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It is a little sad that I am writing this honestly.

If i were to make a wish right now it would be that “none of my friends find this”

Then again, none of my friends know I do write, so maybe I'm safe haha. That's not really the point I'm trying to make, though.

If you are reading this there is a good chance you are surrounded by people, colleagues, classmates, people you call friends who don't carry the same sense of purpose you do.

This is not saying you should cut ties with everyone.

Our brains lie to us all the time.

The environment we are in now is so diverse ..

At this point, I could call literally anything an environment.

Look at your own body

On the surface of your skin is an environment.

It is slightly acidic, mostly dry and cool.

Billions of tiny germs live on it, fighting each other for space and food.

Good germs protect you.

Bad germs try to harm you.

But the immune system struggles to tell friends from foes because good and bad germs look nearly identical on a molecular level, having the same basic parts.

They share similar surface proteins, chemical signals, same DNA structures–making it so hard to tell them apart.

Your immune cells read germs using basic pattern recognition receptors (PRRs).

And since good and bad cells speak the same chemical language, what is the chance that these receptors don't get confused?

Absolutely no chance.

Another reason is the problem of context.

If a healthy bacterium gets deep inside a cut, your body must treat it as an enemy.

There is also another strategy bad germs actively use.

It is called immune invasion.

Bad germs actively camouflage themselves. They mimic the look of your friendly, resident germs to sneak past your defences.

In one way or the other you are surrounded with people occupying spaces you gave them for free.

Yes.

Take me for an example.

I recently deleted a whole bunch of my contacts .. ohh yes i did.

And out of a 600 plus contact, slightly over 200 of them still existed. I am still thinking it's way too much. I don't receive texts from more than 10 people daily so what good do these numbers do to me?

If someone were to ask

“Hector now that you are aspiring to be a dentist. How many people around you care that you achieve that purpose…?

I would over think this.

And maybe after a much deeper thought i will say– two or three of my really close friends actually care i become one.

Plus my parents and relatives.

Humans aren’t wrong entirely for having friends.

But I fear it is one of the many ways we hide our identity.

We are going to go so deep into this issue.

and by the end of this essay you will know if you can change your friends and actually become someone new.

It's 6:57am as I approach this line .. i have to read my bible starting at 7:am.

I can see my brother sleeping on our bed across from me.

Such a stubborn good lad.

I did not tell you how he started reading the republic the other day.

Ohh you will find out if he actually does politics some day.

You might want to stay longer with me.

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I. How the environment speaks to your being.

Who even made the quote

“show me who your friend is and i will tell you who you are” …?

It is hard to think otherwise.

If you are a wolf amongst sheep there is a chance that in no time you will start to eat grass.

I started reading the Republic of Plato in July when I was still in my first year.

In Book one of the Republic, Socrates debates a young man named Polemarchus about the definition of justice and friendship.

Polemarchus claims that friendship means “doing good to your friend and harm to your enemies”

Socrates did not agree to this.

He argues that a true friend should never harm you, and by “harm”, he means making you a worse version of yourself.

Earlier when I made mockery of wolves it was not to intend that any is better amongst the two creatures.

The sheep is not evil, and the wolf is not superior; they simply possess two different natures.

But when the wolf is isolated in the flock of sheep, the sheer pressure takes over.

To exist in that space, the wolf must go against its own design.

We can say it starts grazing—it chews grass.

Who knows if its lineage might lose its canine and in doing so become an herbivore!!!

Ohh it wouldn’t give life because it exists among Sheep.

This is how friendship silently communicates to your existence.

It alters your daily habits and diet—metaphorically and mentally—until your original nature is entirely suppressed just to maintain peace with the herd.

Plato’s dialogue pushes us to ask: are your friends helping you fulfill your true nature, or are they subtly forcing you to eat grass?

But I think this question should be reflected upon only if you know your true nature.

So what exactly is your true nature?

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II. Nature is geography.

I don’t want to give an abstract definition of nature.

It is hard to say one has figured it out when one is still becoming.

Life is a never-ending cycle of change, so to define us through a fixed nature is to deny humans the ability to change.

But I will try to give you what I think about nature.

First, we must look at Heraclitus and Aristotle.

Consider Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher of fire and fluid reality.

He insisted that the universe is not made of permanent things, but of constant processes.

I came across his famous fragment when I read Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder.

It is one of the three books I bought this year in my search for the meaning of philosophy and it's origin.

Copilot suggested it.

Let's get back to what Heraclitus was saying.

Heraclitus quoted:

Paraphrasing Heraclitus: no man steps in the same river twice, for fresh waters are always flowing.

And if he, Heraclitus was right, looking inward for a hidden, unchanging “true nature” is a wild goose chase.

There is no solid stone inside you.

You are the river.

And what feeds the river?

The rain, the soil, the runoff—the social environment.

Your nature is not on its own as something to be left out; it is the fluid rhythm of how you react to the world around you:

• Everything is flux: Constant change is the default state.

• Your identity is unstable: You are always reacting to external variables.

• Continuous becoming: Both the river and the person are constantly evolving.

Aristotle presents a different angle, yet he brings us to the exact same conclusion.

He spoke of physis (nature) as a source of movement and change inherent in things.

For Aristotle, a thing’s nature is tied to its potential, like a seed containing the blue print of a tree.

But a seed’s potential means nothing without a landscape.

Knowledge poured into an unprepared vessel cannot fulfill its nature to become wisdom; its environment forces it to become dust.

This is why the abstract separation between “you and “your environment” is an illusion.

In the Bible (Luke 8:4-15), Jesus tells his disciples a parable where a farmer scatters seeds on four types of soil: a path where birds eat them, rocky grounds where plants wither with no roots, thorns that choke the new plants, and good soil that grows a rich harvest.

Just as the seeds in the parable were fundamentally unchanged in their potential, their ultimate fate was decided entirely by where they landed.

You cannot fulfill a nature independent of the soil you are planted in.

The soil dictates the growth and the conditions for a rapid growth as you may wish.

This leads me to what I truly believe: your social environment is your true nature.

You are not a static wolf fighting against a sheep environment.

You are a malleable, living process.

The company you keep, the conversations you absorb, and the expectation of your peers don't just influence you from the outside—they literally form your becoming.

If you change your environment, you change the definition of who you are.

III. Can you actually change your friend’s worldview?

I am thinking about us humans now, stretching all the way back to the beginning.

When we were first introduced to this world as babies, weren’t we all the same in every way?

We arrived with no opinions, no biases, and no worldviews.

Philosopher John Locke famously argued that we are born as a tabula rasa ( a blank slate)—completely empty, waiting for the environment to write upon us.

Modern genetics says otherwise though .. another topic for later.

But his argument sparked in my mind a heavy question: is it possible for two babies to be programmed from birth to live a good life?

And if it is possible, am I right to choose that “good life” for them?

Or is it better to step back, to withhold the programming, and let them experience a world they must find entirely by themselves?

I had to think deeply on this because I don't think I have ever been able to forcefully change someone.

But a personal experience from last year might serve as a reference to the question at hand.

I will tell you a quick story.

Last year, I transitioned from studying anatomy to dentistry. Now, having finished my first year, I am planning to return to school this September.

I remember vividly the day my parents dropped me off at my new school location in Ibadan, while leaving our home in Lagos, Nigeria.

2hrs after they left, i met my new housemate for the second time ( i had initially visited the school before that time to arrange housing and there I met him)

Walking out of my room with the aim of checking in with my new surroundings, I found him visibly distressed.

When i pressed him, he told me had gambled and lost a handful of money.

In that exact moment, I knew my life with him would be tough.

I had already gone through that exact phase at my former school—the gambling and other stuff like that I can't say now.

I had come to Ibadan to begin what I called my redemption arc: a new life, a new environment, a new study.

But life doesn’t give you the whole journey upfront.

From November of last year until now, I got to know a little more about him and why it is like that for him.

At times, his presence made me want to go back to that side of me.

But I didn't.

I am not telling this story to look good.

If that is what you think you are far from the point I am trying to cite.

Instead, I tried to change him.

I learned more about his past life and began breaking down the thoughts and habits he assumed were permanent for him.

Today, I think he is changing.

But am I responsible for his change?

Obviously I am not

That shift can come from himself and only him alone.

Think of me as the environment.

I did not write his code like a programmer fixing a machine.

I simply altered the geography of the room he was sitting in.

I became somewhat like a different element in his landscape.

So here is what I think:

we cannot program people, and we cannot force them to find the world alone either. All we can do is decide what kind of environment we choose to be when we walk into their empty rooms.

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IV. How You Can Actually Become Someone New

Let us sum up everything we have built from the beginning.

If your environment is your geography, and your social circle is the soil that dictates your growth, then the truth is blunt:

If you do not change your friends, it is highly unlikely you will ever escape being stuck.

I know what it feels like to just let people leave your life.

It is almost quiet sometimes.

Most of the time it is lonely.

It feels like a cold betrayal of history.

But let us look inward again, back to the surface of your skin.

Your skin is constantly shedding.

Research says every single day, you lose roughly 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells.

You do not consciously try to shed them; it is a natural, necessary law of survival.

Why?

Because if the old, dead cells stay attached, they suffocate the new layers beneath them.

They trap the dirt and in doing so invite the bad germs to breed.

When you look at your phone and realize that out of hundreds of people, only a tiny fraction actually care about your highest purpose, letting the rest fade away is not being cruel.

It is simply practicing psychological desquamation—the shedding of old tissue.

Remember how the immune system gets confused?

Bad germs mimic good ones because they share the same basic language.

Your old friends might speak the language of comfort, nostalgia, and "good times," but on a deeper level, they are the microbes keeping you stuck in the mud.

If a bacterium—even a healthy one—stays in the wrong context, it becomes an infection.

Some friends were meant for a specific season of your life.

If you bring them into your current redemption arc, they become the wrong context.

They force the wolf to keep eating grass.

And so to become someone new, you must accept that you cannot clean the microbes without changing the surface they live on.

You cannot forcefully change your friends, just as your immune cells cannot easily reprogram a bad germ.

You can only change the environment of the skin itself.

By altering your habits, your location, your focus, and your boundaries, you make the environment inhospitable to mediocrity.

The people who refuse to grow will naturally slip away, not because you fought them, but because they can no longer survive in the climate you have created.

Don't you know you are a malleable, living process ?

You are the river, and you are the skin.

To grow a rich harvest, you must shed the dead cells, clear the thorns, and choose good soil.

Becoming someone new doesn’t start with a loud declaration to the world; it starts quietly, when you choose what—and who—is allowed to occupy the spaces you used to give away for free.

It took me days of deep, uncomfortable thought to finish these pages.

But everything truly began to shift at exactly 6:57 AM on that first morning, sitting across from my sleeping brother.

When the clock struck 7:00 AM and I finally opened my Bible, I wasn't just turning a page—I was stepping into a new river.

The essay took days to write, but the decision to choose my own geography happened in a single second.

—Feranmi

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P.S.

As I step into my second year of dental surgery studies, I’m spending more time looking at the structural design of the human body—specifically how early habits shape our growth, health, and minds.

You’ll start seeing subtle threads of anatomy and preventive health woven into these bi-weekly essays.

Glad to have you here for the evolution.

✨ Enjoying this?

If my words have inspired or entertained you, please recommend me to other readers. Your support helps this community grow, and I’m truly grateful for every share.

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If you enjoy this essay, I am sure you will love more of my essays below

If you read one of my recent essay, The Ghost of Eleven, you know we recently dug deep into the existential side of procrastination.

the tax it takes on our identity, our self-trust, and the fear of confronting a "graveyard of unmet potential."

But as I mentioned at the end of that piece: understanding the philosophy of your fear doesn't automatically make the pencil easier to lift. While the why of procrastination is a matter of the soul, the how is a matter of the brain.

