There’s something almost disturbing about a human being wanting to be different so badly.

It’s not the good kind of different.

It’s the kind where you have conditioned your brain to believe what you are not. Where you slowly adopt the pattern. Where you observe a particular behaviour, identify with it, and then begin to reproduce it until the distinction between what you are and what you have convinced yourself to be becomes blurred.

You slowly become what you’re not.

This is also why I think some people want a mental illness so badly.

I have a theory.

And I’d like to break it down.

People who desperately want a mental illness need a diagnosis. There is a peculiar desire to inhabit a condition that deeply hurts the people who actually live with it.

Over the years, “mental illness” has been thrown around like it’s nothing. Like it isn’t someone’s reality. Like it isn’t something someone wakes up to every day and wishes would disappear.

Like someone doesn’t wake up wishing something would happen.

That the cloud would turn into a magnet and pull everyone back into the void.

That it would be better not to exist.

Because living with a mental illness is, in itself, an experience of pain.

So the audacity to sit in your home, scroll through your phone and watch people who actually face these illnesses explain their struggles, only for you to pick up on a pattern and immediately say, “I have this.”

Not for anything.

Not because you have been properly assessed.

But for pity.

For a sense of belonging.

For the reassurance that there is a word, a diagnosis, a category that can finally explain why you feel the way you do.

That having a mental illness would make you fragile. That it would make you different. That it would make you special.

Which is an insult to the people who battle these struggles.

For the few years I’ve lived on this earth, I’ve encountered people who have cosplayed as psychopaths.

People who haven’t been diagnosed as one.

People who come to me and say,

“I think I am a psychopath.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I didn’t cry when this stranger died.”

I look at him in utter shock as he gives a reply a baby would give watching a man being buried in the ground.

You have conditioned yourself to believe you’re a psychopath because a random person on the internet died and you felt nothing.

A psychopath?

When I put you in a room with a psychopath, you would shake till your butthole loses control and you’re covered in a swamp of your shit.

He continued, with all seriousness, and mentioned the “patterns” be had noticed in herself because of how she killed a cockroach that had been flying around.

Yeah.

I just killed a mosquito sucking my flesh.

Can someone call me a fucking doctor and have me in rehab?

Now, I am no psychologist.

But I think people who have a disturbing obsession with wanting to be perceived as something, particularly something they believe will make them worthy of pity, may be struggling with something much more fundamental: belonging.

There is a psychological appeal in having a label.

A diagnosis can give language to an experience that previously felt chaotic. It can provide an explanation, a framework, even a community.

But when the desire for the diagnosis comes before the desire to understand the reality of the illness, something becomes distorted.

You are no longer trying to understand yourself.

You are trying to construct yourself.

You begin to cage your mind within the concept of a mental illness because you have attached a sense of identity and fulfilment to it. You convince yourself that the diagnosis will finally give you a place in the world.

And that is the disturbing part.

You have taken someone else’s suffering and turned it into a source of identity.

That is a total terror and an insult to the person who has caged himself in rehab, fighting for a solution to his psychopathic tendencies.

David has an obsession with OCD.

He would climb Mount Everest if he could and put a flag right on top of it that says:

“Hey everyone, guess who’s got OCD?”

Yeah, right.

David.

Now, David, two days back before his journey to Mount Everest, had this urge to deep-clean his house.

His house, which he had not cleaned in a week.

David, oh David, worked his ass off and arranged everything properly and says,

“Bitch, I have fucking OCD.”

David just arranged a remote horizontally.

David goes ahead to tell his friends how he has OCD.

“Oh, that’s uhm… good news, buddy.”

David doesn’t even know the full meaning of OCD.

And that is exactly the problem.

Why?

What is the psychology behind the need to be seen as different?

When I was younger, I used to want to be sick.

Oh, so fucking badly.

I had a reason.

I wanted a lot of attention.I wanted to be pitied.I wanted to be seen as fragile.

I was projecting.

I was already weak. I was already fragile. I just needed a reason for it to be more acceptable.

Why?

I believed sick people were weak.

I had created an association between illness and fragility, and because I already felt fragile, I wanted an external justification for it. I wanted something that would make my weakness comprehensible to other people.

Something that would make it acceptable.

This is no karma.

I now live with a brain aneurysm.

I scream “fuck” every single day like a mantra.

Because fuck.

I am sick now.

What do I do?

And I fucking hate that I am.

But I am not weak.

I am not fragile.

I do not want to be pitied.

I do not want to be cared for simply because I am sick.

I want to be treated the way they would treat someone without an illness. I want to be treated like they treat the girl next door.

And maybe that is the irony of the entire thing.

Illness does not automatically make you weak.

Sickness does not strip you of your humanity.

And being vulnerable does not mean you have become fragile.

Sometimes, you are simply a person carrying something you never asked to carry.

Why do people want mental illness?

You wouldn’t even live a day if you truly understood the struggle.

The struggle of seeing things.The struggle of voices screaming in your head. The voices not knowing who you are. The voices that remind you to end this whole thing. The voices that constantly sing your insecurities back to you.

You wouldn’t live a day.

A minute.

A second.

You would want the world burning.

You would hate the appointments.

You would hate the assessments.

You would hate having to repeatedly explain an experience you never asked to have.

You would hate how mental illnesses are thrown around like they mean nothing.

David wants OCD.

David thinks it’s cool.

Titi wants to be a psychopath.

“It would make me cool,” she says.

Amy wants ADHD.

“It would make me special.”

You want to be bipolar.

“It would make me fearful.”

Maybe the real problem is your need to be diagnosed .

And if you genuinely believe that something is wrong, then go and find out.

Get assessed.

Get the fucking answer.

Now go for the fucking appointments.

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My friends call me “Mother of Crazy Stories.”

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And, oh baby, do I wear that badge like an honour? Hell yes.

Frankly speaking, I think I deserve an award. My personal history provides enough evidence to justify the title. There is, after all, a very legitimate reason my friends arrived at this conclusion.

Why was I given this name?

Well, I once spent a considerable amount of time in a talking stage with a man who had a mummy fetish.

Very disturbing.

I am still trying to reconcile the fact that I was in that situation for as long as I was without catching the problem. In my defense, I did notice certain things. Eventually.

I should have known when he started calling me “mummy.”

I should have known when he developed an inexplicable fascination with receiving baby cuddles.

A twenty-three-year-old man.

Baby cuddles.

At some point, I had to ask myself whether I was in a talking stage with a man or accidentally applying for the position of his mother.

So yes, I deserve the name.

In fact, contrary to everything I ordinarily believe, I am beginning to suspect that I require a rather serious deliverance.

Pour me into a bathtub of anointing oil. Not just any anointing oil, please. I want the one with the unmistakable fragrance of the early 2000s.

I can still remember the smell of the anointing oil Papa gave my mum around that time. She would dip her thumb into the oil and place the tiniest amount on our heads. Somehow, that little drop would remain a permanent resident on my body. I could bathe with Tura for three consecutive days and still smell faintly like I had just returned from an evening service.

Anyway, let us not digress.

Yes, I met this Mr.

Now, my mother knows me as the woman who loves fine ass men. My friends know me as the woman who, for reasons I cannot adequately explain, seems to attract the strangest specimens of masculinity.

And my brothers?

Well.

They have already accepted that I may die single.

Me?

I am beginning to think I might have a little problem.

It was supposed to be a girls’ outing. Nothing complicated. Just a group of girls celebrating the end of school, having a good time and behaving like women who had just survived university and were determined to make the most of their freedom.

I had already told my friend that I was going to get sufficiently intoxicated to shake my ass for her.

We were prepared to return home with the lesbian allegations intact and, quite frankly, with our heads held high.

I arrived before everyone else.

Naturally.

I always arrive early to occasions.

But who goes to a club early?

Please, if you learn nothing else from this story, learn this: do not go to a club early.

There is absolutely nothing noble about being the first person outside a nightclub.

So there I was, standing outside in a pair of bootcut trousers that were doing an almost criminal amount of work on my ass.

And I’m sure you know I have a little something going on back there.

Well.

I needed to feel sexy that day.

Not moderately attractive.

Sexy.

So I stood there, completely innocent, waiting for my friends to arrive.

This is particularly amusing because my friends have somehow constructed an image of me as a man-hater.

They have never seen me speak to a man.

Others have gone as far as predicting that I will eventually become a nun.

And honestly, I understand why.

I have always been the quiet one. Shy. Reserved. L

Really quiet.

But something about that night made me want to temporarily abandon the responsible-girl persona.

I wanted to be a little wild.

And then he came.

Sexy.

Dark chocolate.

Lanky, with just the right amount of muscle. The kind of physique that suggests the man could raise legs without consulting a physiotherapist.

His braids were neatly styled.

Boyyy, if you are reading this, you should marry your hairdresser.

He had these enormous eyes, too.

That was his charm.

He looked dangerously innocent.

If that makes any sense.

He walked towards me with a smile permanently fixed on his face.

“I am fucking high right now,” he announced, wearing the most innocent expression imaginable.

I did not ask.

Maybe some demon standing behind me had asked on my behalf.

“Okay… Mr. Fucking High. Nice to meet you,” I replied.

“Oh shit… pardon meeeee, my lady,” he said, in the most intoxicated manner possible.

Now, ladies, the bar is not in hell.

You all know me na.

I was simply trying to have a new experience.

“I’m Smith. And I am fucking high,” he repeated.

“Okayyyy… I think we established that about five seconds ago,” I said, smiling softly.

“I know. I know. I just… uhm… you’re just so fucking beautiful.”

I mean…

Thank you, baby.

But I know.

“I was going to say I don’t usually do this,” he continued, “but that would sound stupid considering my current state.”

“Well, I would have walked away if you had said that,” I joked.

Then this man looked at me and delivered the sentence that effectively murdered the evening.

“You just… you remind me of my mother.”

Jesus Christ.

My life is a fucking movie.

Can someone press pause?

Who is the director?

Is this the part where the scene rewinds and I am given the opportunity to make a different decision?

Because, you see, I had just spent time in a talking stage with a man who had said almost exactly the same thing to me.

Apparently, there is a peculiar category of men walking around this country who see a random woman standing outside a nightclub and think:

Ah. My mother.

What kind of psychological journey leads a person there?

And you know that part where you decide to try something new purely for the experience?

Yes.

That part.

Scratch it out.

Burn it.

Throw the ashes into the river.

Because beneath the comedy of this story, there is something rather unsettling about repeatedly finding myself in the company of people who seem to have been assembled from the stranger corners of human behaviour.

I genuinely enjoy my solitude.

I like my own company. I like disappearing into my little corner of the world, minding my business and existing without having to negotiate my peace with another human being.

But there are moments when I want to try something different.

There are moments when I want to do life with someone.

And somehow, whenever I entertain that possibility, I find myself in the company of people who either have mummy fetishes, cheat, lie, manipulate, or possess some other fascinating psychological complication that I did not apply for.

It is beginning to feel statistically significant.

Maybe some people really are meant to be alone.

And I do not mean that in the tragic, pity-filled way we usually speak about solitude, like being alone is some unfortunate condition from which everyone must eventually recover.

Maybe solitude is not a punishment.

Maybe it is not a waiting room.

Maybe, for some people, it is simply the most peaceful way to exist.

Because at what point does the constant search for companionship become more exhausting than the solitude you were trying to escape?

