In early 2022, just when I was fresh out of uni, one of my friends called me, full of excitement: “Babes, we’re going out on Saturday!”

I asked where. She named the spot, and in my mind, I did a fast calculation immediately. Transport. Food. Maybe one or two other things because somehow, “I’m just stepping out” can become 30,000 naira or more before you know what is happening.

Right then and there, I knew I couldn’t make it.

And it wasn’t because I didn’t miss her, or because I was trying to be distant. Neither was it even because I wanted to stay indoors.

I just knew that going out meant spending money that wasn’t in my budget and I was trying very hard to be responsible with the money I had left on me.

So I gently told her, “Ah, I don’t think I can make it o.”

“Why?”

I quickly offered a white lie, because how will I tell you that I don’t have the money to hang out with you? 😔: “I’m not around mehn. I traveled yesterday.”

“Okayyy. No problem.”

That “okayyy” sounded small, but it was heavy.

Because there’s a very funny yet hurtful thing that happens when you’re going through a tight season financially: your financial situation can start looking like a reflection of your feelings.

How You Sometimes Feel as The Broke Friend

You become the friend who doesn’t come out anymore. The one who can’t make their friend’s life easier when they complain about a very horrible situation. The one who misses the birthday dinners, weekend trips, spontaneous catch-ups, concerts, weddings, and “come and let’s just hang out.” The one who keeps saying, “I’ll come next time, don’t worry.”

And after a while, you start wondering, Hope I’m not becoming a bad friend like this?

This is the uncomfortable thing about adult friendship that we don’t always say out loud: money determines how much of each other’s lives we get to experience.

And it’s not necessarily because money determines how much you love somebody, but because it determines how much access you have to them too.

You can love your friend deeply and still not be able to afford the version of friendship that exists between you. You can miss them and not be able to go see them.

You can want to celebrate their birthday and not have money for the restaurant they chose. You can genuinely want to attend the event with them, but when you add the ticket, transport, food and everything else, you realize that one day of fun is going to have consequences on you for the rest of your week.

So you stay home.

And your friend doesn’t experience your bank balance. They experience your absence.

From your end, the story is, I can’t afford this.

From their end, it may slowly become, They don’t really come through for me anymore.

And neither person is necessarily wrong.

Because money doesn’t only determine what you can buy. It determines what you can participate in. And participation is a huge part of friendship.

Dare I Say Friendships Were Easier When We Were Young?

When we were younger, friendship was easier because our financial realities were often more similar.

You went to the same school. You lived in the same area. You had roughly the same amount of pocket money. Someone bought chin-chin and everybody ate it with them. Someone bought Bobo, Ribena, or maybe even that orange-coloured drink that was always inside those white transparent nylons, and everyone shared it.

You could sit outside for hours just talking and that was enough.

Then adulthood happened.

One friend gets a job that pays ₦1 million. Another earns ₦300,000. One is building a business. Another is unemployed. One has parents who can help them when things get tight. Another is helping their parents. One person has disposable income. Another person is calculating whether they can survive the month without touching their savings.

And suddenly, two people who are equally close can have completely different ideas of what is “affordable.”

Your friend says, “It’s just 20k.”

And you’re thinking, 20k is my food money for the month.

Nobody is necessarily being unreasonable—you’re just living in two completely different financial realities.

Money and Reciprocity

But money affects more than the things you get to do together. It affects reciprocity.

Imagine you have a friend who is doing significantly better financially than you. Every time you go out, they pay. They send you money. They buy your birthday gifts. They cover things when you’re together.

Of course, you’re grateful. But after a while, you may start feeling strange about it.

You don’t want to always be the person receiving. You want to take them out too. You want to buy them something nice. You want to be able to say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this one.”

But you can’t.

And this burdens you with an helplessness that comes from loving someone and not being able to reciprocate their generosity in the same language they’re using.

Sometimes you start avoiding the friendship altogether because receiving starts making you uncomfortable.

You stop accepting invitations because you know they’ll pay. You stop asking for help because you don’t want to feel indebted. You might even stop celebrating certain milestones with them physically, because you know you cannot give the kind of gift you think the person deserves.

So now money isn’t just preventing you from participating. It is affecting how comfortable you feel inside the friendship.

And on the other side, the person with more money can also become frustrated. But it’s not necessarily because they’re counting every penny they’ve spent on you, instead it’s more because they may eventually feel like the friendship has become one-sided.

I’m always the one traveling to see you.

I’m always paying.

I’m always planning.

I’m always making things happen.

That frustration is not automatically selfish—friendship is reciprocal and people want to feel like they are being met somewhere in the middle.

When You Can’t Come Through

Sometimes, the hardest part of being the broke friend isn’t even missing dinners or not being able to afford a hangout.

It’s watching someone you love go through something difficult and knowing that money could make their life a little easier, but you simply don’t have it to give.

Your friend is stranded and needs transport money. Someone in their family is going through something and they need financial help. They need to pay for something urgently, and you know that if you had it, you would send it without thinking twice.

But you don’t.

And that can hurt in a very different way because sometimes, when you love people, you don’t just want to listen to their problems. You want to do something about them.

You want to say, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” You want to be able to send the money, book the ride, pay the bill, or take one thing off their plate.

So when you can’t, you may feel helpless. Because even if your friend wasn’t expecting you to save them, you wish you had the capacity to make their life easier.

And I think that’s one of the most painful parts of being broke: sometimes you don’t want more money because you want more things. You want more money because you want to be able to come through for the people you love.

Are You the Broke Friend or Are You Just Stingy?

It’s important to also note that there’s a difference between being broke and just being stingy.

Being broke means you genuinely do not have the money to do something. Being stingy means you have the money and simply do not want to spend it, even when contributing would be reasonable or when you’re consistently allowing other people to carry your share.

You can be broke and still be generous. You can be broke and still be thoughtful. You can be broke and still be the friend who remembers birthdays, brings something small when their friend visits, checks in, offers what they can, or says, “I can’t do 30k, but I can do 10k.”

In the same way, you can have plenty of money and be incredibly stingy with the people around you.

So the question isn’t simply whether someone has money. It’s what they do with what they have.

What Does Intentionality Mean to You?

It’s why I genuinely believe that intentionality in friendships goes beyond having money and splurging it on your friends. It means knowing what matters to your friend and finding a way to show up within your reality.

It could mean remembering that they have an interview or an important event and texting them that morning, or the evening before.