That’s why I collaborated with Toiba from BUILD. She is a master at dissecting the mechanical and behavioral side of how we actually move past resistance.

She writes with incredible honesty and clarity about why our brains freeze at the start line—and the practical workarounds that bypass broken willpower entirely.

I’m thrilled to bring her perspective straight to your inbox today.

Here is Toiba.

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When Intention Meets Resistance

You already know what you needed to do today. You knew this morning. Maybe you knew last night. And if I had to guess what actually happened between that knowledge and right now, it probably looked something like this.

You sat down to work.

You were ready.

Everything was in place.

And then something happened in the space between "I'm going to start" and actually starting, and the next time you looked up, hours had passed and the task was exactly where you left it, untouched, while you'd been doing everything adjacent to it. Preparing for it. Planning a better version of your plan. Reorganizing the workspace so that when you finally started, conditions would be ideal.

The conditions became ideal.

You still didn't start.

I'm not talking about the kind of procrastination that comes from fear, or perfectionism, or being genuinely overwhelmed, those are real, and the advice that targets them probably helps.

I'm talking about a different kind, one that almost never gets named specifically, where the task doesn't scare you, you know exactly how to approach it, you might even want to do it, and you still cannot begin.

The intention is completely there.

The action doesn't follow.

And no amount of motivation, planning, or instructions to yourself closes that gap.

I sat at my desk from 6:30 in the morning until 5 in the evening once, genuinely trying to start something, and got absolutely nothing done. Scrolled. Gave myself a pep talk. Cried a little, which was embarrassing. Reorganized things that didn't need reorganizing. Planned a more detailed version of a plan I already had. And by 5pm I had a very organized set of notes about a project I hadn't touched, and a lot of feelings about what that said about me.

It took me embarrassingly long to stop reading it as proof of something fundamentally broken in me, when what it actually is is a mechanism, and mechanisms, unlike character flaws, can be worked around.

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The Real Bottleneck: Why Standard Advice Fails

Here's what's actually happening when you want to start and still can't.

The thing I kept running into with every piece of procrastination advice I'd ever read is that it assumes you already have some momentum, it's just pointed somewhere unhelpful, or blocked by a fear you haven't faced yet. Which is sometimes true, and when it is, that advice works. But when the problem is a habit so wired it fires before you've consciously decided anything, none of it helps, because every method still asks you to do the one thing that's currently unavailable: initiate.

What was really helpful for me was finding ways around that specific step, rather than trying to fix it directly.

What this kind of procrastination costs you over time isn't just the task, but your plans. You start a day believing what you wrote down. By 3pm you've watched yourself not do it again, and the next plan you make carries that.

At some point making plans starts to feel hollow, because somewhere underneath it you've stopped fully trusting that you'll follow through.

That erosion is quiet and it compounds, and it doesn't show up in any conversation about productivity.

I know it, because I’ve lived it.

The other thing that doesn't get said is, spending a day not starting is genuinely exhausting.

People assume you rested.

You didn't. You were negotiating with yourself the entire time, carrying anxiety, half-planning, half-trying, half-giving up, cycling through all of it for hours straight. That specific tiredness isn't from the task. It's from watching yourself fail to begin it, repeatedly, while completely aware that you're doing so.

Then there's the preparation trap, which is the version I fall into most. When I can't start, I prepare to start. I reorganize things that don't need reorganizing. I make a more detailed version of a plan I already have. I find a better system for a task that needs no system, just doing. And by the time I'm done, the task is somehow heavier than when I started the day, because now I've spent hours on everything except it, and starting has become this loaded, significant thing rather than just a thing I need to do.

I've read a lot about procrastination. A lot. The advice that comes up most is: break it down, just start, remind yourself why it matters, the 5-4-3-2-1 method, the 3-2-1 method.

I say this without dismissiveness because I've genuinely tried all of it—none of it touches this specific version, because all of it assumes you have some capacity to initiate and just need pointing in the right direction.

This problem lives earlier than that.

Which is also why the fix has to come from somewhere different.

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Solutions that worked for me, and will likely work for you

Everything that follows works on the same principle, take the initiation decision out of your hands entirely.

Your environment makes the choice. Another person makes the choice. A sequence you already set in motion makes the choice.

You follow.

Because asking the broken mechanism to bootstrap itself is exactly what hasn't been working, and at some point it makes sense to stop doing that.

Step 1: Replace the decision to start with a cue that starts for you.

There's a meaningful difference between "I'll work at 7pm" and actually working at 7pm, and for most people with this specific problem, that gap is where the day disappears.

Time is a weak trigger because it lives in your head, and your head is precisely what isn't cooperating right now.

What works significantly better is attaching the start to something that already happens reliably, so the environment does the triggering instead of your willpower.

Not "at 7pm I'll open the document" but "when I put my dinner plate in the sink, I open the document."

Not "I'll study after class" but "when I walk out of the lecture hall, I go directly to the library, sit in the same seat, open the laptop, and write the first question down."

The cue fires.

The behavior follows. You didn't have to decide anything at the moment it mattered most.

Build an invariant starting procedure for the things you consistently struggle to begin, the same short sequence, every single time.

The early steps become the trigger for what comes after, and over enough repetitions, the sequence starts carrying you in before you've had a chance to negotiate with yourself about it.

Step 2: Borrow an external ignition.

When your internal ignition won't fire, the most practical thing you can do is borrow someone else's, and I mean this completely literally.

I cannot wake up to my alarm. Nothing works, multiple alarms, Alarmy, my parents screaming, the dedicated tickling-my-feet-snatching-my-blanket combination that has been inflicted on me more times than I'd like. So my best friend Amina calls me at 5am instead. I set her ringtone as my alarm. One second of her voice and I am wide awake, because I genuinely fear for my life. She has that energy, and she knows I know it.

The same principle applies to starting work. I couldn't get myself to begin studying alone for weeks, so I found people who were already starting and worked near them. My brain needed to observe someone else beginning before it could register that beginning was an option available to me.

The deeper mechanism in all of this is that someone or something else is pressing start, and you're following rather than leading.

A real accountability check with someone who notices if you go quiet.

A scheduled session that begins whether you feel ready or not.

Sending whatever exists to someone at a fixed time, because now the deadline exists outside your own head, and something actually happens at 4pm, which is the only kind of deadline that functions. If internal initiation is unreliable, stop making internal initiation the bottleneck.

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Step 3: Block the exit before the session, not during it.

Most people try to make working more attractive. But what really helps more is making avoidance harder.

Before your work session, not during, before, while your brain is still cooperating, put your phone somewhere that requires actual effort to retrieve.

Block the specific sites you reliably disappear into.

Close every tab that isn't the task.

If your escape route is your bed, work somewhere without one.

When the easy exit is gone, what's left is the task — and the task, once you're actually in front of it with nowhere easier to go, is almost always more manageable than it looked from a distance.

Step 4: Clear the queue before you ask for output.

Your brain switches between two modes, one where it takes things in, and one where it produces things.

The switch needs a gap. Most of us never give it one, and then sit down to create something and go completely blank and call it a block, when what it actually is is a backlog.

For thirty minutes before you need to start something that matters, give it nothing.

No phone, no videos, no input of any kind.

The first time I tried this I lasted four minutes before the itch to reach for something became almost physical. (Four minutes. Timed it. Embarrassing. Moving on.)

That reaction told me more about my actual state than anything I'd read had.

An overwhelmed input queue cannot generate, it can only keep receiving.

The gap is what allows the switch. Build it in deliberately, because nothing in the structure of a normal day gives it to you.

Knowing which problem you actually have, specifically enough to use the right fix for it, is the only way to stop wasting time on the wrong ones.

Sending better instructions to a broken ignition is the wrong fix.

A physical contact point, an external signal, an empty transition, those are the right ones, and they work in a way that motivation and planning simply don't.

If you want something concrete to do with this right now, I put together The 15-Minute Unstuck Protocol. It’s a free, open tool with five micro-exercises that all require you to do something, not just read about it, to break the paralysis today.

15-Minute Unstuck Protocol

And if you want more of this, I write at BUILD every week, same honesty, same mess, from the middle of it.

Wishing you a start, borrowed, stolen, or built, whatever gets you there.

—Toiba

And if you want the philosophical side of this, the why behind the what, go back and read Hector’s piece:

BUILD

The Ghost of Eleven

Hey, Toiba here…

Read more

a month ago · 10 likes · DiscoveryWithGrace

That's where this conversation started.

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A few nights ago, my phone lit up with a small blue bird looking worried.

250 days, it said.

Streak’s in danger. Unfreeze Duo.

There was a button right underneath, ready to save the number for me. No German required. It just required a tap, and the streak survives another day, whether or not anything actually sticks in my brain.

It was past midnight….

I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling sluggish, dragging the pillow down and jamming it behind my back before my head found a spot that felt halfway human.

I didn’t tap it. I just stared at the glowing blue bird, wondering when a language app had gained the emotional leverage to make me feel guilty at some ungodly hour of the night.

250 days of “learning” German, and if you dropped me in Berlin tomorrow, I’d struggle to order a coffee without breaking a sweat.

My mind drifted back to a week earlier. I'd been deep in an embryology chapter, names like Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen scattered across the page.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I put my pen down, flipped to a blank page, and wrote a sentence I didn't fully understand yet.

Why are humans obsessed with numbers, even the ones who hate math?

I looked at it, shrugged, and went back to studying. I didn't touch it again for days.

Truth is, I didn't want to look too closely at why it had come out of me.

But staring at that frantic little bird, the answer felt painfully clear.

Every single day, without fail, I'd open the app just to keep a number progressing upward.

What would actually happen if I skipped a day?

Would my German knowledge truly atrophy?

Would I lose anything real, or just a score?

I turned the phone face down.

The screen went dark, taking the bird with it.

I. The Number That Was Never the Point

Before Duolingo, there was Snapchat.

For a while, I kept streaks going with people I genuinely didn't care about.

Their names just attached to a fire emoji and a number that kept climbing.

Opening a snap, sending a black screen back, closing the app. That was the entire relationship some days.

At some point, I let a 52 day streak end.

It wasn't on purpose, I just forgot and almost immediately, I got a message from the person, someone I barely knew, asking why I'd let it die like that.

I sat with that message for a second, confused… I mean we hadn't spoken in weeks except through that streak.

The number had been doing all the work for a friendship that had actually stopped existing a long time ago.

I stopped keeping Snapchat streaks after that… cos I lost it.

Today the only one I maintain is with a friend who actually speaks German to me, frequently, in real sentences.

The streak survives because the thing underneath it, actual practice, actual conversation, is still alive. Every other streak I ever had was just a number pretending to be a relationship.

There's a principle economists call Goodhart's Law, and it fits this perfectly, even though it was never built with Duolingo or Snapchat in mind.

The concept is deceptively simple, but once you sit with it, you will notice a strange shift.

A measurement works perfectly when it is just observing something honestly. But the moment you start optimizing for the measurement itself, instead of the thing it was supposed to represent, the two quietly split apart.

You can keep a number climbing long after the real thing underneath it has completely rotted away.

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II. Other Numbers Doing the Same Quiet Damage

This shift isn’t hard to spot, but you can see its true weight in the small choices that dictate your days.

• The Screen Time Limit
  How often do you stay off screens on your own terms? It takes discipline to step back. Yet, we often turn our tools of freedom into a new kind of prison. Take screen time limits. A daily boundary should mean presence and peace—a gentle reminder to look up.But once the limit becomes the target, the trap snaps shut.

  Suddenly, you are scrolling frantically to beat the countdown timer.You end up more intensely sucked into the screen for ten rushed minutes than thirty relaxed ones. The tool meant for peace creates a desperate rush.

