because according to him, he barely had friends, it wasn’t peer pressure that got him there. It was just pain that had nowhere else to go, finding a shape that the world around him was already offering.

His mother noticed eventually. She started taking him to church, surrounding him with women, trying to expose him to something different. And I’ll be honest, my first reaction to that was, you cannot bring a woman hater into a room full of women and think that’s the solution. That felt less like healing and more like just, proximity without any real work underneath it.

Uni came. Same feelings. He remembered sitting in lectures and feeling genuine irritation when women answered questions. That she had a voice. That she used it. That nobody stopped her.

And still, something kept moving in him.

He told me it was exposure that changed him. Moving to a new city. Seeing women in positions he wasn’t used to seeing them in. Having a female team lead at work and sitting with how uncomfortable that made him until the discomfort started to quiet. It wasn’t one conversation. It wasn’t one moment. It was just the world consistently showing him something different from what he believed, until what he believed started to crack.

And then he decided he wanted to get married. Now this surprised me, because from everything I understood about misogyny, a man who hates women doesn’t usually arrive at I want to build a life with one. But he did. And I think that tells you something about how complicated people are. How hatred and longing can exist in the same person at the same time, pulling in completely opposite directions.

He has a wife and a child now, his wife knows his history. The first few years were hard, because he had always been alone, and suddenly someone was in his space every single day. A woman in his space every single day. He had to learn how to be with a person. How to stop flinching at something that used to make him furious.

He’s still learning, he said that himself. And I respected that more than if he had given me a clean, neat story about how he’s completely fine now. Because I don’t think that’s how it actually works.

When I asked him about feminism he said he wasn’t one. He believes in equal rights but also thinks there are certain things that are for men and certain things that are for women. And I pushed back a little. I asked him where that line was and who drew it, he said it was more of a feeling than a position, and I told him that's exactly how ingrained beliefs work. I said, you do realise you are significantly closer to being a feminist than you were as a misogynist? That’s not a small thing. That’s a lot of ground.

He said maybe. But it would have to happen gradually. And genuinely, I respect that answer, because the alternative is someone performing a conversion they haven’t actually lived. And that helps nobody. He also said something at the end that stuck with me. He said we live in a patriarchal world. And even now, sometimes, when a decision is made that benefits men, there’s still a pull. A small voice that says, this works in your favour. Why not let it, and he has to choose, every time, not to.

This conversation happened a while back and, I’ve been thinking about it ever since. About how misogyny gets built, through pain that was never treated, through cultures that hand young boys a framework for that pain and call it tradition. About how some of the men who cause the most damage are carrying wounds that nobody ever bothered to address. That is not an excuse. I need to be clear about that.

Understanding where something comes from is not the same as excusing what it does to the people on the receiving end of it. Women live with misogyny every single day regardless of how it started in the man practising it.

But I think if we only ever talk about it as something evil men choose, we miss the part where we could actually interrupt it. Where we could reach the boy before he becomes the man. Where we could give boys language for their pain before the pain becomes something else entirely.

I have never encountered an ex-misogynist before this conversation. I didn’t even know people like that existed. And honestly, I’m still sitting with everything he told me.

What do you think? Do you believe people can transition from very deeply ingrained patriarchal cultures? And what do you think it actually takes?

You meet someone. Maybe at a party, maybe through friends, maybe somewhere completely random. You guys start talking and it’s just easy. Like, embarrassingly easy. The conversation flows, the energy is there, and before you know it you’re texting every day, seeing each other, doing all of the things. And this person? This person is showing up. They’re nurturing, they’re present, they’re putting in effort. You’re thinking, okay. I think I found something real here. I can actually see myself in this long term.

And then you have your first fight.

That’s when everything changes.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Partly because of the videos I keep seeing on TikTok, people sharing their experiences, their stories, their “slide A vs slide B” moments where the person they fell for just completely transforms. And partly because I’ve lived it. I’ve been on the receiving end of an avoidant person, and I didn’t even know that’s what I was dealing with until i was already in it.

Here’s what happens when you’re with an avoidant person. In the beginning, everything is great. They’re warm, they’re attentive, they’re drawing you in. And you’re not imagining it, that part is real. But the moment things get hard, the moment there’s tension or conflict or any kind of emotional weight, they disappear. Not always physically. Sometimes it’s emotional. They shut down. They go cold. They become someone you don’t recognise.

And your first instinct, because you’re a reasonable person who remembers who they were two weeks ago, is to apologise. To just get back to how things were. Because you were there from the beginning. You know what this is. You know what it can be. So you shrink yourself a little. You manage the conflict. You make it okay.

That right there is the trap. Because you’re not dealing with a rough patch. You’re dealing with a pattern. And patterns don’t change just because you apologise hard enough.

I want to be fair here, because I’m an empath at my core and I genuinely try to see things from every angle before I come to a conclusion. I think that a lot of avoidant behaviour comes from somewhere real. Childhood. Past relationships. Trauma that was never properly dealt with. The way they were raised, the love they did or didn’t receive, the relationships they watched growing up. All of that shapes how you show up for people. I understand that. I genuinely do.

But here’s where my empathy runs out. You are an adult. And part of being an adult is recognising the things in you that are causing damage, to yourself and to other people, and doing the work to unlearn them. The fact that your avoidance has a root cause doesn’t mean the people who love you have to absorb the consequences of it indefinitely. At some point, awareness has to become accountability.

Why do they come in so warm? Why do they put in all of that effort at the beginning, make someone feel so seen and so chosen, and then pull the rug? Is it an ego thing? Is it a fear thing? Is it that they genuinely don’t realise they’re doing it? Because I really want to understand. I’m just really curious about what’s happening inside a person that makes them do that.

Being with an avoidant person changed me. It affected me in ways I’m still unpacking. I’m talking heart palpitations. I’m talking anxiety I’d never experienced before. I’m talking looking at myself in a situation and thinking, how did I get here? Seeing myself that diminished, that affected by one person’s inability to just be consistent, that scared me.

And then I became one too

When you’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of inconsistency, your brain starts to protect itself. You start to pull back before they can. You start to keep one foot out of the door at all times. You stop letting people fully in because the last time you did, it cost you something real.

The difference is that I’m honest about it. If I’m not looking for anything serious, I will tell you. Upfront. Because I know what it feels like to be on the other side of that confusion and I refuse to do it to someone else.

How many avoidants out there know exactly what they are and just don’t say it? How many people are walking into situationships and relationships carrying all of this unaddressed stuff, drawing people in, and then wondering why it never works out?

At this point, I think instead of leading with your name, you should lead with your truth.

Hi. I’m an avoidant. I will show up beautifully in the beginning. I will make you feel chosen. And then when things get real, I’m going to struggle and isolate you in ways that might hurt you. I’m working on it or I’m not, but either way, you deserve to know before you catch feelings.