If every attempt to find connection keeps placing you in increasingly bizarre situations, maybe the question is no longer, “Where is my person?”

it becomes, “Why am I so determined to find one?”

Not everyone is going to find their people.

And I think we should be more comfortable admitting that.

People meet wonderful people every day.

People also meet terrible people every day.

Some people find lifelong partners.

Some find heartbreak.

Some find character development.

And some of us apparently find twenty-three-year-old men outside nightclubs who are high and see their mothers in us.

Life is peculiar.

And no, I am not saying any of this because I want someone to come rushing into my comments with:

“You will definitely find your person.”

Please.

I am not looking for a person.

Either way, if you ever wonder why my friends call me Mother of Crazy Stories, remember that I once went to a club for a girls’ night and somehow ended up being compared to somebody’s mother.

Frankly?

The title is well deserved.

I hope you enjoyed this article.

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People love being part of the majority. More often than not, it gives them a sense of belonging, validation, and purpose. There is comfort in knowing that others share your opinions, your ideologies, and your worldview. It is human nature to seek community. The problem begins when belonging quietly turns into conformity, and differing choices are treated as betrayal.

There is a plot that a section of Nigerian feminism has lost. It is no longer solely about supporting and empowering women. It is no longer solely about women’s rights or women’s choices. Somewhere along the line, for some people, it became about convincing every woman to adopt the same ideology: that marriage is inherently patriarchal, that it offers nothing to women, and that it inevitably diminishes their strength and identity.

There is a term called misandry. It is prejudice, contempt, dislike, or hatred towards men. It is not a concept I oppose because I do not oppose things I do not fully understand. I question them first.

History gives misandry context.

For centuries, marriage has often been an institution that placed women at a disadvantage. Women were abused, violated, denied autonomy, and in some societies treated as property. Young girls were exchanged to settle debts or strengthen alliances. Women carried the emotional and physical labour of raising children while frequently sacrificing their own ambitions, identities, and well-being. Those who left abusive marriages were mocked, ostracised, labelled witches, or condemned as failures. Some women who tried to leave never made it out alive.

Historically, women had little identity outside the men they belonged to. Their names, achievements, and voices were hidden beneath the authority of fathers and husbands.

Many of these realities have changed, yet many still persist. Women continue to experience domestic violence, sexual assault, workplace discrimination, and countless forms of harassment. They are still told not to dream too boldly or take up too much space. For many women, these experiences shape how they see men, relationships, and marriage.

Women.

Beautiful, resilient women.

Women who have survived unimaginable cruelty and still found the strength to stand.

This is why I understand where some misandry comes from.

Many women who identify with those beliefs have witnessed generations of suffering. They have watched mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends endure violence. Some have experienced it themselves. Their distrust was not created in a vacuum. It was built through history, observation, trauma, and lived experience.

Whether one agrees with their conclusions or not, it is important to understand that those conclusions often have real experiences behind them.

What I question is something else entirely.

It is no longer simply a collective rejection of men for some people. Increasingly, it has become a collective hostility towards women who are heterosexual and who desire marriage and family.

Instead of supporting those women, they ridicule them.

They call them weak.

They describe them as brainwashed.

Some even go as far as wishing them painful marriages simply because they made a different choice.

Is that feminism?

Can a movement built upon the principle of choice condemn women for choosing differently?

Marriage has been unfavourable for many women throughout history. That is a fact supported by countless examples. But to conclude that every marriage is inherently oppressive, or that every woman who desires one is foolish, is no longer an observation. It becomes a sweeping generalisation.

Leave the women who want marriage alone.

Last week, I was speaking to a woman about how I personally do not want to get married. I explained that I am deeply individualistic. I enjoy my solitude. I struggle to imagine spending the rest of my life sharing my space and decisions with another person.

I am a wanderer.

Marriage does not align with the life I currently imagine for myself.

That is my choice.

Her response was, “Yes girl! Those women wey wan marry go suffer.”

Pause.

I expressed my personal decision without attacking women who wanted something different. Yet somehow, the conversation became an opportunity to mock them.

Saying that women who want marriage are destined to suffer contradicts the very principle feminism has spent decades defending: a woman’s right to choose the life she wants without shame.

To the ambitious women

I think there are many kinds of ambitious women.

There is the woman whose purpose is to reach beyond the sky. The explorer. The visionary. The woman who feels most alive while building, creating, discovering, and achieving. For some of these women, marriage feels limiting because they know their personalities. They become so consumed by their work that everything else fades into the background.

I understand that woman because I see parts of myself in her.

When I become invested in something, I become completely absorbed. I worry that I would pour myself so entirely into marriage that I would slowly abandon the dreams I once carried.

That is not because marriage is inherently limiting.

It is because I know myself.

Then there are women who possess a different kind of balance.

They can nurture a marriage, raise children, build successful careers, travel the world, and still pursue their ambitions. One role does not erase the other.

Neither woman is wrong.

There are also women whose greatest dream is a simple life.

A quiet apartment.

A loving husband.

Children running through the house.

Peace.

To them, family is not settling.

It is purpose.

And there is nothing inherently inferior about that dream simply because it looks different from yours.

Some women genuinely enjoy motherhood. Some genuinely desire marriage. Some genuinely find fulfilment in building a home.

That desire is not automatically oppression.

In the race for women’s rights, we sometimes forget women’s choices.

We become so determined to fight against one form of conformity that we accidentally create another. We begin expecting every woman to define freedom exactly as we do.

Perhaps it is because belonging to the majority makes us feel validated. It gives us certainty. It reassures us that our choices are the correct ones.

But feminism should not require uniformity.

It should protect choice.

The woman who wants to remain single deserves respect.

The woman who wants to become a CEO deserves respect.

The woman who wants to be a mother deserves respect.

The woman who wants all three at different stages of her life deserves respect too.

Freedom loses its meaning the moment women are punished for making choices other women would not make.

Leave the women who want marriage alone.

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Picture this.

You’re lying on the tiny bed with worn out sheets in your tiny apartment. It’s as clean as it can get. Maybe clean is far too strong a word. It’s, well… accommodating.

You’ve scrolled endlessly through the internet. You know every trending news story, the ones yet to trend, and the ones that have already come and gone.

You’re bored.

Luckily, you read.

You pick up the bag of chips lying in the corner and search for the best dark romance to ease your fantasies. You want something grotesque. A toxic love story that somehow deceives you into believing it deserves a happy ending. A book with torture… you have a particular template.

A ruthless billionaire who is cruel to everyone, gets off on slitting people’s throats, and somehow chooses a weak partner. A slow, miserable partner with daddy issues and unpaid loans.

Somehow, the ruthless mafia boss who controls the universe bows at the feet of the helpless partner.

He slits throats, burns houses down, has a terrible temper, and behaves like an animal.

And somehow… it gets you cheesing. Giggling. Smiling at the curtains, imagining your mafia savior is standing right there.

What is the psychology behind wanting something you would never actually want?

I am no psychologist. But I have a theory.

I think the human mind responds to violence more than we realize. Toxicity. Anything that spikes adrenaline. Somehow, the brain becomes more attentive to what is unusual.

It starts slowly.

First, it’s just a toxic romance.

Then it isn’t.

It starts to become grotesque.

You realize you’ve gone down the rabbit hole.

It’s why you’ll find yourself reading the darkest romances about step siblings fucking each other and somehow being rewarded with a pitiful ending that still manages to make you feel better about yourself.

Which isn’t my problem.

My problem is how authors have a way with your mind.

It’s like a psychological game.

It starts with you questioning your own sanity, then questioning everyone else’s, and finally… understanding your own mind and accepting it.

Fantasies are usually abnormal.

But is a fantasy supposed to be logical?

Fantasies are meant to be, well… interesting.

But things become even more interesting once you realize there are two sides to you.

The part that’s perfectly comfortable reading dark romance but would never want any of it to become reality.

No one wants to fuck the bully who humiliated them for years simply because he had a pitiful past.

No one wants a stalker who installs CCTV cameras in every corner of the house and becomes jealous over the slightest interaction.

In your subconscious, however, you love the idea.

It is the very thing that excites you.

You want it only in your fantasy.

Because fantasy demands nothing from reality.

Reality is different.

Reality is the front you present to the world.

Your fantasies, however, are the parts of yourself you have not fully accepted as your own.

Because it feels rather concerning that the very things you find morally and socially unacceptable are the exact things that turn you on.

So who are you, really?

The one who sits and creates dark scenarios where you’re being tortured, torn apart, and pleading for someone powerful enough to submit to?

The part of you that wants to completely let go and embrace your own toxicity?

Or the part of you that chooses what is acceptable?

Because embracing your true self means being in constant conflict with your own mind.

You want to stop reading dark romance.

You really do.

You miss the days when you simply read stories about college students falling in love.

It’s no longer that.

Maybe it never was.

I think people cling to what is acceptable because they don’t want to discover what their minds are capable of accepting.

To fully accept yourself can sometimes feel like losing yourself.

Because you’re in a constant battle with your own mind.

Your morality conflicts with your fantasies.

But fantasies, in themselves, are normal.

The problem is that you’re going down a rabbit hole.

Look around you.

These are no longer just dark romances.

They’re disturbing.

They’re concerning.

You consume these stories like a drug.

You crave them.

And the more you crave them, the more the abnormal begins to feel normal.

Until you no longer know where to stop.

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Yesterday was fucked.

My day took a turn, and not the kind you recover from with a deep breath and a good night’s sleep. You know those days when everything seems to happen at once, and no matter what you do, you can’t regain control? You feel like a basket trying to hold water. No matter how tightly you grip it, everything keeps leaking through.

The only thing I needed was food.

Food is important. Food is comfort. It is what makes people laugh, cry, celebrate, grieve, and gather. I needed something comforting. I needed to laugh, even if it was just for a moment. The dish I wanted was yam with egg sauce.

I stood in my tiny kitchen, staring into nothingness. I was wearing nothing but an oversized shirt, my hair was an unintentional mess, and I looked exactly how I felt.

I picked up a knife.

But it wasn’t the yam I thought about.

I stared at the knife a little longer than I should have and thought, Would I die if I cut myself?

The thought disappeared almost immediately.

I am not suicidal. My life may feel unbearable at times, but I still want to live. That is what I owe myself. I will not suffer and then leave this world so easily.

I will wait until my body withers on its own.

The thought lasted less than a second. It brushed past my mind without permission. It didn’t linger.

Until it did.

I reached for the yam again.

This time the image was grotesque.

I imagined the knife piercing too deeply into my stomach.

Would I bleed? Would I die? How does someone even die from a single stab wound?

The questions frightened me.

I dropped the knife. No, it slipped from my hand.

I walked out of the kitchen and put on a comedy show on my iPad. I needed something to interrupt the thought before it convinced me that it meant something about who I was.

For a moment, I wondered if I was losing my mind.

I think intrusive thoughts are the parts of ourselves we instinctively push away.

They are direct. They are daring. They challenge everything we believe about ourselves. They arrive without warning, bringing images, impulses, or questions we would never willingly invite. They are the thoughts that flash through your mind for a second before disappearing. The ones you never say out loud.

The ones that make you ask, Who am I, really?

Am I my intrusive thoughts?

If I sat with them long enough, would they become actions?

Maybe that is why we dismiss them as “just silly thoughts.” We blame them on something we watched, something we read, stress, exhaustion, or curiosity.