• The Smart Water Bottle / Hydration App

  A hydration goal is supposed to represent listening to your body’s physical needs. But once hitting that 3-litre target becomes the goal, you find yourself standing over the kitchen sink at 11:30 PM, aggressively chugging lukewarm water just to make the app animation turn green. You aren’t hydrated; you are just bloated and waking up three times in the night to use the bathroom. The tracker replaces actual thirst.

• The Playlist Length / Podcast Speed

  A playlist or podcast queue is supposed to represent a curated companion for your daily commute. But once maximizing your time or “efficiency” becomes the target, you start listening to discussions at 1.5x or 2x speed. You finish the episode, but the art of a natural human pause, the cadence of the host’s voice, and the actual enjoyment of the conversation are stripped away. You consumed the content, but you didn’t experience it.

• The Daily Journaling Goal

  A daily journal prompt is supposed to represent self-reflection and emotional clarity. But once “writing every day” becomes the target, you sit down tired, scribble three lines about how busy your day was, and close the book. You check the box for consistency, but the page contains zero actual reflection. The ritual survives, but the meaning dies.

• Follower counts.

  A follower count was supposed to represent reach or trust. But once it becomes the target, people start shaping what they say around what will perform, not what they actually believe. The number goes up. The honesty underneath quietly goes down.

• GPA.

  A grade is supposed to represent understanding. But once the grade becomes the target, students, myself included some semesters, start optimizing for whatever earns the mark, not whatever actually sticks. You can ace an exam on material you'll forget completely in two weeks, and the transcript will never know the difference.

Followers, grades, sleep, streaks. Different numbers, same quiet failure.

Each one started as an honest way to represent something real.

Each one, once it became the target, started working against the very thing they were supposed to measure.

III. We've Been Doing This Since Before We Could Write

I was surprised to discover that this isn’t some modern glitch invented by Big Tech.

Humans have been doing this for a very long time.

The oldest known tally marks archaeologists have found are carved into a bone roughly 20,000 years old, the Ishango bone—notches counted in deliberate groups, likely tracking lunar cycles or quantities of food.

Long before agriculture, long before writing, long before anyone had the concept of hating math, people were already compelled to count something and mark it down.

It makes sense once you think about what counting was actually for.

Early humans didn't need calculus to survive.

But they needed to know how many days of food were left.

How many people were in the tribe.

How many moons until winter came back.

Counting wasn't abstract.

It was the difference between eating and not eating.

We're descendants of people who got very good at watching numbers accumulate.

Because the ones who didn't watch closely enough didn't last long enough to have descendants at all.

By around 3000 BCE in ancient Sumer, some of the earliest writing ever discovered wasn't poetry or philosophy.

It was accounting.

Clay tablets recording grain, livestock, debts owed to one person by another.

Numbers existed to track obligation.

In a strange way, those tablets were the earliest streaks.

Who owes what to whom,

and for how long.

The instinct carried forward.

The Egyptians built entire calendars around counted flood cycles of the Nile, because survival depended on predicting those numbers accurately.

Then, centuries later,

Pythagoras and his followers in ancient Greece pushed numbers somewhere entirely new.

he's recorded as saying.

They didn't just use numbers to track grain or debts anymore.

They believed numbers were sacred,

Maybe they even thought it was the actual structure holding reality together.

ARE THEY WRONG?

That was the moment counting shifted from survival tool to belief system.

Numerology followed in nearly every culture after that.

Lucky numbers, unlucky numbers,

7, 13, 40—integers carrying weight far beyond whatever quantity they actually represented.

So here's the throughline.

Humans started counting to survive and to hold each other accountable.

Somewhere in that long history, the number itself became sacred—

first spiritually, and now digitally.

We've just swapped the bone for an app.

And that took me right back to that blank page in my notebook, and the names sitting at the top of it.

Hippocrates.

Aristotle.

Galen.

For centuries, the early observers of life were obsessed with tracking development.

Aristotle used to open hen eggs at precise daily intervals, hoping to catch the exact moment a faint red speck began to pulse into a heart.

Galen charted fetal membranes with painstaking care.

They wanted a timeline.

A clean, predictable sequence for how a handful of cells becomes a breathing organism.

But embryology doesn't move like that.

If you look at an embryo under a microscope, life does not move in uniform, equal increments.

It doesn’t yield a steady 5% increase in complexity every twenty-four hours like a progress bar filling up on a screen.

Instead, there are long, deceptive stretches where nothing seems to change on the surface at all.

Cells are dividing quietly in the dark. Structures are folding inward, hidden from view.

Then, all at once, through a process called gastrulation, where a simple ball of cells completely reorganizes it's internal architecture— the entire blueprint of the body gets laid down in one chaotic leap.

Real development is messy, non-linear, and deep.

It relies on periods of dormancy, unexpected shifts, and quiet, invisible reorganization.

And yet in our daily lives, we keep trying to force things like learning a language, or understanding a concept, mastering a craft— into the rigid shape of a factory line.

We want a daily tick mark.

We want day 212 to look bigger than day 211.

In doing so, we confuse calendar time with actual growth.

An embryo doesn’t care what day of the week it is. It moves when the internal conditions are ready. Learning works the same way. I could spend thirty days tapping vocabulary cards on a screen without moving an inch toward real fluency, or I could spend three frustrating hours wrestling through one dense German paragraph and come out the other side with an actual shift in how my brain handles the language.

The app counts the thirty days because thirty days are easy to code into a streak. It can't count the three hours of wrestling, because wrestling doesn't leave a tidy number behind.

Maybe that’s the real reason we love numbers so much. They rarely describe how we actually grow. What they hand us instead is something biology never will, the feeling that we’re in control of the timeline.

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IV. What Happens When the Counter Breaks

I let it break.

No unfreeze, no gems, no last-minute save. I closed the notification, put the phone face down, and let 250 days drop to zero.

The next morning, the small blue bird was gone.

The dashboard was stark and bare: 1 Day.

​I felt lighter almost immediately—untangled from something I hadn't realized was wrapped around me so tightly.

A number was never proof that I was fluent in German; it was only proof that I showed up and somewhere along the way, little old me had started treating compliance as if it were competence.

There is something liberating about admitting that a streak is a cage that happens to feel like safety.

You keep showing up not because you are growing, but because stopping feels like a small failure you don't want to explain to anyone, even to yourself.

But I won't pretend it was entirely clean. It was 250 days. I felt a real, specific kind of grief—the sunk cost of something I had protected every single day for the better part of a year, gone in a single evening.

Release brought lightness, but it also brought an unexpected ache.

I don't know if I'll open the app again tomorrow.

What I do know is I don't want a number deciding whether I actually learn a language. I want to set aside real time for it, on my own terms, because I'm curious, not because an app is threatening to look sad at me haha.

And if I’m honest, some part of me might fall for it again tomorrow.

The one streak I never worried about breaking is the one with my friend who actually speaks German to me. That one was never really about the number. The real thing under it never stopped happening, so the counter was just along for the ride.

What to do with this

I want you to look at one number you're currently protecting right now. It may be a streak, a follower count, a grade or a step count, anything.

Ask yourself honestly.

Is the number still attached to the real thing it was supposed to represent?

Or have you been quietly guarding the number itself for a while now, out of habit, out of the fear of a stranger asking why you let it die, long after the real thing slipped away underneath it?

You might not like the answer. Until a few nights ago, I didn't either.

—Feranmi

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I asked Google if I could hit 6’5 in the next five years.

It said no.

Virtually impossible, actually.

Then it explained why, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since — or slept properly, if I’m honest.

Height comes down to growth plates at the ends of your long bones — basically the femur and tibia.

In guys, those plates usually fuse somewhere between sixteen and twenty-one. By eighteen, mine are either locked or almost there.

Genetics decide about 80 percent of it anyway.

Stretching, hanging, special diets — none of that rewrites your DNA or forces a fused bone to grow longer.

If I’m a late bloomer, maybe I squeeze out another half inch over the next year or two. That’s it.

I couldn’t choose to be taller. But I could still choose the rest of it. And that question — what’s actually mine to work with, versus what I just have to survive …is the one that’s kept me up.

It’s almost 12am and I’m still awake, timetable open on my phone, trying to plan a summer I haven’t started living yet.

A plan that looks like studying from six a.m to noon, going to gym by evening.

The part that seems unreal to me is trying to finish all this before my second year starts. David Goggins would have aimed for more. Well… I am not him and he isn’t me.

But why does it already look like too much, when I haven’t done a single hour of it yet?

Today Portugal lost to Spain in the World Cup. Still grieving. Who isn’t watching the tournament? It is a strange thing to watch a clock run down on a screen while your own time feels entirely stalled.

I didn’t plan to write about patience tonight. I planned to sleep.

But I am sitting here instead, phone still lit, close to my brother whose snore can’t out noise the sound of my neighbour’s generator.

My brother turns in his sleep beside me and drags his hand across my face like I’m not even here.

I almost laugh.
He’ll hear about it in the morning.

But I keep doing this: building a version of myself in my head before I’ve built anything with my hands.

Tonight it just happened to be a summer schedule. A few months ago it was a body I wanted overnight. Before that, a course I didn’t choose. Before that, a phone that wasn’t even mine to lose.

I am still trying to figure out why every version of growth in my life has felt exactly like this. Slow, a little painful, and completely invisible while it’s happening.

So let me start from the body, since that’s where it’s clearest.

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I. The Tear

“Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop.”—Rumi

I started going to the gym this summer, yesterday.

First time in my life.

I’m at the age where looks start to matter to you, whether you admit it out loud or not.

I wanted a better physique. Simple as that.

So I couldn’t choose to be taller.

But I could still choose the rest of it. The shape, the strength, whatever was still mine to work with.

That’s when I decided if I was going to run an experiment on my own body this summer, I’d run it on the part that actually listens back.

Before now, everything I did was self-taught.

Pull-ups on some bar that looks strong enough to hold me.

Stretches I copied from videos.

….whatever my body could figure out on its own.

But a real gym is different.

You have to be deliberate now.

You have to think about what you eat, not just what you lift.

So I started reading up on it.

Eggs, fish, meat, beans…

Protein and fibre, because that's what actually builds muscle.

Now listen

When you stretch a muscle under weight, you're not building it at that moment.

You're tearing it.

Small, real damage to the tissue.

The growth doesn't happen in the gym at all.

It happens after.

In the quiet hours nobody sees.

That's when the body sends protein to the torn spot and starts repairing it, piece by piece, into something a little stronger than before.

I keep coming back to that.

Because the muscle doesn't know it's growing while it's tearing.

If you asked it in that moment, it would only tell you it hurts.

It has no way of knowing a stronger version of itself is coming.

It just sits there and takes the damage until the repair starts.

That, to me, is closer to what patience actually is.

Not the calm, smiling version we're taught to admire.

Just quiet endurance while something is being fixed that you can't see yet.

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II. The Phone

When I was fifteen, I told my parents I wanted to learn barbing.

A skill. Something I could engage in with my hands.

A craft I could finish in one afternoon and actually see.

They said no.

Not because they looked down on it.

My mother would never think that way.

It's because they knew what happens to a fifteen year old who starts making his own money too early.

You start to feel grown.

You start to think you can decide your own path before you're ready.

And they had already decided, long before I could argue back, that the one thing they could guarantee me was an education.

Everything else would have to wait.

I didn't understand that at the time.

I only understood no.

So I sat where I was told to sit.

Another tear, though I couldn't call it that yet.

I was enrolled in a private tutoring class for five days a week… from eight in the morning to two in the afternoon, preparing to rewrite my entrance exam because I hadn't made the cutoff the first time.

The walk there was long.

Some days I walked, some days I took a bike, and I remember complaining to my mum almost every week about transport money.

But I didn't mind the walk itself.

I liked pausing along the way to just watch the environment. People moving without thinking about it. A baby crying somewhere. Someone selling something by the roadside.