Just imagine if people led with that. We’d save each other so much time. So much energy and so many heart palpitations.

Thing is, nobody ever plans to disappear from their life. It doesn’t start with a dramatic decision or a big announcement. It usually starts as a casual sentence. Someone says they’ve been busy, someone else laughs and says they’ve been “locking in” too. No long explanation, just a phrase that’s supposed to cover everything.

It sounds normal at first, I mean everyone understands wanting to focus, wanting more money, wanting progress. So when you hear it, you agree silently, and move on.

After a while, you start noticing a pattern. They stop replying as much. They cancel plans more often. They’re “always working.” Reaching out or responding to their guys become something to get back to later. Most times their family becomes background noise. In fact, anything that doesn’t directly connect to productivity starts to feel optional because it doesn’t feel urgent.

Over time, this lifestyle becomes your normal. Lock-in culture quietly tells you that if you really want to succeed, you have to shut everything else out. You’re supposed to be unreachable, constantly busy. Your days shrink into a list of boxes to tick, and you keep convincing yourself that someday, once you finally make it, you’ll get to enjoy life.

It’s seen as discipline. As proof that you’re serious about your goals. But when you take your time to look closely, something doesn’t quite sit right. If cutting yourself off from everyone was the sure way to feel fulfilled, then the most isolated people would also be the happiest, and that’s hardly ever true. More often, what you see are people who are drained all the time, quick to snap, and can’t even relax without that little voice in their head telling them they should be doing more.

The issue isn’t work itself. It’s what work slowly starts to take the place of. We don’t do well when life turns into an endless to-do list. We’re not built to stay emotionally cut off for long, even if it looks productive from the outside. The damage may not show up all at once, but it creeps in quietly. And instead of recognizing this as a warning sign, modern hustle culture praises it.

Being exhausted becomes something to brag about, never being available becomes a personality trait and burnout gets renamed as ambition.

What people don’t often admit is that “locking in” isn’t always about building something. Sometimes it’s about avoiding something. For a lot of people, nonstop work is easier than sitting with their thoughts. It’s easier to chase income than to fix relationships. It’s easier to stay busy than to admit you feel lonely or unsure. Most times it goes even deeper than avoidance. it could come from not really knowing who you are outside of being busy. When there isn’t a strong sense of self, goals can become a hiding place. If the day was full, then at least it meant something. If you achieved something, then maybe you’re on the right track. Without that structure, you’re left alone with questions you don’t have answers to—what you actually enjoy, what matters to you, what direction even makes sense. So being busy feels safer than being still.

There’s also pressure underneath all of this that people rarely say out loud. Comparison. The fear that if you slow down, someone else won’t. In a world that treats rest like laziness, constant activity starts to feel like protection. People don’t only lock in because they want more. They lock in because they’re scared of falling behind, or of being average in a culture that measures worth by output.

The biggest misconception, though, is the belief that life can be postponed.

Lock-in culture runs on the idea that you can struggle now and live later. That friendships will wait. That your body will wait. That joy will wait. That once you reach a certain milestone, everything else will neatly fall into place. Life doesn’t really work like that. People drift. Habits stick. Energy changes. The time you keep pushing aside doesn’t exactly return when you’re finally ready. That’s why some people reach the goals they were chasing and still feel unsettled, because it was built without anything around it. Money can improve comfort and options, but it can’t replace connection, peace of mind, or a sense of actually being present in your own days.

None of this means ambition is wrong. Wanting more and working hard is very necessary, financial stability matters. But obsession and commitment are not the same thing. Having a life outside work is not lack of discipline. The people who really go the distance, the ones who don’t end up burnt out or secretly bitter about the life they created, are usually the ones who didn’t vanish while chasing growth. They put in the work, yes, but they also kept their relationships, their hobbies, their little joys alive. They let themselves enjoy moments as they came, instead of acting like happiness was something they had to earn later.

The question lock-in culture almost never brings up is: who are you turning into while you’re chasing what you want? because if the answer is someone who’s always exhausted, emotionally far from everyone, and can’t even sit still without feeling guilty, no achievement is really going to fix that. Success that asks you to abandon your whole life isn’t discipline. It’s neglect that only looks admirable from a distance.

What is rarely asked is where those reactions came from.

Most people were never taught how to handle emotions. They were taught how to behave.

From an early age, many of us learned rules like: don’t talk back, don’t cry too much, don’t be dramatic, don’t embarrass the family, don’t question authority. We learned how to perform well, endure pressure, and keep moving. What we did not learn was how to recognise emotions as they show up, how to name them, or how to respond without losing control or disappearing entirely.

So people adapted.

Some learned that silence was safer than honesty.

Some learned that raising their voice was the only way to be heard.

Some learned to apologise constantly, even when they were hurt.

Some learned to detach so they wouldn’t feel rejected.

Over time, these behaviours stop looking like coping mechanisms and start looking like personality. “That’s just how I am.” “I’ve always been like this.” But these patterns didn’t appear randomly. They were learned in environments where emotional expression was misunderstood, minimised, or discouraged.

This isn’t about blaming parents or caregivers. Many of them were never taught these skills either. In homes where vulnerability was treated as weakness, emotions were handled with dismissal, discipline, or prayer alone. “You’re fine in Jesus name.” “Stop crying.” “Be strong.” So children learned to survive by suppressing what they felt or expressing it in distorted ways.

The problem is that emotions don’t disappear because they are ignored. They show up later in adult relationships where simple conversations turn into fights, in workplaces where stress leads to burnout, in friendships where people feel unseen and misunderstood. When emotional regulation is never taught, emotional reactions become the main form of communication.

This is why many mental health conversations miss the mark. They focus on extreme cases or clinical labels, while ignoring the everyday dysfunction people live with. Many individuals are not in crisis, they are emotionally untrained. They don’t know how to pause before reacting, how to sit with discomfort, or how to express needs without guilt, anger, or avoidance.

Emotional regulation is not about being calm all the time. It is not about suppressing feelings or becoming detached. It is about awareness. Recognising what you feel before it spills out. Understanding your patterns instead of defending them. Learning to say “I need time to process this” instead of exploding or shutting down.

At some point, adulthood demands responsibility. Upbringing explains behavior, sure but it cannot excuse staying unaware forever. Understanding where these patterns come from is only useful if it leads to change. Otherwise, people repeat what they know and pass it on to partners, children, coworkers, friends etc.

Mental health conversations shouldn’t just be about crises or diagnoses. We need to talk about the everyday stuff, how we handle stress, how we deal with conflict, how we actually manage ourselves when life gets messy.

When people aren’t taught emotional skills, the damage doesn’t always look dramatic. A lot of the time, it just looks like normal life. And that’s exactly why it gets ignored.

