Every argument I could make, I’d already made. The reasons to go ahead were lined up and none of them were flimsy. If a stranger had brought me this exact decision as their own, I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell them to go.

But I didn’t. Not right away.

I kept looking for the hole in my own reasoning, rechecking it the way I’d redo a math problem I’d already gotten right, just to see if it would come out different this time.

It didn’t. There wasn’t a hole.

That was almost worse.

If the logic had actually been weak somewhere, I’d have had something to point to. Instead, I had a decision that made sense from every angle I turned it, and a body that still wouldn’t move.

I told myself I was being careful. Thorough. That I was being wise, taking my time, not rushing something that mattered. It’s a flattering word. It’s also, from the inside, almost impossible to tell apart from being afraid.

At some point I stopped asking whether the decision was right. I already knew that part. What I started asking instead was smaller and harder to sit with: if this is right, why do I have to talk myself back into it every single day, like it’s a fact that doesn’t stay true unless I keep repeating it?

I don’t have a clean answer to that one. I’ve since made the decision — that part is finished. What isn’t finished is understanding why knowing something was true was never, on its own, enough to make me act on it.

I keep wondering whether that’s because I was asking logic to do a job it was never built for.

I could tell you exactly why the decision made sense. I could not tell you why my legs wouldn’t move toward it anyway. I had a compelling case. I just didn’t have anything that could talk my fear out of the room.

Maybe that’s why I got so exhausted trying to think my way into courage. I kept assuming there was one more insight I hadn’t found yet, one more sign that would finally tip the scale, as though courage was something that arrives after enough evidence. I’m starting to think it isn’t.

The strange thing is that, looking back, I don’t think I needed more information. I needed permission to stop collecting it. Not because information is bad, but because there comes a point where gathering more of it becomes a way of postponing the responsibility of choosing.

It’s uncomfortable to admit that sometimes the obstacle wasn’t confusion at all. It was the quiet hope that if I waited long enough, the decision would somehow make itself. That circumstances would change. That certainty would become impossible to ignore. That I wouldn’t have to carry the weight of choosing, because something else would choose for me.

It rarely does. At some point, even not choosing becomes a choice. I think that’s what I’ve come to understand.

Not that logic didn’t matter — it did. It kept me from a few impulsive decisions, and it was right that my feelings alone weren’t something to fully trust either.

But logic had limits.

At some point it reached a place where it seemed to say,

I’ve taken you as far as I can.

Everything after that belonged to something else.

I’ve called it faith.

I’ve called it trust.

I’ve called it courage.

I’m not sure those words are as different as I’ve made them out to be.

All I know is that every decision I’ve made that actually mattered has eventually arrived at that same edge — the place where the facts stopped changing, but I still had to.

Maybe that’s what I was resisting all along.

Not the decision,

But the version of myself that would exist on the other side of it.

Because this decision asked something of me.

It asked me to let go of the comfort of endless deliberation.

It asked me to accept that I wouldn’t know everything beforehand.

It asked me to become the kind of person who could move without being certain.

I used to think that was weakness.

Now I wonder if that’s what faith has always looked like.

Not having enough reasons to eliminate every doubt.

Just having enough trust to take the next step anyway.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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I don’t usually write like this.
Most of what I share here is unfinished — a question I’m still inside of, not an answer I’ve arrived at. The slow work of figuring out who I’m becoming.

But this month has been different, because the thing I’ve spent it telling you about is the one thing in five years I haven’t second-guessed.

Having to share my salvation story with you this past few weeks has had an unexpected effect — gratitude, mostly.

If there’s been any benefit to going through all this, it’s the fact that I get to appreciate and be grateful to God, for how far He has brought me since the day I made the decision to try Him.

I would admit,
I’m not living my best life yet, but I’m not where I used to be.

That confused, struggling person with unanswered questions has traded certainty for something steadier — the assurance of His peace and presence, which has been enough for me.

If any part of what I’ve shared this month sounds like something you’ve felt, that quiet sense that something’s missing and you don’t know what, I don’t have a formula for you.

I only have what worked for me.
I told Him the truth, and I gave Him a try.

If you want to do the same,you don’t need better words than the ones I had:

Jesus, I’ve tried every other thing and it didn’t work. I’m willing to give you a try.

That’s it.
That’s the whole prayer.

If you said it and meant it, I’d genuinely love to hear from you, not because I need to know, but because I remember what it felt like to have someone to tell.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Last time,
I told you about the day everything changed.

This week,
I want to tell you what actually happened in the years since. Not the version that sounds good in a testimony, the real one.

I can say this without needing to dress it up: I have no regrets.
Shortly after I gave my life to Christ, something interesting began to happen.

I began studying the Bible daily, and every day I did, I always found something that either related to a challenge or a situation I’d faced the previous day, or a word that would come in handy during the course of the present day.

I was amazed.
It was a really great feeling to be guided on how to handle certain issues better than I normally would.

It was like I was prepared for anything. Nothing could take me by surprise anymore.

Another thing following God has done for me is give me the ability to make hard decisions that actually moved my life forward — the kind I knew I needed to make, but couldn’t always find the will for on my own.

There were decisions I had to make, habits I had to stop, people I had to disconnect from, because of what they were doing to my life, but I couldn’t muster the willpower to do it on my own.

After letting Him into my life, I noticed that the things I once felt had such a stronghold on my life, really had no power over me anymore, and I was able to give them up and pick up healthier habits and work towards breaking free.

What I can say for certain, across all of it,

is that I stopped having to go through life alone.

There’s something to having an all-expense paid tour guide through the jungle of life, knowing the one walking with you already knows the way out, even on the days you can’t see it yourself.

See you next week for the final piece!

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Last time,
I told you about the day I finally admitted I couldn’t carry everything by myself anymore.

This is what happened next, and today’s actually the date.
Five years ago,this is exactly how it went.

We (my best friend and I) went looking for a quiet, comfortable place to talk, which led us to the university chapel.

I opened up about everything going on.
I couldn’t take it anymore, and I was willing to accept any solution to everything trying to swallow me whole.

When I finished pouring out my heart, he had a calm, almost expressionless reaction to everything i had said. Not because he was judgmental or short of words, but because he understood exactly where I was, because he’d been there himself.

After listening, he had a few things to say about some of what I’d mentioned.

Then he said the thing I was most glad he did:

“Go to the altar and tell Jesus about everything. If you don’t tell him, I would know.”

That sounds funny now, looking back.
It wasn’t the conventional way of leading someone to Christ.
No “lift up your right hand and repeat after me.”, the whole theatrics
But it was a simple, effective way to reach a young man desperate for a way out.

I did as he said. Went to the altar, don’t even know when my knees got to the ground, because I was tired of what life looked like at the time, and said the only prayer I could manage:

“Jesus, I’ve tried every other thing and it didn’t work. I’m willing to give you a try.”

That was all I could muster.
I got up, went back to my friend, and we went about the rest of our day.

Now, I know that’s not the most dramatic salvation story you’ve heard.
I felt the same way at the time.
I was expecting the whole speech of “now that you’re born again, here are your dos and don’ts,” but I didn’t get any of that.

Life just continued.

But one thing I can say without a shadow of doubt, is that everything began to change after that day.

I started experiencing a peace I’d never felt before
all the worrying, all the noise in my head, just seemed to disappear.

I couldn’t believe it.
The things I used to struggle with stopped having a hold on me.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Last week,
I told you about the quiet discomfort of watching my two closest friends move toward something I wasn’t ready to admit I wanted too.

This week is about what happened after.