It could mean bringing them their favourite snack when you visit. It could mean calling instead of waiting for them to always initiate. It could mean suggesting something you can both afford instead of disappearing because you cannot afford what was originally suggested.

And sometimes, intentionality is simply communicating instead of making your friends guess.

Because this is another uncomfortable truth about being broke: your friends cannot always tell the difference between “I don’t have money” and “I don’t want to come.”

If you decline every invitation without explanation, eventually people will adjust. They will stop asking, because they might simply believe you don’t want to participate anymore.

How Do You Measure Love in Your Friendships?

Another part of this conversation is that the real problem isn’t necessarily that one friend has more money. It’s that both friends have unconsciously decided that money is the only way to measure effort and love.

The financially comfortable friend may need to stop assuming that everyone who loves them can afford their lifestyle.

The broke friend may need to stop assuming that saying “I can’t afford it” is the end of the conversation.

There can be another conversation after that.

“Can we do something cheaper?”

“Can I come over instead?”

“Can we hang out at yours?”

“I can’t do this one, but I really want to see you.”

“I can’t contribute that much, but I can contribute this.”

Those conversations require a level of honesty that can be uncomfortable because nobody wants to announce that they’re broke, especially not to people they love.

But sometimes, the embarrassment of saying “I can’t afford this” creates more distance than the actual lack of money.

And perhaps that’s what makes being the broke friend so difficult. You’re not necessarily less loving. You’re not necessarily less generous. You’re not necessarily less interested in the friendship. You may simply have fewer financial options.

But because so much of adult life is organized around money, having fewer options can make you look like you care less.

And that is a painful misunderstanding.

At the same time, the conversation we really need to have is: How much should money determine the friendship?

How much should someone’s inability to afford your lifestyle affect how you perceive their love for you?

How much financial inequality can a friendship carry before resentment begins?

Can you remain close to someone whose idea of a normal day out costs what you spend on a week?

Can you keep accepting from someone without eventually feeling uncomfortable?

Can you keep giving without eventually feeling used?

And what happens when the financial positions reverse?

So perhaps the real work of friendship is not pretending money doesn’t matter.

It’s learning how to remain friends when your financial lives don’t look the same.

If you enjoyed reading this, I think you’ll love my book, Does Love Live Here? —a book about love, friendships, adulthood, and all the complicated things we sometimes struggle to put into words.

It’s available as an ebook and paperback on Amazon and Nestuge.

You can get your copy here: https://bio.site/BusayoJoan

Let me give you a quick backstory about what inspired this article. But just so you brace for impact, it’s me being a lover girl with my backstory.🙈

It was past 7:30 PM on a dark evening, and I had just collected my law degree certificate at my school’s Senate Building. My friends and I were busy lamenting about the stress that comes with studying at a public university, while also planning how we were going to get public transportation out of school.

I had already planned my journey home in my head. Because, well, I’m hyper-independent. I’m your typical Nigerian babe who always has a Plan A, Plan B, and, just in case life decides to misbehave, Plan C.🙃

So naturally, I wasn’t worried. I knew exactly how I was getting home.

I was fully prepared to join the evening rush, jump into a public bus or cab, endure the traffic, and handle myself. I mean, I’m a whole lawyer (in equity, as at then); I handle things quite well.🙂

Then my phone rang. It was my boyfriend (now my fiancé). He had just arrived from Abuja after a long, exhausting trip back down to our state.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m still in school,” I told him casually, already preparing to hang up. “It’s going to take a while before I finish, so I'll just find my way home when I'm done.”

Meanwhile, I was sad internally because what do you mean I have to start hopping buses by this time of the night? I’m a soft babe, please!😭

Now, any normal person would have said, “Okay babe, enter a cab, share your live location with me, text me when you get home.”

But he didn’t even argue. He just said okay.

Without me asking, begging, or even hinting, he took the initiative.

He got into his car and drove 30 minutes through the dark, straight down to my uni to pick me up, even with bad headlights.

When his car pulled up at the school gate and I saw him, I didn’t just feel touched by his gesture.

I felt completely, strangely naked.😔

My hyper-independent self immediately went into panic mode. Here I was, certificate in hand, ready to prove to myself that I’m a strong, capable woman who doesn’t need saving, and this man just casually showed up to take care of me.

I didn’t need him to come; I could have easily boarded a bus and reached home safely.

But he saw a moment to make my life easier, and he took it without asking. Having someone care for you, anticipate your needs, and hold space for you without you having to fight for it? It felt terrifyingly bare.

It turns out I really do have straight As in self-reliance. Maybe even too many.

Because sometimes, being vulnerable feels almost uncomfortable when you’ve spent so many years building this hard-girl, I-can-handle-it-myself personality.

Just like that, my fiancé’s gesture got me thinking about all the other little things that can make me feel this way. The things that strip away that “I’ve got it” version of me and leave me feeling oddly exposed.

If you’ve ever wanted to crawl into a hole because someone caught you being human or caring too much, welcome.

Here is the list of things that make me feel very exposed:

• Receiving gifts or favors without immediately figuring out how to repay them: I know you’re being kind. I know you’re not keeping score. But there’s something about simply receiving without giving something back that makes me feel strangely exposed. I start mentally calculating how I can return the favor because being cared for without having to earn it feels unfamiliar.

• Asking for help: You could tell me “I wasn’t talking to you,” out in public and I won’t feel as embarrassed. You could even pull down my trousers and run away, and I wouldn’t feel as embarrassed as I do when I think about asking for help.😭 Even when I genuinely need it, there’s something about saying, “Can you help me with this?” that feels like admitting I can’t handle everything on my own. I can carry something until it becomes unnecessarily heavy before I finally say I need someone to help me put it down.

• A friend asking me, “Are you fine?” Especially when they ask it in that tone—the one that tells me they already know I’m not. Because suddenly, I’m not just dealing with whatever is wrong; I’m being seen in it. And sometimes I’d much rather tell you I’m fine than admit that I’m not and let you see how much something is actually affecting me.

• Showing my partner my trauma and fears: Explaining why certain things hurt me, why I react the way I do sometimes, what I’m afraid of, or what has shaped certain parts of me. It’s quite terrifying to hand someone the keys to your softest places and trust them not to use it against you. But that’s the beauty of love too.