But beyond the noise, one fact remains. People are reaching their limits, and mental health is still handled casually, like it doesn’t truly matter. We like to romanticise suicide from a distance, call it “brave” write poems around it, or even turn it into a symbol. It's often wrapped in dramatic language to make it sound meaningful or brave. It isn’t. It is what happens when someone becomes so worn down by their mind that disappearing feels easier than remaining. That's not strength. It's exhaustion.

This isn’t only about the act. It’s about the aftermath.

It begins with the first person who walks in and finds you. That image never leaves them. A parent screams. A sibling goes silent. A friend calls and hears a stranger say the worst words they will ever hear. Phones light up with unread messages. People who “didn’t check in enough” drown in guilt. People who loved you now carry trauma they never asked for. They start interrogating themselves. “What didn’t I see?” “What didn’t I do?” “Could I have stopped this?” And regardless of how deeply they loved you, life does not pause. The world keeps moving. But the people closest to you never return to normal. Your absence becomes something they learn to carry, not something they recover from. This is the part nobody wants to talk about. Suicide doesn’t end pain. It redistributes it.

Our society hates this conversation. We worship productivity. We worship strength. We use prayer to replace understanding. We talk about mental health only when a public figure dies. Then we panic briefly. And move on. Meanwhile, people are quietly shutting down. They isolate. They detach. They lose energy for life. They keep existing physically while mentally disappearing long before anyone notices.

Mental health is not a luxury. It decides whether a person can wake up, function, feel anything at all, stay alive. And yet it is dismissed, misunderstood, joked about, ignored, or only addressed when it has already reached breaking point. There are people walking around drained beyond language. People who do not know why they feel empty or angry. People who think they’re burdens. People convinced nobody would truly miss them. They exist in our homes, friendships, workspaces, and timelines. Most of the time, they are quiet about it.

This is why conversation matters, not trend-driven empathy, not shallow panic. Real conversations. Communities that don’t ridicule emotional struggle. Families that don’t dismiss distress as weakness. Environments where saying “I am not okay” is not embarrassing.

If suicide ever feels like the only option, here is the blunt reality: after you leave, life continues, but the people who loved you live with damage they never heal from. Your pain does not vanish. It becomes theirs. Permanently.

Mental health is as essential as food, water, and shelter. It's central to survival and dignity. People deserve to exist without battling their minds alone. They deserve understanding, language, and real support.

Auditing your life isn’t about shaming yourself for the choices you’ve made or the time you’ve wasted. It’s about truth. Raw and unfiltered. It’s standing naked in the middle of your own existence and asking the questions that matter:

Who am I living for?

What relationships lift me, and which quietly drain me?

What habits do I defend because they’re familiar, even when they hurt?

What stories have I told myself so long that they’ve become lies I now believe?

And most importantly, am I taking accountability for my own suffering?

Not the kind that hides behind excuses, but the kind that makes you stare at yourself in the quiet of the night and admit every choice, every small betrayal you’ve committed against your own peace.

Stop walking into rooms where what you want isn’t waiting for you, where the outcome you dream of cannot possibly exist. If your heart is asking for nourishment, don’t sit at a table that only serves crumbs. If your soul is asking for space to breathe, don’t crowd yourself into chaos. Audit not just yourself, your habits, your thoughts, your lingering resentments, but also the spaces you occupy, the people you let linger, the stories you let yourself replay. Every environment, every interaction, every corner you visit repeatedly deserves the same scrutiny you give to your own heart.

Ask yourself: Is this place healing me, or am I feeding my own exhaustion? Is this person helping me grow, or am I helping them fill their void? Auditing isn’t cruel, it’s merciful. It tells you, gently, where you’re being soft on yourself, where you’re allowing illusions to dictate your life. And if you can face that with honesty, then, and only then, can change actually walk in.

The process isn’t gentle. You’ll find heartbreak in corners you didn’t know existed. You’ll see friendships and romances you’ve been tolerating simply because they were easy. You’ll confront the ways you’ve sabotaged your own happiness, even when everything looked perfect from the outside. There is pain here, yes, but there is liberation too.

When you audit your life, you start to make space. Space for clarity. Space for growth. Space for love—real love, the kind that doesn’t drain, manipulate, or diminish you. You begin to understand that the life you want is not a miracle waiting somewhere in the future. It’s here. It’s breathing quietly under the dust, waiting for you to notice it, to sweep the shelves, to dust off the neglected corners, to let it shine.

Think of it like writing a letter to yourself in the dead of night, no audience, no judgment, just words that recognize every scar, every victory, every quiet desperation you’ve been carrying. And as you write, you begin to notice the patterns, the cycles of anxiety, the relationships that no longer serve, the self-sabotage that whispers to you at the most tender moments. You name them, you see them, and then you release them.

It is not easy. It requires patience. Courage. Honesty that can hurt like sunlight on bare skin. But it is necessary. Because if you do not audit your life, nothing changes. You continue to revolve around the same heartbreaks, the same regrets, the same half-dreams that never come to fruition. You continue to live in the fog, waiting for a miracle, when the miracle is in the cleaning, in the dusting, in the deliberate care of your own existence.

And after the audit, after the reckoning, there is a peace unlike anything else. You breathe differently. You walk differently. The world doesn’t change immediately, but you do. Your choices become intentional. Your presence becomes deliberate. You stop giving energy to the people, habits, and distractions that drain you, and start pouring it into the people, projects, and moments that truly matter.

Take the flashlight. Walk the room. Lift the corners. Name every thing that no longer serves you. And then, let it go. Because change will not wait for your permission, and your life will not wait for your comfort. The sooner you audit, the sooner you find the clarity, freedom, and joy that have been waiting patiently all along.

Many young people, especially in their teens and early twenties, grow up believing that love is something you prove by giving. You show love by making yourself available, by adjusting, by being the one who understands, who stays, who gives another chance. You start to build your sense of worth around how much someone else needs you, how much space you take up in their world, how much they see you as irreplaceable. You want to be chosen so badly that you forget you already are.

That’s where self-abandonment sneaks in. And it’s so subtle that most people don’t recognize it as a problem. It doesn’t always look like losing your identity overnight. It starts with small things. You start saying “it’s fine” when it’s not. You let small boundaries slide because you don’t want to seem difficult. You silence your irritation when they cancel plans again. You tell yourself they’re just tired, just busy, just distracted. You swallow discomfort so the other person won’t have to deal with it. You start reshaping yourself to fit the relationship, convincing yourself that’s what it means to compromise.

I’ve swung between over-involvement and retreat. At first, I’d pour everything in. My emotions, my time, my focus. I’d blur the line between “we” and “me” until my world felt full, but only because it was orbiting someone else. Then, when I started to feel the exhaustion of that erasure, I’d pull back too far.

I decided we wouldn’t talk every day. It was mutual—four days a week instead of seven. That distance felt liberating. I could breathe again. I remembered I had a life, a rhythm, a sense of direction outside of “us.”