A few months later, the life I thought was on a smooth sail began having some trouble.
Academic struggle that came out of nowhere.
Financial pressure.
And some personal troubles which felt too big for one person to be dealing with all alone.

It felt like the good life I thought I had had suddenly begun to come apart.

I got myself mixed up in a few things I’m not proud of, just to try to take the edge off,
to escape the reality of the troubles I was facing — but they never seemed to satisfy.

I tried so many things in an attempt to get my life back in order, but still couldn’t find a permanent solution.

I had lost my peace.
Struggling with all of it left me with this constant feeling of something in my life was missing, but I didn’t know what it was, or how to even find it.

I went through my days like I was fine, because for some reason,
I didn’t want anyone to know I had problems.

There was a fateful Wednesday which, now that I look back, was the beginning of the end of my struggles.
I decided to go to church for a service that wasn’t compulsory. This was to the surprise of a number of people.🙄

Anyway, I got to church, and something that had never happened to me before happened that day.

Everything the preacher was saying felt like someone, or rather something, had revealed to this man exactly what my past and present problems were, and he was just going on about it.

It felt like all my secrets were exposed to the world.
But that sermon was one of the most convincing ones I’ve ever listened to in my life.

It hurt, but it made me feel safe, seen.
Like there was someone who knew everything I was struggling with, was willing to see me in it, and wanted to pull me out of it.

That sermon didn’t get me to tell anyone anything, but it was the beginning of admitting to myself that I had something to tell.

One fateful day, I’d had just about enough of everything going on, and I decided to open up to my best friend.

I just told him we had to talk, and he was ever ready to hear what I had to say.

I didn’t know it yet, but that conversation was about to change everything.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Last month, we talked about something I think every one of us wrestles with at some point — identity.

Who exactly am I?
What was I made for?

This month, I want to talk about something even closer to me.
Five years ago, I said the simplest, least dramatic prayer of my life, and somehow everything changed after it. I’m spending July telling that story here, piece by piece, the way it actually happened — not the polished version, the real one.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In 2021, I was in my first year of university, and everything seemed to be going fine. My grades were in a good position, finances weren’t luxury but things were alright, I had people I could call friends. I was living the life, or so I thought.

I had two close friends, one who’s still my best friend till date, and another who is still a close friend of mine. We did everything together — ate together, went to classes together, the usual. Everything stayed that way until they started doing something I wasn’t interested in at the time: going for church programs.

Now don’t get me wrong, I was also a Christian by every religious standard. I was born into a Christian home (a pastor’s family, to be precise), knew all the religious activities, and could recite and explain Bible passages to you extensively, like a proper believer would. But deep down, I knew I didn’t have a personal relationship with God, and I wasn’t in a hurry to fix that.

I’m sure you’re wondering why someone with that much exposure to the faith didn’t want to be serious about it. Looking back, I think it was because I had an idea of what following God meant — commitment and consistency, two attributes I believed I didn’t have in me to uphold. Not a wrong instinct to have. Just not the right place to end the story.

My two close friends were going for extra church programs I wasn’t attending. We were at a Christian university, so some services were non-negotiable. I attended those and did nothing more.

If it wasn’t compulsory, I wasn’t interested.

I began to feel like my two closest friends were having more time together without me, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. Looking back now, I think the discomfort wasn’t really about losing time with them. It was something else — something I didn’t have a name for yet.

That’s where I’ll leave it for now. Next week — what happened when the rest of my life stopped going as smoothly as I thought it was.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”

— Alexis Carrel

Nobody tells you that looking inward is one of the hardest things you will ever do.

We talk about self-discovery like it’s a pleasant exercise. Like one day you sit quietly, ask yourself a few deep questions, and the answers arrive neatly — here is who you are, here is what you’re for, here is the version of yourself you’ve been waiting to meet.

It doesn’t work like that.

What actually happens when you start looking is this: you find things, and not all of them are comfortable.

Some of what you find is good — the gifts you had dismissed, strengths you had been sitting on without realising it.

But others are harder to face. Beliefs you had been carrying about yourself that were never true. Versions of yourself you had performed for so long you had mistaken them for the real thing. Patterns you had repeated in relationships, in decisions, in the way you showed up — that only made sense once you were honest enough to trace them back to their source.

That is where the suffering Carrel is talking about lives. Not in some dramatic collapse, but in the quiet, uncomfortable work of seeing yourself clearly and deciding to do something about it.

For me, this journey has looked like a continuous process of learning, unlearning, and relearning. And I want to be honest — it has been as challenging as it has been rewarding. One of the most humbling things I have had to sit with is that the more you commit to knowing yourself, the more you realise how much of what you were certain about was incomplete. Some of those old convictions needed refining. Others needed replacing entirely. Either way, the certainty had to go first.

What I didn’t expect was where that process would begin. Of all the places to start, it started with the one relationship I had been neglecting the most — the one with my creator.

But I want to be honest about what that looked like initially, because I think a lot of people will recognise this version of it. It wasn’t a genuine pursuit at first. It was religious activity. Church, the routines, the rituals — all the theatrics that come with showing up without really being present. There was no real relationship. Just activity dressed up as one.

And when the identity crisis hit and I started searching, I’ll admit the motivation wasn’t entirely pure either. It felt like an equation at the time — get closer to God, do all the right things, and he would hand me the answers I was looking for. A transaction disguised as devotion.

What I didn’t expect was what the process would actually produce the longer I stayed in it.

The answers didn’t arrive on my schedule. But something else did — a gradual, quiet shift in why I was showing up at all. It stopped feeling like a negotiation and started feeling like something I genuinely wanted. Not because of what I stood to gain, but because of who I was getting to know.

That distinction — following God for what he gives versus who he is — sounds simple when you say it out loud. Living your way into understanding it is something else entirely.

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” — Matthew 6:33

The verse I had probably heard a hundred times before started to mean something different. Not as a formula — do this, get that. But as an invitation to reorder what I was actually after.

From there, something else happened that I hadn’t anticipated. Growth stopped feeling like a series of isolated decisions and started feeling like a single, connected movement. Once I began to build intentionally in one area, I started noticing the gaps in others. My spiritual life was improving — and suddenly my personal habits felt inconsistent with that. So I worked on those. Then my finances felt misaligned. Then how I led, how I worked, how I showed up in rooms.

It’s like pulling a loose thread. Once you start, you can’t un-find the others.

My decisions started to look different — not because I suddenly had all the answers, but because I knew myself well enough to ask better questions before acting. The people I gravitated toward shifted. I found myself less drawn to rooms where I had to shrink, and more drawn to people doing the same honest work on themselves that I was trying to do.

That’s not a small thing. That’s a whole life, slowly reorienting.

But I want to be careful not to make this sound too clean. Because even as I write this, the process is still ongoing. There are still layers I haven’t reached. Still assumptions I’m carrying that I haven’t examined closely enough. Still moments where I catch myself slipping back into an old version of myself I thought I had moved past.

That’s the thing about being both the marble and the sculptor. The work doesn’t stop. You don’t arrive at a finished version of yourself and set down the tools. You just get better at holding them.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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These are questions I spent a long time being unable to answer honestly.

For the longest time, I based my identity on academic validation.
I had told myself that the “only thing” I was good for was anything academically related.

In secondary school, I wasn’t involved in any other kind of social activity — not because I didn’t want to. Deep down, I really wanted to be one of the people everyone considered the “cool kids.” (The people everyone always wanted to be around, who seemed to be the best at every sport, most social, you get the gist)

But for some reason, that wasn’t me. That wasn’t my strength.