Most people say, “My intrusive thoughts are not me.”

Psychologically, that is often true. Intrusive thoughts are unwanted, involuntary mental events. They can be disturbing precisely because they go against a person’s values.

But they still happened in your mind.

That is the uncomfortable part.

Especially for people who have built their identity around morality. People whose minds have clear boundaries about what is acceptable and what is not.

So what separates someone from their intrusive thoughts?

Discipline?

Values?

Choice?

There are people who act on harmful impulses, and there are people who never would. Intrusive thoughts are not always dark, but when people talk about them, darkness is usually what comes to mind.

I think every person exists somewhere between who they are and who they choose to be.

I know I could do this.

But I won’t.

Not because I am incapable, but because my values, my beliefs, my discipline, and years of self-reflection refuse to let me become someone I do not want to be.

The first time I explored an intrusive thought, I was eleven.

I spent a lot of time alone in my mother’s fish shop. Naturally, flies were our neighbours.

My mum had bought me a toy bus with tiny seats inside.

One day I wondered, “Would flies stay alive if they had no wings?”

In my childish mind, I thought I was being kind.

I didn’t want them dead.

I just didn’t want them eating my mother’s fish.

So I patiently caught the flies, removed their wings, and placed each one inside the toy bus. I even left grains of rice for them because I genuinely believed I was taking care of them.

When they stayed alive, I was happy.

To me, I was simply being a good neighbour.

Years later, I looked back and realised how disturbing that story sounded.

As a child, I thought I was helping.

As an adult, I understand why people looked at me with concern when I told them.

How far can the human mind go?

Are we afraid of discovering who we truly are?

Or are we afraid of discovering who we could become if nothing restrained us?

People happily embrace the parts of themselves they admire. The part acceptable in the eyes of society . The part where no one stops says “ what the fuck are you doing ?”

The darker parts are often handed over to the devil, fate, temptation, or anything that keeps them at a safe distance.

No one wants to claim thoughts that disturb them.

I sometimes wonder if we have explored only a tiny fraction of our own minds.

Maybe part of us knows that exploring everything means confronting truths we are not ready for.

Maybe that is one reason society gives us rules.

Following rules is easier than discovering yourself.

It is easier than asking difficult questions. It is easier than confronting what you might be capable of without them.

The second time I explored an intrusive thought, I was thirteen.

A kettle of water was boiling.

I knew hot water could burn people.

But knowing something and understanding it felt like two different things.

So I wondered,

“Would I really burn if this water was poured on me?”

I tested it.

I asked my brother to splash some of the hot water on my head.

Not my hand.

Not my foot.

My head.

It hurt.

Curiosity had answered itself.

What would human beings do if they had unlimited freedom to satisfy every curiosity?

That was the last time I deliberately explored one of my intrusive thoughts.

Following society’s rules became easier.

Accepting only the parts of myself I could live with became easier.

The one where I don’t stop to say “ Am I okay?”

One last thing.

People who deliberately commit cruel or gruesome acts against others are responsible for those actions. This is not an attempt to romanticise or justify violence, nor is it a defence of psychopathy or sociopathy.

This is simply an attempt to understand something many people experience but rarely admit:

Sometimes the scariest thing about an intrusive thought isn’t the thought itself.

It’s wondering why your mind was capable of imagining it in the first place.

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I like to call it internalized racism. The process where your brain, against its better judgment, has somehow been conditioned to believe the negative stereotypes about your own race. It is one thing to be exposed to those prejudices. It is another thing to internalize them. Because hearing something repeatedly is different from accepting it as truth. You may come to believe it because it is all you have ever been taught. But to embrace those stereotypes is to slowly surrender parts of your identity.

What is a Black woman without her skin?

Your skin is your identity. It is the one truth you cannot outrun.

Now, it is no breaking news that Black people carry a history—slavery. Black people were colonized by Europeans, hence Eurocentrism. We have been stripped of our culture, our beauty, our traditions, and our rituals. Conditioned not only to accept Western culture but, in many cases, to measure ourselves against it. It has seeped so deeply into our consciousness that even decades after political freedom, there remains a kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Maybe not even subtle.

It is as loud as the speaker the evangelist in the neighbouring street uses as an alarm every morning.

It is in the way our cultures and beliefs have been labelled “primitive,” “local,” or “undeserving” that we often find ourselves reaching for what belongs to the white man instead. We crave validation from whiteness like an addiction. It is why you think getting fucked by a white man somehow makes you more desirable.

Now, saying every Black woman wants to get fucked by a white man because of internalized racism would contradict everything I stand for. Personal preference exists. Love knows no race, culture, or class. The heart wants what it wants.

But I am speaking to the woman who believes that a white man giving her an orgasm has somehow elevated her social class. That sleeping with whiteness has made her superior to the woman living in the next compound. It is why she would gladly marry a ninety-year-old John who has lost half his teeth, while people scream her name and congratulate her as though she has won the lottery instead of simply finding a husband.

I am speaking to the Black woman who changes everything about herself to become more acceptable to white men. The one who tells younger girls to chat with lonely white men online, even when those men have strange fetishes and unsettling obsessions with Black women

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I do not entirely blame the women who have somehow attached their worth to being desired by white men. I blame the pastor who stood on the altar and somehow found a prophecy of a white husband. A white man taking you abroad. A white man changing your life. And somehow, you grew up with your brain wired to seek whiteness like destiny.

Your prayers begin with, “God, please give me a husband.” Then you become specific. Not just any husband. A white husband. A white man who worships your feet as though you are the very bane of his existence. Which, in itself, is not the problem. I, too, desire to be adored.

But somewhere along the way, you confused preference with conditioning. You wrapped internalized racism in the language of preference. And deep within yourself, you know it runs deeper than that. You know your insecurities are speaking. You know society has whispered into your ears what success should look like, and it handed you the image of a white man.

You know it.

I do not blame you.

I blame colonization and what it has done to Black people. That our cultures are considered local. Our hair is considered unprofessional. Our languages are considered inappropriate. In reality, we are politically free. But our minds were colonized long before our bodies were liberated. That is the tragedy.

For generations, white men have been portrayed as the blueprint. The romantic ideal. The prince. The dream. Young women have consumed those images through films, literature, advertising, textbooks, and pornography until fantasy itself began wearing a white face.

This is why “it’s just my preference” is not always a simple sentence. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Desire does not exist in isolation. It is shaped by culture, media, pornography, literature, schools, history, and the world around us.

A preference becomes intellectually interesting when it consistently mirrors existing systems of power. If someone falls in love with a white man, that tells us nothing. Human attraction is beautifully unpredictable. But when whiteness becomes the standard of desirability, while Blackness is dismissed as less attractive, less refined, less intelligent, or less worthy of intimacy, we are no longer discussing individual chemistry. We are confronting the cultural residue of Eurocentrism.

The point is not that every interracial relationship is evidence of internalized bias. That would be absurd. People fall in love across race, culture, language, and nationality for countless genuine reasons. To suggest otherwise would reduce human relationships to political statements.

But if you have never questioned why your imagination so often associates romance, beauty, luxury, and desirability with whiteness, then perhaps it is worth examining your worldview. The answer may be uncomfortable.

This conversation is not about condemning your attraction to white men. It is an invitation to sit with yourself. Study your patterns. Your behaviour. Your desires. Your obsession, if there is one, with being chosen by a white man. Ask yourself whether any part of it has been shaped by internalized racism.

The difficult thing about internalized racism is that it rarely announces itself. It hides behind preference. It hides behind “it’s just my type.” It hides behind denial. Sometimes it hides behind self-hatred so familiar that it no longer feels like hatred at all. And that is the cruelest part. You may not even realize it is there.

I do not entirely blame you.

Colonizers did not only want land.

They wanted minds.

Because once the mind is conquered, the body follows.

Land can be reclaimed.

But reclaiming the mind takes generations.

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I had a heated argument with my neighbour. I like to call him the devil’s incarnate. No… on a second thought, I’d rather say he is the devil himself, merely borrowing human skin for convenience.

I do not feel guilty for saying that.

A man can only prove himself wicked so many times before people stop calling it an opinion and start calling it a fact. He has repeatedly shown himself to be cruel, inconsiderate, and strangely committed to making other people’s lives miserable. Bullying isn’t something he occasionally does. It is practically stitched into his personality.

But if there’s one thing I refuse to give a bully, it’s satisfaction.

I will bruise a bully’s ego even if it’s the last meaningful thing I do on this earth.

He kept rambling about how sharp mouthed I am, speaking with the confidence of someone who mistakes volume for truth. I left him standing at the gate and quietly walked back home. My mind desperately needed another place to live for a while because if it stayed with him any longer, I’d probably start charging him rent.

I also hate seeing myself out of character. My dear enemy had dragged the beast that usually sleeps peacefully inside my heart into broad daylight. The poor thing was now stretching, yawning, and asking if it should clock in for work.

I needed a distraction.

So I reached for my phone.

And for reasons I still cannot explain, I suddenly wanted to read about a woman.

Delilah.

I don’t know why I chose one of the most infamous women in the Bible. Maybe my mood had already made the decision before my brain could object. It was giving vicious woman, and against every ounce of common sense I possessed…

I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

Now, Samson has quite the reputation.

Mention his name anywhere, and almost everyone immediately thinks of one thing—a man blessed with supernatural strength, a judge chosen by God.

It’s different for me.

Whenever I picture Samson, strength isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.

I imagine a ridiculously handsome young man with hair so magnificent that women secretly wished they had his routine. I imagine someone fully aware of the effect he had on people, especially women. Children probably watched him with sparkling eyes, pretending to lift imaginary lions when they got home.

People must have watched him pass by and whispered,

“I wish I were as strong as Samson.”

I imagine a tall man who grew up wrapped in the overwhelming love of parents who had once believed children were something they would only ever pray for. Parents who looked at him and silently remembered every tear they had cried before God answered them.

Then life happened.

Now, here’s something about Samson that people rarely stop to think about.

While reading his story, I couldn’t help noticing how drawn he was to Philistine women. He wanted to marry a Philistine woman— Timnah ,simply because she pleased his eyes.

Look at that .

I imagine Samson as the human embodiment of ” I saw it. I wanted it. Therefore, it shall be mine.”

Surely there were beautiful Israelite women.

Beautiful women couldn’t have suddenly become extinct in Israel.

But no.

My brother enjoyed shopping in enemy territory.

In today’s generation, Samson would probably be the greatest ragebaiter on the internet. Every other week he’d find a new way to keep his enemies awake at night.

As if that wasn’t enough, he later slept with a prostitute in Gaza.

Another Philistine city.

That man genuinely enjoyed playing with fire.

At this point, the flames probably knew him by his first name.

And that introduces us to today’s main character.

Delilah.

I imagine Delilah as a woman whose presence entered a room before she did. The kind of woman conversations accidentally paused for. The kind whose confidence unsettled other women and intrigued men at the same time.

I imagine eyes that carried too many secrets, eyes that had witnessed things they would never confess, eyes that smiled long before her lips ever did. She was probably the kind of woman rumours followed because mystery is expensive, and people love spending gossip where they cannot afford the truth.

Even the Philistine rulers sought her out, and that alone tells me she wasn’t an ordinary woman

I also imagine a woman who had bills to pay.

Real bills.