• Letting someone read anything I’ve written: Writing is one of the places I’m most honest. You might think you’re reading a paragraph, a caption, or a random thought, but sometimes you’re actually reading something I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. So yes, I may act like it’s “just something I wrote,” but please understand that you’ve just been handed a tiny piece of my brain and heart.

• Someone watching me while I’m doing something: Why does this make me suddenly forget how to function?😭 I could have been doing it perfectly fine two minutes ago, but the second I realize someone is watching, I become painfully aware of my hands, my face, my movements—and I become so clumsy!

• Trying to express how I feel and ending up crying: I hate when the words are there but my tears arrive first. Because now I’m not only trying to explain what hurt me; I’m also trying not to feel embarrassed that you can see how deeply it hurt. Sometimes I’d rather finish the entire conversation composed than have you see just how much I care about what I’m saying.

• Being confrontational: Saying, “I didn’t like that,” “You hurt me,” “That wasn’t okay,” or “I need you to stop” instead of swallowing it and moving on. There’s something about standing up for myself while someone is looking directly at me that makes me feel completely exposed. Especially when I care about the person and know that speaking up might change the relationship between us.

• Someone remembering something I mentioned casually in the past: Because why were you listening that closely? 🥹 I find it so intimate when I realize someone has been paying attention to the little things about me when I wasn’t even trying to be noticed. The restaurant I said I wanted to try. The random thing I said I liked. The story I thought you had forgotten. Somehow, being remembered makes me feel very seen.

• Being taken care of: Especially when I’m used to being the one checking in, helping, remembering, fixing, and showing up. Sometimes having my partner say, “I’ve got you. You don’t have to worry about this,” makes me feel more vulnerable than doing everything myself. Because for a moment, I have to trust that someone else can hold something for me without me constantly checking whether they’re still holding it.

• Someone seeing me fail at something I really cared about: I can handle failing. What feels harder is someone I care about witnessing the disappointment on my face before I’ve had time to put myself back together. I hate being seen in that tiny window between “I’ll be fine” and actually becoming fine.

• Admitting that I miss someone: Especially when I’ve been trying to act like I’m perfectly fine. Saying “I miss you” feels like admitting that someone has a hold on a part of my emotional vulnerability that I can’t simply switch off. And somehow, that feels very naked.

• Telling someone I need reassurance: But not because I want them to fix anything, instead it’s because sometimes I just need to hear, “We’re okay. I’m not going anywhere. You’re not alone in this.” Asking someone to soothe a fear I could technically keep to myself feels incredibly vulnerable.

• Telling someone what I actually want instead of saying “anything is fine”: Because sometimes “anything is fine” is easier than risking disappointment, being perceived as demanding, or hearing someone say no. Saying “Actually, I want this” means allowing my preferences to take up space.

• Saying “I love you” first: I don’t know why this feels like someone yanking a face cap off your rough hair and running away with it.🙂 Because even when I know it’s mutual, there’s still that tiny moment where I’m holding my heart out before I know exactly how it’ll be received. Now I’ve got sweaty palms, a heart beating way too fast, and suddenly three little words feel like the biggest risk I’ll ever take.🥹

Being human is a ridiculously exposed business.

But maybe the trick isn’t to build thicker armor—maybe it’s just learning to let someone hold the door for you, stand there in the dark, and realize that being cared for isn’t actually going to hurt us.

How about you? Which one of these hit closest to home for you?🥹

If you loved reading this, you might enjoy reading my book Does Love Live Here? —a collection of honest reflections on love, relationships, family, adulthood, self-worth, trauma, and the many experiences that shape who we become.

It’s available as an ebook and physical copy/Amazon paperback via this link: https://bio.site/BusayoJoan

And if you enjoyed reading this, you’ll probably enjoy my newsletter too. Subscribe for more honest conversations about life, love, womanhood, adulthood, healing, and everything in between.

A few days ago, the artwork above by the digital artist Cyn began floating around Twitter and it was titled “and she saw me bleeding.”

If you’ve seen it, it likely made you pause, scroll back up, and stare. It captured something so heavy yet so common in the corners of womanhood that the comment section quickly transformed into a makeshift digital confessional.

Hundreds of women—particularly Nigerian women—began sharing the precise, jagged shapes of their maternal wounds.

The same vibe that ran through the discourse was as harrowing as it was plain: For many women, their first experience of a bully, their first encounter with an enemy, wears their mother’s face.

It is a terrifying thing to admit aloud. We live in a society that treats motherhood as a flawless, holy institution. In Africa, “Mom” or “Mummy” or “Nne” or “Iya” or “Mama” is placed on a pedestal so high it touches the heavens.

We sing songs about how they suffered for us, how they carried us for nine months. But we rarely talk about what happens when that same mother returns from her own battlefield and turns her weapons on the daughter she brought into the world.

“Why Is She the Way She Is?” Blame Her Parents, Her Spouse, or Just Herself

To truly understand the sharp, irritable, and often cruel nature of a toxic mother, you have to look closely at the house she was forced to build her life in. She is rarely a villain born in a vacuum.

Long before she was a mom or a wife, she was a daughter, and the foundation of her dysfunction was laid in her childhood home, built by the very people who were supposed to protect her.

For some, the fracture began under the weight of two equally cruel parents. In that house, there was no safe harbor.

She grew up in a crossfire of neglect, volatility, or absolute control, learning early on that the world is an inherently hostile place where the strong devour the weak. She was taught that love is a transaction paid for in compliance and suffering. With no model of empathy or kindness, she absorbed all that tyranny.

For others, the wound was more confusing, twisted by the contrast of having one loving parent and one cruel one.

Perhaps she had a father who adored her but was powerless to stop a tyrannical mother, or a gentle mother whose impact was erased by a dominant, abusive father. This dynamic taught her a different, insidious lesson: that love is weak, helpless, and ultimately incapable of saving you.

She watched the loving parent submit or fail to protect her, and in her pain, she subconsciously made a devastating choice. She chose to align with the aggressor. She buried her capacity for gentleness, associating it with the vulnerability that ruined the parent she actually loved.

Whether raised by dual tyrants or left unprotected by a helpless love, she enters adulthood already deeply fractured, only to find herself trapped in a familiar prison.

She is systematically broken all over again by the man she shares a bed with.

When a husband subjects his wife to emotional cruelty, financial control, degradation, or physical violence, a strange and devastating transformation occurs.

She cannot fight back against him; the patriarchal structures of her community dictate that she must endure, submit, and smile for the sake of the family.