So I looked inward, and the one area with the least amount of struggle was academics.
I convinced myself: this is what I am good for. If I want to be relevant, I need to be the best at this.

It felt like direction. It felt like a self.

Fast forward to university,
I had been doing well from first year through the first semester of second year.
Then everything changed.

For the first time in my life, I had an unfavorable result.

Some might argue it wasn’t that bad, but for someone who had built his entire identity around academic excellence, it was nerve-wracking.

I wasn’t used to failure. Not academically, and not in any area of my life so this was a feeling I didn’t know how to process.

I arrived at what felt like the only logical conclusion:

“I once thought I was good at this. This result says otherwise.”

“If academics isn’t my strength, then what actually is?”

I was having an identity crisis. The one thing I had believed to be true about myself wasn’t holding anymore. And as someone who needed a sufficient level of certainty in everything, I was lost.

But looking back, I believe that academic setback was one of the ways God used to set me on the path of self-discovery.

After I came to terms with the new reality — that I genuinely had no idea who I was or what I was capable of becoming, I began asking questions I had asked before, but this time with real urgency:

“Who exactly am I?” “What exactly are my strengths?” “What on earth am I here for?”

The last question turned out to matter most.

The following semester, a lecturer I will forever be grateful to, stood at the front of a class I can barely remember. I couldn’t tell you the topic or what was discussed that day. But I will never forget a recommended text he gave:

Rick Warren. The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?

The first part of the title didn’t stick. The second part felt like someone had reached into my chest and pulled out the exact question my soul had been carrying. I wrote it down. I got the book after class.

While reading, I arrived at something I hadn’t been expecting.

I found out that the search for meaning isn’t primarily outward. It doesn’t start with what you’re good at, or what your results say about you. It starts with admitting you don’t fully know yourself, and turning toward the one who made you to ask.

Two scriptures met me in that season:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart.”
— Jeremiah 1:5

“Call unto me and I will answer thee, and show you great and mighty things which thou knowest not.”
— Jeremiah 33:3

What struck me wasn’t just the promise.
It was what the promise implied, that God had already formed an idea of me before I had any say in the matter. Which meant that the question who am I was never fully mine to answer alone. I just needed to learn to ask the right person.

I won’t tell you I had everything figured out after that book. I didn’t and still don’t. But something shifted. Not toward certainty, but toward a different kind of question. Less of “what am I good at?” and more “what was I made for?” Those sound similar. They’re not. One starts with you and ends at a ceiling. The other starts somewhere further back, before you even had an opinion about yourself.

Self-discovery has been one of the most rewarding journeys I have ever embarked on. I’m still on it and honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The fact that there is still more to uncover, more to understand, more to become, isn’t a problem to solve.

That’s the point!

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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I’m not even sure when it started. It just always was.
That quiet, persistent awareness that everyone else seemed to be part of something and I wasn’t. Not in a dramatic, obvious way, just that people had other people.
People except me.

In secondary school I wanted to be one of the cool kids.

You know the ones. The ones who moved through the hallways like they owned them, who always had people around them, who never seemed to be searching for somewhere to belong because they already did.

I watched them more than I’d like to admit. Not with bitterness exactly. More like the way you watch something you want but can’t quite reach — quietly, from a distance, hoping nobody notices you noticing.

I tried a few times, I think, to initiate something. To find a way in.
But mostly I just watched. And the hardest part wasn’t being rejected, it was being invisible. Rejection at least means someone noticed you were there. Invisibility means you weren’t even in the equation.

So I did what made sense at the time. I looked inward for something I could actually stand on that would give me some level or relevance (or fame if you may), and found that the thing with the least resistance was academics.

I was good at it. Or at least, I didn’t struggle the way others seemed to. So I built myself around that instead.
If I couldn’t belong the way they did, at least I could be the best at something. It felt like a decision.

“that would still make me relevant”, i told myself.

Like choosing the option that was actually available to me rather than the one I actually wanted.

I told myself that was enough.
It wasn’t.

A few years later, i got into the university, and I saw this as a second chance at my social life.

New environment. New people. No history. Nobody knew the secondary school version of me — the one who watched from the outside and built a whole identity around not needing what he actually needed.

“I could be different here”.
Or at least I could make sure the same cycle didn’t repeat itself.

So when I arrived, I did something that made complete sense at the time and very little sense looking back.
I attached myself to the first set of people I came across.

Quickly, Before the loneliness could settle in again.

I told myself I had finally found my people.

What I had actually found was a temporary fix for a feeling I had been carrying for years. And I mistook the relief of not being alone for actual belonging.

They weren’t bad people — I want to be clear about that.

It’s not like the signs were obvious from the beginning, but the closer you let people in, the more you start to see and slowly, things started showing up that I wouldn’t normally have agreed with.
Things I couldn’t fully ignore. But I made the compromise most people make — nobody’s perfect, everyone has flaws, you learn to live with it.

The mistake I made wasn’t accepting that people have flaws. It was not asking myself honestly: which flaws can I actually live with?, and which ones should be sending me in the other direction (away from them)? I wasn’t asking that question.
I was asking a different one — is this better than being alone? And the answer kept coming back as yes. So I stayed.

There’s a moment I keep coming back to.

We were in a lecture. I was doing what I had always done — sitting at the front, raising my hand, asking questions, participating. That was just me. It was natural. And then one of them leaned over and told me to stop, that I was “drawing too much attention.”

I put my hand down.
Just like that.

You’re surprised right?, I am too.

Something in me registered in that moment that this didn’t feel right. Some quiet signal I shouldn’t ignore but chose to anyway. Because I was more concerned with not being alone than with being myself.

That became the pattern.

Small things at first. Then not so small. The expressive, curious version of me that had always shown up loudly started to go quiet. Lay low. Don’t draw too much attention, fit in. And for a while it worked — in the sense that I was no longer alone.

But I was disappearing. Slowly, piece by piece.

There wasn’t a dramatic moment when I realized it.

One day I just looked at how I was living and held it next to the mental image I had of myself and realized they didn’t match anymore. The person I thought I was and the person I had been showing up as — they had become two different people.

And I remember sitting with that realization and not knowing what to do with it. Not yet. Just knowing that something had gone wrong somewhere along the way and that I had let it happen because belonging — or, what I thought was belonging had felt more urgent than being myself.

So i made a decision, to part ways with my first set of friends, and this wasn’t easy.

Part of what made leaving so hard was the thought that they were the only people I had that I could call mine. That if I walked away, I’d be back at the beginning — invisible again, watching from the outside again, alone again.

But I left anyway. Quietly, without a clean explanation, without a goodbye that made sense to anyone but me.

Most of them were offended. Some asked for explanations I didn’t know how to give. One asked if everything was okay and I gave him an answer I was sure he could receive. Two others shrugged — it’s your life, do as you please, no hard feelings.

What I didn’t expect was what I found on the other side of that decision.

There were already people in my life — people who had been there the whole time, that I hadn’t given the same attention or relevance. People I had overlooked because I was so focused on belonging to the wrong group that I hadn’t noticed what I already had.

Leaving didn’t feel like what I feared. Sometimes you feel like you’ve lost something. But then you look at what you actually have and you’re just — grateful.
Grateful you found it before it was too late.

It may have looked like it cost me my friends. But my identity wasn’t a price I was willing to pay for belonging that was costing me myself.

‎Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Here it is:

The thing I kept telling myself was that it was small.

Manageable.

The kind of thing you address when life slows down enough to give you the space.

And so I left it where it was, filed under later, and kept moving.

What I didn’t anticipate was that the ignoring itself would become the problem.