But eventually, that space became a wall. What had started as a boundary turned into separation.

According to Harriet Lerner in The Dance of Intimacy, when two people can’t maintain a clear sense of self within connection, the relationship becomes unstable. It oscillates between too much and too little. One person overfunctions, the other underfunctions. One abandons themselves to fix things, the other withdraws to protect their sense of autonomy. And before long, what you once called “love” becomes a pattern of reactivity, complaining, withdrawing, chasing, avoiding.

That realization unsettled me. Because for so long, I equated love with merging. I thought “closeness” meant constant access, constant talking, constant knowing. I didn’t realize that genuine closeness requires distance, the kind of distance that comes from differentiation, not disconnection.

This book didn’t tell me to abandon myself for empathy, and it didn’t tell me to harden my boundaries in the name of independence. It taught me the balance. It taught me that I can love deeply without losing my sense of self, and I can stand firm without shutting down.

Being a lover girl isn’t the problem. The problem starts when love becomes the only identity you know how to perform. When your tenderness turns into servitude. When your generosity becomes the stage where your own needs go to die.

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One evening, I watched a girl talk about gratitude. There was something about the softness in her tone, the sincerity in her words. It stayed with me. It made me realize how much I’ve been rushing through life, blind to how far I’ve come. Last year, I couldn’t even picture being this close to the end. Two years ago, I thought I’d never make it out. Yet here I am, one breath away from the finish line, about to defend, about to close this long, weary chapter. And instead of savoring it, I’ve been counting down the days like they meant nothing.

These are my last days in university. My last days worrying about deadlines, footnotes, and grades. My last days living alone in a city that once felt foreign, and somehow became a silent witness to my becoming. I came here not knowing a soul, and yet I survived five, six years of it. That should mean something. That does mean something. But I was too impatient to see it. Too consumed with leaving to realize I am standing in the middle of answered prayers.

Sometimes grace comes disguised as a quiet nudge, a random video, a single sentence, a moment that makes you pause long enough to whisper, I should be grateful. Even when life feels empty. Even when nothing makes sense. Maybe God lets us hit ground zero so we can remember what it means to start again. To rebuild. To feel the weight of grace in the smallest things.

It’s easy to question, to complain, to ask “why me?” But real strength is being able to stay in the ache and still whisper, thank you. Thank you for the waiting. Thank you for the lessons that came wrapped in discomfort. Thank you for what remains, even when so much has changed.

Gratitude shifts everything. It opens your eyes to what you once prayed for and now call ordinary. I think back to when I wasn’t even studying law, scrolling through Instagram, wishing I could be where I am now. I used to dream of this life. And now that I’m here, I caught myself forgetting that. That realization humbled me.

Yes, it’s been hard. But somewhere in all that hardness, I found softness. I learned how to be still. How to sit with silence and not fear it. How to pray differently. How to rebuild my peace. I learned to love my own company, to grow quietly, to bloom without applause.

Every moment I’ve hated, every phase that broke me, every version of myself I couldn’t stand, became the reason I’m grateful now. Those nights I wanted to disappear taught me to appreciate light. The versions of me that doubted, feared, and fell apart built the one who can finally stand firm. So next time life feels unbearable, I hope you remember this: one day, you’ll look back and say, that was all worth it.

I’ve said countless times that I hate this phase, and I still do. But now I understand it. It was never meant to punish me. It was preparing me. Slowing me down just enough to see beauty again.

So, be grateful. Even when nothing works.

Be grateful for breath. For strength. For another chance. Gratitude doesn’t erase the weight, it just teaches you how to carry it with grace.

Maybe it’s that relationship you’ve been in for five years. You know it no longer serves you, but you stay because of time — five years is a lot, right? Still, deep down, you know you want more. You know you deserve more. But you silence that thought because comfort feels easier than courage.

Wanting more isn’t about greed. It’s about awakening. Your version of “more” won’t look like anyone else’s. For one person, it might mean love that feels alive again. For another, it’s chasing that scholarship, starting that business, or simply believing you can build a life outside your current circle.

There’s so much out there — wealth, wisdom, opportunity, yet so many people shrink their world to what feels familiar. Someone running a hair or nail business, earning just enough to get by, telling themselves “₦300k a month is fine.” But is it, really? Why stop there when you know you can stretch higher?

There’s an energy that comes with wanting more. It pulls you out of smallness. It reminds you that staying stuck is a choice. You’re not meant to settle for a relationship that drains you, a city that limits you, or a job that silences you. Wanting more isn’t rebellion, it’s responsibility.

As women, we’ve come from generations where wanting more was forbidden. Our mothers and grandmothers were taught to shrink, to dream quietly, to obey, to settle. But look around now. Women are rewriting that story every day.

So why are you still playing small? Why are you convincing yourself that what you have now is all there is? You’re sitting on untapped potential, delaying applications you know you’re qualified for, choosing comfort when you could choose growth.

Comfort isn’t evil, but staying there too long becomes self-betrayal. Wanting more expands you. It shapes your mindset, your discipline, your reality. There’s so much to see, so much to experience, so much life waiting outside your comfort zone. Stop silencing that part of you that wants to evolve. Listen to it. Feed it.

You owe it to yourself to want more, and to go get it.

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I’ve written about self-love before, I’ve read about it, preached it to myself, drafted essays I never posted. But talking about it is different from living it. Most days, I tolerate myself. I stay in spaces that don’t nourish me. I excuse habits that don’t serve me. I celebrate others while leaving my own wins unmarked.

Because here’s the hardest truth I’ve had to face: loving yourself isn’t optional. It’s foundational. You can’t become your best self if you don’t love yourself.

Try seeing yourself through a third-person lens, like your own best friend. Someone you love deeply. Someone you’d comfort when they’re sad, celebrate when they win, defend when they doubt themselves. You’d never call them stupid, unworthy, or expendable. So why do that to yourself?

If your best friend failed, you wouldn’t say, “you’re useless.” You’d hold her, speak life into her, remind her who she is. You’d want her to get back up. That’s love. And that’s exactly the love you owe yourself.

Real love doesn’t just feel good, it holds you accountable. If you truly love yourself, you won’t keep doing things that harm you. You wouldn’t let your best friend drown in substances, constantly escape, party away her potential every Friday night. You wouldn’t watch her slowly lose herself. So why let yourself wither away?

You say you love yourself, but you still feed yourself pain. You stay where peace doesn’t live. You cling to habits that quietly kill you. That’s not love. That’s comfort disguised as self-soothing.

And when good things finally happen probably, a graduation, a promotion, a small dream achieved — you celebrate others but forget to celebrate yourself. You buy your friends cake, but not yourself. You plan dinners for others but shrug off your own milestones. You say, “it’s not a big deal.” But it is.