Not the dramatic soft life bills we invent online, but the kind that stared back at you every morning and refused to blink.

Then one day, opportunity knocked.

The Philistine rulers handed her an assignment.

Find the source of Samson’s strength.

Of course, they weren’t asking her to volunteer. Attached to that assignment was a reward so attractive it practically smiled at her—one thousand one hundred pieces of silver from each Philistine ruler.

Well…

Would you look at that.

All she had to do was uncover the secret of a man she barely knew. That’s the kind of offer that would make anybody sit up instantly .

People love reducing Delilah to a greedy woman, but I think that’s too simple. She was a Philistine, while Samson was an Israelite who had repeatedly humiliated her people. From her perspective, she wasn’t betraying her nation; she was serving it. Just as Samson fought for Israel, Delilah stood with the Philistines.

History has an interesting habit of deciding who the villain is depending on which side of the battlefield you’re standing.

Sometimes…

It’s just politics.

Now, they knew Samson’s weakness, and they intended to make him pay for it.

Notice that they didn’t send soldiers after him.

They didn’t organise another ambush.

They didn’t promise him more wealth, more land, or more influence. Samson already had enough victories to his name. None of those things would have tempted him.

Instead, they studied him.

People underestimate how dangerous observation can be. Sometimes your greatest enemy isn’t the loudest one. It’s the one quietly taking notes while you continue living your life. They watched Samson long enough to realize that there was one appetite he never seemed to outgrow.

Women.

Beautiful women.

Philistine women.

So they sent one.

And not just any woman.

Delilah

.

The Bible doesn’t spend pages describing her beauty, but it doesn’t have to.. I imagine Delilah as the kind of woman who walked into a room and unknowingly rearranged the atmosphere. The kind of woman people looked at twice without realizing they had done it. There was probably something unsettling about how composed she was, something almost dangerous about how little she revealed. She carried herself like someone who knew exactly what she was capable of.

And, just like that…

It worked.

Samson fell in love.

First mission accomplished.

Love is fascinating because it has a way of convincing intelligent people to temporarily misplace their intelligence. It softens your instincts, quiets your suspicion, and slowly persuades you that vulnerability is the same thing as safety. Before you know it, your heart begins making decisions your brain would have rejected in broad daylight.

Somehow, your strength quietly changes address.

It no longer belongs entirely to you.

It now lives in the hands of someone else.

And the frightening part is that you hand it over willingly.

That is what love does.

Now Delilah had crossed the first hurdle. The next phase was testing the waters.

I imagine my girl cuddling up to him, waiting for the perfect moment. Not while he was fighting lions or settling disputes. No. One of those quiet moments when the world felt small and nothing seemed capable of going wrong. Wrapped safely beneath the arms of the man who loved her, she probably looked up at him with the sweetest face she could gather and, in a voice that almost sounded like a whisper, asked,

“Tell me where your strength lies.”

Now, Samson…

My man.

You should’ve stood up immediately.

If my talking stage randomly asks me that, I’d automatically assume I’m about to be added to his collection of missing persons.

Because…

From where to where?

I thought we were just having fun.

What exactly does my strength have to do with this romantic activity?

Like I said, Samson would’ve made an excellent ragebaiter.

He lied to her. Not once. Not twice. Several times. And they weren’t even believable lies.

“Bind me with seven fresh bowstrings that have never been dried.”

Sir…

Please na.

Is this supposed to sound convincing?

Or are we performing a ritual?

The funny part is that Delilah actually went ahead and tried it. She tied him up, called for the Philistines, and Samson snapped the bowstrings as though they were ordinary threads.

Now, if I were Samson, that would’ve been the end of whatever situationship we had going on.

I would have carried my bags and ran as far as possible.

Because why are you experimenting with my weakness?

Who sent you?

Why do you keep asking the same suspicious question?

And why are Philistines magically appearing every single time we have this conversation?

But love has a strange relationship with common sense. It has a way of repainting red flags until they look pink. It convinces you that coincidence is innocent and that suspicion is insecurity.

So Delilah kept asking.

Day after day.

Again.

And again.

The Bible says she pressed him daily until he was sick to death of it.

I laughed when I read that verse because I could almost picture Samson waking up every morning thinking,

“Here she comes again.”

“Babe…”

“No.”

“Please…”

“Delilah, we’ve discussed this.”

“But if you really love me…”

Ah.

There it is.

The guilt trip.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Samson finally gave in.

He placed his life in her hands. Completely. He handed over the one secret that had protected him all his life, not because he was forced to, but because he trusted the wrong person with the right information.

And right there…

He fell.

Now, this was a fun Bible study.

But notice something. The Philistines didn’t just attack Samson, they studied him. They learned his patterns, his desires, the things that excited him, and the things that made him vulnerable. They could’ve baited him with money or power, but those things weren’t his weakness.

Women were.

Your love for certain things can become the very doorway people use to gain access to you. Your vulnerabilities are often what people search for first because vulnerability gives them influence, and influence gives them control. In a twisted way, there’s a quiet satisfaction that comes from knowing you can pull someone’s emotional strings.

And while you’re busy letting your guard down around someone, don’t automatically assume they’re doing the same. You might be operating from love while they’re operating from a mission.

It is left to you to know the difference.

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A Jehovah’s Witness told me women who lead the church are demonic.

I live in a “face me I face you” apartment. It was the only available hostel I could find close to my school. It comes with its own chaos… but at least we are compensated with gossip. Nothing escapes our ears. We are like a polygamous family that cannot stand each other but somehow still knows every detail of each other’s lives.

I was lying on my bed watching the K-drama Rookie Teacher, laughing at how ridiculously satisfying the series was. You should watch it. It is honestly a masterpiece.

Until I heard:

“Women should not lead the church.”

See, I could be lying on my bed, crying over the most ridiculous thing, drowning in a terrible day or simply existing in misery. But the moment I hear anything concerning women, something in me immediately wakes up.

I transform.

I suddenly feel like some superhero levitating around strange energies.

I instantly feel alive.

Now I knew exactly where to pour every buried thought and every stored-up argument hiding in the corners of my mind.

Jehovah’s Witnesses have come to my house many times before. I admire their dedication to following Christ and I always opened my door to listen to their sermons.

I got out of bed and realized a man in his late fifties was having a heated conversation with my neighbor about who should lead the church.

I stepped outside.

“Good morning sir,” I said. “I had to get out of bed the moment I heard that statement.”

He laughed, and then the second man followed with his own laughter. But his sounded forced — the kind of laughter people give when they do not know whether to be amused or uncomfortable.

“Do you mind if I join?” I asked, like I was not still going to join if he said no.

“Sure,” he replied. “We were talking about women’s place in church. Open your Bible to 1 Corinthians 14:34–35.”

I opened it.

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“Do you understand now, ma’am?” he asked.

“No, I do not sir. Neither do I agree with what was written here.”

I wanted to say more, but I needed to hear his response first.

“If you’re a Christian, then you should follow your Bible.”

“Okay sir, then tell me why women should remain silent as though they are machines programmed for obedience. Why should men decide for them as if women were created without minds of their own?”

My irritation had already begun leaking into my voice.

“Sister calm down, you are taking it too far,” he said. “I’m not saying women should not speak in church. They can take roles. But leadership belongs to men.”

“Why?”

Because up until that moment, he had not given me one actual reason why leadership should belong to men or why women should be forbidden from speaking.

“Because women are the ones who dominate the Igbe community. They speak to demons.”

Pause.

Because even I needed a pause.

Yes, I was shocked too.

I am not making any of this up. This happened by 9:43 in the morning while I was already having a terrible day.

Let us continue.

I stared at his face and laughed because this had to be a joke.

Somebody pinch me.

“Ah, so you mean you travelled around the whole of Nigeria counting Igbe women and men, right?”

Now we are discussing Christians, not traditionalists.

If I wanted to discuss traditional beliefs, I would speak to traditionalists.

So how exactly are you trying to build your argument with that? It is not even a fact. It is not even a constructive opinion.

And saying women speak to demons is not just ridiculous.

It is deeply misogynistic.

And the fact that an outreach that is supposed to be about winning souls somehow transformed into a debate on women’s worth says far more about you than it does about me.

Women have spent centuries being told what they should do.

Soon they will probably teach us how to breathe too.

“In what way do women speak to demons?” I asked, irritation written all over my face.

“I believe women who lead churches are demonic. People no longer understand what church is anymore…” he paused before continuing, “especially those shallow churches.”

There are two things here.

First, he insulted other churches simply because they are led by women.

Second, he carries a prejudice and wraps it carefully in scripture.

And this is not coming from some gender-war perspective.

Because there is a difference between faith and bias wearing holy clothes.

Today I understand why people deconstruct.

Because they read their Bibles day and night.

They were probably among the strongest followers of Christ.

Until they reached certain verses.

Verses that sat in their chest like stones.

Until they heard sermons that constantly circled back to women.

Women.

Women.

Women.

Women have not been allowed to breathe freely for the longest time. Women have not been taken seriously in leadership positions. If she reaches the top, people assume it happened through favoritism, luck, or some fortunate mistake.

Never hard work. Never discipline. Never dedication.

Never the sleepless nights spent pouring herself into ambition.

It is rarely about that.

Instead, it becomes about bruised egos.

Because somewhere, somehow, the existence of a woman in power feels like an insult.

Like a wound to pride.

Because superiority is all some people have ever known.

Power becomes oxygen.

And as a bonus? There are Bible verses waiting patiently to be bent into whatever shape supports their thinking.

Just like this man standing before me saying:

“Women who lead the church are demonic.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“Sister, it is not of God,” he said, obvious annoyance stretching across his face. “We just read the Bible.”

“And does that sound—”

I was cut off.

“I have to preach next door.”

I approached this conversation with an open mind.

But religion can sometimes become the most comfortable hiding place for prejudice. You blame it on your flesh as though your spirit went on vacation.

Or you blame the devil because he becomes the easiest place to dump your demons.

We do not question.

We do not become curious.

We hold onto whatever helps us sleep peacefully at night.

And sometimes we use the Bible not as a mirror for ourselves but as a weapon against other people.

A woman and a man are equal.

We are both human.

A woman can lead just as much as a man can. A woman can become a general overseer just as much as a man can.

And what hurts even more is that many women themselves have accepted otherwise.

“That’s how it has always been my sister. What can a woman do jare?”

They accept limitations and mistake them for destiny.

Their minds have been conditioned to sit under the shadow of a man.

To not reach.

To not seek.

To not dream.

To simply stay quiet.

Because of course,

the Bible says so.

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The first stage is shock.

Before that moment, life is still painfully ordinary. You are lazily pressing your phone, pretending to be interested in a random TikTok video explaining how to kill a cockroach while your eyes fight sleep. You are barely paying attention. There is still a cockroach hanging stubbornly on the wall, half dead, surviving the different insecticides you sprayed on its pitiful little body. Everything is normal. Everything is quiet. Then your phone rings.

You hear the news.

You laugh because clearly the person on the other end must be lying. There is absolutely no way. You laugh again, but this time it sounds strange. Not normal strange. The kind of strange that sounds like a psycho who just murdered a victim he had been hunting for years. The kind of laugh that escapes before your brain even understands what your ears have heard.