Not the original issue. The ignoring of it.

The collapse I didn’t see coming

Unaddressed things don’t stay in one place.

They bleed. Into your relationships. Into your work. Into your faith. Into decisions you thought had nothing to do with the original wound.

You think you’re managing one small thing in one corner of your life, and then one day you look around and realize the corners have been quietly talking to each other the whole time.

Things started collapsing. Not dramatically — but visibly enough that I could no longer tell myself it was unrelated.

And that was the moment something shifted.

What I had to admit

I think we talk about “it’s okay to not be okay” as though it’s a soft, reassuring thing — like a permission slip someone hands you with a gentle smile.

In my experience it wasn’t like that at all.

It was more like finally stopping to look at something you’d been walking past for months and realizing it was worse than you’d let yourself believe.

The admission cost me something.

It cost me the version of myself I’d been maintaining — the one who had it together, who was fine, who just needed a little more time.

Letting that version go, even privately, even just to yourself, is harder than it sounds.

But I’ve come to understand that you cannot begin to address what you haven’t been willing to name. And I had been unwilling for a long time.

What moving forward has actually looked like

I won’t package this into steps. That’s not what this is.

What I can tell you is what it has looked like for me — imperfectly, incompletely, still in progress.

It has looked like stopping when I feel the urge to file something under later. Not always successfully. But stopping long enough to ask whether later is a genuine plan or just a more comfortable word for never.

It has looked like rebuilding things privately before I had anything presentable to show publicly. The altar before the program. The honest conversation before the performance. The real thing before the version of it.

It has looked like accepting that healing is not an event. Not a single conversation or a breakthrough moment or a season you pass through and emerge from whole. It’s quieter and slower and more unglamorous than that. Some days it looks like nothing at all.

But it’s different from before. I can feel the difference — not in the absence of difficulty, but in the way I’m facing it now versus the way I was avoiding it then.

Where this leaves me

I started this series talking about the cost of keeping up. The performance. The lie that there was no time.

What the collapse taught me — slowly, reluctantly, through the evidence of my own life — is that there is always a cost. I just didn’t get to choose when it came due.

I’m not on the other side of this.

But I’m no longer pretending the cost isn’t real.

That feels like somewhere to start.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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“You’ve moved on, but not fully. You still have some healing to do.”

These were the words my best friend said to me — and they sent me down the rabbit hole where I found this Substack.

Let me offer some context.

A few years ago, I was in a wonderful relationship. Genuinely wonderful. But despite that, it came to an unexpected end.

After the separation came what I assumed was the standard sequence:
Pain, then denial, then grief, then eventually, acceptance, and then you move on. That’s how it’s supposed to go — or better still, how i thought it should.

What I had no grid for was how long any of it should take. Or how you’d even know when it was done.

Fast forward a few years. I was talking to someone new, and I was telling my best friend about her — about certain things I’d started to notice. We talk about everything, so this wasn’t unusual.

But somewhere in the middle of me describing the familiar patterns I was picking up on, he stopped me. And not because of anything about her — but because of what he was hearing in me.

The way I was describing her habits, her tendencies, the things that gave me pause — it all sounded, to him, like I was still narrating the last relationship. Like the old story hadn’t finished playing yet.

“You’ve moved on, but not fully. You still have some healing to do.” Those were his next set of words.

I asked him what he meant. We talked it through. But I left that conversation carrying two questions I couldn’t put down:

How do I properly move on?

And how do I know when I actually have?

How do I properly move on?

My first attempt at an answer was to stay busy.

I’m not sure I even made a conscious decision about it — I just started filling time. More work. More plans. More noise.

The logic, somewhere underneath it all, was that if I kept moving, I wouldn’t have to feel it. And for a while, that almost worked.

But “almost” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Because the feelings didn’t go anywhere. They just waited. And the longer I kept busy, the more interest they seemed to accrue in the background — until eventually they started showing up in places I didn’t expect.

In how I read new people. In how quickly I looked for exits. In the patterns I was apparently describing to my best friend without even realizing what I was doing.

What I’ve come to understand slowly, is that there’s no shortcut past the actual feeling.

Not the idea of feeling it.

The thing itself.

The hurt that doesn’t have a clean name. The anger you feel guilty about. The grief that keeps returning even after you thought you’d dealt with it.

I’m not saying you have to perform suffering. But you do have to let it be real.

And beyond just letting it be real, I’ve come to understand that healing requires something more intentional: you have to create space for it. Deliberately.

That looks different for different people — journaling, honest conversation with someone you trust, prayer, therapy, or simply choosing to sit with the discomfort instead of reaching for distraction the moment it surfaces.

The specific method matters less than the decision behind it:

I am going to face this instead of outrun it.

What I’ve noticed is that most of us don’t lack the desire to heal.

What we lack is the willingness to be uncomfortable long enough for healing to actually happen.

Busyness is comfortable. Distraction is comfortable.

But feeling everything you’ve been avoiding, that’s very uncomfortable, but it’s the only door I’ve found that leads anywhere real.

That’s where healing actually starts.

Not at the point of moving on, but at the point of honest acknowledgment — and the daily, unglamorous choice to stay with it.

How do I know when I’ve healed?

This is the harder question. And honestly, I’m still not sure I have a complete answer.

What I can say is this: I thought I was fine. Years had passed. I had processed, or thought I had. I wasn’t walking around in obvious pain. By every external measure, I had moved on.

And then my best friend said what he said, and something quietly landed.

Because he wasn’t pointing at something I was doing wrong.

He was pointing at something I was still carrying. Something I could see the shape of in how I was reading this new person. Not the content of what I was describing, but the texture of it. The way I was already bracing.

The human mind is remarkably good at pattern recognition. Too good, sometimes.

You meet someone and something in them echoes something old — a tone, a habit, a way of going quiet — and before you’ve consciously registered it, you’re already somewhere else. Already in a different room, with a different person, in a situation that ended badly.

The question isn’t whether you recognize the pattern. You will. The question is what happens in the space between recognition and response.

That space, how wide it is, how clear, might be the most honest measure of where you actually are.

So where does that leave me?

When I left that conversation with my best friend, I didn’t leave with answers.

I left with something more useful: the willingness to look.

Because I think that’s actually where it begins — not with a plan, not with a breakthrough, but with the quiet admission that there is still something here that needs attending to. That moved on and healed are not always the same thing. That time passing is not the same as work being done.

I don’t have this fully figured out. I’m not writing this from the other side of it. I’m writing it from the middle — which is, I suppose, exactly where this Substack was always meant to come from.

But I’m looking now. And maybe that’s the first real step.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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There is a particular kind of loneliness that exists inside religious community.

Not the loneliness of being unknown — plenty of people know your name, your story, the highlights of your testimony.

But the loneliness of being known for a version of yourself that is no longer fully true. Of standing in rooms where people look at you a certain way, expect certain things, and not knowing how to tell them that the person they’re seeing is running on fumes.

I lived inside that loneliness for longer than I’d like to admit.

What it looked like from the outside

From the outside, nothing had changed.

I was still showing up. Still attending. Still leading when I was asked to lead, still saying the right things in the right rooms.

If you had watched me from a distance during this season, you would have seen someone whose faith appeared intact.

What you wouldn’t have seen was what had quietly stopped happening in private.

My prayer life had been declining for a while. Not suddenly — the way these things usually go, it happened gradually. The sessions getting shorter. The consistency getting looser. The sense of genuine connection getting thinner.

The fire doesn’t go out all at once. It just gets smaller and smaller until one day you realize the warmth you thought was still there is just the memory of warmth.