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Every moment you win deserves acknowledgment. You are worthy of celebration. You are allowed to pause, breathe, and say, “I did that”

Loving myself hasn’t been gentle. It’s been loud and quiet all at once. It’s been me unlearning how to survive and learning how to live.

The journey isn’t smooth. The moment you decide to change, life throws its hardest tests at you. It’s like the universe leans in and whispers, “Are you sure?”

The point of becoming your best self is becoming someone you admire. Someone you’d be proud to call your best friend. Someone you’d defend, nurture, and root for.

So treat yourself that way. Talk to yourself that way. If you wouldn’t say it to someone you love, don’t say it to yourself. If you wouldn’t let someone you love stay in chaos, stop letting yourself stay there.

Drop that joint. Pour out the bottle. Leave that relationship that drains your spirit. You don’t need another situation. You need peace.

It’ll hurt at first — familiarity always does when it leaves. But a month from now, you’ll breathe easier, sleep better, and start recognizing yourself again.

Time may not heal everything, but it heals a lot. It teaches you to stop reopening old wounds just to check if they still hurt. Pain becomes a teacher, not a home.

Then one day, walking to buy groceries or scrolling through old photos, it’ll hit you—you’re living in answered prayers.

Quietly, you’ve become the person you once imagined.

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“In this life, you have to grind. And if you’re a woman, you have to grind twice as hard.”

And honestly? Real.

Because for as long as I can remember,

I’ve heard people say,

“Women have it easier,”

“Women are treated better,”

“Women are privileged.”

And I just think— if that’s true, why then do we still flinch at the word feminism? Why does a movement built on equality still sound like rebellion to some ears?

It breaks my heart that even today,

in this generation of light and loud dreams,

so many of us still carry the quiet burden

of proving that we belong.

Women have learned to grind twice as hard

because we never want to be dependent.

We never want to be seen as subjects,

or as people waiting to be saved.

We’ve watched what that looks like, and we said, NEVER AGAIN.

We learned from our mothers.

From their endurance.

From their unspoken ache.

From the countless Nigerian women who carried entire homes on their backs while the world still called them “the weaker gender.”

Eight out of ten mothers are

the true breadwinners,

the ones who made water taste like stew, the ones who went without, so we could have something.

We saw that.

And we said, not me — not again.

What hurts is that even as we evolve, we’re still building a world beside men who haven’t all evolved with us. And that’s why so many women today

Say things like:

“I don’t want to get married,”

“I don’t want kids,”

“I just want peace.”

because we’ve seen what it costs.

Still, when I look around,

I’m amazed, because women are rising anyway.

Eighteen-year-olds with three side hustles,

mothers running 9–5s and small businesses,

students building brands, entrepreneurs birthing dreams.

We’re doing it all.

Not because it’s easy, but because we know no one’s coming to save us.

it’s sad, but it’s also breathtaking.

Because women are magic in motion.

It’s almost impossible not to think about how far we’ve come. There was once a time when women were told not to go to school.

When we were seen as burdens, as property,

as bodies meant only for the kitchen,

for childbearing,

for serving.

There was a time when women were used to settle debts,

when our dreams were too expensive for the world to invest in,

when we were told, “This profession is not for you.”

But today, We are the ones leading industries,

the ones rewriting history, the ones refusing to be silent.

Women like Annie Idibia, who rose after heartbreak, who rebuilt herself publicly,

who reminded us that strength can wear lipstick

and still cry softly at night.

And beyond the headlines and hashtags, I’ve seen it firsthand

my mother,

my living definition of resilience.

She showed me what it means to start again, to fall and still rise, to fail and still try, to put your head down, work, pray, and keep building.

I’ve seen almost every version of her,

the tired one, the hopeful one, the fierce one,

and every single version taught me how to survive.

That’s why I’ll never blame a woman

who chooses herself first.

Because being a woman is sacrifice in its most sacred form.

We literally grow humans inside us, tear open our bodies give them life, and still show up to the world smiling.

And yet, sometimes,we’re met with violence,

neglect,

disrespect.

It’s insane. Utterly insane.

But still, we rise.

Every. Single. Time.

This might be the missing piece you’ve been overlooking, the part of healing that isn’t about your mind at all, but your body’s memory of safety.

I’ve been learning about something that completely changed the way I see myself and others: healing your nervous system.

Now, that might sound complex, but stick with me. Your nervous system is basically the communication network of your entire body. It’s made up of your brain, your spinal cord, and all the nerves running through you. Its job is simple but powerful, it constantly scans what’s happening both inside and around you, and then decides how to respond.

Think of it as your body’s control center. Just like every company has a control room that manages everything, your nervous system manages you.

It decides when to relax, when to be alert, when your heart should slow down or speed up, and whether something feels safe or threatening. It’s always scanning, always asking one key question: am I safe right now?

And it’s really good at its job. Sometimes, too good.

Your nervous system has two main modes, kind of like switches.

One is the sympathetic nervous system, which is your stress mode — it activates when your body senses danger.

The other is the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calm, healing mode — it helps you rest, feel grounded, and safe.

If your body is constantly stuck in stress mode, which happens to many people, it means your system is always sensing danger, even when there’s none.

When that happens, everything starts to go off balance. You feel anxious, exhausted, reactive. You overthink, struggle to sleep, people-please, or find it hard to feel calm.

Your hormones are off, your emotions are off, your focus is off and so on

What’s even more fascinating is that your nervous system doesn’t only respond to real danger, it responds to perceived danger.

Let’s say you’re watching a horror movie. You know it’s fiction — props, lights, camera tricks. But when that scary scene comes on, your heart still races, your body tenses, maybe you even jump.

Why? Because your nervous system can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s perceived. It’s reacting not to truth, but to what it thinks is true.

That’s what happens in everyday life too. Even when there’s no real threat, your body still goes into survival mode because it feels unsafe.

When your nervous system becomes dysregulated like that, stuck in constant alert, it becomes really hard to feel calm or grounded.

You might not even consciously know why. But your body and subconscious remember things your conscious mind has long forgotten.

Maybe something happened in childhood, or maybe you just grew up in a home where you had to “read the room” to stay safe.

Maybe you had to study people’s moods before speaking, or live in constant uncertainty about money or emotions.

Over time, your body adapted, it learned that being hyper-aware was the way to survive.

And the same system that once protected you starts to work against you, keeping you stuck in stress, overwhelm, and fear.

I remember when I worked a 9-5

I’d get anxious every time my boss emailed me. I’d overanalyze her tone, her body language, even the timing of her messages.

There wasn’t any real danger, but my body didn’t know that. My nervous system had learned that reading cues and anticipating moods was how to stay safe.

Somewhere along the line, my body had decided that normal, everyday things were now threats.

My system was stuck in a loop, constantly asking: am I safe? am I okay? am I safe?