Suddenly, the TikTok videos do not matter anymore. The cockroach hanging on the wall no longer matters. The noises outside become distant, almost nonexistent. The entire world loses meaning in a matter of seconds. Your heart makes a loud thump, and somehow that becomes the only proof that you are still alive. Then another thump follows, harder and louder than the first. Suddenly, you become convinced that this is it. You are about to die from a heart attack.

You wait for your body to collapse, but it does not. Instead, it betrays you slowly. Your body begins to tremble in front of your own eyes. Your head vibrates like a machine on the verge of exploding, and your stomach feels like your intestines are having some secret meeting inside you — a meeting dedicated entirely to your destruction. Your feet suddenly feel detached from the floor beneath you, almost like they are levitating. Your eyes weaken and your vision blurs around the edges. You cannot move. You cannot walk. Breathing itself suddenly feels like work.

Then you find tears.

But even they betray you.

Because they do not fall.

They simply sit there, trapped in your eyes as if they too have abandoned you. Meanwhile your heart continues its violent reminder, thumping loudly against your chest as if it desperately wants you to remember that unfortunately, you are still alive.

The second stage is denial.

After disappearing during the chaos, the logical side of your brain suddenly returns. It whispers that you need two sides of the story, that you need confirmation before believing something this terrible. So you ask the trusted one while silently praying that everything was a misunderstanding. You have not prayed in ages, but suddenly you pray like your life depends on it. You pray like a child making desperate promises to God.

Then the answer comes.

Your knees weaken immediately when you realize it is true. The betrayal happened. This is real. It is not some fragment of your imagination. Not some cruel hallucination. Not some nightmare. Because nightmares are survivable. Nightmares end.

Reality does not.

Denial is terrifying because even after the truth is placed directly in front of you, you still refuse to accept it. You convince yourself that it is temporary, that eventually you will wake up and laugh at how ridiculous all this was. But you do not wake up.

Because you never slept.

You have been awake for far too long. Your eyes now carry permanent shadows beneath them, and suddenly you begin to fear people. You jump at the slightest sound. You study everyone around you like they are all psychopaths waiting for the perfect moment to reveal themselves. You observe their eyes, their hands, their footsteps and their pauses. Every movement becomes suspicious. Every action becomes a question. Every word becomes something to analyze.

And somewhere in the middle of all that exhaustion, a realization quietly slips into your mind.

You are damaged.

And maybe beyond repair.

The third stage is numbness.

You have lost your mind. You have lost a part of yourself, and now all that remains is a hollow version of who you used to be. You become like a house after a robbery — still standing, but missing everything important inside. You become a closed book protected by passwords and keys. You become comfortable with isolation and convince yourself that you no longer need anyone.

Humans begin to terrify you.

So your companion becomes your phone. Maybe sad books too — books with storylines that resemble your own life a little too much.

But eventually, you grow tired.

Not physically tired.

Soul tired.

The kind of tiredness sleep cannot fix.

You become numb.

Numbness is a terrible thing because pain was manageable. Crying was manageable. Feeling hurt was manageable. At least emotions reminded you that you were still human.

But now you feel nothing.

And somehow, that hurts even more.

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That is the part nobody talks about when it comes to betrayal.

It’s currently raining outside. I’m sitting on this old bench that has somehow lost one of its legs. It feels like I’m balancing on a painful seesaw, swinging between discomfort and stubbornness because I refuse to move.

The rain has created a stream we never signed up for, so technically I’m swimming in rainwater right now.

And do you know what Ify would do under this condition?

Romanticize a rainy day.

Because apparently, I like suffering with aesthetics.

But is it still romanticizing if your heart suddenly decides to thump loudly for absolutely no reason? If your chest tightens out of nowhere, like your body just remembered something your mind was trying so hard to bury?

Like excuse me?

The heartbreak already happened. Why is my body doing bonus content? Why am I getting chest pains and random heavy breathing like I signed a contract for an extended edition?

Call me toxic, but I love thinking about my heartbreaks for the plot. Not because I miss the person or want to relive anything. I think I just like checking if there’s still pain there. I want to know if I still hurt or if I’ve become numb to it.

Well… let’s just say I have successfully given myself temporary chest pain.

The cause of the heartbreak is ashamedly a man I met a few years back. I am in fact embarrassed to admit that I once allowed my heart to be controlled by someone like me. A human. If we actually sit down and think about how much control we hand over to people just because we love them, it’s actually scary.

Let’s call him David.

David and I had a thing… because I hate admitting it was an actual relationship.

Now David in the head of an 18 year old me was “the perfect man”. I genuinely thought he was unreal, like a fragment of my imagination. Courtesy of K-drama love stories and my very unrealistic expectations.

That was how 18 year old me was.

Now in reality, he was smart… I’ll give him that. He had a way of manipulating you. And I’m not talking normal manipulation that makes you think you’re the problem. I’m talking psycho level. Crazy stuff. If that dude started a manipulation class, he would become rich.

Now I was a lover girl experiencing a “first love” situation. Notice the quotation marks? Great.

I wanted to be the perfect person for him. Well… aside from my trust issues and overthinking, I think I tried. Or maybe not. Actually no, I did try.

But the thing about trying too hard for someone is that sometimes you become so focused on proving your love that you stop paying attention to whether you’re receiving any back. You excuse things you should question. You ignore things because you think love means patience.

Funny enough, heartbreak itself wasn’t even the worst part.

The worst part was slowly realizing that the person who hurt you was not who you thought they were. It’s discovering that while you were loving sincerely, someone else was performing sincerity.

That hurts differently.

Because now you begin questioning yourself too.

Was I blind?

Was I stupid?

Did I ignore signs?

You replay scenes like a detective investigating your own sadness.

And somehow, after all of that, your heart still decides to betray you with random loud thumps.

The heart palpitations you get during a heartbreak are still so unnecessary.

I’m already emotionally suffering. My chest does not need to join the cast.

Anyways… the rain is still falling and this bench still hates me.

I think I’m done writing now.

My heart is acting up again.

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Today I went to church.

Not for the sermon, not for the praise and worship. I simply went to show off my hairstyle.

This was how it happened.

I was scrolling through TikTok in my tiny apartment, lying on my rumpled bedsheet with a pile of clothes that had somehow graduated into becoming my pillow. I searched, “different ways to style a pixie curl.” I figured it out. And right there, that became the only reason I went to church.

And guess what? It worked.

People were staring… and you know I love a little attention.

Praise and worship went by in a blur, then the sermon came. The pastor was talking about serving God fervently. Meanwhile, I had been scrolling through my phone, looking for anything to keep my mind occupied. Somehow, that journey of distraction led me to my Bible app.

I realized something.

There was this man we were told about in Bible school — Noah. My old man.

Now this is the story of Noah.

Noah was six hundred years old when the flood came upon the earth. He was one of the few people God found righteous in a generation that had completely gone off the rails. Imagine being surrounded by people acting like chaos itself had opened a branch office on earth.

God basically gave Noah insider information. Not a clue. Not a hint. A whole plan. Full details. He told him that He was going to send a flood to destroy the earth and instructed him to build an ark — a massive one. Then He told Noah to bring his family and pairs of animals into it.

Now I know some of you are already saying, “But why would God do that?”

I hear you. I really do.

But hold that thought, queens and kings.

Now I imagine a six hundred-year-old man. Forget that Noah was still strong enough to build a giant ark because that itself deserves respect. But in my head, I’m picturing an elderly man walking towards me with wisdom in his eyes, probably moving at a pace that says, “I have seen things.” The kind of face that has watched generations come and go. The kind of face that has paid taxes in spirit before taxes were even invented.

Now imagine this man walks up to you and says, “My child, listen carefully. A flood is coming and all of you are going to die.”

I would laugh at first.

Because at that point, I’m probably thinking about what I want to eat or trying to survive life itself. I would probably look at the man and say, “God abeg, for this hot sun?”

Or maybe even say, “Make the flood come abeg. Let it wipe all of us.” Because honestly? Sometimes adulthood alone feels like a group project designed by enemies.

People are natural unbelievers. We usually need proof before we believe anything.

And there was no proof.

To make matters worse, rain itself was probably not even a familiar thing to them in the way we know it today. So imagine Noah building a giant ark while everyone around him watched like, “Yeah… grandpa has finally lost the plot.”

But the ark was huge. Really huge. That alone would have made me curious. I mean, what harm would it do to just follow the old man and hide inside for small safety measures? Abi?

I think people are quick to judge the “unbelievers” in the Bible. The people who did not believe are treated like Satan’s personal assistants. But the truth is… we are not that different.

We still judge.

We still laugh at people who say Jesus is coming again because, to many people, it sounds ridiculous.

We still laugh at the idea of hell because honestly, is life not hell enough?

We still laugh at eternal life and at the thought of mansions waiting somewhere beyond this earth.

We still laugh at pastors preaching about signs of the end times and “666.” We call them dramatic. We call them ignorant.

We basically tell them to touch grass.

So let me take you back.

If Noah walked up to you and said a flood was coming…

Would you enter the ark?

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I am sitting in the back seat at church. Two ushers have already come to persuade me to move to the front, but we all know I am such a stubborn babe.

And the back is where I reside… well, only for events where my social anxiety decides to creep in. Aside from that, you’ll almost always find me at the front.

Now, let’s get to the reason we’re here.

You see, I’m not going to pretend I enjoy Sunday sermons all the time.

Pastors seem to enjoy preaching about three topics that are starting to bore me: giving, fornication, and marriage. Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these topics. I am just bored of them. I think there are far more interesting things to talk about… like Eve and how she is such a misunderstood babe.

So, I decided to pick up my phone and read through Genesis. But one particular story stole the spotlight.

My queen… Eve.

Now, this is what happened.

Adam was created first, and God realized something instantly—that this young man was incomplete without a woman. I mean, how can a man’s companion simply be nature and animals? I would be lonely.

So He said, “You know what? Let me give this man a helper.” And that was when a queen was made. Well, not made exactly. More like fashioned from the rib of a man.

Now, that was not all. He placed them in a beautiful garden called Eden. A sweet baecation. Starting a honeymoon immediately? Sweet.

There were not many rules on this baecation, except for one: stay away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which unfortunately happened to be the most attractive tree in the garden.

Talk about temptation.

Imagine your favorite drink staring right back at you, calling your name and whispering, “Take me.” I bet that’s how Eve felt.

Now, let’s talk about something. Where was Adam while his wife was having a conversation with the serpent? Probably off naming another animal.

Eve had to find something to keep herself occupied, and that was when she met the serpent.

The serpent told her, “Eat it. Nothing will happen.” Basically the biblical version of your friend saying, “Baba, do am. Nothing go spoil. Last last, you go dey alright.”

Eve tasted the fruit. And in that moment, I imagine she was confused. Probably standing there thinking, “Ahahn… why is this thing sweet like this?” And that was when she decided to share it with her husband. Isn’t she such a sweet woman? She tasted something good and wanted her man to experience it too.

Now, Adam could have simply said, “No. God told us not to.” But he was such a hopeless lover boy. “How can I say no to this woman?” he probably thought. So they both ate the fruit.

And lo and behold, ladies and gentlemen, the word “ everywhere first blur “ suddenly became clear. They realized something instantly.

“Why are we naked?”

I bet they both had the exact same confused look on their faces. And just like that, the baecation was over.

Now, that is such an interesting story.