The generational inheritance of pain, combined with her current reality of rage, helplessness, and humiliation, does not simply evaporate—they simmer under the surface, souring into a toxic pool of resentment.

And who is the safest target for that displaced rage? The daughter.

The daughter becomes a mirror of the mother’s own vulnerability, a painful reminder of both the child she once was and the victim she still is.

When a mother looks at her little girl, she doesn’t just see a child; she sees a version of herself that is still soft, still unprotected, and still capable of being hurt.

Because she could not control her parents, and because she cannot control her husband or her destiny, she seeks absolute, tyrannical control over her daughter.

If the father is a storm that tears through the house, the mother becomes the localized lightning strike, taking out the only person lower than her in the family hierarchy.

Yet, in many other instances, this tragic blueprint does not exist.

There are daughters who look at their toxic mothers and find absolutely no history of violence, no generational curse, and no oppressive marriage to point to.

Their mothers were deeply, unconditionally loved by both of their parents. They grew up in safe, nurturing homes, only to marry spouses who treated them with nothing but more kindness, devotion, and respect.

In these cases, there is no heartbreaking justification for why she is the way she is.

There is no tragic backstory to soften the blow of her malice, no external monster to blame for her bitterness.

Her cruelty is not a defense mechanism or displaced trauma; it is simply a conscious choice, a manifestation of entitlement, envy, or an innate desire to dominate.

“Does She Even Love Me?”

The heartbreak of this dynamic is that it leaves daughters stranded in a permanent state of confusion.

A mother’s love is supposed to be an axiom—a fundamental truth you don't need to prove.

But when that love is replaced by a permanent scowl, sharp tongue-lashings, and random acts of cruelty, the daughter spends her entire life asking a quiet, agonizing question: Does she even love me?

On Twitter and in private conversations, women share the experiences that chipped away at their spirits before they were old enough to understand what trauma even meant.

Tolani, 26:

“I remember coming home with my report card—I came second in class. My dad didn’t care, he didn’t even look up from his phone. When I showed my mom, hoping for a hug, she threw the paper back at me and said, “So the person who came first, does she have two heads? You’re just useless like the people from your father’s side.” She was so angry at him, but it was my chest that took the bullet. To this day, when she walks into a room, my stomach drops. I always feel like I’m about to be scolded for simply existing.”

Chidinma, 31:

“My mother never looked at me with softness. Never. Everything was an irritation. If I laughed too loudly, I was loose. If I sat quietly, I was planning evil. I remember adjusting myself around her mood swings. She would look at me with so much disgust, and I’d lie awake at night wondering what I did wrong in the womb to make her hate me so much. It took me years of therapy to realize she didn’t hate me—she hated her life, and I was the easiest thing to yell at.”

Adeola, 24:

“The verbal venom was only half of it. It was the physical violence that made me realize my life meant nothing to her. I remember being fourteen and it was hair washday. Then I accidentally spilled a bottle of her expensive hair oil. The rage that took over her face was demonic. She didn’t just beat me; she grabbed a heavy, metal-handled pestle from the kitchen and swung it directly at my head. I ducked, and it shattered the glass pane of the cupboard behind me. Just imagine if that was my head.”

Divine, 21:

“One time, she threw a heavy, sharp kitchen knife at me across the living room because I didn't hear her call me. It nicked my shoulder, drawing blood, and she didn’t even blink. She just yelled at me to clean the floor. I survived her by sheer luck. When the person who brought you into this world almost takes you out of it over very trivial things, you realize there is no ‘discipline’ there. It is pure, homicidal rage.”

This is the raw reality of the “mean mom” phenomenon. It is an irritability that cannot be pleased.

How maternal abuse rewires you

When we strip away the societal excuses, we have to look directly at the scars left behind. A mother’s abuse does not simply bounce off you; it fundamentally reshapes how you exist and move through life.

Think about it this way: when you are a little girl, your mother is your very first mirror. You look at her to understand who you are. If she looks at you with warmth and delight, you learn that you are someone worthy of being cherished. But when she looks at you with disgust, or treats your very existence as a burden, that mirror shatters.

1. You spend your entire adulthood walking around with a deep, unspeakable ache—like a phantom limb of self-worth. You might go on to do amazing things, build walls of perfectionism, get the best degrees, and have everyone admire you, but because that first foundational brick of maternal adoration was never laid, the structure always feels on the verge of collapse.

2. You live constantly reaching for a sense of value that should have been yours by birthright, but feeling only a dull, empty space. You find yourself apologizing for breathing, for speaking up, for simply occupying room on this earth.

3. To survive her, you also had to become a master of the air. You had to learn to read the atmospheric vibe of your home the second you stepped through the door. Your nervous system was tuned like a violin string stretched far too tight, vibrating violently at the slightest breeze.

4. You became an expert translator of heavy footsteps, the cadence of a door closing, or the icy silence that preceded a violent downpour of words.

The tragedy is that this hyper-vigilance follows you everywhere.

5. In your adult relationships, you are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. If a friend or partner is quiet for a second, your brain immediately goes into overdrive: What did I do wrong? How do I fix this? You cannot rest, because your body still believes it is living in the minefield of your childhood home.

It even makes you a stranger to your own self.

6. In many toxic African homes, the daughter’s body becomes public property—scrutinized, critiqued, and shamed. “Why is your stomach big?” “Look at how dark you are getting.” “You laugh like a loose woman.” To survive that constant bombardment, you learn to let go of yourself. You float somewhere above your own life, disconnecting from your feelings, your hunger, your fatigue, and your desire, because inhabiting your own flesh feels too dangerous.

Perhaps the most painful part of all of this is the corrupted blueprint she leaves you with for love. When she pairs affection with cruelty, your brain accepts a deeply broken translation of intimacy.

It is like being taught that water is supposed to burn and scald your throat. So when someone finally comes along and hands you a glass of cool, refreshing, easy water, you push it away.

You don’t trust it because it doesn’t hurt and your brain has been trained to believe that if there is no pain, there is no real substance. You find yourself drawn to chaotic, critical, or emotionally unavailable partners, mistaking the stomach-churning anxiety of trying to win them over for “passion.”

And even when you finally pack your bags and move out, or when you decide to go completely silent and cut her off, her voice doesn’t just stay behind.

It moves into your head. It becomes the narrator of your life. When you make a minor mistake, it’s not your voice that berates you—it’s hers, echoing with that same biting, sarcastic tone she used when you were ten years old.