I knew something was wrong. I knew it needed fixing.

And I didn’t fix it.

Not because I didn’t care. But because fixing it would have required stopping. And stopping would have required honesty. And honesty felt like a risk I wasn’t ready to take.

The thing about spiritual communities

Let me say something that doesn’t get said enough:

Most people hide their spiritual inconsistencies because they are uncertain of how their spiritual community would act towards them.

There is a gap, sometimes a wide one — between what a community says it believes about grace and what it actually makes people feel when they’re struggling.

The theology says come as you are.

The culture says but not too as you are.

There are acceptable struggles.

The ones you can mention in a testimony after you’ve come through them. And then there are the ones you carry quietly, because there is no safe place to put them down.

So you perform. Not out of malice, but out of self-preservation.

Because the fear underneath it is this: if they saw the actual state of things, they would think less of you. They would question your leadership. They would reclassify you. And in communities where your spiritual reputation is tied to your relationships, your roles, your sense of belonging — that reclassification feels like too high a price.

So you keep showing up. You keep leading. You keep saying the right things.

And privately, you keep telling yourself you’ll fix it later.

What the gap actually feels like

It wasn’t dramatic. No crisis of faith, no thunderclap moment of collapse. Just quieter than that — and in some ways that made it harder to address. Because you can tell yourself a quiet decline isn’t really a decline. You can point to everything you’re still doing and convince yourself the foundation is still intact.

But I knew. Somewhere underneath the performance, I knew.

There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from standing in a room, leading something, while privately aware that your own altar has gone cold.

You say the words. You mean them — in the way you mean things you used to feel more fully. But there is a gap between the mouth and the heart that you are quietly, constantly aware of.

And the part that doesn’t get talked about: maintaining the performance doesn’t just cost you energy. It costs you the very thing you’re performing about. The more you perform spiritual health you don’t have, the further the real thing recedes.

What I’ve come to realize

The fear that kept me performing — the fear of being seen as less, of losing the regard, of being reclassified — that fear made a kind of sense at the time. I understood it. I still understand it.

But I understand more that the private altar matters in a way the public performance never can. Not because of what anyone else can see there. Because it’s the one place where performance isn’t possible. Where it’s just you, and what’s actually true, and whether you’re willing to sit with the distance between you and your heavenly father.

I stopped being willing for a season.

Now I’m finding my way back to that perfect state.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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There is a version of you that other people carry around in their heads.

Built from every good impression you’ve ever made. Every time you showed up well, said the right thing, held it together when it mattered. Over time, that version becomes its own kind of pressure — not because anyone is demanding anything from you, but because you start to feel responsible for maintaining it.

And so you do. You keep up.

I know this because I lived it. And for a long time, I lived it well.

The performance was working

The thing about performing is that it’s surprisingly sustainable — at least on the surface.

I was showing up. Socially, I was present and dependable. Spiritually, I was still attending, still leading, still saying the right things in the right rooms. Emotionally, I had filed the painful things under dealt with because enough time had passed and I was still functioning. By every visible measure, I was fine.

What nobody could see, what I was barely willing to see myself, was that the inside told a different story.

My prayer life had been quietly declining for longer than I wanted to admit. Not dramatically, just gradually. The way a fire doesn’t go out all at once, it just gets smaller and smaller until one day you realize you’re sitting in the dark. I was still leading programs. Still showing up to the things. But the private altar, the actual place where something real was supposed to be happening — that had been neglected in ways I kept telling myself I’d address later.

Emotionally, I had convinced myself I had healed because time had passed and life had continued. What I didn’t know yet was that moving on and healing are not always the same thing.

And underneath all of it was the same quiet engine: I didn’t want to disappoint the image people had of me. So I kept performing — kept maintaining the surface — because the alternative felt more frightening than the exhaustion of keeping up.

The lie I told myself

The story I used to justify all of this was simple: I don’t have time.

It’s a convincing story. Especially when it’s mostly true — life is genuinely busy, there is always something next. But “I don’t have time” is rarely actually about time. It’s about what you’re afraid will happen if you stop.

Because stopping means feeling it. And feeling it means admitting that the version of you people have been carrying doesn’t fully match the one that exists when nobody is watching.

That admission is frightening. So you stay busy instead. You keep the surface polished and tell yourself you’ll deal with it when things slow down.

But things don’t slow down. And the longer you wait, the more it costs.

What I began to see

At some point — not dramatically, not all at once — I began to notice where things were heading if I kept going the way I was going.

Not a crisis. Just a quiet, honest look at the trajectory. And something about seeing that was enough to shift something in me.

Because wounds that go unaddressed don’t wait patiently. They don’t stay contained. The longer you leave them, the more they spread — until the evidence starts surfacing in places you didn’t anticipate. In how you relate to people. In decisions made from fear rather than clarity. In the exhaustion of maintaining a version of yourself that requires constant upkeep.

An untreated wound doesn’t just hurt. Eventually, it announces itself.

I was beginning to see the announcement coming. And that was the first honest thing I’d admitted to myself in a while.

What I’ve stopped doing

I’ve stopped telling myself I don’t have time.

Not because I suddenly have more of it. But because I’ve understood — slowly, reluctantly — that the alternative is arriving at every important moment already depleted. Already managing. Already performing.

Healing, I’m learning, isn’t one thing. It isn’t one conversation or one breakthrough. It runs deeper than that. And most of us are carrying more unaddressed weight than we’ve been willing to admit — not because we don’t care, but because the performance has been working well enough that stopping felt unnecessary.

I’m still in this. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But I’ve stopped calling it fine.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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The past year of my life has felt like a rollercoaster.

Events, emotions, and moments came too quickly, too close together. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, something in me started shifting.

Quietly. Without announcement.

There was a time when I thought I had a clear sense of who I was becoming.

It wasn’t a detailed roadmap — more like a shape. The kind of person I was moving toward. The convictions I was building my life around. This was the version of faith that made sense to me and held everything together.

I wasn’t certain about everything, but I was certain about the direction.

And then, slowly, I started noticing gaps.

Not doubts exactly.

More like the explanations I used to reach for weren’t going as far anymore. The things that once felt settled started feeling… incomplete.

I found myself asking questions I didn’t use to ask.

For the first time, I couldn’t tell if I was clinging to my beliefs or just the version of myself that needed them to stay the same.

I found myself delaying the resolution of issues I had previously resolved quickly. The version of me I had been constructing began to feel like it belonged to someone slightly younger—someone less acquainted with how complicated things can get.

I referred to it as “confusion” for a while, because it felt like I had once again lost my sense of direction.

But that word felt too passive—like I had misplaced something I once knew.

I hadn’t misplaced anything. The clarity was still there.

It just wasn’t big enough anymore for what I was carrying.

From the inside, though, it didn’t feel like expansion.

It felt like failure. Like moving backwards— becoming less sure when I had hoped for greater certainty.

Especially when faith is involved. Especially when the convictions that are shifting are the same ones you built your sense of self around.

There’s some grief in that.

A quiet kind of grief—one that doesn’t come with language. Just the slow realization that something that once held you together doesn’t hold you the same way anymore.

It shows up in small ways. Certain conversations feel harder to sit through. You hesitate before saying things you used to say without thinking. Something that used to feel settled now feels like you’re holding it too tightly to keep it from slipping.

Nothing has fully fallen apart. But something isn’t as intact as it used to be.

What I’m beginning to see—and I’m still figuring this out— is that the clarity I had wasn’t wrong.

It was just built for an earlier version of me.