Underneath all of that, I realized, was something simple but deep, broken trust.

Broken trust in myself, in others, in life.

My system didn’t trust that I could handle stress. It didn’t trust that I could survive uncertainty.

So it stayed on guard, always scanning, always bracing.

That’s really what nervous system dysregulation is, it’s not a personality flaw.

It’s a survival response.

It’s your body saying, “I don’t trust that I can handle what’s coming next.”

Healing it means rebuilding that trust.

It means convincing your body, over and over again, that you are safe now.

That it’s okay to relax.

That life is not always a threat.

Your body probably remembers everything, the chaos, the fear, the moments you had to hold yourself together.

And until you teach it that it’s safe now, no amount of positive thinking will ever feel like peace.

You’ve probably tried every “regulation tool” that exists — breathwork, grounding, stretching, dancing, maybe even crying into your pillow or lying flat on the floor just to feel something shift.

And yes, these things help. They bring relief in the moment.

But sometimes don’t you ever wonder why the calmness never seem to last?

Because if we’re being honest, most of these tools are designed to help you recover from stress, not necessarily to prevent your body from slipping into that panicked state in the first place.

It’s like constantly wiping fog off a mirror without realizing the steam is still coming from the shower.

You might see clearly for a few seconds, but it always comes back.

That’s when I started to understand that healing your nervous system is not just about knowing how to calm down, it’s about understanding why your body never feels safe enough to stay calm. Breathwork or any of those beautiful tools don’t rewire the part of you that still believes:

“Rest is lazy.”

“Money is unstable.”

“Love isn’t safe.”

“I’ll be rejected if I speak up.”

They soothe the surface, but the old programming, that silent, subconscious fear, stays untouched.

Real healing starts when you begin asking gentle but honest questions like:

• Why does my body feel unsafe when I’m not busy?

• Why do I panic when money feels uncertain?

• Why does conflict immediately make me feel like everything is falling apart?

• Why do I feel guilty for resting?

Every time you feel anxious, reactive, or frozen, your nervous system is trying to protect you based on an old belief it still thinks is true.

That’s why identifying these beliefs is the first step to real regulation.

Once you’ve found them, the next step is to show your body that those old fears are no longer valid, but gently, in small doses.

You can’t force your nervous system into safety, you have to teach it, little by little.

Think of it like helping a scared child learn to walk again after a fall.

You don’t drag them up and yell, “You’re fine!”

You hold their hand, take a step, pause, reassure them, and try again.

That’s exactly how the body learns new safety.

So if your fear says, “Rest will make everything fall apart,” maybe sit still for ten minutes, no phone, no scrolling, no multitasking. Just rest.

If your fear says, “People will leave me if I say no,” practice saying no once, even softly.

If your fear says, “Conflict means abandonment,” start by disagreeing gently with someone you trust, and notice how the world doesn’t end afterward.

These are what I like to call tiny nervous system reps, small, consistent actions that slowly convince your body that it’s safe.

While doing this, it’s important not to push yourself into extreme discomfort.

Healing doesn’t mean shocking your system into bravery.

It means taking small, manageable steps that stretch you but don’t overwhelm you.

When you push too hard, your body panics and shuts down, it thinks you’re in danger again.

But when you stay kind, patient, and curious with yourself, your body starts to understand that discomfort isn’t danger.

There’s always going to be a bit of discomfort , when you open up to your partner, when you check your bank balance, when you let yourself rest instead of working.

The difference between healing and relapsing is how you sit with that discomfort.

You can move through it harshly, with shame, frustration, and judgment, or you can move through it gently.

For me, that looks like slowing my breath, placing my hand on my shoulders, and reminding myself softly:

“We’re not in danger. This is just a new experience. We’re safe.”

You can literally speak to yourself like a scared child, because sometimes, that’s exactly who’s reacting inside you.

If conflict is brought up and your body tenses, tell yourself,

“It’s okay, we can handle this. It’s safe to have our own opinions.”

If you’re waiting on a reply that never comes, tell yourself,

“Even if this doesn’t go how I hoped, I’m still safe. I can handle disappointment.”

This is what it means to sit through discomfort gently.

You stop fighting yourself. You begin to build safety from within.

And every time you survive something your body once labeled “danger,” your nervous system gathers new evidence, proof that it’s safe now.

That’s how the rewiring happens: not through force, but through repetition.

You don’t heal by doing it perfectly.

You heal by doing it again and again, calmly, kindly, consistently.

Because one day, you’ll realize that the very thing that used to send you spiraling now feels… neutral.

And that’s when you’ll know, your body finally believes you’re safe.

And maybe, for the first time in a long time, you’ll finally believe it too.

One of the things I promised to do this year was to reconnect with God.

To know Him, not the version I was told about, not the one filtered through fear or habit, but the One I’ve always felt somewhere beneath the noise.

When I started, I was doing it quietly.

At my own pace.

A pace that made sense to me, soft, slow, real. I prayed because I wanted to talk to Him. I listened because I wanted to understand.

But somewhere along the line, I didn’t even notice when my prayers changed.

They became wish lists.

Every “thank You” had a hidden “but.”

Every “I love You” came with “please do this for me.”

I didn’t think it was bad. After all, I still said my thank-yous, still gave Him credit.

But then, today, I saw a post from a friend.

He said he wouldn’t be joining the Hallelujah Challenge this year because his heart wasn’t in the right place, that he didn’t want to treat God like a genie.

And I don’t know what it was, but those words made sense to me.

Because maybe that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, treating God like a wish dispenser.

Pray hard enough, sing loud enough, cry long enough… and maybe He’ll grant it.

It made me stop and ask myself:

Why did I start this whole “reconnection” thing?

Why do I pray every morning?

Why was I so eager to join this challenge?

Is this an instruction from God or a strategy to get what I want from Him?

Human relationships are transactional, yes.

But this one?

It was never meant to be about exchange.

It was meant to be about love.

When I came back to God, it wasn’t because I wanted to trade obedience for blessings.

It was because I wanted to rewrite what I was taught.

To find God not in routine, but in relationship.

To walk with Him, not work for Him.

Realizing I’d drifted off course, made me feel sick.

Because I was trying to heal something old, and somehow, I recreated the same pattern.

I’m stepping back.

Not from God, but from the noise around Him.

From the constant doing and the restless striving.

I want to go back to the stillness.

To the slow, quiet pace that feels like home.

Coming back to God after being distant, after being Agnostic for years, is messy.

It’s confusing. It’s lonely.

It’s like learning to breathe again.

And sometimes, I still have questions.

Sometimes, things don’t make sense.

But I’m learning that faith isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about trusting even when the questions stay.

Someone once said, “To praise God properly, you must be blind and senseless.”

But I don’t agree.

Faith isn’t blindness.

It’s choosing to see with your heart when your eyes can’t.

So yes, this is me reconnecting with my why.