If you look at life plainly enough, almost like an animal watching other animals, it starts to look beautiful in a way you can't really explain.

I didn't know it then, but that walk was probably the only part of my day that belonged completely to me.

Once I got there, honestly, I didn't mind it.

There were other people my age there, all of us quietly scared about the same thing.

That's where the phone incident happened.

The art teacher asked to borrow my phone and a friend's, said he needed to search something for his class.

His classroom was separated from ours by a flat board, so we couldn’t see what he was doing.

At the same time, he had given his own students a test and told them to hand in their phones as well.

Only my friend did.

And with those two phones, he walked out the back door and never came back.

Nobody has seen him since.

I still half wonder if we got charmed haha.

I didn’t call it a tear then. I don’t think I had the word for it yet.

Losing that phone in the middle of a boring, high pressure season felt like losing air.

It was my only real connection to anything outside that hall.

My parents didn't react much. Not angry, not sympathetic. Just quiet.

I think they saw it as a small price for the bigger lesson: how to keep going when something is taken from you and you had no say in it.

I told myself maybe it was God pushing me to focus.

I don't know if I actually believed that or just needed something to hold onto.

Either way, I let it go, kept studying, and when the exam came, I passed properly this time.

III. The Wrong Room

Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

This is where the misplacement starts.

I didn't get into the course I wanted.

I was given anatomy instead.

There's a specific feeling in that.

Not failure exactly.

You're standing in a place built for a real purpose, around people who chose to be there, who want to be there. And you're only technically present.

Like a muscle pulled slightly in the wrong direction, still expected to hold weight.

Everything around you says this is fine, you should be grateful, and something quieter in you keeps saying this isn't it.

My parents saw it too, I think.

But they let me start anyway.

Their reasoning was simple. If I sat out a year waiting for the perfect course, I might lose whatever drive I still had.

Better to be somewhere, even the wrong somewhere, still being made to work, than to sit at home doing nothing.

So I studied anatomy I didn't choose.

And I'll be honest, I wasn't grateful for the wisdom of it while I was living it.

I was just misplaced, a little resentful, going through motions that weren't mine.

Later my parents told me I'd sit for another exam.

I wasn't surprised. Some part of me had been hoping for that news.

I needed to know if they still believed there was somewhere better for me.

I sat the exam.

Did better than before.

Then it fell apart again.

The school I actually wanted didn't take me, and the government was closing the admissions window for good.

Schooling in Nigeria isn't easy for anyone.

Competition everywhere, and underneath it, the quiet corruption of people who buy or connive their way into seats that should belong to someone else.

I'm not the first to say it and I won't be the last.

It's a shared sickness. You either let it eat you or you keep moving anyway.

I told my friends I might not be coming back.

Part of me hoped I wouldn't have to.

My father is the one who fixed it.

Quietly, the way fathers sometimes do the most important work without saying much about it.

He went looking for private schools that could still take me, even past the deadline everyone else had given up on.

He found one.

I got in.

To study dentistry.

Not barbing. Not the artist life I used to picture for myself when I was younger. Not even anatomy.

Dentistry.

And it was that November, in the middle of all that upheaval, that I started writing.

I don't think that's a coincidence, looking back.

Writing was the one place I finally got to choose something for myself.

After years of being placed by exam boards, by admission systems, by my parents' careful decisions, into rooms I didn't pick.

The muscle had been pulled in so many directions by then that it needed somewhere to repair itself in a shape I actually recognized as mine.

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IV. 1, 1, 2

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”—Lao Tzu

A few months ago I wrote about being in the "1,1 stage."

It's from the Fibonacci sequence. The first two numbers sit next to each other, identical, no visible growth yet.

1, 1.

That was my first year.

Physics, chemistry, biology, maths, again.

Subjects I'd already half lived through in secondary school, now slower, more repetitive, less like discovery and more like standing still.

I complained about it a lot at the time.

I meant every complaint.

I've just finished that year.

Second year is starting.

Biology has become anatomy, properly this time, on my own terms.

Chemistry has become biochemistry.

Physics has become physiology, which sounds unrelated but really isn't. Physiology is just physics applied to something that bleeds.

1, 1, 2.

The sequence doesn't know it's building toward anything either.

Each number is just the sum of the two before it.

It's not pushed forward by discipline or a plan it's proud of.

It just adds up.

I used to think patience meant deciding to wait.

Sitting down, gritting your teeth, choosing to endure like it's a virtue you pick off a history library shelf.

But almost none of what I just told you was something I chose.

Neither the stolen phone, nor the wrong course, nor the missed cutoff, nor the corruption — not even the school that finally worked out. My father found that, not me.

I wasn't choosing patience through any of it.

I was just staying alive while it happened, the same way a muscle keeps existing while it heals, whether it understands the healing or not.

You only get to call it patience afterward.

Nobody hands you the word while you're still in the middle of the tear.

You only get to look back, the way I'm looking back right now, and say, oh. That's what that was.

V. What I Actually Think Now

I have a lot of thoughts building castles without bricks lately, if I'm honest.

I don't know exactly what this summer should be about.

I'm about to start second year, not sure if the gym, the reading list, the anatomy textbooks, and this newsletter can all fit inside one version of me without something giving way.

I don't want to be known only as a future dentist.

I want to be known as someone who writes, who explores other things, who might one day own a farm or stand in front of a camera or finish reading Homer without having to read every sentence three times haha.

Maybe none of that is misplacement anymore.

Maybe it's just the tear before whatever comes next.

So here's what I actually think patience is, after years of not choosing very much of it.

It isn't the calm, patient virtue we're taught to admire.

It's the active, unglamorous, often involuntary work of enduring damage you didn't ask for, in a shape you didn't choose, until something on the other side of it turns out stronger than what came before.

You don't get to see the growth while it's happening.

You only get to feel the tear.

I'm not where I want to be yet. I want to say that plainly, without dressing it up.

But I've been shown a glimpse, a small, specific glimpse, of what I could become if I let the repair happen instead of resenting the tear.

So I'll leave you with the same question I sat with tonight, close to two in the morning, more tired than I've been in months.

What are you in the middle of right now, the exam, the job, the year, the relationship, that you won't be able to call patience until you're far enough away to see the whole shape of it?

You probably won't know the answer tonight.

I didn't either.

But it might be worth naming the tear anyway, before you know what it's building.

— Feranmi.

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This week, we’re exploring the difference between signal and noise.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

— Richard Feynman, physicist

John looked at me and smiled before he spoke.

There is something about that smile keeps replaying in my head. Not because it was unusual. John smiles often, the way people smile when they are about to say something they have been holding for a while and are finally ready to release.

He said: out of everyone that listens to me, you do not just sit and hear me finish. You ask questions that point me toward paths that are hard to follow.

Then he left.

And I sat with what he had said the way you sit with something that landed harder than you expected.

I felt light.

Not proud exactly. Something more like suddenly visible.

Like a part of me I had not examined had just been named by someone else, from the outside, with more accuracy than I could have managed from the inside.

And then, almost immediately, a question arrived that I was not prepared for.

Who am I?
Not in the existential way I promise....

It's more like a genuine curiosity about the person John had just described.

Because the Hector John was talking about, the one who asks the right questions, who points people toward hard paths, who listens differently, I had not introduced him to myself yet.

He had been there, apparently. Doing things. And I had not noticed.

I have been thinking about that ever since.

And it's not only about John, though we will return to him.

But about the question his words produced in me.

About how a thought can arrive, from inside or outside, and feel so certain, so true, so undeniable, and still leave you wondering: is this actually real?

Or is it just the mind building momentum toward something that feels like truth?

That is what this essay is about.

How do you tell the difference?

I. The Machine That Never Stops

Your brain generates approximately 6,200 thoughts per day.

And a significant amount of these thoughts doesn't arise from the ideas you chose to think.

Nor the problems you sat down to solve.

Just thoughts.

Arriving without invitation.

Departing without asking permission.

The machine runs continuously, producing its output whether you are paying attention or not.

Most of these thoughts pass through unexamined…

They arrive, they linger for a fraction of a second, they are replaced by the next one. You do not choose them.

You do not verify your thought.

You simply have them, the way you simply have a heartbeat, automatically, without deciding to.

But some thoughts do not pass through.

Some stick.

They repeat.

And the more you engage with them, the louder they become.

Until repetition turns them into something that feels like fact, rather than thought.

Like things you know rather than things you are merely thinking.

This is where the trouble begins.

Because the brain does not come with a label on each thought telling you whether it is true or not.

It almost does not sort its output by accuracy.

It produces thoughts the way the body produces cells, continuously, without quality control, leaving the evaluation entirely up to you.

And most people never learned how to evaluate.

They learned how to think.

They were not taught how to think about their thinking.

So they follow the thoughts that arrive with the most force.

The ones that feel most certain.

The ones that come back most often.

Not because those are the truest thoughts.

Nein.. Nein.. (No.. No..)

But because certainty and repetition feel like evidence, and nobody told them otherwise.

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II. When Momentum Feels Like Truth

Pay attention because here is where it gets complicated.

Your thoughts do not arrive in isolation. They connect.

One thought sparks another.

That one sparks two more.

Two more spark three.

The pattern is familiar if you have been reading this publication for a while.

It is the same mathematics that builds a sunflower's seeds and a nautilus shell.

Thoughts grow associatively, each one emerging from the ones before it, building momentum the way a spiral builds, slow at first, then suddenly faster than you can follow.

Psychologists call this associative thinking. The brain, for example, when encountering new information, does not file it away in isolation.

It connects it—instantly—to what it already knows, generating related thoughts faster than consciousness can track.

This is how creativity works.

One idea leads to an unexpected connection. Which in turn leads to an insight you could not have arrived at deliberately.

The spiral is doing its work, and the result feels like a revelation because, in a real sense, it is.

What you reach at the end of a creative spiral can be genuinely new.

But anxiety runs the same process.

One worry becomes two fears.
Two fears become three catastrophic outcomes.
The spiral tightens.

By the time you reach the end, the conclusion feels certain. Inevitable.

It carries the same weight as insight.

The mathematics is identical.

The output is completely different.

This is the problem Daniel Kahneman spent his career examining.

A psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for studying how often humans get their own thinking wrong—which is either reassuring or slightly concerning.

He identified two systems of thinking that operate in every mind

System One is fast.

Automatic.

Associative.

It is the spiral.

It produces responses instantly—matching patterns, making connections, generating feelings that feel like facts. It does not deliberate. It does not verify. It simply produces, continuously, with enormous confidence.

System Two is slow.

Deliberate.

Effortful.

It is the part of you that can step outside the spiral and ask:

where is this actually going?

Is this thought true or does it just have momentum behind it?

The problem is not that System Two is incapable, but that it is selective.

It requires energy, attention, and a willingness to slow down—conditions most situations do not encourage.

So System One runs almost everything.

Most of what you believe, most of what feels certain, was produced by a system that generates output faster than verification is possible.

I sat in front of a mathematics exam last week.

Forty questions. Thirty minutes. Calculus, limits, differential equations.

System One delivered its verdict immediately:

This is impossible.

How can this certainty arrive before I had attempted a single question?

It felt like an accurate assessment of reality. In truth, it was just a rapid pattern match to past experiences of difficulty, presented as fact.

I stopped looking at the clock.

I started solving.

I finished.

The thought felt true. It was not.

By the time you reach the end of an anxiety spiral, the conclusion feels just as certain and undeniable as any creative insight. The mathematics is identical. The output is completely different.

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III. John's Upstairs

John came to university and saw a different society.

He had grown up with everything—comfortable, socially fluent, aware of what was happening online before it happened anywhere else. But his awareness, as he told me, had a particular quality: the kind that comes from exposure without depth.