One that hadn’t yet sat with certain questions long enough. One that hadn’t yet felt the weight of certain experiences.

I had answers, but I hadn’t yet encountered the full shape of the questions those answers were meant to carry.

And that’s different from losing your way.

Outgrowing clarity feels like confusion because the disorientation is real—but the cause isn’t absence.

It’s an expansion.

The old map isn’t wrong.

You’ve just walked further than it was drawn for.

There’s a strange tension in being here. I’ve changed, but I’m not yet someone new enough to stand on different ground. So I move through things half-certain, half-aware, learning to live without the same level of internal resolution I once depended on.

I don’t have a new clarity to offer in place of the old one.

What I have is the beginning of a sense that this in-between—the place where the old answers stop fitting and the new ones haven’t formed yet—is not a detour from growth.

It might be what growth actually feels like.

It's not a sign that something has gone wrong.

But a sign that something in me is still becoming.

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There is a kind of tired that has nothing to do with effort — the kind that comes from time passing without movement.

I have written before about the uncertainty — the not-knowing, the in-between, the season that stretches longer than you planned for. I don’t want to revisit that ground. What I want to sit with this time is something quieter: not the waiting itself, but what the waiting is doing to me. Who I am becoming inside of it.

Because of that, I am beginning to think, is the real question. Not when will this end? But who will I be when it does?

Two People. Same Season. Different Stories.

Let me tell you about two people — call them Tunde and Emeka.

They graduated from the same university, around the same time, with degrees that looked similar on paper. Both of them left school with the reasonable expectation that things would move. They had done the work; Sat the exams. Applied early, followed up, networked, waited.

And then — nothing. Or at least, not yet.

Six months passed. Then twelve. Both of them were home, both of them were applying, both of them were getting the same polite rejections — or worse, the silence that isn’t even a rejection.

From the outside, their situations were identical.

Inside, they were becoming two completely different people.

Tunde spent the first three months angry — which, honestly, made sense. But the anger stayed. It settled into him. He stopped reading. Stopped working on the skills he said he wanted to build. Most of his time was spent in the company of his frustration, rehearsing every reason the system was unfair, every person who had gotten a break he hadn’t.

He wasn’t wrong, exactly. But something in him was hardening.

When conversations about the future came up, he spoke with a kind of bitterness that didn’t used to be there — like possibility itself had become something he no longer trusted. He was waiting, but only waiting. Pressed against the walls of the season, growing more rigid inside it.

Emeka was going through the same thing.

Some mornings, he also couldn’t get out of bed. He had his own version of the anger, his own late nights of wondering whether he had miscalculated something fundamental about his life.

But somewhere around month four — almost without deciding to — he started doing small things.

He picked up a certification course he had bookmarked and forgotten. He started writing his thoughts down — badly at first, then with more intention. He reached out to people a few steps ahead of him, not to “network” in the polished sense, but because he was genuinely curious about how they thought and what they had learned.

He started showing up to things even when he didn’t feel ready.

He wasn’t performing productively.

He was just — slowly, quietly — refusing to let the season have the only say in who he was.

He still didn’t have a job.

But he was building something inside the waiting.

About two years after graduation, things began to shift for both of them.

Tunde got an opportunity through a family connection. Emeka landed a role after a process he had been building toward for months.

From the outside, it looked like they had both simply crossed the finish line.

But when they sat together not long after — catching up the way old friends do when life has kept them apart — something was different between them.

Tunde had the job, but he seemed unsettled in it. He struggled with feedback. It was difficult for him to operate in environments where he wasn’t already certain of the outcome. The season had given him survival instincts, but not much elasticity.

He was starting over in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

Emeka walked into his role with something already built.

The certification meant he wasn’t bluffing his way through technical conversations. The writing had sharpened how he communicated. The relationships he had built during the waiting weren’t just contacts — they were people who already knew how he thought.

He wasn’t just ready for the role.

He had been preparing for it — even when he didn’t know exactly what he was preparing for.

The difference between them wasn’t talent.

It wasn’t luck, though luck played its part.

It was what each of them had done with the same stretch of empty time.

I have thought about Tunde and Emeka a lot recently — mostly because I see pieces of both of them in myself on different days.

There are days I am Emeka. Reading, building, staying present to the season even when I don’t like it.

There are other days I am Tunde — closed, circling, measuring my life against timelines I thought I would have outgrown by now. On those days, I am more fluent in my frustrations than in my growth.

The days I am Tunde, I am only waiting.

The season becomes the whole story. There is no subplot.

The days I am Emeka, I am waiting and becoming something.

The season is still there — it hasn’t moved — but I am moving inside of it.

That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Not whether the waiting is fair — it often isn’t — but whether I am doing anything with it while it lasts.

What Are You Doing While You Wait?

I want to be careful here — I don’t mean this as a productivity lecture.

Filling every hour with output is not the point. And I don’t think that’s the lesson from Emeka’s story either.

What I mean is something quieter. More internal.

The waiting season surfaces things — fears you had filed away, patterns you hadn’t noticed, assumptions about yourself that only become visible when external validation is removed.

The question is whether you are paying attention to what is coming up or just waiting for it to stop.

Because what happens in this season — the stretch of time nobody photographs — is that something is forming.

Not dramatically.

Just gradually, in the direction of whatever you are feeding.

What I Am Still Figuring Out

I don’t have a clean ending to offer here.

I am still in the middle of my own version of this. There are things I want — roles, clarity, movement — that have not arrived yet.

There are days I handle that with some grace.

And days I don’t.

But I have started asking myself a different question when the frustration peaks.

Not why is this taking so long?

But who am I right now?

What am I building in this season that cannot be built any other way?

I don’t always have a good answer.

But I think the asking is doing something.

The season will end — it always does.

Who it leaves me as… that part is still being decided.

And I want to be ready.

Becoming with Busayo is a newsletter about navigating early adulthood—faith, work, identity, and the slow work of growing up. If this resonated with you, share it with someone in their own in-between. If you would like to continue to see our newsletters, kindly subscribe below

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Look, I don’t have it all figured out.

I want to say that upfront, not as a disclaimer, but as the foundation of everything that follows. Because what I’m about to share isn’t coming from someone standing at the top of the mountain looking down, but from someone still on the climb, lungs working, legs feeling it, but eyes holding on to something in the distance, and that has made all the difference.

And I couldn’t keep it to myself.

There are times when it feels as if life is designed to break you.

Not refine you. Not to build you, Break you.

These are usually times when you feel like you’ve done everything right, and still nothing moves. Where you’ve done everything you’re supposed to, and the results have been, at best, silence. Where you watch the people around you step into the very things you’ve been quietly believing for, and you celebrate them genuinely, mostly, except for that small honest ache that follows you home afterwards.

You know the one. The one that asks the question so dominant in your mind, but your heart is too scared to ask because you fear there may be consequences.

“Why”, “Why isn’t it my turn yet?”

In this moment, why eventually becomes something you direct upward, late at night, when the performance of okayness has finally come off, and it’s just you and God and the unresolved everything.

I’ve been in that season.

Parts of me still are.

But something has changed. And that change is the reason I’m writing this.

I want to tell you about hope.

Not the greeting card version, not the motivational poster on the wall of a waiting room, but the real thing. The kind that doesn’t require circumstances to cooperate before it shows up. The kind that exists not because everything is fine, but because something in you refuses to accept that this is all there is.

That hope is not naive.

It is not the absence of realism. It is not pretending the night isn’t dark, or the wait isn’t long, or the silence isn’t loud. It holds all of that, fully, honestly, and still insists that something is coming.