I don’t want to come to God just for favors anymore.

I want to come because I miss Him.

Because I want to know Him.

Because I want to live for Him, not just from Him.

I’m learning to slow down.

To find Him in silence.

To worship without wanting.

And maybe that’s what this reconnection was always meant to be,

not a revival,

but a return.

Have you ever tried to hold something in your hand that keeps slipping away? You reach, you stretch, you almost have it, and then it slides right past you.

That’s love to me.

Always near, always present, yet never fully defined.

Love is the lens I see the world through. The filter on my vision. The pulse beneath everything. To me, the world is made of it, stitched together by it, undone without it.

But on some days, love feels like a mirage.

Today, after a long day, I found myself watching Dexter. A serial killer with no feelings, pretending his way into a woman’s life so convincingly that she believed it was love. And it made me think.

What even is love?

What should it look like?

What should it feel like?

What should it demand of us?

Friendship is the first place my mind goes.

How do you know when you’ve actually been loved by a friend? In this era of curated aesthetics, of people hanging around just for vibes, how do you separate true love from polite indifference?

I want to believe most of us have felt friendship-love. But if we’re being honest, how can we ever be sure?

Then there’s the question of romance.

How many times have I typed into Safari at 2 a.m.: How do I know when I’ve experienced love? How do I know if I really love them?

Because the truth is sometimes what we call love is just companionship.

One fills silence.

The other fills the soul.

And still, the lines blur.

Self-love.

The most preached, the most aestheticized. Buy yourself flowers. Take yourself to the garden. Cook yourself something beautiful.

And yes, these things are lovely. But do they prove that I love myself? Or are they just the normal rhythms of wanting and getting? If I crave ice cream and buy it, does that mean I’m practicing self-love or simply being human?

Sometimes I wonder if what we call self-love is just survival dressed in pretty clothes.

Most times if not all the time, what we call love is just attachment.

We meet someone. They feel like “our type.” They catch our attention. And suddenly, we start bending ourselves, shrinking ourselves, abandoning little parts of who we are just to fit inside their life.

We call it sacrifice.

We call it compromise.

But it’s self-abandonment.

And when the attachment breaks, we are left wondering: Did I ever really love them, or was I just terrified of being alone?

The way we love is rarely about the person in front of us, it’s often about the blueprint carved into us long ago. The love we received, or the love withheld when we were children. The way arms opened, or the way they didn’t.

And that’s why love is so hard to define.

Because it wears every background, every wound, every history.

Sometimes I wonder if love is even knowable.

You can be safe with someone and still question if it’s love.

You can set boundaries to protect yourself and then wonder if the love disappeared with the space.

You can spend months calling attachment love, only to wake up and realize it was fear wearing a mask.

So what is love, really?

To me, love is like threading a needle. You bring the string close, so close, you’re almost there, and then it slips. Over and over, you try. Over and over, you miss.

Maybe love isn’t meant to be caught in our hands. Maybe it isn’t meant to be explained or pinned down. Maybe love is not a definition but an experience.

A rhythm you live inside.

A truth you stumble into.

A mirror that reveals you to yourself.

Maybe love is everything and nothing.

Maybe love is the stone and the ripple.

The wound and the balm.

The question and the answer that never comes.

And maybe that should be enough?

I thought I’d share 22 of them here, maybe you need them too.

1. It’s okay if someone doesn’t choose you. Walk away in peace.

2. Enjoy the process of becoming.

3. Ask for help when you need it, and ask those around you how you can help when they’re going through it. We all need help sometimes.

4. Happiness doesn’t come from outside, it comes from within.

5. Growth is painful, but what’s more painful is staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.

6. Rest is not laziness, it’s part of growth.

7. Not every season will be loud, some seasons are quiet so you can bloom later.

8. Falling down is an accident, staying down is a choice.

9. Your life doesn’t get better by chance, it gets better by change.

10. You can be proud of yourself even while you’re still becoming.

11. The moment you start believing in yourself, everything changes. The world starts believing in you too.

12. You are allowed to outgrow people, places, and even old versions of yourself.

13. The right people will love you for the depth you carry, not in spite of it.

14. Self-celebration is fuel, not vanity.

15. To heal a wound, you have to stop touching it.

16. Progress is progress, no matter how small.

17. You are not behind, your timeline is your own.

18. Every closed door is also redirection.

19. Softness is strength.

20. You deserve to experience love, joy, and peace without shrinking yourself.

21. You are absolutely capable of creating the life you can’t stop thinking about.

22. Don’t let your mind get the best of you.

Which resonated with you the most?

The first lie every boy learns is that softness will ruin him.

The second lie is that hardness will save him.

From childhood you were warned: don’t cry, don’t show emotion, don’t feel. Each rule carved you into a stranger to yourself.

But the poison doesn’t stay inside you. It leaks.

Into friendships, where tenderness feels foreign.

Into romance, where you confuse withdrawal for mystery and control for love.

Into marriage, where a woman’s success feels like an attack on your manhood.

I remember reading about a woman who was thriving—career, finances, life, all of it soaring. Her husband, meanwhile, was struggling. Instead of celebrating her, he ran to a Baba to ruin her progress.

Can you imagine? So fragile that instead of lifting himself, he tried to dim her light.

That’s not strength. That’s fear masquerading as masculinity.

And when it’s not sabotage, it’s violence.

The boyfriend who slaps his girlfriend when he feels “disrespected.”

The husband who shouts, punches walls, then later swears he was “just angry.”

The man who mutters, “If she can’t be mine, she won’t be anyone’s.”

We’ve seen the headlines; women killed for saying no, for wanting out, for simply existing outside a man’s control.

what is strong about that?

What is masculine about being so terrified of rejection you’d rather kill than feel?

What is manly about demanding power because you’re too fragile to stand beside a woman as an equal?

And let’s not forget the casual cruelty, the men who say, “If she dresses like that, she’s asking for it.” Do you realize how sick that sounds? No woman has ever walked outside asking to be violated.

That’s not masculinity. That’s barbarism.

But sometimes it’s not even about anger or violence. Sometimes it’s about performance.

How many of you are actually living for yourselves?

You call it masculinity, but half the time, it’s just imitation.

You smoke because your friends smoke, even though you hate it.

You dress a certain way because your clique demands it, even though you’d rather stand out.

You swallow pleasures, deny love, refuse tenderness, not because you don’t want them, but because you don’t want to look “soft.”

That’s not manhood.

That’s insecurity with a costume on.

I’ve met men who shine because they are free to be individuals, guys who don’t need to fit the mold, who live with color, creativity, and authenticity. And yet, those are the very men other men mock, labeling them “gay” or “soft” or “different.” But in truth, they are the ones living.

The rest? Just obeying a script.