He knew what was popping online. What he didn’t know was that hydrogen produces a popping sound when ignited in the presence of oxygen.

He was not unintelligent.

He was unexamined.

Then he arrived somewhere new.

He saw his kind of people, and another kind entirely.

And something happened upstairs—his word, not mine—that he could not fully explain, but could not ignore.

He said, “It’s not that I had a bad life, or that something was off about the way I was brought up. But there is something going on upstairs. It’s forcing me to become new.”

I asked, “In what sense?”

He smiled. Said I was the right person to talk to—someone who asks questions that point toward hard paths. Then he left, leaving the question open.

The way people do when they know the answer will require something from them, and they are not sure they are ready to pay.

I have been sitting with what he said ever since.

Not the part about me. The part about upstairs.

John felt, with real force and certainty, that something in him needed to change. That feeling arrived the way all System One outputs arrive—fast, certain, undeniable.

It felt like truth.

But was it?

Was it insight—his mind recognizing something real about the gap between who he had been and who this new environment required him to become?

Or was it the spiral doing what spirals do—building momentum from novelty and unfamiliarity until the conclusion felt inevitable?

Dressing up discomfort as revelation?

He could not tell.

That is the honest answer. And the fact that he could not tell is not a failure of intelligence.

It is the condition of having a mind that runs faster than it can verify.

IV. The Witness Problem

There is a philosophical difficulty nobody warned you about.

You cannot step outside your own mind to check it.

The thing doing the examining and the thing being examined are the same instrument.

Look at it this way.

When you try to verify a thought, you are using more thoughts to do it.

And when you try to observe the spiral, the same problem appears: you are already inside it.

There is no neutral position.

No elevated vantage point from which the mind can look down at itself with clean objectivity and say: yes, that one is true, that one is noise.

This is what makes John's situation so honest.

He felt something going on upstairs with genuine force and certainty. But he could not fully trust the feeling because the feeling was produced by the same mind that was trying to evaluate it.

He was both the witness and the defendant. The judge and the one being judged.

And anyone who has sat in both chairs at once knows that justice in that courtroom is unreliable.

So he did the only thing that actually works.

He brought it outside.

Not to resolve it.

Not because I would hand him the answer.

But because another person’s response to your thought is the one piece of evidence the thought itself cannot manufacture.

John could not trust his own certainty.

But he could watch what happened when his certainty met someone else’s questions.

That friction—the resistance of a mind that was not already committed to the conclusion—was the closest thing to a witness he could find.

The witness problem does not have a clean solution.

But it has a practice.

And the practice is this: when a thought arrives with unusual force, when momentum builds to the point that the conclusion feels inevitable, bring it somewhere it has to survive contact with something outside itself.

Not to be told you are right.

To find out if you still believe it when it has to justify itself to a mind that did not produce it.

“Another person’s response to your thought is the one piece of evidence the thought itself cannot manufacture. John could not trust his own certainty. But he could watch what happened when his certainty met someone else’s questions.”

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V. Epistemic Humility

This is the part of the essay I have been sitting with the longest—the part that does not resolve cleanly.

Even if you bring the thought outside, find your witness, slow down, and apply everything you know about how the spiral works, one fact remains:

you cannot fully trust the instrument you are using to check itself.

This is what philosophers call epistemic humility—an awareness of the limits of what your own mind can verify about itself.

The brain is both the thing being examined and the thing doing the examining. You cannot step fully outside it. You cannot find a neutral position from which to evaluate your own thinking with perfect accuracy.

So the question of whether your mind is telling the truth does not have a clean answer.

It has something else instead:

a practice.
a discipline.
a set of habits that make you more likely to catch the thoughts that are misleading you, without ever making you immune to them.

The practice is simple.

You notice when a thought arrives with unusual force and certainty.

That force is not evidence of truth. It is evidence that System One has strong feelings about something. Strong feelings deserve examination, not automatic trust.

You ask where the thought came from.

Did it emerge from careful observation and evidence?
Or from fear, novelty, or momentum building toward a conclusion that feels inevitable?

You look at what the thought is asking you to do.

True thoughts—the ones that are actually pointing somewhere real—almost always demand something difficult. They point, as John said, toward hard paths.

The comfortable thought—the one that lets you stay where you are and feel certain about it—is more often the spiral than the signal.

And even after all of this, you stay humble.

Because the mind most convinced it has found the truth is often the mind that has stopped checking.

Because the mind most convinced it has found the truth is often the mind that has stopped checking.

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VI. The Hard Path

John left the conversation unresolved.

At first, it felt like incompleteness. Like a question that deserved an answer and did not get one.

Now I think it was the most honest thing he could have done.

Because the true thought—the one actually pointing somewhere real—does not announce itself clearly and wait for you to act on it.

It requires you to sit with the discomfort of not knowing.

To keep examining.

To follow the thread even when you cannot see where it leads.

To choose, again and again, the hard path over the comfortable certainty of the spiral.

That is what distinguishes signal from noise.

Not volume. Not certainty. Not how often the thought returns or how undeniable it feels when it arrives.

Signal leads somewhere that requires something from you. It points toward a version of yourself that does not yet exist and asks you to do the difficult work of becoming it.

It makes you ask—like John did—who am I if this is true? And what do I have to change to live inside that answer?

Noise is comfortable.

It confirms what you already believe.

It builds momentum toward conclusions that feel inevitable without asking anything of you.

It is the spiral running its natural course, producing certainty the way the body produces breath—automatically, without effort, without truth.

The mathematics exam told me it was impossible.

That was noise.

John felt something “upstairs” forcing him to become new.

That was, I think, signal. Not because it was comfortable, but because it was asking him to walk somewhere hard.

You cannot always tell them apart immediately. The brain moves too fast for that.

But you can learn to notice the difference in what each thought is asking you to do.

Signal almost always points somewhere harder.

That is not proof of truth.

But it is the closest thing we have.

And maybe that is enough to begin with.

To follow the hard thought.

To ask the uncomfortable question.

To sit with the unresolved—the way John did, the way I am now—knowing the answer is not the point.

The examination is.

— Feranmi

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"Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a person as he could be, and he will become what he should be."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

My literary uncle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, got me thinking about something that happened a while back. Just last month, someone told me they were planning an "academic comeback" after reading my essay on procrastination.

​I didn’t sit with that comment because I didn’t understand it; I sat with it because I didn’t know what to do with it.

Eight months ago, I was writing between exercise sets at 1:33 AM, my mother in the background, Lagos quiet outside. I was publishing something I didn’t know was good or bad because I didn’t yet know enough to tell the difference. That first piece was scattered, unplanned, and written without the kind of self-awareness that would have stopped me from publishing it.

Eight months later, someone was rebuilding their academic life from something I had made.

And if you really think of it …

It is kind of like there is a gap between who I was in August and what my words are doing now. I have been sitting with that line, turning it over, trying to understand its shape.

Let me be real with you…

I didn't feel I deserved that comment yet—not at the stage I am in, and not with everything I am still figuring out.

This essay is about the people who showed up before I had earned their presence.

The ones who looked at something unfinished and chose to see what it was becoming rather than what it was.

It is more about what that kind of belief does to a person. And about a specific stranger in Finland who, without knowing it, changed everything.

I. The Best in the Room

There is a particular feeling that belongs to the child who is good at something and knows it.

Not arrogance. Something quieter and more honest than arrogance. The feeling that arrives when you finish something, step back, and understand without anyone having to tell you that what you made is better than what the people around you made. That you are, in this specific room, at this specific thing, simply the best.

I knew that feeling when I drew.

I cannot give you a single memory with clean edges. No one teacher, no one afternoon, no one drawing I can hold up as evidence. What I have instead is the feeling itself, preserved more clearly than any specific moment that produced it. The applause of teachers. The recognition of friends. The quiet confidence of someone who has found, early, a thing they are made for and has been seen making it.

When someone commented on my art, something in me lifted. Not pride exactly. Something closer to confirmation. Like the world agreeing with something I had always suspected about myself but hadn't yet been given permission to fully believe.

I was the best in the room. And not a single soul was fighting for my spot.

I did not know then how rare that feeling was—how many people move through their entire lives searching for it and never quite arriving. I did not know that one day the room would change, and the thing I was best at would be taken from me. Not dramatically, not by anyone's malice, but by the slow, reasonable accumulation of other demands.

I just drew. And people saw me. And for a while that was enough.

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II. What the Curriculum Took

Secondary school does not kill creativity with any drama.

It does something quieter and more effective: it redirects it. It takes the part of you that wants to make things and hands it a syllabus.

My drawings did not stop entirely; they just became biology drawings. Skulls. Kidneys. Liver cross-sections. Microorganisms rendered in sharp pencil for the sake of accurate scientific illustration. Chlamydomonas. Euglena. Parenchyma cells arranged in neat, labeled diagrams waiting to be assessed.

I remember asking myself somewhere in those years whether it counted as art.

I still don't have a clean answer.

There is skill in a good biology drawing.

There is attention and care and the particular patience of someone trying to render what is true rather than what is imagined. Maybe that is art. Maybe the curriculum was not taking something from me but reshaping it into something more useful.

But the feeling was gone.

Nobody applauded a well-drawn kidney. Nobody looked at my Euglena diagram and told me I was the best in the room. The making continued. The being seen did not. And slowly, without announcement, the part of me that had lifted when someone looked at what I made and recognized it went quiet.

I finished secondary school. I survived JAMB—Nigeria’s high-stakes university exam—and the grueling year I spent at another university studying Anatomy, before the long detour finally brought me to Dentistry.

I built a new version of myself out of different materials—harder ones, more practical ones, ones that made more visible sense to the people around me.

The drawing stayed behind. Not with a goodbye. Just gradually, the way you stop using a room in a house until one day you realize you haven't opened the door in years.

III. The Finnish Stranger

August last year. A suggestion from my Sunday school teacher. A skill I needed. A platform I had never used.

I started writing the way I started most things in those months: without a plan, without a strategy, and without any real understanding of what I was doing or where it was going. My first piece was written between exercise sets. Superman pose. Long arm crunches. My mother in the background. Lagos at midnight, carrying its particular quiet.

I wrote as I lived. Scattered. Present. Unfiltered.

I had never written anything longer than secondary school letters to local government chairmen—those formal, structured, performative essays Nigerian students are assigned. Write to your chairman. List the problems in your community. Suggest solutions. What I was doing now was nothing like that. It was simply recording a life as it happened, one moment pulling the next, with no editorial distance between the living and the writing.

​I published it. Not because I thought it was good, but because I didn’t know enough yet to know it wasn’t.

That ignorance, I understand now, was a gift.

The rawness was the only honest thing I had to offer. And somewhere in the world, on a platform I had just discovered, a stranger in Finland was about to find it.

Her name was Kirsi Maria.

She wrote: "this is lovely, random and unorganized. I enjoyed it. I especially like the fact that it seems you at least didn't overthink this. You just let it flow."

I read that comment and felt something I had not felt in years.

It wasn't pride or relief; it was something older and more specific. It was the feeling of being the best in the room. Not because she told me I was excellent, but because she looked at my rawness and made sense of it. She described what it was before I had understood it myself.

She told me what the mess meant.

I was on a bus in Lagos when I replied to her. The city was moving past the window, flashing landscapes I should have been watching. Instead, I was typing frantically to a stranger in Finland because she had done something I did not know I needed.

She saw me.

Not just the essay—she saw me. She told me that what she felt through my words was the joy of discovering new sides of yourself, the sense of freedom that comes when you show real parts of who you are. She was describing me more accurately than I could have described myself at that moment.

I feel seen, I told her, in a way I don't deserve.

I did not have the language then for what had happened between us. Now I do.

In 1968, psychologist Robert Rosenthal conducted a study that would change how we understand the relationship between belief and performance. He told teachers that certain students had been identified as "late bloomers" who were about to experience significant intellectual growth.