Then you end up policing your own joy and sabotaging your own happiness using the exact words she spent decades teaching you.

The African Context: “I Suffered, So You Must Suffer Too”

There is also a cultural flavor to maternal trauma in African homes. It often masquerades as “discipline” or “training.”

We laugh about the flying slippers and the devastating insults (“Look at your head like...”), using humor to bandage wounds that are actually deep and infected.

But if you look under the laughter, the darkness in those shared experiences is staggering.

So many women confessed that, as little girls, they used to lie awake and actively fantasize about dying by their parents’ hands.

They didn’t want to die because they hated life; they wanted to die so that, just for a second, their parents would look at their lifeless body and feel a single, fleeting drop of guilt. They wanted the abuse to stop, and they realized the only boundary their mother might actually respect was their own death.

Yet, collectively, we still pretend this is normal.

We shrug and say “it’s just African discipline,” as if breaking a child’s spirit and driving them to crave the grave is just a tough-love parenting style. We refuse to call it what it actually is: raw, unchecked abuse.

In many households, motherhood is viewed through the lens of martyrdom. A good mother is one who has suffered.

Because many of our mothers married young, endured horrific marital abuse, starved themselves so their children could eat, and gave up their own ambitions, they internalize a dangerous subtext: If I survived hell to raise you, you do not have the right to a soft life.

So when a daughter grows up and begins to show signs of independence, joy, or beauty, it can trigger an intense, subconscious jealousy in her unhealed mother.

The mother looks at her daughter’s unwrinkled skin, her education, her opportunities, and her freedom, and instead of feeling proud, she feels a profound sense of grief for the life she never got to live.

The cruelty becomes a way of dragging the daughter down into the mud of reality. It’s an unspoken decree: I was broken, so you must be broken too.

“It’s your mother’s first time living too, give her grace”

Whenever daughters speak up about this, a very distinct type of societal gaslighting begins.

People immediately rush to the mother’s defense. They start chanting the modern mantras of therapy-speak: “You have to understand, she’s a victim of her environment too.” “Give her grace, it was her first time living too.” “She did the best she could with what she had.”

But to the daughter reading this, I want to say something very clearly: You do not owe her that grace.

This narrative is a manipulative trap designed to guilt-trip victims into silence so that society doesn’t have to look at the rot in its most sacred institution.

When people tell you to give her grace because it was her first time living, they are asking you to minimize your own devastation to make her comfort possible.

Yes, it was her first time living. But guess what? It was your first time living too.

The difference is, she was the adult. She was the one who brought a helpless, defenseless soul into this world.

You were a child. You did not ask to be her emotional punching bag or her target practice. Your need for safety, sanity, and physical survival should never have been sacrificed on the altar of her unhealed trauma.

When a mother chooses to throw sharp knives, swing heavy metal objects at her daughter’s head, and verbally destroy her spirit, she has crossed a line where “doing her best” is no longer an acceptable excuse.

You are allowed to say, “I understand she was hurt, but that does not make what she did to me okay.” You are allowed to prioritize your own survival over the excuses.

The tragedy of the mother-daughter war is that it replicates the very family and patriarchy that harmed the mother in the first place.

By breaking her daughter, the mother prepares her to accept abuse from future partners, teaching her that love is synonymous with cruelty, conditions, and constant criticism.

To the daughter reading this: Please know that you are allowed to move on.

If your mother was your first enemy, the path to healing is long, windy, and incredibly lonely.

It requires you to mourn the mother you deserved but never got.

You do not have to make excuses for the woman who spent years systematically dismantling your peace. You do not have to find peace in her presence, nor do you have to allow her continued access to the soul she tried so hard to break.

Sometimes, the most brilliant, raw, and revolutionary thing a daughter can do is to look at her mother's reflection in the mirror, gently step away, and decide that the generational curse ends with her.

You are the flower that managed to crack through the concrete. It is time to let yourself bloom in the soft light of a life you build on your own terms.

If you felt seen by these words, please know you aren’t crazy, ungrateful, or “bad” for protecting your peace. Naming the pain is how we start to heal.

Because this conversation is so vital, I hope you subscribe to my newsletter as there’ll be more conversations for you and every other woman in search of healing, direction, joy, love, and happiness.✨

I’ve also poured my heart, our shared truths as women, and our survival into something permanent: my very first book—Does Love Live Here?—is officially out on pre-order.

It is a soft place to land for every woman learning to mother herself and do better for herself—a guide, a hug, and a promise for those of us deciding to break the mirror and build a life of our own.

And if you felt seen by these words, I promise you will find a home in these pages.

You can pre-order it now via the link below—I can’t wait for you to be among the first to hold it in your hands.💓

Pre-order my book, Does Love Live Here?

Every year on this day, someone somewhere in a well-furnished office drafts a statement. They’ll use words like future, hope, investment, promise.

It will be read at a podium by someone in a well-ironed Agbada or in a well-tied Gele. Then, there will be a cake or music playing somewhere.

Children will be gathered in a hall and dressed in uniform and told to smile for an audience of adults who will take photographs and post them and go home to their children who are there, who are safe, who are whole.

And somewhere right now, in Oyo State, a mother is sitting with her hands in her lap staring at a door her child has not walked through in twelve days.

I don’t know how to hold both of those things at once. But we have to.

We have been having to in this country for so long, and with so little relief, that I think we have forgotten this is not normal. That children going to school in the morning and not coming back is not a condition of life that a people should accept. That the grief has become so familiar we have stopped fully feeling it, and that unfelt grief does not disappear—it just becomes the air we breathe, the weight we carry without knowing we are carrying it, the thing underneath every ordinary day that we do not name.

It is Children’s Day. And although I stepped out today and was elated at the Children’s Day parties and celebrations that were being held while the children scampered around, danced, and competed for gifts, I found myself half-struggling to find the cause for celebration.

On the 15th of May, twelve days ago, gunmen on motorcycles rode into the Ahoro-Esinele community in Oriire district, Oyo State. Then they raided the Baptist Nursery and Primary School in Yawota and two other schools in Esiele, seizing pupils and teachers. read here

The children taken were between two and sixteen years old. 

Two years old. Please I need you to stop on that number for a moment.

A two year old child.

A child who still needs help climbing stairs.

A child who calls every woman they meet Mummy because the world is still new enough that they have not yet learned its categories.