Humans are naturally curious. Curiosity is what keeps us moving. We do not simply function without knowledge. We want to know why we cannot do something, why we should do it, and why we shouldn’t. Put a strange object in front of a baby and tell them not to touch it. It is at that exact moment that touching it becomes their life’s mission.

Humans are also rarely satisfied. First, you want a phone. You get the phone. Then you want a car. You get the car. Then your eyes wander toward a yacht. There are always more mountains after the mountain you just climbed.

Eve saw the tree and instantly became curious. There were other fruits, other beautiful things, other blessings. But people have a strange habit of wanting what they cannot have—or perhaps what they should not have.

That right there was Eve.

And if we’re being honest, that is us too.

We often read her story and shake our heads as though we would have done better. But every day, in our own little ways, we stand before our own forbidden trees. We already have enough, yet we reach for more. We are warned, yet we want to see for ourselves. We are satisfied until something unavailable catches our attention.

Maybe that is why Eve’s story has survived for so long. It is not just the story of the first woman. It is the story of every human being who has ever looked at something they shouldn’t touch and thought,

“Just this once.”

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I am sitting on a bench next to a convenience store. Beside me is a woman, probably in her mid-thirties or forties. She is having a heated argument with a lover. Maybe. I don’t know.

I’m holding a cup of coffee that tastes like disappointment.

I genuinely do not like coffee, but I bought it for the plot. More specifically, for the aesthetic. The cup was cute, and I needed to be in character for a conversation that was about to happen.

And that, right there, sums up the kind of person I am.

I prefer to call myself human.

I know you’re probably on your bed, in your office, or sitting on your toilet seat reading this and wondering, “Of course you’re human. Were you supposed to be a tree?”

Stay with me.

I’ve always been good with words. I call it a superpower. What keeps humans going is communication, and life becomes a little easier when you know how to wield it well.

That is where I come in.

The reason I’m sitting on a bench next to an angry woman is not because I’m trying to reconnect with nature. It’s because I’m preparing for a conversation I genuinely do not want to have.

I started speaking to this young man weeks ago.

Now, I am an avoidant who is painfully aware of her flaws. I crave love the way a starving person craves food, but the moment it reaches my doorstep, I bolt. Love feels beautiful from a distance. Up close, it feels like standing in front of a moving train and hoping it changes direction.

This young man, however, is the kind of person who runs toward people.

The kind who stays.

The kind who chases you until your knees weaken from running.

Let’s call him Deji.

Deji is not particularly good with words.

I am.

And words are power.

Not power in a cruel way. Not the kind that controls people like puppets. Just the kind that allows you to steer a conversation wherever you want it to go. The kind that lets you bury a truth beneath a mountain of beautiful sentences and somehow leave looking innocent.

The frightening thing is that I don’t always do it intentionally.

Sometimes it feels like muscle memory.

Deji wants love from Ella.

Ella has love to give, but she would rather not.

You see, Ella has handed her heart to people before. Not once. Not twice. Enough times to learn that some people mistake a beating heart for something that can be crushed.

So now she keeps it locked away.

I’m talking padlocks. Chains. Security systems.

Deji wants answers from Ella.

“Why do you run?” he asked on a random Tuesday.

A normal person would probably answer with something simple.

“I’m just not ready.”

Clean. Reasonable. Honest enough.

But writers are people-pleasers.

That is our dirty little secret.

We know exactly which words belong together. We know how to arrange pain into poetry. We know how to dress confusion in silk and make it look profound.

Sometimes we don’t even need to convince you.

All we have to do is find the most heartbreaking words available, stitch them together carefully, and place them in your hands.

You do the rest.

You call it honesty.

I stared at Deji and thought about what to say.

The truth sat at the edge of my tongue.

I could have said:

“I’m terrified of love.”

Or:

“I think something inside me broke a long time ago and I haven’t figured out how to fix it.”

Or even:

“I’m selfish enough to want affection and scared enough to run from it.”

But I didn’t.

Instead, I fed him hope.

I wrapped truth and lies in the same package and handed it to him.

“It’s just me. I think I might be the problem, you know? Every time I think I’m making progress, it feels like I’m right back where I started. Back to being that kid who’s afraid of opening up. I try. God knows I try. I want this to work. Us. You and I. In our little world. But the thing is…”

I paused.

“This world isn’t ours alone.”

There were truths in those words.

There were lies too.

The problem with being good at language is that you learn how to hide inside it.

A sentence can become a mask.

A paragraph can become a fortress.

A well-placed metaphor can distract people from the fact that you never answered their question.

In that moment, I wasn’t trying to explain myself.

I was trying to make myself feel better.

I could have given him a direct answer. Something solid. Something he could hold.

Instead, I gave him fragments.

I gave him beautiful ruins and left him to build meaning from the wreckage.

I’ve always known words are my greatest strength.

It is where I have complete control.

It is where I win.

Again and again.

It is where I feed you lies so gently they feel like truth.

Where I hand you promises wrapped in grief.

Where I leave pieces of myself scattered between sentences and convince you they were meant for you.

Maybe that’s why writers make the best liars.

Not because we’re dishonest.

But because we know exactly what the truth is supposed to sound like.

Or maybe … we’re just dishonest?

See how I convinced you too?

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YOU PITY YOURSELF

I am sitting on a chair I got from a store last week. The attendant was unbelievably rude. I’m definitely not going there again. There is a table in front of me. Papers, cereal wrappers from three days ago, and a journal I have no confidence in opening lie scattered across it. I’m stuck in my tiny apartment. There isn’t much to my name except my bed, half-finished foodstuffs that are almost expired, wigs I’m tired of wearing, and beautiful clothes I have no confidence in wearing.

My life is pretty normal. There’s not much tragedy I can’t handle.

Well… so I thought.

I brush my hand across my face. There’s a wet substance near my eyes. I check the mirror.

It’s my tears.

You know you’re used to pain when tears flow randomly down your face. Why am I crying? You must be wondering.

I don’t know.

I honestly do not know.

All I know is that, two minutes before these tears decided they needed to fall, there was a girl watching a queer movie, Love in the Big City. In it, a gay man and a heterosexual woman are both navigating lives that seem miserable in their own eyes—and maybe in the eyes of other people. Not mine, though. They seemed fine. Well, except for how lonely they both were.

I think it was at that point.

No. It was definitely at that moment.

My brain decided it was the perfect time to spiral and remind me of how miserable my life seemed.

I mean, on the surface, it’s just a normal girl navigating her life in a school she totally hates and a course she’s ashamed of. Maybe it’s also her inability to have a social life. For a moment, she likes it. She likes her quiet life. She likes how much “control” she has over her little world.

But maybe—just maybe—the control she has over her life is the very thing that is pitiful about her.

She goes crazy the moment she slips out of that controlled life. She overthinks everything.

The need for control.

Pitiful.

I pitied myself today. I stared at my lonely life and wished for drama. But the crazy thing is, if I were ever thrown into one, I would definitely run away.

But I want it.

Or maybe I just want something new.

Last week, I was sitting with my twin brother. I told him I needed money to go out. The money came.

It always comes.

But money wasn’t the issue.

Money was just a reasonable excuse—an acceptable reason for the presence of misery. People say it all the time. I need money for this. I need money to go out. I need money to live.

But you—

You pity yourself.

You pity your life.

You pity you.

I want to say more, but I have run out of thoughts. My head feels like a dark cloud without stars. There is no inspiration for the next word. No perfect sentence is oozing out of my head now.

I have exhausted my brain for today.

I have pitied myself today.

This story explores themes of trauma, mental health, violence, and the darker corners of the human mind. Some scenes may be distressing for certain readers. Please read with care.

This is also my first ever attempt at a story . I hope you love Mira as much as I do .

THE GHOST IS NEAR

I am an overthinker. A chronic overthinker.

I don’t just think—I build universes in my head and live in them rent-free. A whole mansion of ghosts. Every room is occupied by a memory, a mistake, or an insecurity that refuses to die.

The voices?

Unpleasant, but familiar.

Almost comforting in a twisted way.

Silence unsettles me. A quiet mind feels suspicious. I’d rather have a few ghosts rattling chains in my head than be left alone with nothing at all.

I study people.

Not in a serial-killer way.

At least, I hope not.

I calculate their steps. I pay attention to how fast they walk, how hard their heels strike the ground, how they shift their weight before turning. I watch for hesitation. Confidence. Fear.

Mostly fear . It gives me control over them .

People tell on themselves with their bodies. Most of them don’t even realize it. I study how long it takes someone to look away when they catch me staring.

I study everything.

Too much, probably.

It’s the kind of thing that sounds concerning when you say it out loud. You know? The usual psycho stuff.

But inside my head, it makes perfect sense.

Plus , it’s fun. Way too fun.

Today is a work day.

Coffee shop shift. Same routine. Same faces. Same creeps who think eye contact is a marriage proposal.

Perfect.

I pace around my tiny room with my earphones in one hand and my bag half-zipped on the bed. The room looks like it lost a fight. Dirty clothes carpet the floor. An empty cereal wrapper lurks in the corner like it’s trying not to be noticed. I kick a shirt under the bed, throw the wrapper into the trash, and pull my duvet over the remaining mess.

Problem solved.

Or at least hidden.

Which is basically the same thing.

“Ahh,” I sigh. “Much better.”

It isn’t.

But denial is free.

I grab my bag and head for work.

The walk to work is short—too short for my thoughts to behave. I don’t get enough time to observe strangers and quietly judge whose life looks more miserable . By the time I step into the coffee shop, I have already mentally quit three times

“Mira, you’re late.”

Ah.

My manager.

Grumpy. Strict. Permanently tired-looking, but secretly soft. Last week she gave me an entire box of pancakes for breakfast. So clearly, she’s in love with me. Right?

I grab the last waffle off her plate.

“You’re early,” I say.

She gives me that smile. The one that says, Not funny, but I’ll allow it for the sake of workplace harmony.

“Get to work.”

“You’re no fun.”

“Fun won’t pay the bills.”

“Neither will this job.”

“Mira.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I slip on my apron.

The café is busier than usual today. Too many people. Too many tired eyes pretending coffee is a personality trait. Is everyone really this burnt out, or is this just survival with extra steps?

“And oh, Mira—”

I pause halfway through tying my apron.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Her eyes narrow.

It’s the same look security guards give when they’ve already decided you’re guilty. They just haven’t figured what your crime is yet.

“Did you get another piercing?”

I blink.

“Define ‘another.’”

“That’s not an answer.”

She sighs.

“You already have, like, thirty-two piercings.”

“Cute, right?” I ask, attempting my best cute face.

She stares at me. I stare back. She blinks first.

Victory.

“You are exhausting.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“And you should change your hair colour.”

I run a hand through my ginger hair.

“Why? It’s cool.”

“It looks like a traffic cone.”

My hand falls.

“That was unnecessarily personal.”

“Change it.”

She starts walking away.

“It’s fifteen piercings, actually,” I call after her.

She doesn’t turn around.

I lower my voice.

“Plus one nipple piercing.”

******

The morning drags on. There isn’t much work today. Just the usual routine. A customer complaining that their order got mixed up. Amy reminding everyone who the manager is every five minutes. A coworker constantly trying to recruit me into her church.

Which, for the record, will never attend. I swear that place isn’t a church. It’s a cult. They wear white on Tuesdays, black on Mondays, and red on Sundays. In what universe does that make sense?

“Table four. You’re up.”