What the teachers did not know was that the names had been chosen completely at random. There was no test, no special identification. There was only a belief, planted carefully in the minds of the teachers, that these particular students were capable of more than they were currently showing.

By the end of the year, the students on that list had significantly outperformed their peers.

It wasn't because they were smarter. It was because someone believed they were.

The teachers, without realizing it, had changed how they spoke to those students. How long they waited for them to answer. How much complexity they introduced. How much encouragement they quietly offered. The belief restructured the environment, the environment restructured the students, and the expectation became the reality.

Rosenthal called it the Pygmalion effect, named after the myth of the sculptor who carved a woman from ivory and loved her so completely that she came to life.

You become, in part, what the people who see you believe you can become.

Kirsi Maria was my Rosenthal teacher. She did not tell me I was a great writer. She told me, in the particular language of someone paying genuine attention, that what I was doing meant something. That my rawness was readable. That a stranger in Finland could feel the joy of a young man in Lagos discovering himself for the first time on a page.

She did not know she was doing any of this.

She just commented on a piece she liked.

But belief does not need to know it is belief to do its work.

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IV. Before You Deserved It

I have thought carefully about what would have happened if Kirsi had not found that first piece.

I would have continued. That part I know. Writing had already become something I needed rather than something I chose, the way certain things announce themselves as necessary before you have language for why.

But it would have been different. Not absent. Different.

There is a version of me that writes in silence for months before anyone arrives. That version is more careful. More self-conscious. More occupied with the question of whether the thing being built is worth building at all. He writes, but he holds something back… more like a protection against the possibility that the rawness means nothing to anyone but him.

Kirsi collapsed that version before he could fully form.

She arrived at the beginning, before I had earned anything, before the voice or the structure or the ideas that now hold the essays together had developed, and she told me the rawness itself was enough. That the unorganized, flowing, unplanned thing I had made from exercises and midnight and a mother's laughter already contained something worth finding.

That is what the people who believe first do.

They do not wait for you to deserve it. They see what you are becoming before you can see it yourself. They show up at the beginning, when the thing you are building looks nothing like what it will eventually be, and they say quietly or loudly, with a comment or simply by staying: I see something here.

I think about the 39 people who were subscribed to me in January. Before the memory essay. Before the procrastination series. Before I had found the form that now holds everything together. They were there when I was still the biology drawing, still practicing the skill without the feeling, still learning what it meant to make something that mattered to someone beyond myself.

I did not deserve them.

I am not sure deserving was ever the point.

The people who believe before you deserve it are not making an accurate assessment of what you have already produced. They are making a bet on what you might become. And the bet itself changes the odds. Because now you are not writing alone in the dark wondering if the thing means anything.

You are writing for someone who already decided it does.

I still draw sometimes. An open hand, badly proportioned, uncertain lines, the work of someone who stopped at twelve and is slowly trying to remember how hands work. The feeling of being the best in the room is not there yet.

But something else is.

The knowledge that a stranger in Finland once looked at something raw and unformed and chose to say: I can see you in this.

And the knowledge that eight months of growth from that beginning produced something that made a student somewhere decide their academic life was worth fighting for again.

I did not earn either of those things at the time they were given.

They were given anyway.

And the only honest response to that kind of grace is to keep becoming what they saw.

— Feranmi

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“Omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.”Everything is alien to us. Only time is truly ours.— Seneca

It is 6:09 in the morning.

The kind of cold that only arrives after heavy rain the night before has settled into the room. The birds outside are doing what birds do when the air is clean and the world feels briefly uncomplicated. I laid my bed five minutes ago. I should be preparing for classes.

Instead I am sitting here thinking about what we lose when we wait.

In an earlier essay, I wrote about procrastination as a body signal. As ancient intelligence. As your nervous system communicating something about the mismatch between the task and the conditions, not about your character. I meant every word of it. I still do.

But I left something out.

Not by accident. By something closer to the very thing I was writing against.

I left out the part that is harder to say. The part where the signal, if you listen to it long enough without ever acting, stops being wisdom and starts being a way of quietly disappearing from your own life.

There are pieces of ourselves we lose when we stall. I don't think most people notice it happening. That is what makes it worth writing about.

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I. The Other Later

The word is later.

It is one of the most quietly destructive words in any language. Not because it is a lie, exactly. Sometimes later is the honest answer. Sometimes the body genuinely needs different conditions, a different hour, a different frame. I wrote about that last week and I stand by it.

But there is another later. A different one entirely.

Not the later that says: not now, something is off, give me better conditions.

The later that says: not now, not today, not this version of circumstances.

And if you wait a little longer you might find a version of the moment that feels easier to enter.

That later is not wisdom. It is negotiation with yourself that you are slowly losing.

What this kind of later takes is not obvious because it doesn't arrive all at once. It works the way erosion works. You don't watch the cliff disappear. You just notice one day that the edge is closer than you remembered.

It takes time, yes. But that is the easy part to name.

What it actually takes is the version of you that would have done the thing.

Every day you delay something that genuinely matters, the image of yourself doing it grows slightly less real.

Not dramatically.

Not in a way you would notice on a Tuesday morning.

But the brain is a narrative organ. It builds its sense of who you are from the evidence of what you do. And when the evidence keeps returning with the same answer—not yet, not today, maybe tomorrow, the brain begins to update its story about you accordingly.

You stop being someone who does the thing.

You become someone who means to.

That distance between meaning to and doing is where self-respect quietly leaks out.

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II. A Story About Figs

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”— Aristotle

Let me tell you about two monkeys.

They were given the same task by the elder of their troop. Climb the great fig tree at the edge of the forest and bring back fruit before nightfall.

The first monkey looked at the tree, felt the familiar weight of effort, and began climbing. The bark was rough. She slipped twice.

The sun was higher than she would have liked. But by midday she had the fruit, and something else that doesn't have a name exactly, only a feeling.

The quiet knowing that she was a monkey who climbs.

The second monkey looked at the same tree and felt something different. Not fear, not laziness. Something more reasonable than either of those. The sun was high and hot. Her hands were still damp from the morning rain.

The conditions were not quite right. Later, she told herself. When it is cooler, when my hands are dry, I will go.

Afternoon came. The conditions were better. But she had spent the morning not climbing, and the image of herself climbing felt slightly less vivid than it had at dawn. She found new reasons. The shadows were getting long. It would be better to start fresh tomorrow, with the whole day ahead of her.

Tomorrow came. The figs were gone, taken by birds in the night.

But here is the part the story doesn't usually tell.

The second monkey didn't only lose the figs. She lost something quieter and harder to recover.

She had spent two full days building a story about herself, a monkey who waits for better conditions, and that story had started to feel like the truth.

The next task the elder gave her, the pull of later arrived faster than before. It took less to justify. The threshold for not quite right had lowered. The muscle of beginning, which is not a metaphor but a real neural architecture built through the repeated act of starting, had weakened.

The first monkey had the fruit.

The second monkey had a habit.

That is what later does when we use it the wrong way. It doesn't just defer the task. It begins, slowly and without announcement, to rewrite who you are.

III. The Trade You Don’t See

There is a concept in psychology called temporal discounting.

It describes the brain's tendency to value the present more than the future. Not irrationally, exactly, because the present is certain and the future is not.

But the degree to which we discount the future is extreme, and it compounds in ways we rarely account for.

When you say later, you are not being neutral. You are making a trade. You are choosing the comfort of this moment over the version of yourself that exists on the other side of the action.

And because future-you feels less real than present-you, because you cannot feel future-you's relief or pride or momentum, the trade always feels reasonable in the moment and almost always costs more than you expected.

This is not a character flaw. It is how the brain is built. But understanding how it is built is what allows you to work with it instead of simply being carried by it.

The other thing that happens, and this one is less discussed, is what psychologists call the intention-action gap.

The gap between meaning to do something and actually doing it is not just time. It is a place where identity quietly shifts.

Research on self-concept shows that we build our sense of who we are primarily from our actions, not our intentions.

You can intend to be a writer every day for a year. If you do not write, your brain does not register you as a writer. It registers you as someone who thinks about writing. Those are not the same person, and over time, the distance between them grows into something that begins to feel like a stranger.

Seneca, writing almost two thousand years before the concept of temporal discounting existed, said it with less technical vocabulary and more force. He wrote that we suffer not from the shortness of life but from the wasting of it.

That the life we are given is long enough if we know how to use it.

But most of us, he observed, live in a way where the best part of life passes while we are doing badly, much of it passes while we are doing nothing, and all of it passes while we are doing something other than what we mean to be doing.

He wrote that in 65 AD.

He was describing your Tuesday.

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IV. Two Months of Later

I want to tell you something I have not told many people.

For the past two months, something has been happening to me at night. And I have not looked it up.

Let me explain why that is strange.

I am the kind of person who types questions into Google the moment they arrive. I read three articles before I have finished forming the question. I am naturally curious in a way that usually does not give me the option of remaining uninformed about something that interests me.

And yet.

I have been falling into these states at the edge of sleep.

A glitch at the back of my neck.

A pull into something that feels less like dreaming and more like arriving somewhere.

The night I watched a video about Nikola Tesla, who claimed to have received signals from other planets, who described tapping into an intelligence no one else around him could access, I turned my phone over and closed my eyes.

And fell into something I could not name.

I was somewhere in the universe. Images running through my head like information being downloaded. Abstract matter, scientists, habitations blurring past. I came out of it scared. I went back in. The second time I found myself in an abandoned classroom from secondary school, walking on chairs stacked on top of each other, hiding from my vice principal while a torchlight swung through the dark. The blanket I pulled over myself was somehow a door.

Closing it brought me back.

Opening it brought me out.

I woke up with my heart racing and the room looking different than it should.

And what did I do?

I did not look it up.

I called it maybe a bad dream and waited for it to happen again.

It happened again.

I still did not look it up.

That is procrastination on the deepest kind of task. Not a textbook. Not a deadline. Myself. The strange country of my own experience, which was sending signals every night, asking to be understood, and which I kept filing under later.

What was happening, I can tell you now, is sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations.

A well-documented neurological event that occurs in the transition between wakefulness and sleep. The brain wakes before the body does. In that gap, it generates experiences that feel more vivid than ordinary dreams.

The dark entity at the door.

The sense of a presence.

The paralysis. The racing heart.

These are not supernatural. They are your own nervous system producing sensation without a body to anchor it in.

The Tesla video almost certainly primed the content. A curious mind fed ideas about signals from other planets, about one man receiving what no one else could receive, will find those ideas waiting at the threshold of sleep.

I am not possessed. I did not access a portal.

I was scared. I chose later. And for two months something was happening to me every night that I did not understand, when I could have understood it in twenty minutes.

What I lost in those two months was not grand.

It was the simple, available peace of knowing what was happening inside my own body.

The curiosity that defines me failed to show up for me when I needed it most, not because it was gone, but because I kept deciding that now was not the right time to be honest with myself about being scared.

Later, in this case, cost me two months of unnecessary fear.

Multiply that across every domain of a life and you begin to see the shape of the loss.

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V. The Quietest Loss

I want to be careful here because I already wrote about procrastination as a valid signal, and I do not want to undo that.

Both things are still true.

Sometimes the body is saying: not now, the conditions are wrong, listen to me.

That is real. That deserves your attention.

And sometimes the body is saying: I am uncomfortable, and comfort is what I prefer, and later is the word I use to make that preference sound like wisdom.

The difference matters.

The first kind of later is information.

The second kind is negotiation.

The way to tell them apart is not always obvious, but there is a question that helps.

When you say later, do you feel relief or do you feel weight?

Relief, genuine relief, the loosening of something that was tight, usually means the body needed what it asked for.

Weight, the particular heaviness of something unfinished that you carry into the next hour and the next day, is the body telling you that later was not the honest answer.