A child whose entire understanding of safety is the presence of a familiar adult, and who was taken, in a place that was supposed to be safe, by strangers, into a forest, and has not been seen since.

A mathematics teacher named Michael Oyedokun was killed (beheaded) while still in the hands of these kidnappers. read here

He woke up that morning the way teachers do—probably tired, probably thinking about lesson plans, probably not thinking about dying because why would he be.

He went to a classroom. He taught children how numbers work. He did not come home. Somewhere there is a family of his that woke up this morning, on Children’s Day, in the silence of a house where someone used to be and isn’t anymore. And there is no word in English or Yoruba adequate to what they are feeling today.

It’s part of why it annoys me that, today, while a government official somewhere reads a speech about Nigeria’s children being the leaders of tomorrow, those children are in a forest.

Frightened. Hungry, maybe. Missing their mothers in the way that only children can miss someone—with their whole body, completely, without the adult ability to reason their way to hope.

They are still out there. Today. On Children’s Day.

And here’s the thing about Nigeria that undoes me in a way that I cannot make peace with no matter how many times I try: we have been here before.

We have been here so many times that we’ve developed a whole ritual around it.

The condemnation from the presidency. The hashtag that trends for 72 hours. The press conference where serious people in uniforms say serious things. The promise of rescue. The follow-up story that gets less engagement than the original. The prayer crusades and night vigils and intercessions and “Holy Ghost Fire!” and “Have Faith.” The slow, devastating fade as the news cycle moves and the missing children become a statistic and the statistic becomes a reference and the reference becomes a footnote in an article about the next abduction.

And then the next abduction.

And then the one after that.

On the night of April 14th, 2014, 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State. read here

They were 16, 17 years old.

They were in the middle of preparing for their final examinations which is such a specific, ordinary, heartbreaking detail.

They were studying. They had futures mapped out in their heads—things they wanted to be, places they wanted to go, the particular private dreams of girls on the edge of becoming women. And in one night, all of it was interrupted by men with guns who took them from their beds.

The world erupted. Michelle Obama held a sign. Celebrities tweeted. There was a hashtag and a movement and a global moment of collective outrage that felt, for a brief and intoxicating moment, like it might actually change something. Like this time the noise would be loud enough that it could not be ignored.

12 years later, 87 of those girls are still unaccounted for. read here

12 years. Those girls would be twenty-eight, twenty-nine years old today.

They have spent their entire adult lives—their twenties, the years when the rest of us were figuring out who we were and falling in love and making mistakes and building things—in circumstances I cannot bring myself to fully describe on a page.

“What pains me the most,” said Ruth, a mother of two of the missing girls, “is I don’t know if they are still alive or if they have been killed. Others have seen their own children. Had they died, I would have probably moved on by now. I pray to God to show me: let me see them with my own eyes if they are alive, or let me hear that they have died.”  read here

Please read that again.

A mother asking God to at least confirm her daughters’ deaths so she can grieve properly. Because the not-knowing that has lasted 12 years, 12 Children’s Days, 12 Christmases, 12 Ramadans, 12 Eid Mubarak, 12 birthdays, is its own sustained cruelty that no language I know has an adequate word for.

It is grief without a grave. It is loss without a conclusion. It is waking up every single morning and not knowing whether to mourn or to hope and having to choose, again, to hope, because the alternative is a darkness she cannot afford to enter.

12 years of that. And the government has largely moved on.

A tally by the Associated Press shows at least 1,799 students have been seized in a dozen of the largest abductions since the 2014 Chibok attack. read here

1,799 children.

Each of them with a name.

Each of them with a family who has sat in a room somewhere in this country doing the same thing that mother in Oyo is doing right now—waiting, and praying, and trying not to think too hard about what waiting and praying has looked like for the families in Chibok who have been doing it for twelve years.

This is not a crisis anymore. Because crises, at least, have a beginning and a middle and, eventually, an end.

This is a pattern. This is a policy failure so sustained, so entrenched, so catastrophically normalized that it has become part of the texture of Nigerian life—the same way the sound of a generator becomes part of the texture of Nigerian life, background noise you stop consciously registering even though it is always there, even though it represents a failure so fundamental that its normalization is itself the scandal.

We have adjusted.

And of course we have—we are Nigerians, and adjusting is what we do, it is the specific genius and the specific tragedy of this people.

We have learned to live inside a situation that should be producing ungovernable, sustained, society-altering outrage, and we have called it resilience, and sometimes it is resilience, and sometimes it is just grief that has nowhere left to go.

And I want to say something about what it means to be an adult in this country today, because the conversation about safety in Nigeria does not begin and end with children, and I think we owe each other the honesty of saying that.

The adults are not safe either.

The person driving to work is not safe. The person on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is not safe. The person worshipping in a church on a Sunday morning is not safe. I mean, there was even a Catholic church bombing in Owo, Ondo State that killed 50 worshippers in 2022, and that doesn’t even encompass the number of endless killings of Christians that has gone on for years in this country. read here

The market woman who leaves before dawn is not safe. The student on a campus in the northwest is not safe. The farmer on his own land in the south and in the north is not safe. The family sleeping in a community where armed men move between states freely and at will, who plant explosives on rescue routes like they own the country is not safe.

What we are all managing, every single day in this country, is a negotiation with danger that we have no name for because naming it would require us to fully acknowledge what it means.

We calculate routes. We travel in daylight. We check in when we arrive so someone knows we made it. We have developed a sixth sense for when something feels wrong because that sense has been useful often enough that it has sharpened into a survival tool. We live with a low, persistent, chronic anxiety underneath everything—underneath the jokes, underneath the hustle, underneath the extraordinary, infuriating, beautiful Nigerian capacity for joy—and we have normalized it so completely that we have forgotten it was never supposed to be there.

This is not living. This is survival performing the role of living because we have no other option and because this country has never given us the luxury of the difference.

We deserve the difference.

We have always deserved it. Every one of us, and every child among us, was supposed to have it.

And so, I hope they come home.

I hope they all come home—the 39 taken this month, and the ones taken last year, and the ones taken the year before, and the 87 Chibok girls who have been gone for twelve years and whose mothers are still waiting with a faithfulness that is either the most devastating or the most sacred thing I have ever encountered and I genuinely cannot decide which.

I hope one day we live in a country where Children’s Day is only a celebration.

Where it does not carry underneath it this silent, collective acknowledgement of all the children who are not here to be celebrated.