That’s not weakness.

That is one of the most courageous postures a human being can hold.

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

You are not the first person to have walked through what you’re walking through.

I know that can sound dismissive, like someone telling you your pain isn’t unique when what you need is for someone to acknowledge that it’s real, and trust me, I’m not here to do that, so let me be clear:

Your situation is specific to you. Your timeline is yours. The weight of your particular waiting is not something anyone else can fully measure.

But the experience of waiting, believing for something that hasn’t arrived yet, of holding on, when holding on is the hardest thing to do, is a concept that is as old as humanity itself.

And every single person who has ever come through a season like this has one thing in common.

They didn’t stop.

Not because they weren’t tired; not because the doubt never came; not because they had some special reservoir of strength that you don’t have access to. They came through because they made a decision — sometimes daily, sometimes hourly — to take one more step. To believe one more day. To keep their hand open instead of closing it around the uncertainty.

And the morning came.

It always came.

I think about the people whose stories we know, the ones who waited longer than seemed reasonable, who held on past the point where most people would have let go, who came out the other side of seasons that looked, from the inside, like they might never end.

Their stories don’t inspire us because everything worked out perfectly. They inspire us because of the gap between what they believed and what they could see. Between the promise and the evidence. Between the night and the morning.

That gap is where faith lives.

And that gap is exactly where you are right now.

Which means you are not behind. You are not forgotten. You are not the exception to a rule that works for everyone else.

You are in the gap.

And the gap is not the end.

I genuinely believe — not as a performance, not because it’s the right thing to say, but because something in me is more settled about this than almost anything else — that there are better days ahead of you.

Not because your situation is about to resolve itself magically, not because the waiting is over or the questions have all been answered.

But because of who is walking with you through it.

The same God who has been faithful to every person who ever trusted him in the dark is faithful to you. He doesn’t have a different track record for your situation. He doesn’t run out of morning. And he has never, not once, abandoned a story halfway through.

Your story is still being written.

And in the pages ahead, the ones you haven’t lived yet, the ones that will make sense of everything that has felt senseless, are worth staying for.

So this is me, someone still on the climb, turning around to tell you

Don’t stop now.

Not because the road is easy. Not because the night is over. Not because you finally feel ready.

But because the morning is coming.

It was always coming.

And when it arrives, and it will, you are going to look back at this exact season, this exact moment of holding on, and you are going to understand something you couldn’t see from here.

That it was worth it.

Every single day of it.

The night was real.

The weeping was real.

But it was always, only, for a night.

Your morning is coming.

Hold on.

Some seasons don’t make sense from the inside.

Not because nothing is happening around you—life moves. People go about their business. The world turns. Your obligations show up faithfully every morning, whether you feel ready or not.

But inside, there’s a part of you that keeps score of the things that actually matter. And that’s what makes it feel like nothing is moving.

No breakthrough. No shift. No sign.

Just the same sky. The same prayers. The same quiet that doesn’t explain itself.

And at some point, in the middle of that stillness, a question surfaces. Not politely. Not intentionally. But the way honest things do—raw, unannounced, directed upward.

How do you expect me to go on when it feels like nothing is happening?

I want to tell you about someone.

Someone whose experience might feel uncomfortably familiar.

He had done everything he understood to be right.

He showed up to work, in his relationships, and to his faith. He made the intentional choices, built the disciplines, said no to what deserved a no, and yes to what deserved a yes. He prayed—not performatively, but genuinely, with the kind of persistence that costs something.

And still, the thing he was believing for had yet to happen.

Months passed.

He watched people around him move. He was genuinely happy for them, mostly—but there was always that small, honest ache beneath the celebration. The one that whispers:

When will it be my turn?

He had read the right things. Quoted the right scriptures. Encouraged others through similar seasons with words they believed when he said them.

But belief, he discovered, is easier to articulate than it is to inhabit.

And one night—unremarkable in every other way—sitting with the full weight of everything that hadn’t happened yet, he reached the end of his own reasoning.

He had run out of ways to explain it.
Out of energy to keep manufacturing hope every morning.
Out of the kind of faith that feels like faith.

All that was left was the question.

Here is what I find remarkable about that question.

It is not the question of someone who has stopped believing.

It is the question of someone who still believes enough to be honest. Still trusts enough to ask. Still in relationship enough to bring the complaint directly—not to the world, not to a journal, not to the quiet comfort of lowered expectations—

But to God.

There’s a tradition of this that we don’t talk about enough. David asked how long God would hide his face. Job refused to dress up his suffering in language his friends would find acceptable—and was told, in the end, that he had spoken rightly. Jeremiah was honest to the point of what some would call irreverence.

These were not people of weak faith.

They were people whose faith was deep enough to survive their honesty.

And there is a difference—a significant one—between crying out to God and walking away from Him. Between wrestling and quitting.

In fact, the person who asks how is still, in the very act of asking, going on.

So what did he do?

He didn’t receive a vision. No voice broke the silence with a timetable. No circumstances rearranged themselves overnight to confirm that the wait was worth it.

What happened was smaller than that—and in some ways, more significant.

He made a decision.

Not a feeling—he was too tired for feelings. Not a declaration—those had started to feel hollow. Just a quiet, almost stubborn, interior decision:

I am going to trust that something is happening even though I cannot see it.

Not because the evidence demanded it.
Not because it was easy.
Not because the question had been resolved.

But because deciding that the silence meant absence felt like a loss, he wasn’t willing to accept it.

Because somewhere beneath the exhaustion, beneath the questions, beneath the ache of unanswered prayers, something remained.

Small. Unspectacular. But present.

The faint, stubborn belief that the silence was not emptiness.

That unseen did not mean undone.

And so he took the next step.

Not triumphantly. Not with certainty.

Just the next step. And then the one after that.

I wish I could tell you this made everything easier. It didn’t.

The circumstances didn’t immediately change. The silence didn’t suddenly fill with answers. The season didn’t end the next morning.

But something shifted.

Not around him—in him.

The weight didn’t disappear. But he found he could carry it differently. There is something that happens when you stop fighting the uncertainty and begin—reluctantly, imperfectly—to release it.

Not resignation. Not giving up.

Something more like opening your hand to the One who holds what you cannot see.

Choosing to believe that what is unseen is still being worked out—because you trust the One working behind the scenes.

If you are in that place right now, hear this:

The question is allowed.

The confusion is allowed. The exhaustion is allowed. You do not have to perform a faith you are not feeling. You do not have to dress uncertainty in language that makes everyone around you comfortable.

But this matters:

The fact that you are still asking—still directing the question upward, still expecting something from the silence—says something about what remains in you.

And what remains in you is enough to take the next step.

Not because the answers have arrived.

But because the One you are asking hasn’t left.

Not some things.
Not the comfortable things.
Not the things that make sense from where you’re standing.

All things.

Even this.

So keep going.

Not because the road is clear.
Not because the silence has lifted.
Not because you finally feel ready.

Keep going because you are not walking alone—

Because the One walking with you has never once lost His way.

There are seasons when it feels like the world is moving and you are standing still.

Someone in your circle just got a promotion. Another person landed a new job. A friend just announced something you’ve quietly been hoping for yourself. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, there’s you—and on the outside, at least, it looks like nothing is happening.

You don’t want to compare. You know better. But you see your people winning, and you want to be genuinely happy for them, and you are, sort of, except there’s this small, persistent voice in the corner of your mind asking:

“When will my own come?”

“See my mates, we all started at the same time.”

You know these thoughts aren’t entirely healthy. But they’re there, and you don’t quite know what to do with them.