Most of us know which one we are feeling.

We are just hoping nobody brings it up.

I am bringing it up.

Because I think the cost of the second kind of later is one of the quietest losses of our time. Not the dramatic loss of opportunity that productivity content loves to dramatise. The slow erosion of the person you were becoming. The version of you that was building toward something, that had the thread of an intention in its hands, and kept setting it down in rooms it never returned to.

You can feel it if you reflect honestly.

The projects that aged inside you without being finished.

The conversations you kept meaning to have.

The thing you told yourself you would begin when the conditions were right, when the time was right, when you were ready, when the version of the moment that felt easier to enter finally arrived.

It did not arrive.

Or if it did, you had already stopped believing it would, and the disbelief kept you from recognising it.

The second monkey did not lose the figs because she was lazy.

She lost them because she built a story about herself, one reasonable decision at a time, that made starting feel like something she would do tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a very good story. It has the advantage of never arriving as itself. It always arrives as today, with its own conditions and its own reasons to wait. And the monkey who lives in tomorrow never has to confront the fact that tomorrow is now.

I am not ending this with a framework.

I am not giving you a conditions audit or a set of steps because I already did that earlier, and this week is about something harder than steps.

This week is about sitting with the weight of what gets lost.

Not to punish yourself. Shame is still not the answer. I meant that when I said it.

But because some losses deserve to be named before they can be changed.

The fig tree is still there.

The question is how long you have been standing at the bottom of it.

Not every fruit waits. Not every window stays open. Not every version of the person you were becoming remains available the longer you make it wait.

Some things, left long enough, do not spoil dramatically.

They simply become something you used to think about.

There is a particular grief in that — quiet, ordinary, almost invisible. But naming it matters. Because once you see what later takes, you cannot unsee it.

The tree is waiting. The fruit is waiting. The only thing not waiting is time.

—Feranmi

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The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”— Marcus Aurelius

Something in me awakened.

I didn’t know what it was at first. I just knew I couldn’t walk past.

I was on my way to school, taking the usual route, when I saw him. A boy. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old

He was standing beside a painting he had made — a half-peeled banana, rendered with the kind of quiet confidence that belongs only to people who make things because they cannot help it.

Not for grades. Not for approval. Just because the thought demanded to exist.

It was the kind of work that could feature in a contemporary art gallery. And he was selling it on the side of the road, smiling.

I almost smiled back. But I didn’t.

Because something else was happening.

Something quieter and more unsettling than admiration.

I looked at that boy and his painting and felt, with a clarity I wasn’t prepared for, that I was looking at an image of what I could have become.

I passed his route the next day. Even though there were other routes.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

Until one morning he wasn’t there. He had moved. And I felt the absence the way you feel the absence of something that was never officially yours but somehow mattered anyway.

I have been thinking about that boy ever since. About why I kept returning to his route. About what the painting was doing to something inside me that I hadn’t examined in years.

And I think I understand now.

It wasn’t nostalgia. It was recognition.

The brain encountering something that matched a pathway it had never fully let go of.

A thought that had gone quiet at eleven years old, the year I stopped drawing, the year school started demanding more and art started demanding less, suddenly finding its voice again on the side of an Ibadan road.

This essay is about how that happens. How thoughts grow. How they wait. How they return.

And what it means that the most important ideas in your life are probably not new ones.

They are old ones, finally ready to be heard.

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1. The Seed

When I was young, I could copy drawings so precisely that there was almost no difference between the original and mine.

I could build cars from rotors and cardboard.

I loved the process of making something from nothing, of looking at a blank surface and knowing, with a child’s uncomplicated certainty, that something would exist there that hadn’t existed before.

Then school became serious.

My parents, who loved me and wanted the best for me, began to say things that made complete sense and cost me something I didn’t know I was paying.

They said I deserved more than art.

They said I could study something in the health sector.

They said I could change lives.

I believed them. Because they were right. And because I was young enough that the cost of the belief was invisible.

So I filed the art away. Not dramatically. Not with a conscious decision. Just gradually, the way you stop using a room in a house until one day you realise you haven’t opened the door in years. The drawing stopped. The building stopped. The part of me that wanted to make things with my hands, rather than my mind, went quiet.

I finished secondary school.

And after three years of intense work , I was admitted to study dentistry. The course I had worked toward. The life my parents had pointed me toward. The version of myself I had built by putting away the other one.

And I genuinely love it. That is the strange part. I am not writing this from a place of regret about dentistry. I am writing it from a place of honest bewilderment about what happened to the thoughts I set aside.

Because they didn’t disappear.

They waited.

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II. What the Brain Keeps

Here is what neuroscience says about thoughts that go quiet.

They don’t die. They become dormant.

Every thought you have ever had with emotional intensity,

every skill you practised with genuine engagement,

every passion that absorbed you before the world told you to want something else, leaves a physical trace in the brain.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

The repeated act of drawing at eleven built neural pathways, strengthened synaptic connections, laid down architecture that the brain does not simply dismantle because the activity stopped.

This is what neuroscientists call synaptic plasticity — the brain’s ability to strengthen and weaken connections based on experience.

The pathways built through passionate use become strong, efficient, and fast.

When you stop using them, they weaken through a process called synaptic pruning.

But they rarely disappear entirely.

Especially when the experience was emotionally charged.

The brain, it turns out, is a conservative organ. It keeps what it loved.

This means the artist I was at eleven did not vanish when I stopped drawing. He became latent. The pathways he built are still there, quieter than before, less travelled, slightly overgrown. But present. Waiting for a trigger that matches their frequency.

A boy on the side of the road, smiling over a painting of a half-peeled banana, was that trigger.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thinking.

System One is fast, automatic, emotional, associative.

It operates below conscious awareness, pattern-matching at extraordinary speed, recognising before the mind has time to reason.

System Two is slow, deliberate, analytical, effortful.

When I saw the banana painting, System One responded before System Two had even registered the scene.

Before I had formed a thought about the boy, before I had made any conscious connection to my own childhood, something in me had already recognised what it was looking at.

A dormant pathway, activated by a matching signal. The recognition arrived as a feeling before it arrived as a thought.

That is how the most important thoughts begin.

Not as ideas we generate.

As recognitions the brain makes on our behalf, in the fraction of a second before we know we are thinking.

The ideas that matter most don’t arrive. They return. They were always there, waiting for the right conditions to become audible again.

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III. How Thoughts Grow

But recognition is only the beginning.

A thought that is recognised and then ignored returns to dormancy.

What makes a thought grow is what happens after the recognition

whether you feed it or starve it,

whether you return to its route or take a different one.

I kept returning to the boy’s route.

I told myself it was incidental.

A convenient path to school.

But I knew, on some level below the rationalisation, that I was going back to see the painting.

To feel the recognition again.

To stay near the thing the brain had woken up.

This is the feedback loop that makes thoughts grow.

A thought produces a feeling.

The feeling produces a behaviour.

And the behaviour reinforces the thought.

Each loop strengthens the neural pathway a little more, makes the thought a little louder, brings it a little closer to the surface where it can finally be acted on.

Cognitive behavioural theory is built on this loop.

The thoughts you think repeatedly become the beliefs you hold without examining.

The beliefs you hold shape the actions you take.

The actions you take produce the experiences that confirm the beliefs. The loop closes. The pathway strengthens. The thought grows.

This works in both directions.

A thought fed with attention and returned to with curiosity grows toward action.

A thought starved of attention and suppressed with shame shrinks back toward dormancy.

Which means the question of whether a thought grows into something you live is not really a question about the thought. It is a question about what you do in the moments after recognition.

Do you return to the route?

Or do you take a different road?

IV. The Environment That Shapes What We Think

Thoughts do not grow in isolation. They grow inside a context, and the context shapes them as much as the original seed does.

My parents did not kill the artist in me.

Never.

They planted a different seed with more water.

The health sector seed had more resources behind it — more social reinforcement, more cultural validation, more visible evidence of where it led.

The art seed had love but no infrastructure. In that environment, the health sector thought grew faster. That is not a failure of character. That is how environments work.

The brain is neuroplastic — it rewires itself continuously based on experience.

The experiences available to you in your environment shape the pathways that strengthen and the pathways that weaken.

A child surrounded by artists develops different neural architecture than a child surrounded by doctors.

Not because one brain is better than the other, but because each brain is faithfully building itself from the materials available.

Culture shapes thought. Language shapes thought. The stories your family tells about what a good life looks like shape thought.

Education systems reward certain kinds of thinking and penalise others, and the brain, responsive to reward, adjusts accordingly.

This is not determinism.

It is not an excuse or an explanation that removes agency.

It is context.

Understanding the environment that shaped your thoughts is the first step toward consciously choosing which ones to feed and which ones to let go dormant.

Because here is what the environment cannot do: it cannot permanently erase a thought that was built with genuine passion before the environment intervened.

It can suppress it.

It can redirect attention away from it for years, even decades.

But the pathway remains.

Quieter. Waiting.

And sometimes, on the side of a road you didn’t have to take, a twelve-year-old boy is standing next to a painting of a banana.

And everything the environment suppressed wakes up at once.

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V. What This Means for Real Life

The thoughts you think repeatedly become the lens through which you see the world.

This is not a motivational statement.

It is a neurological fact.

Every repeated thought strengthens a pathway.

Every strengthened pathway makes the next thought along that route faster, easier, more automatic.

Over time, the thoughts you have most often become the thoughts you have by default – the assumptions you don’t examine, the interpretations you don’t question, the lens you look through without knowing you are looking through a lens at all.

This is why habits are so difficult to break.

A habit is not just a behaviour. It is a thought loop that has been strengthened through repetition until it runs automatically, below the level of conscious decision.

Breaking a habit requires not just changing the behaviour but interrupting the thought loop, weakening the pathway, and building a new one strong enough to compete with the old one.

That takes time.

It takes repetition.

It takes the willingness to feel the discomfort of a new pathway being built while the old one is still pulling.

This is also why overthinking is so exhausting. The overthinker has built extremely strong pathways for analysis, for anticipating problems, for examining every angle before committing.

The brain follows its strongest pathways automatically.

The overthinker is not choosing to overthink.

The overthinker has simply spent years strengthening those particular routes until they run without being called.

And this is why the thoughts you feed in childhood matter so much.

The passionate engagement of an eleven year old is not trivial.

It is architecture.

It is the brain at its most plastic, building pathways with the efficiency that only genuine curiosity produces.

Those pathways do not fully disappear.

They wait. And they can be reactivated, years later, by the right trigger.

The implication is both humbling and hopeful.

You are not entirely the author of your thoughts. The brain is constantly generating them from the pathways available, shaped by genetics, environment, experience, and repetition. Much of what you think arrives rather than being chosen.

But you are the curator.

You decide which thoughts to return to.

Which routes to walk again.

Which recognitions to feed and which to let pass.

The curation is slow and imperfect and sometimes you don’t notice you’re doing it. But it is real. And over time, it shapes the architecture.

You cannot fully control what thoughts arrive. But you can control which ones you return to. And the ones you return to are the ones that grow.

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VI. The Question the Future Is Already Asking

I want to end with something unresolved. Because the most honest essays do not close every door.

We live now inside an environment that has never existed before. Billions of people carrying devices that learn, with extraordinary precision, what thoughts we are most likely to engage with, and feed us more of those thoughts, thousands of times a day.

The algorithm does not care which thoughts are true.

It does not care which thoughts are good for you, which ones align with your actual values, which ones belong to the person you are trying to become.

It cares only about engagement.

And engagement, it turns out, is produced most reliably by thoughts that provoke strong emotion, outrage, fear, desire, confirmation of existing beliefs.

The brain is neuroplastic.

It builds itself from the materials available.