Where a child going to school in the morning is so unremarkably, boringly, completely safe that nobody feels the need to mark it or be grateful for it. Where safety is not a privilege that some children have and others don’t depending on which part of this country they were born into. Where a mother sends her child to school and thinks about nothing except what they should eat for dinner.

I hope we make a choice, as a people, that requires people in power to decide that the lives of ordinary Nigerian children are worth the same sustained, resourced, urgent attention as anything else they apply themselves to when they want results. Not just in speeches. But also in action and in the kind of political will that does not evaporate after the press conference and does not require a hashtag to activate.

We are owed that country.

Our children are owed it.

Please, bring these kids home.

I have been thinking about love all week.

But not in a sad way.

Instead, in the way it sneaks up on you when you’re not expecting to be moved and then something cracks open—in this case, four people getting on a rocket and going to the moon—and suddenly you’re sitting with your whole chest wide open praying for their safe return (splashdown).

Which they did: at exactly 8:07pm ET, April 10 2026.

That’s what happened to people this week. The entire world went quiet for a moment and just felt something.

Different people from differing ages, races, cultures, religions, backgrounds all debated about mathematical calculations, the beauty of the moon mission, the risk the mission could come with, and how they hoped the Artemis II would splashdown safely.

And it got me thinking: Why did four people going to the moon make so many of us suddenly want to call someone? Suddenly want to say something we’d been sitting on? Suddenly feel the full weight of everyone we love and how little we tell them?

I think it’s because from that far away, everything unnecessary falls off. The noise goes quiet. The distractions dissolve. And what’s left is always, always the same thing.

Love.

After the crew left Earth, three of them pulled their commander—Reid Wiseman—aside and told him they wanted to name a crater on the moon after his late wife, Carroll. When they flew past it and someone spelled out her name—C, A, R, R, O, L, L—they all broke down.

Over 252,000 miles from home, four people held each other and wept.

That moment broke me open a little. And that’s because it was so quietly, devastatingly human.

Nobody put it in the mission brief.

Nobody asked them to do it.

They just loved their person and decided to show it in the most permanent way they could find—which happened to be the moon, but the moon was just what was available.

Love always finds what’s available.

This is the thing about love that ordinary life keeps making us forget: it does not require the right moment. It does not require the perfect words or the grand occasion or the stars aligning first.

It only requires someone paying close enough attention to notice what matters to you and then doing something about it. Without waiting to be asked.

One of the astronauts was asked what the highlight of the whole mission was.

But he didn’t mention the lunar flyby, or breaking the human distance record, or even seeing the moon up close for the first time in fifty years lmao.

He said it was the conversation with his daughters. Just the three of them, communicating, across hundreds of thousands of miles of dark.

I have read that quote four times and it undoes me every time.

Because we spend so much of our lives waiting to have something worth showing for ourselves before we fully show up for the people we love. Waiting until things are sorted. Until we’ve arrived somewhere. Until we have good news, or more time, or more energy, or a better version of ourselves to offer.

And here is a man at the farthest point any human has ever been from Earth, having just done one of the most extraordinary things a human being has ever done, and the best moment of the whole thing was his daughters. Just that. Just them.

Love is not impressed by your achievements. It is not waiting for you to become more worthy of it. It has never cared about your credentials.

It only wants the thing that you keep thinking you’ll give it later—your actual presence. Your full, undivided, unhurried attention.

Just you. Just them. Just this.

There is also something this mission said about work, about what it looks like to love what you do so completely that you would leave Earth for it.

Three years of training for ten days in space. Three years of preparing for every possible thing that could go wrong somewhere no one can reach you, and then getting on the rocket anyway, because the work was that worth it.

Because the dream was that specific, that deep, that irreversibly theirs.

I think about how many of us are doing work that we are merely enduring. Work that we have made peace with, that pays the bills, that is fine.

And fine is not nothing.

But fine isn’t the feeling that comes with watching your life’s work take off; the kind that gladly overwhelms you enough to forget everything else.

You deserve work that asks something real of you. Work that is connected to something you actually believe in, something that would still matter to you even if no one was watching, even if no one was impressed.

Work that you would do thoroughly, not because someone is checking, but because you cannot stand to do it any other way.

The crew woke up one morning to Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” playing from mission control.

Because going to the moon does not mean you cannot also have fun. Joy is not the enemy of serious work or serious love or serious grief. It is what makes all three survivable.

This is permission, if you needed someone to give it to you, to leave room for the lightness in the middle of the heavy season.

Do not let life make you too serious for joy.

Do not let loss make you too careful for love.

Do not let the weight of everything that matters make you forget to be present for any of it.

We say “I love you to the moon and back” like it’s a small, bedtime, throwaway thing. A sweetness. A reflex.

But love—love that names craters after people it has lost, love that calls home from the edge of the universe just to hear a familiar voice, love that shows up without being asked and stays without being begged—that is not small.

That is the most serious thing we do with our lives. The most demanding. The most worth it.

And here is what I keep coming back to: from 252,000 miles away, looking at the whole Earth through one small window… what those astronauts kept talking about was gratitude.

For the planet. For each other. For the staggering, unlikely, unearned gift of being alive on this specific rock, with these specific people, with this specific one chance to do something with it.

And I think that is the thing the moon reminded all of us of this week, whether we wanted to be reminded or not.

That we are not here forever.

That the people we love are not here forever.

That the ordinary days, the unremarkable phone call, the dinner that wasn’t special and the conversation that didn’t go anywhere particular—those are the actual contents of a life.

Those are what we will reach for when everything else falls away.

Don’t wait for the extraordinary moment to love people extraordinarily well. The moment is now. It has always been now. It is so stubbornly, insistently now.

And you should never forget to give and receive love as fully as you can, in all that you do and all that you are.❤️

Once again, congratulations to the Artemis II for showing humanity what love, passion, and humanity is really all about. If you read this to the end, I love you to the moon and back.✨

At some point, every woman has been asked a simple question—what do you want, what do you like, what would make you happy, what’s your favorite color—and has felt, in that moment, genuinely stumped. Not because she is simple or incurious or hasn’t thought about herself. But because she has spent so long thinking about everyone else that the question of herself feels almost foreign.

It’s a strange thing to discover.

That you have preferences you cannot exactly name. That your favorite color is somewhere underneath what everyone else thinks it should be. That the life you have assembled around you fits everyone except you.

Here is something nobody says enough: selfishness has a terrible reputation and women are the ones paying for it.