Frank snaps his fingers in front of my face.

“Alright, baby boy.”

“Seriously?” he sighs.

I grab the order and head toward the table, but something catches my attention. A woman sits across from a man, mid-thirties maybe, twisting her fingers around the strap of her handbag. The man reaches for her face and she flinches.

The movement is small. Most people wouldn’t notice it.

I do.

Immediately, something inside me tightens.

“Okay,” I whisper under my breath. “Deep breath. We’ve come a long way.”

I inhale slowly.

It doesn’t work.

The technique isn’t working.

I glance back at the table. This time, his hand is wrapped around her wrist. Not hard enough to cause a scene. Just enough to make her uncomfortable. Just enough for me to notice.

I look away and start counting. The cracks on the wall. The tables. The customers. My fingers.

One. Two. Three. Four. Fi—

“Fuck it.”

I plaster on my customer-service smile and walk over. The woman glances up. A faint bruise shadows the side of her neck. Not fresh. Not old. The kind of bruise that has a story attached to it.

I turn to the man.

“Sir?”

“What?” he snaps.

Ah.

A dickhead.

This is exactly why I study people. You can easily tell who would turn out to be a dickhead .

“Someone’s asking for you out back.”

His eyebrows pull together.

“Who?”

I shrug.

“Didn’t catch the name.”

After a dramatic sigh, he follows me through the back door.

The alley behind the café is empty. Quiet. Hidden. The sort of place where sins gets buried.

“Where—“

The sentence never finishes. The metal tray in my hand connects with the back of his head before he can finish the word. The sound echoes through the alley. He drops to one knee with a curse, one hand flying to the back of his head. A strained noise escapes him.

Music to my ears.

He stumbles forward, muttering something that sounds a lot like fuck.

Yeah.

Fuck you too.

Then he looks up.

And suddenly, something buried deep inside me comes rushing back. Not slowly. Not cautiously. It crashes through me like a dam breaking, flooding every corner of my mind before I can stop it.

Again.

The thought settles into my head with terrifying ease.

My fingers tighten around the tray. I take a step forward. Then another. The man raises an arm to shield himself, and I can’t help the smile that spreads across my face. Not the customer-service smile. Not the fake one I wear for tips and small talk.

The other smile.

The one I keep hidden.

A sharp rush of excitement tears through me. Hot. Familiar. Addictive. For a second, I forget about the café. I forget about the woman. I forget about consequences.

All I can think about is how easy it would be to hit him again.

The tray feels heavier in my hand. I lift it slightly.

Stop.

The voice cuts through the noise in my head.

Clear.

Sharp.

Absolute.

Stop.

I freeze.

The excitement vanishes as quickly as it came. The tray slips from my fingers and crashes onto the concrete. I stare at it. Then at the blood on my hands. Then at the man sprawled on the ground.

Reality slams into me.

“Oh, shit.”

I step forward, my hands trembling now. The rush is gone, replaced by something far worse.

Fear.

Please.

Please be alive.

I crouch beside him and press two fingers against his neck, searching for a pulse. For the first time since I hit him, I’m terrified of what I might find.

Yesterday, I slowly realized how empathy is losing its grip on Nigerians. The painful part is not this realization, but the fear that I am slowly getting affected too.

I was in a bus. One of those yellow buses that had clearly seen better days. The paint was fading slowly, the rust more visible than the yellow itself. We were packed like sardines, tortured by the smell of people who had somehow forgotten where they kept their sponge and soap.

Two men sat behind me. Between them was a woman. She looked uncomfortable. I noticed immediately. I gave her a look that silently asked, “Are you okay?”

She did not respond.

I faced forward and minded my business.

Two minutes into pretending to mind my business, I heard a sound behind me. The sharp sound of a slap landing across someone’s face, followed by a loud voice.

“Why are you touching my breast?”

I expected an apology. At least a stupid excuse. A careless “sorry.” Something to justify his disgusting act.

There was nothing.

People continued discussing their businesses and laughing over phone calls. Nobody addressed what had just happened. The entire bus acted like the woman had suddenly become invisible, like she was some kind of ghost.

I looked back at her. Her face carried defeat. The kind that comes from realizing nobody is coming to save you. She quietly put on her AirPods and faced the window.

I got home and realized something horrifying.

I did not stand up for that woman. I did not say anything. I only looked at her with pity.

I could not bring myself to confront the man. He felt dangerous. There were sharp objects inside the black nylon bag beside him.

Even now, I am still trying to justify my silence. Trying to explain why I said nothing. Trying to convince myself that fear is a valid enough excuse.

Have we truly become this numb?

How did a bus full of people watch a woman get assaulted and continue their conversations like nothing happened? How did we ignore it so naturally, like it was a normal occurrence? Like it was something we had all seen too many times before?

Maybe we have.

People watched her break down in public and did nothing. Some of them would probably use it as gist the next morning. Some blog somewhere would turn it into a headline before sunrise.

“Omo, e dey happen. I don tire.”

We say these things so casually while hearing the most grotesque news imaginable. We say them like they mean nothing.

And maybe numbness grows like this. Slowly. Quietly.

How do you remain emotionally soft in a country where terrible things happen every single day? Every month. Every year. The same hardship. The same violence. The same suffering. Over and over again until pain becomes routine.

I sat with my friend the other night after hearing about the death of an acquaintance. We both expressed our sadness, but then she said something that struck me deeply.

“Omo Ella, I’ve seen worse.”

Her face carried a painful expression. Something between exhaustion and pity.

“I’ve seen hell. We’ll all be fine.”

At first, I wanted to get angry. I wanted to tell her how insensitive that sounded. How cruel those words were.

But I paused.

And I looked at her carefully.

When pain becomes the only thing you truly know, it starts to feel like home. What should hurt you no longer does. You become so familiar with suffering that your body stops reacting to it the way it should.

Then one day, you try to search for empathy within yourself and realize it has been buried underneath your own exhaustion. You realize how drained you are. How impossible it feels to pour from a cup that has been empty for years.

How do you empathize with others when you barely empathize with yourself?

People have become numb.

Someone comes online to share their pain and the first reaction is laughter. You see comments like—

“Werey, you never see anything.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Let’s hear the other side.”

“Why are you telling us this?”

We shame people for speaking up until they crawl back into silence. Back into whatever private hell they were trying to escape from.

People now wear hardship like a badge of honor. Sometimes it feels like Nigerians have developed a national version of Stockholm syndrome. We have glorified suffering so deeply that endurance has become our entire personality.

“Naso life be.”

We repeat it constantly, as though suffering is some sacred rite of passage. Naso life be until this life eventually kills people.

You can be drowning emotionally to the point where getting out of bed feels impossible, yet people still tell you, “At least you’re alive.”

Even our reactions to tragedy have become frighteningly casual. Someone gets beheaded today and we wave it off like old news. A woman gets raped tomorrow and people become more concerned about her outfit than the assault itself. Someone admits they are depressed and suddenly they are called selfish or ungrateful for being sad.

We tell people to endure. We tell people to ignore it. We tell people to pray harder. We force people to keep hoping inside situations that are destroying them slowly.

I do not know when this ends. In fact, I think it is getting worse.

I think we are slowly losing ourselves to Nigeria.

I think we are slowly becoming comfortable with this life.

With this suffering.

With this exhaustion.

With this hell on earth.

And the most painful part is that I can feel it affecting me too.

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Two days back, I had just gotten home from a job I absolutely hate. I had stopped by a store to get some noodles and drinks — a tiny celebration for my misery. My boring life only revolves around school, work, and insecurities that whispered cruel things into my ears.

I got home hoping to collapse onto my bed, the one that seemed to miss my warmth. But my keys — the keys to my apartment — were missing.

How much worse could my day get?

Well, it did get worse. Rain poured heavily from the sky.

“Wow, perfect timing,” I muttered to the air. “Can you at least fucking wash all my misery away?”

I found shelter in a small store. Beside me sat a woman whose face carried unbearable weight. You could see the exhaustion stitched into her expression.

“The rain is much ba—” she paused. She sounded nervous. Tired. “It has such bad timing,” she continued.

“Ah… I agree.” I had to say something — anything. No one wants to be remembered as a bitch. “It’s too late for rain,” I added.

A long silence settled between us, but it wasn’t peaceful. The only sounds were the rain beating against the patched roof opposite us, trees swaying happily, and children laughing while playing in the storm without a single care in the world.

How lucky they were, to not feel burdened by life yet.

“If you were given ten million naira, what would you do with it?”

The question caught me off guard. It felt random, especially after what seemed like hours of uncomfortable silence.

“Well, I—”

“I was asked that today in a meeting,” she interrupted with a laugh.

It sounded forced — the kind of laugh people make when they are trying to stop tears from falling. But she was terrible at hiding her emotions. A tear slipped down her face, then another, until it became uncontrollable.

What do I even do in that situation? Console her? Or leave her alone to unravel quietly?

“And I didn’t know what to say,” she continued, cleaning her nose with her loose wrapper. “I have never thought of such a huge amount before. I never had dreams that big.”

She paused, then looked at me with longing. Like a mother staring at the ghost of her younger self.

“Do you know why?”

I simply nodded.

“Because my end goal was always marriage,” she said softly. Then after another pause, she added, “I thought that was enough.”

I wanted to ask more questions. I wanted to know exactly what she meant — but she left.

The rain had stopped and left behind the kind of calmness that makes people confess things they usually bury.

I eventually got home after what felt like ages of searching for my key. I didn’t sleep immediately like I intended to. The woman’s voice kept echoing in my head like a warning.

Realistically, who randomly asks someone what they would do with ten million naira?

But then again, if you truly had dreams, you would spend the money before it even reached your hands.

But this is not about money.

It’s about the situation.

It’s about how women shrink themselves to fit into the standards of marriage. It’s all we have known. It’s all we have been taught.

Your entire life is preparation for marriage. You must know how to wash clothes for your husband. You must know how to cook for your husband, or your mother will ask what kind of life you plan to live in your husband’s house.

From childhood till now, your life has been one long grooming ceremony for a man you have not even met yet.

You’ve been taught that women have it easy because marriage is security. That a man will eventually come and save you.

The desire to work less, the desire to depend on a man, the desire to be rescued — it is all you’ve known.

So how dare you dream for yourself?

You know it too. You see it. Even in your imagination — the one place where you are allowed to be delusional without fear — you still crave saving. From a man.

Even in your fantasies, you are not the one soaring high. You are not the one doing remarkable things. You are not the one driving the expensive car or standing confidently on a podium while people listen to you speak.

You are not the one.

It is always the man — the savior you dream about every night. He is the one achieving greatness while you sit quietly beside him like someone waiting to be protected.

Why?

Is it fear? Or is it simply who you have become?

Is it fear of becoming something bigger? Or has society truly convinced you that your existence is meant to stay confined in one place?

You do not speak too loudly because you want to be desirable to your Prince Charming. You soften yourself because you want to be yearned for by a “king.” You change your style because people say no one wants a woman who is too different.

You cannot move out because independence makes you look “cheap.”
You cannot dance because dancing makes you look “wild.”
You cannot fully become yourself.

You have been promised marriage and handed limitations disguised as protection.

Now, you no longer have to dream too much.
You just have to wait for a savior.

Keep waiting.

Keep waiting.