At the end of the day, masculinity is not supposed to devour your individuality. It’s not supposed to strip you of joy, of the right to want, of the right to try. If you’re building your whole life around what other men think, then you haven’t built anything at all.

Poisoned masculinity doesn’t only wound women, it starves men. It strips you of closeness, tenderness, the freedom to love and be loved. You find yourself in relationships where presence feels impossible. Friendships where your tongue knots around the words you ache to say. A life where breathing deeply feels like a luxury you were never taught.

At this stage, you should know better. You’ve seen enough, lived enough, heard enough. If you’re still clinging to this type of masculinity, it’s not upbringing anymore, it’s a choice .

And so I ask:

When will you stop hiding behind excuses?

When will you stop mistaking fear for strength?

When will you finally choose a masculinity that holds both power and tenderness, love and accountability, individuality and freedom?

Because until you do, you’re not living as a man.

You’re living as a mask.

And when the mask finally cracks, the only person underneath it will be a stranger, even to yourself

Dear subscriber, your turn 👀

I’ve said my piece, now I want to hear yours. Comment, argue, laugh, reflect. Share this with that one friend who really needs to read it.

Don’t just lurk. Engage.

Thank you💋

In a few hours (minutes now as I edit) I’ll officially be 22. That number feels surreal. Heavy. Like I’m stepping into a whole new chapter I don’t quite feel ready for.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with birthdays. I wouldn’t say I hate them, but I’ve never been the type to go crazy about them either. And yet, every year, I feel like I deserve to celebrate myself, like I should go all out just because.

This year? No big plans. Maybe I’ll go to the movies, which is slowly becoming my quiet birthday tradition. Maybe I’ll take pictures. But nothing grand.

I find myself sitting with this question that’s been in my head for the past few days:

What exactly am I entering this new year with?

And the one word that keeps repeating itself in my mind is: worry.

If there was an award for worrying, I promise you, they’d call my name. You know how, in school, they’d announce “Best in Mathematics” or “Best in English”? Well, mine would be “Best in Worrying: Benny.” I’d walk up proudly to collect that award, because worry has been stitched into almost every part of who I am.

I worry about my future. I worry about relationships. I worry about my health. I even worry about worrying. Worry is the rope I’ve been gripping tightly, even when it’s no longer tied to anything solid. Imagine hanging on to a rope that’s already slipped off the rock—your hands are burning, but you still won’t let go. That’s me.

And because I worry, I plan.

I over-plan.

I try to control.

I even struggle to ask for help because I worry I’ll look weak, or like a burden, or worse—that I’ll be rejected.

But here’s the truth I want to step into this year: letting go.

Letting go of things that no longer serve me. Letting go of people who’ve already let go of me. Letting go of the endless worrying about how everything will play out.

I don’t mean I suddenly want to be carefree in a reckless way. I mean carefree but with caution. I want to love without worrying. Receive love without worrying. Live more freely, without carrying the weight of everything I can’t control.

I’ll be honest, I’m scared. 22 feels big. Serious. Like it’s the age where I’m supposed to have my life figured out. People my age are getting married, buying cars, starting families, chasing big dreams. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here on my bed, writing about how terrified I am of entering this new age.

But I’m also grateful. Deeply. I’m grateful that I even made it here. I remember being 12 and not believing I’d live past 18. So 22 feels like a milestone I don’t take for granted.

I’m grateful for my family, who are my everything. For my friends, my acquaintances, and yes, even the people who challenge me. And I’m especially grateful for you—my subscribers. Sometimes I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that my words reach people in ways I’ll never fully understand. I’ve read comments that almost made me cry, because it’s wild to think a few lines from me could touch someone’s life that deeply.

I’m not promising to be a brand new woman overnight. But I am choosing differently this year. Choosing not to let worry drive every decision. Choosing to trust that what’s for me will find me. Choosing to release the rope when it’s no longer tied to anything.

So here’s to 22. To being scared, but hopeful. To gratitude. To letting go. And to whatever unfolds from here.

Say happy birthday in the comments 👀😜

It’s 11:51 PM.

I’m staring at my ceiling, waiting for midnight so I can listen to Gabzy’s new drop.

And I won’t lie, I wish I wasn’t listening alone.

But…life happens.

I’ve been thinking. Not just about today, but this whole week.

Last week too.

Maybe even last year, if I’m being honest.

There’s this strange space I’ve found myself in lately. The in-between.

Where you know exactly what you don’t want,

But you still have no name for what you want. Where silence feels louder than certainty.

I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know it’s not chaos disguised as passion.

Not longing that never lands.

Not softness that comes with splinters. I keep circling memories I never meant to keep.

Replaying moments I swore I’d moved past. Sometimes I wonder if it’s love I miss,

Or the idea of being chosen.

There are days I feel brave enough to let go.

To say: “this isn’t it, and I deserve better.”

And then there are days where I scroll through songs, messages, signs

searching for something to justify staying soft. It’s like my heart and my head are playing tug-of-war

while my soul watches from the corner, arms folded, waiting for me to decide who I want to be.

I’m tired of holding space for potential. Of romanticizing maybe. Of thinking I can love someone into becoming.

Who told us that was love?

I want to feel safe where I rest.

I want to speak without shrinking.

To be seen in full, edges and all, and not just in glimpses.

I want to yearn and still feel grounded.

To dance with someone whose presence doesn’t feel like a cliff.

And maybe I’ll find it. Maybe I won’t.

But at least I’ve stopped lying to myself about what I can’t carry anymore.

There’s one sentence that always rings in my head: If you don’t know what to pursue, pursue yourself.

And I think… that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I’ve made it a point to sit with my feelings, to redirect them gently, slowly, toward light.

I set daily goals. Tiny targets that pull me through the fog.

Movement helps.

I gym. I walk. Sometimes I cross 10,000 steps without even noticing.

Self-care too—daily, deliberate.

Affirmations. Mirror work. Little rituals to remind myself that I’m still worth every damn thing.

It’s hard to lead a life that actually feels good from the inside.

It takes so much effort to build peace in a world that profits off your pain.

But then, in those quiet moments,

when I’m eating a well-made meal, watching the sky shift,

listening to birds without needing to speak, I remember why I’m doing all this.

Because I love myself too much not to.

Still… that doesn’t mean I don’t want company.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be loved. And I’ve made peace with that too.

One day, I know I won’t have to shrink to feel wanted.

I won’t have to fold myself into someone else’s version of love.

I’ll exist fully, loudly, softly, in love that feels like home.

And if anyone ever asks, “Why do you always write about love?”

I’ll say: because love is the one thing that keeps evolving. Because it’s the mystery and the answer.

Because I believe—deep down—that one of our reasons for being here is to love.

Not just romantically, but wholly. Friendship. Family. Faith. Self.

So no, I’ll never stop writing about love.

Because love is crazy.

But love is everything.

It’s midnight and I’m listening to Gabzy.

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