First, your feelings are valid

We are both logical and emotional beings, and emotions are not a menu you order from. You get the full package. The joy and the ache, the celebration and the envy. You don’t get to pick only the pleasant ones.

So when the question of "How am I supposed to watch people win and not feel like I’m falling behind?” comes up, you need to understand this: those feelings are natural. To a degree, they are deeply human. What becomes a problem is not the feeling itself, but what you do with it. Whether you let it sit with you quietly, or whether you let it take root and slowly hollow you out.

A lot of people suppress or deny those feelings. That doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them harder to see. So instead of pretending they don’t exist, let’s talk about what to actually do.

Be genuinely happy for them

“Rejoice with them that do rejoice.”

— Romans 12:15 (KJV)

One of the most practical things you can do when someone else’s season feels like a mirror of your lack is to actually join in their celebration. Not performatively, not a strained smile and a “congrats” text, but genuinely.

I know that’s easier said than done. But here’s the thing about genuine joy for someone else: it cannot coexist with bitterness. A positive and a negative emotion cannot occupy the same space at the same time. When you choose to celebrate someone, you are, in a very real way, displacing the envy.

Wait your turn—with intention

“All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”

— Job 14:14 (KJV)

I know “wait your turn” is not what you want to hear. But stay with me.

The race is not always to the swift, nor to the strong, but time and chance happen to us all. Simply put: na turn by turn.

It is their season to be where they are. And when it is yours to get that promotion, to cross that item off your list, to finally step into the thing you’ve been quietly building toward, it will happen.

But here is what changes everything: the waiting does not have to be passive. It can be purposeful. And sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do while you wait is to learn the waiting story of the very people you’re tempted to envy.

Some of them waited longer than you’d believe for the exact thing you desire. They went through seasons you wouldn’t wish on anyone, stayed faithful when there was no evidence it would pay off, and came out on the other side. When you hear those stories, the envy has nowhere to stand. It quietly becomes admiration.

You go from “God when?” (Apologies to my international readers who may not feel the full weight of that phrase), to something quieter and stronger:

“If they could wait this long and still come through, why am I in such a hurry?”

What are you doing while you wait?

I believe one of the reasons the waiting feels so unbearable for some people is that they genuinely have nothing they are working on. No path they are walking. No commitment they are showing up to.

When you are pursuing something—a career, a craft, a goal, or even a discipline—the waiting reframes itself.

You are not behind because you are lazy. you are simply on a different path, building something that takes the time it takes. That knowledge gives you a quiet confidence that scrolling through other people’s highlight reels simply cannot take away.

There is also something practical worth naming: when you are genuinely busy chasing your own thing with everything you have, you will find that you have very little bandwidth left to track what everyone else is doing. Not because you stop caring—but because you are occupied with something that matters.

So get busy. Not to escape the feelings — but to build something worth waiting for.

I know there are other ways to navigate this season, and I don’t claim this piece covers all of them. But these three—celebrating others, waiting with intention, and staying occupied with purpose, are a strong foundation.

“When you feel like you’re behind, you are not. You are on a different path, building at a different pace. And sooner than you think, it will be your turn to stand somewhere and tell someone else: I waited for this too.”

There’s this quiet pressure that follows you around in this decade of your life.

You wake up some mornings feeling like you should be doing more…
achieving more…
becoming more.

And yet, when you pause long enough to evaluate your life, it can feel like you’re not really doing anything at all.

Everyone seems to have advice for you:

“Focus.”
“Explore.”
“Build.”
“Maximize this season — it’s the most profitable one of your life.”

And maybe they’re right.

But sometimes those answers don’t feel like answers. They feel like slogans.

Because beneath the productivity talk and career strategies, there’s a deeper question that doesn’t get addressed:

Who am I becoming in the middle of all this?
And how do I know I’m not wasting my potential?

I’ve wrestled with this personally.

There were moments I looked at my life and thought, I should be further.
Moments I compared timelines.
Moments I mistook movement for meaning.

What I’m slowly learning is this:

Self-discovery doesn’t arrive all at once.
It unfolds as you move.

It’s not something that “happens” to you.
It’s something you conclude over time — from the risks you take, the failures you survive, the rooms you enter, the things you try and realize aren’t for you.

Clarity is rarely the starting point.
It’s usually the reward for engagement.

Your 20s are not a test you pass.
They’re terrain you explore.

And yes, it can feel like you have the most potential you’ve ever had and absolutely no idea what to do with it at the same time.

But here’s what I would tell you (and myself):

There will come a time — sooner than you think — when the questions that feel all-consuming now won’t carry the same weight. Not because you figured everything out, but because you grew into someone who can carry uncertainty without panic.

This season is less about having the right answers
and more about building the capacity to handle them when they come.

Dear person in your 20s:

You are not behind.
You are not late.
You are not wasting your life simply because you don’t have it mapped out.

But comfort alone isn’t enough.

So here’s a simple action point:

Pick one thing that moves you forward — however small — and commit to it consistently for the next 30–90 days.

Not ten things.
Just one.

One skill.
One project.
One discipline.
One area of growth.

Movement creates information.
Information creates clarity.
Clarity creates confidence.

You don’t need to solve your entire life right now.

You just need to keep walking.

Dear person in your 20s, I’m rooting for you.

And I promise, the answers you’re searching for are often waiting on the other side of your next brave step.

Hello Substack Family!

How have we been? I know it’s been a minute since my last post, but I’m back.

So, what has been going on? Well, yours truly has been quite occupied, adjusting to life in a new city and all that comes with it.

Enough about me. I want to share with you the thought currently predominant in my mind.

As we all know, February is usually the month when one topic is emphasized more than at any other time of the year — love.

Why is it usually this way, you may ask? Well, that’s a question I don’t think anyone has an accurate answer to. While I am not against how each individual chooses to participate in the whole love affair, I believe there are a few things worth mentioning.

In this season of love, I have found myself listening to sermons, watching videos, and consuming other forms of content centered around the topic. It’s almost as if that’s the only kind of content everyone is creating these days.

But who am I to judge? This Substack post proves that I got in on it too.

Over the course of the month, I began to notice a pattern. There are a few things that every speaker, in one way or another, emphasized as the bedrock of a solid relationship. However, we’re going to focus on the point I feel is the most important of them all: emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and utilize your own emotions, as well as those of others, to guide thinking and behavior.

Simply put, emotional intelligence does not only apply to those in romantic relationships. It applies to every one of us, as it presents itself in every form of human interaction.

Why is the ability to understand emotions important, you may ask? It is important because it facilitates effective communication. Communication is a vital part of our lives; it’s something we engage in every day. Understanding your emotions, as well as the emotions present in every situation you find yourself in, helps you make the best out of each interaction.

So what does this mean for us?

It means learning to identify what we are feeling before we speak. It means asking, “Why did that trigger me?” instead of “Why did they do that?” It means understanding that not every disagreement is an attack.

Emotional intelligence may not be glamorous, but it might just be the most romantic skill we can develop. Because when two emotionally intelligent people come together, love stops being a battlefield and starts becoming a partnership.

Without emotional intelligence, conversations turn into competitions. Misunderstandings turn into assumptions, and love slowly becomes survival instead of connection.

Maybe the real love code isn’t found in grand gestures or perfectly curated moments. Maybe it is found in self-awareness — in the ability to pause, in the discipline to listen, in the maturity to understand before reacting.

Because the depth of our relationships will rarely exceed the depth of our self-understanding.

And perhaps this February, instead of simply celebrating love, we should be learning how to love better.