I wouldn’t say I have everything figured out. But what I do know is that I do not walk around preparing for some Prince Charming to sweep me off my feet.

I prepare for a life where my first expectation is disappointment. Quite toxic, if you ask me, but still better than sitting around waiting for something that may never come. I do not wait, hoping to build a life that depends entirely on another person.

I curate the kind of life I want for myself. I love knowing that I am the one deciding what becomes of me. That my future rests in my own hands — not in the arrival of a savior wrapped in romance.

It is left to me to create a life for myself.

And it is left to you to make something out of yours.

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You’re intelligent, but that’s all there is to it .

You have this desperate need to know a little about everything . A strange hunger to never be caught lacking. You want to sit in the midst of people and speak confidently even when the conversation changes direction. You want to be that person that always has something to say. Always has a fact . Always understands the topic .

You’ve studied stoicism and its quiet strength. You’ve studied the psychology behind love. You know physics, down to the anatomy of the body . You’ve touched finance too . Heck, you just bought another book that promises to make you smarter. You just subscribed to another podcast teaching self-awareness as though enlightenment is hiding behind somebody’s microphone .

You know it all..
No — you want to know it all.

You’ve somehow convinced yourself that wisdom means collecting pieces of every topic. That intelligence means stuffing your brain until there’s no room left for silence .

But look at you.

You’re exhausted.

Delusional.

That is what this is

You do not have a dream. You do not have direction—you move through life like a snail without a shell, slowly dragging yourself across different interests, different passions, different identities, hoping one of them finally feels like home.

Today it’s finance. Tomorrow it’s anatomy. Yesterday it was human psychology. Today it’s the science behind orgasms. Tomorrow it might be philosophy or astrophysics or business. You keep jumping from one thing to another because your mind is terrified of staying still .

You are stuck in an endless cycle of becoming .

And the truth is — you’re scared .

Scared of being ordinary . Scared of not being enough . Your obsession with perfection is not ambition —It is fear wearing expensive perfume .

That is why you still feel empty .

You sit there wondering, “ how do I know so much and still feel like nothing ? ”

Because knowing things is not the same thing as having purpose .

And deep down, you know that .

You are terrified of looking weak. So you use knowledge as armor . You speak intelligently so nobody notices the insecurity breathing underneath your words .

But your mind is tired .

Give the books a break . Give the podcasts a break . Give your poor brain a moment to breathe . Stop treating your existence like a never-ending assignment .

Live a little .

Yesterday, I sat with a friend . She had just watched a creator on TikTok . The vlog was cinematic — beautiful angles, soft lighting, perfect transitions . The kind of content that makes you suddenly question yourself .

“ Ella, I need to learn how to do this , ” she said with that sad expression people wear when comparison starts eating at them .

“ Oh, that’s nice . But do you actually want to change your content style ? ” I asked .

“ Mine is lame . Look how cool hers is . ”

And there it was . The real issue .

It would not have bothered me if she simply wanted to learn something new . Curiosity is normal . Wanting to improve is normal . But this wasn’t improvement . This was insecurity.

The problem was how quickly she abandoned her own style the moment somebody else’s looked prettier . The problem was how her content suddenly became worthless in her eyes because another person did it differently. The problem was her urge to switch the moment things became difficult .

And that is your problem too .

Today you decide to learn forex . The graphs remind you of the mathematics classes you hated as a child, so you switch immediately .

“ No one wants to relive childhood trauma na”you joke .

Then you try business . Sales stress you out, so you switch again . You discover writing . You start writing . Nobody reads your work immediately and suddenly you’re already close to deleting your account . Already close to giving up . Already searching for another identity to wear .

Do you see the problem now ?

Wait .
You still don’t see it ?

The problem is you .

You keep leaving before things have the chance to grow . You keep abandoning yourself halfway . You keep searching for the next thing because staying in one place long enough to fail scares you .

You need to find something that sets your chest on fire and stay there . Stay there even when it becomes ugly . Even when it becomes boring . Even when nobody claps for you .

Stay .

Because one day, in a quiet moment where the noise finally dies down, you will realize something—

Knowledge does not need to be loud .

It does not need to be rushed .

It only needs your focus .

And your willingness to stay .

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You wake up after a night of gulping down four bottles of alcohol —your head spinning so violently it feels like your brain is begging to escape your skull.

You check the time. 11 a.m.

But you do not care. Maybe you would have cared if there was something waiting for you outside this room, something demanding your existence.

Your eyes wander around the room. Undies from five days ago still sit inside the empty noodles box beside your bed. Clothes that never properly dried are spread across the left side of your mattress, carrying that damp smell of neglect. You stare at the mess and laugh quietly at your own misery. The kind of laugh that does not come from amusement, but from finally realizing your life has started looking exactly the way you feel inside.

Empty.

Like a drum with a pinch of water . Your mind feels like a desert stretched endlessly beneath a merciless sun. Nothing grows there anymore.

You have no job. Two friends. No, scratch that — acquaintances who remember you just enough to send a “how are you?” text once a month before disappearing again into their real lives.

You open your laptop and search for a psychological thriller on Netflix, but even that has become boring. You have consumed so many of them that you can predict the plot before the opening scene finishes. The murderer is always the quiet one. The traumatized one. The one pretending to be normal.

Movies are no longer your comfort zone. Porn is.

To other people, porn is desire. Fantasy. A place they run to satisfy the deepest parts of themselves. But to you, it has become background noise. Something to fill the silence between one lonely hour and another.

At some point, it used to be an answer to your horny state, until your body slowly forgot how to feel desire at all. Now you watch it because, honestly, what else is there to watch? Somehow, you even convinced yourself it was a good thing that these videos no longer appealed to you. Like numbness was maturity. Like the death of desire was growth.

Now it feels less like pleasure and more like a course study. A biology class.

You study the way the vagina pulsates. You study the way the penis rises at the slightest touch. You study how bodies react to friction, how intimacy forms through penetration, how skin folds into skin. You have memorized the different sexual organs so thoroughly they no longer feel erotic. They feel anatomical. Clinical. Detached.

You spend hours scrolling endlessly through videos, searching for the one that will finally make your penis rise, the one that will finally make your vagina wet. Searching for proof that something inside you is still alive.

But you never find it.

Maybe it is you. Maybe the videos are terrible. Maybe the truth sits somewhere between those two things, rotting quietly.

The saddest part is that you miss the days when you watched porn simply to get off. At least that version of you made sense. Half the world watches porn to satisfy themselves. That would have made you normal. Explainable. Human.

But now, you feel ruined. Fucked up in a way you cannot properly explain. Because how do you tell someone you are not even addicted, yet you still cannot stop watching it?

How do you explain that it no longer turns you on, yet you return to it every single day like a ritual?

You know the answer. You know it well. It sits heavily in your chest, waiting patiently for you to stop running from it. Waiting for you to finally admit the truth about your loneliness.

How your inability to socialize has dragged you into a hollow filled with predators and pixels pretending to be intimacy.

You have no work. No drive. No tomorrow waiting for you. You simply exist.

You exist, but you do not live.

You are like a zombie staring at the sunrise every morning, hoping the light will somehow force life back into your dead body. You want something that keeps you busy. Something that pulls you out of yourself. Something loud enough to drown the boredom clawing at your ribs every night.

But the question remains.

What exactly do you want?

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I had just gotten back to school yesterday. The only thing my body needed was rest. Not until my friend called me with that sweet voice of hers.

“Ella, I miss youu. Let’s meet up.”

Now tell me, how exactly was I supposed to say no to that voice?

We met at night under the school trees. There’s something about school trees. They make you uproot every secret you thought you buried safely inside your chest. Maybe it’s the trees. Maybe it’s the quietness of the night. Something between those two always loosens the tongue.

“I received the best head.”

Well… that’s certainly one way to begin a conversation.

“I think this guy is a sex worker. Ain’t no way he gives head like that and doesn’t make money from it.”

And somehow, the night kept getting better.

She kept talking about how he started with the best massage of her life before worshipping every inch of her body down to her ears like she was the last scoop of ice cream on earth. The way she described it was almost dangerous. Like a skilled storyteller pulling you into a scene against your will. You could almost see it happening right in front of you.

It was… a sight.

Then she paused and looked at me.

“Wait… I don’t know anything about you.”

Another way of saying, ‘now tell me about the best head you’ve ever received too’.

I laughed softly. “Because I love listening to you,” I told her, which was true. I genuinely love listening to people speak. “But if you ask though, I’ll tell you.”

She stared at me with that look that screamed’ girllll pleaseeee.’

Now I had to please her .

And somehow, that was the exact moment it happened. Right there in that quiet night, under that slow moving breeze, I realized something I had spent years outrunning.

I might be asexual.

“I’m not really a fan of sex,” I said quietly. “It’s not something I’m interested in.”

I’m not sure if it was me or the person behind me that released that heavy sigh, but the air suddenly felt lighter. Like something hidden had finally slipped out of my chest.

She stared at me for a moment, turned her head from side to side, then spun dramatically like she was searching for hidden cameras.

She’s dramatic like that.

“Ahh… that’s a good joke,” she said, looking at me with eyes practically begging for the real answer. “So you’re telling me never? Like never never? How are you even breathing properly?”

And honestly, her reaction was valid.

Because how do you explain to someone that sex is simply not something you crave for? That your body never burns with the same hunger everyone else keeps describing?

She asked if there was trauma behind it. I said no.

And that was that.

We moved on to sillier conversations and eventually went home. She probably fell asleep immediately she got back.

I didn’t.

I came home with an ache sitting heavily inside my chest. I came home with a realization I was not ready to hold. I came home remembering the day my mom sat me down on the balcony and asked softly if I was okay.

“I never hear you talk to anybody.”

Her face carried the kind of concern only mothers know how to wear.

“You can talk to me, baby.”

I told her I was fine. That I was simply focusing on myself.

The same lie I feed myself to disguise my disinterest in romance. My inability to yearn for people the way others do. My inability to crave someone’s attention so deeply that I begin to feel incomplete without it. My inability to be lost in someone’s soul that I never want to find the key out. My inability to be madly in love, that even if the madness consumes me . I’ll let it burn me with a smile .

And suddenly, everything started making sense.

The reason I hate being approached in public— because it never grows into anything. Yes, I’ll admire you for a moment. I’ll notice your face. Your voice. Maybe even your scent.

But that’s all.

There’s no ache after. No unbearable longing. No tiny crush blooming secretly inside my ribs.

Nothing stays.

That night, I lay on my bed disturbing ChatGPT with endless questions. The first word I searched with trembling fingers was “asexual.”

Then I cleared it immediately.

I didn’t want to know.

Because knowing would make it real.

But I typed again.

And the moment I read through it, something inside me went painfully still. It felt like somebody had been secretly writing about my life without telling me.

The strange thing is, there was once a time I was okay with this.

I used to comfort myself with thoughts like’ at least nobody can break my heart’.

But now?

Now I want to know what it feels like.

Even if love leaves claw marks across my chest. Even if it burns me alive. At least I would have felt something. I want to look at someone and feel completely consumed by their presence. I want to be so deeply lost in somebody’s soul that I stop wanting to find my way back.

I want a love so intense it feels like madness wearing perfume.

I want to understand what makes people whisper things like “I can’t live without you,” even when it sounds ridiculous.

I want to understand yearning.

I want to understand desire.

I want to feel something.

And that’s the part nobody talks about.