We have been taught, from an age young enough that we cannot remember being taught it, that a good woman is a giving woman.

That her value lives in her usefulness. That the measure of her character is how much she is willing to sacrifice and how gracefully she does the sacrificing. That wanting things—openly, unapologetically, just for herself—is a character flaw dressed in a very unflattering outfit.

And so we learn early.

We learn to want smaller. We learn to frame our needs as suggestions. We learn to say “I don’t mind” when we very much do mind, because minding is inconvenient, and inconvenient women make people uncomfortable, and making people uncomfortable has consequences that not minding simply doesn’t.

We get very good at it. We get so good at it that it stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like personality. Like this is just who we are—easy, flexible, accommodating, fine with whatever.

And then one day someone asks us what we want and we sit there in genuine confusion, and we laugh it off, and we don’t examine why it took that long to answer, and we choose what seems least complicated.

The word selfish needs a serious rebrand, and I am volunteering to start the conversation.

Right now, selfish means greedy. Thoughtless. A woman who takes without giving, who prioritizes herself at other people’s expense, who has decided the world exists to serve her specifically.

And yes, that version exists. That version is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the other thing. The smaller, quieter, more necessary thing. The thing that is actually just: knowing what you want and occasionally choosing it.

Having needs and naming them without an apology stapled to the front. Saying no to something that doesn’t serve you without a long explanation of why you’re saying no. Wanting something purely for yourself and not needing that want to be justified by how it will benefit someone else first.

That version of selfish is not greed. It is basic self-knowledge. It is the foundation of every healthy relationship you will ever have. And most women have been scared out of it since certain pivotal moments of their lives.

Think about how we were raised.

Think about the little girls who were praised for sharing everything, for being the peacemakers, for making sure everyone else was comfortable before they thought about themselves.

Think about how bossy became an insult applied almost exclusively to girls who knew what they wanted and said so out loud.

Think about how early the message arrived: your job is to manage the comfort of the people around you, and your own comfort is a secondary concern that you may attend to once everyone else has been sorted.

Now think about what that does to a grown woman.

It makes her apologize before she asks for things. It makes her frame her preferences as questions—“we could maybe do this if you want?”—when she means statements.

It makes her so skilled at reading other people’s needs that she has almost no practice reading her own.

It makes her feel guilty about rest, guilty about ambition, guilty about the money she spends on herself, guilty about the time she takes, guilty about the space she occupies.

It makes her believe that the version of her that is useful is the version that is lovable.

And the sneaky part—the part that makes this so difficult to untangle—is that a lot of it is wrapped in things that genuinely feel like love.

Because she does love the people she sacrifices for.

When she gives up the last piece of something, when she rearranges her schedule without being asked, when she swallows the thing she needed to say because this isn’t the right time—it comes from love.

It is love.

It’s just love that has been trained to express itself exclusively through self-erasure.

Because here is what happens when a woman never practices the appropriate selfishness of knowing and choosing herself: she starts to lose shape. In the small daily erosions of never being the first person she considers. Her opinions get quieter. Her needs get smaller. Her dreams start living in the conditional tense—someday, maybe, if everything else works out first.

She starts building her entire identity around her relationships to other people—daughter, mother, partner, friend—because those are the versions of herself that have always been celebrated, and the version of herself that exists independently, that wants things for no reason other than that she wants them, never quite got the chance to grow up.

We all know a woman like this.

She might be us.

She might be sitting right next to us.

She might be the woman we call when everything falls apart, the one who shows up every time, the one everyone describes as “the most giving person I know” with a warmth that is also, quietly, the whole problem.

She never complains. She never inconveniences anyone. She has an extraordinary ability to sense what is needed in a room and quietly provide it before anyone has to ask. Everyone loves being around her.

And underneath all that giving, she is running on almost nothing.

The day she starts being even a little bit selfish—starts saying what she actually thinks, starts choosing plans that genuinely excite her, starts spending money on herself without guilt—some people find her more difficult. Some people say she has changed. Some relationships shift.

She has to sit with that discomfort, and it is real discomfort, and it does not feel like freedom at first.

But she also, for the first time in a long time, recognizes herself. There is a person there she can locate. A want she has for her own life that feels like a real thing taking up real space.

And that is not a small thing. That is, actually, everything.

Here is the specific selfishness I am asking for, on your behalf, because we clearly need someone to do this:

1. The selfishness of knowing what you like and saying so without framing it as a suggestion.

2. The selfishness of rest, not rest that you have earned through sufficient productivity, just rest because you are a human being and human beings require it.

3. The selfishness of ambition that does not apologize for its size.

4. The selfishness of anger that does not immediately swallow itself to protect everyone else’s comfort.

5. The selfishness of money spent on yourself without needing to justify it to anyone.

6. The selfishness of a dream you have not made practical yet.

7. The selfishness of a no that does not come with an explanation.

8. The selfishness of occasionally, on purpose, being the first person you consider.

None of this means stop loving people. None of this means become someone who takes without giving or who mistakes volume for strength or who confuses self-centeredness with self-respect. Those are not the same things and you already know that.

It means understanding that you cannot pour from an empty cup, and also that even if you could, you would still deserve to keep some for yourself. Not because of what you have earned. Not because of what you are going to use it for. Just because it is yours.

It means understanding that a woman who knows herself, who chooses herself sometimes, who has a self that is distinct from her relationships to other people, is not selfish in the pejorative sense.

She is a whole person. And whole people make better daughters, better mothers, better partners, better friends—not because their wholeness is in service of everyone else, but because it’s simply true, and it happens to benefit everyone else as a beautiful, unrequested side effect.

But that is not why you should do it. You should do it because you are a person and your life belongs to you and the sooner you stop treating that as a radical statement, the better off you will be.

So, what is your favorite color?

Not the one you think is cool because others like it, or the one you’ve been told suits you.

Instead, what’s yours? The one you actually want. The one that, if it were only ever you, just you, no one else to factor in, you would choose without a second thought.

If the answer came quickly, good. Hold onto it.

If it took a moment—if you had to dig for it, if it felt strange to even frame the question that way—then that is exactly what we are working on.

Start there. Start with the color.

And the rest will follow.

Toodles!😚

If this meant something to you, I’m happy it did!

And if you know a girl who has been giving and giving until she’s become a little hard to find underneath all that generosity, send this to her. She’ll know exactly what you mean.

Sending you all my love!❤️