And the materials the algorithm provides, endlessly, at the highest volume and frequency ever encountered in human history, are materials that strengthen very specific pathways.

The question I cannot answer, and that I think our generation will spend its life navigating, is this:

Are the thoughts we think in the age of algorithms still fully ours?

Or are we, without knowing it, thinking what the feed has trained us to think — our genuine curiosity slowly replaced by algorithmically optimized reactions, our original ideas quietly crowded out by content designed to feel like thought but engineered to produce clicks?

I don’t know.

But I think the banana painting boy might.

He was making something original, by hand, at twelve years old, selling it on the side of the road.

No algorithm suggested it.

No feed rewarded it. No engagement metric validated it.

Just a thought that had been growing inside him, fed by curiosity and practice and the simple fact that he returned to it, day after day, until it became something real enough to show the world.

That is how thoughts grow.

Not through viral spread or algorithmic amplification or the approval of strangers on a screen.

Through the quiet, patient, unglamorous act of returning.

To the route.

To the thought.

To the thing inside you that awakened when you saw something that recognised you back.

I thought the boy represented what I could have become.

I was wrong.

He represented what was still there.

The pathway built at a tender age, never fully pruned, waiting for the right trigger.

The artist who went quiet when school got serious and parents got hopeful and life got louder than the drawing could compete with.

He didn’t show me a lost version of myself.

He showed me a dormant one.

And a few weeks later, for the first time in years, I picked up a pencil and drew a horse head.

It wasn’t good. The proportions were wrong and the lines were uncertain and it looked like exactly what it was — a first attempt after a long silence.

But the pathway was there.

Quieter than it used to be.

A little overgrown.

But present.

Waiting, as thoughts always wait, for someone to return to the route.

The ideas that matter most don’t arrive.

They return.

The only question is whether you are paying attention when they do.

—Feranmi

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— Discovery with grace

If you enjoy this essay, I am sure you will love more of my essays below plus you could save it for later.

I sat down to read three pages of my biology textbook.

That was it. Just three pages.

I didn’t get past the second paragraph.

My eyes started blurring—not from tiredness, but something stranger. It felt like my body was quietly refusing.

I tried to push through. Read the same lines again.

The words dissolved anyway.

So I stopped.

And a question surfaced:

Why does my body resist the very things I know would be good for me?

I tried reading again and pushed a little harder. But the words dissolved into shapes. Numbers flying across the page.

I started over, only to drift into a split-second sleep.

A voice whispered: maybe you need to rest. Try again later.

But later became even later.

And then I got up. Moved to a different place. Opened the book again without announcement, without ceremony, without the weight of the plan.

This time I read freely. No blurring. No rope. I turned more pages than I had planned, wanting to keep going.

By every measure that matters, the reading was a success.

And yet, when I looked at the clock, shame arrived anyway. Not because I had failed. But because I had compared my actual result to an imaginary timeline. The plan said this morning. My body said later. My body was right. But my mind said: too late. Time is gone. You procrastinated.

I have been sitting with that moment ever since.

Because I think it contains something most people miss entirely about what procrastination actually is.

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I. The Body Sending a Signal

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”— Viktor Frankl

I started questioning my body after that morning.

Our ancestors didn’t make plans just to avoid them later.

They decided to hunt and they hunted.

Their bodies didn’t resist.

Mine does.

That difference bothered me for a long time.

It felt like civilization had softened us.

Like the luxury of procrastination was a modern disease, something our ancestors couldn’t afford and we couldn’t escape.

But the more I sat with it, the more I thought: we have this backwards.

Our ancestors didn’t follow schedules.

They hunted when the conditions were right—

when food was available,

when their bodies were ready,

when the environment made sense.

They responded to reality.

Not a plan written the night before.

What we call procrastination might not be a weakness at all.

It might be the same ancient intelligence.

The body reading its environment and saying:

not now.

not like this.

In 2001, the psychologist Piers Steel began studying procrastination with the rigour most researchers reserved for more serious problems. His finding unsettled the standard story. Procrastination, Steel discovered, is not primarily about laziness. It is not about weak character or poor time management. It is, at its neurological core, about emotion regulation.

You’re not avoiding the task.

You’re avoiding how it feels.

When the task feels too big or unclear, your body sends a signal.

The blurring eyes.

The tightening chest.

The voice that says: maybe later.

That signal is not laziness wearing the costume of physical sensation.

It’s your nervous system trying to tell you something.

But we rarely hear the signal. Two narratives arrive so quickly that they drown it out.

The first: I’m just lazy. I prefer comfort over growth. This converts the signal into a character verdict.

The second, more modern: my attention span is permanently damaged by my phone. I’ve lost the ability to focus forever. This one sounds informed. But it does the same thing. It takes a temporary state and converts it into a permanent identity.

Both narratives share one quality:

they blame you instead of the conditions.

And once you accept the verdict, the original signal disappears. You stop asking what your body was trying to tell you. You already know. You are the problem.

Procrastination isn’t laziness.

It’s your body refusing conditions that don’t fit.

Shame closes the research door.

You cannot investigate what you have already explained.

Fighting yourself is the ultimate distraction. What you are actually struggling with is not a lack of willpower. It is a lack of listening. And there is a significant gap between the person who white-knuckles their way through life and the person who learns to engineer their way into flow.

The first approach has a ceiling. The second has no limit.

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II. The Script Is the Problem, Not You

There’s a simpler way to understand what’s happening.

You’re not resisting the task.

The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for planning, initiating, and sustained attention, needs something specific to engage: clarity.

Something clear.

Something small.

Something it can actually grip.

When a task feels too big or unclear, your brain doesn’t push harder.

It disengages.

It sends the signal.

It waits for better conditions.

This is not a malfunction.

This is the brain working exactly as it was designed to.

Reading three pages” isn’t always the same task.

At 8am, sitting still, eyes adjusting to the day, with the weight of a planned intention pressing down, the task can feel enormous.

The same three pages, opened without announcement in a different place, without the pressure of a timeline, can feel like nothing. You read them and want more.

The task did not change.

The conditions did.

The philosopher William James wrote that the greatest discovery of his generation was that human beings could alter their lives by altering their attitudes. But James was working before neuroscience.

What he was describing was something more precise:

Human beings can alter their behaviour by altering the frame through which the task is presented to the nervous system.

“Study for the exam” is a command your brain can’t execute.

Too large.

Too formless.

No edges.

Your brain looks at it and has nothing to hold onto.

So it flinches.

Reading and annotating pages 45 to 60 of the anatomy textbook is a different instruction entirely.

It has a start.

It has an end.

The brain can see where it enters and where it exits. The flinch becomes manageable. Sometimes it disappears.

The script is the problem.

Not you.

You’re not broken.

You’re just using a system that doesn’t fit you.

The drill sergeant approach, the one that says push through, try harder, stop making excuses, fails because it treats the signal as insubordination. It interrogates the self. It asks: what is wrong with you?

The engineer approach asks a different question entirely: what does this task need to look like for my body to say yes?

That question is not weakness. It is the most intelligent thing you can ask.

Your body is not your enemy. It is your diagnostic tool. And if you stop blaming yourself and start listening, you can actually engineer your way forward.

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III. The Investigation

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”— Carl Rogers

The shift from shame to curiosity is not just psychological. It is the prerequisite for everything that follows.

Shame is defensive.

It closes inward.

It protects the wound by refusing to examine it.

Curiosity is generative.

It opens outward.

It treats the wound as information.

This is the first shift:

stop treating it like failure—

start treating it like a signal.

Before any investigation is possible, you have to replace the inner verdict with a genuine question.

Not: what is wrong with me?

But: what is my body telling me right now?

That question opens the research door.

And the first tool inside that door is the Conditions Audit.

A Conditions Audit is not complicated. It is the intentional act of mapping the variables that actually affect your focus, rather than inheriting the defaults.

Most people work at the time they are supposed to work, in the position they are supposed to work in, in the environment that was given to them, and they never question whether any of these conditions actually fit their nervous system.

They inherited a script for how to work and they perform it faithfully, wondering why it keeps failing.

So instead, you ask:

Which of these variables have I actually tested?

And

Which am I just assuming?

Time of day.

Body position.

Environment.

Temperature.

Level of background sound ( noise)

Hunger.

Fatigue.

Whether the task has edges or is formless.

Whether you are sitting still or moving.

Whether you announced the intention or simply began.

Each of these is a variable. Each of them affects the nervous system differently in different people. And most people have never systematically observed which ones matter for them.

After the biology textbook morning, I did something I had not done before.

Instead of filing the experience under procrastination and moving on–

I asked: what changed ?

I had moved. I had not announced the intention. I had simply opened the book. The absence of the planned performance removed the pressure. My body had nothing to deliver. It was just ready.

That one observation taught me more than any productivity advice ever had.

Not because it gave me a universal rule, but because it gave me a specific data point about my specific nervous system.

This is what the investigation looks like in practice.

You are not thinking abstractly about the work.

You are monitoring your nervous system’s reaction to specific variables.

You are stress-testing the task.

You are rewriting the internal prompt until your body stops flinching.

This is what I call Linguistic Engineering.

It is kind of like a shift.

You are not looking for a better way to work.

You are looking for the version of the task that feels computationally easy to start. The version the brain( prefrontal cortex )can grip without resistance.

The Boredom Index is part of this.

Not all procrastination is the same. Boredom, overwhelm, and anxiety each require different responses.

Boredom says: I need movement or novelty.

Overwhelm says: I need the task to become smaller.

Anxiety says: I need the stakes to feel safer.

Mislabelling all three as laziness and applying the same solution –try harder, is why the solution never works.

Diagnostic precision matters.

The moment you stop fighting your body and start studying it, procrastination becomes your teacher.

Here is what the investigation reveals, if you stay with it long enough:

Focus is not a mental discipline.

It is a physical state you can engineer.

The same person who cannot read a textbook at 8am in a still chair can read the same textbook freely an hour later in a different place.

The person has not changed. The conditions have. And if focus changes depending on conditions, then your job is not to force it. Your job is to learn how to engineer the conditions that make it arrive.

That is the doorway into agency.

Agency isn’t forcing yourself to work.

It’s understanding yourself well enough to make it easier.

But here is the humility required: even when you find what works, it will not be permanent.

Bodies change. Schedules change. Circumstances change.

You are an ever-revolving study case.

The patterns that work this month may not work next month, and that is not failure.

That is life asking you to stay curious.

IV. The Experiment

So what does this actually look like in real life.

The next time the rope arrives.

The next time the eyes blur and the words dissolve and the voice says: maybe later.

Before the shame.

Before the verdict.

Before you reach for your phone

Pause and name it.

Not: I’m failing again.

Just: this is a signal.

Something about this doesn’t fit.

That tiny linguistic shift interrupts the shame spiral before it begins.

Shame says I am the problem.

The signal says something in the conditions is the problem.

That is the difference between a door that closes and a door that opens.

Then run a Micro-Conditions Check.

Ask with the curiosity of a doctor taking

symptoms:

What is actually off right now?

Are you tired?

Hungry?

Restless?

Is the task too big?

Too vague?

Is the environment off?

You are not interrogating yourself.

You are reading a diagnostic.

Then change one thing.

Stand up.

Change where you are sitting.

Open a window.

Eat something.

Move for two minutes.

Make the task smaller.

Give it edges.

Not “three pages.”

Just the next paragraph.

The body is the first lever.

Not the mind.

Then return with curiosity.

Not with the pressure of three hours.

Give it five minutes.

No pressure. Just see what happens.

And if it works—pause and notice why.

What was different this time?

What condition was the variable?

Write it down.

You are building a personal playbook, one observation at a time.

That is more valuable than any productivity advice you will ever read.

Because it belongs only to you.

It was built from your specific nervous system, your specific conditions, your specific channel between boredom and anxiety where flow lives.

Nobody else can build it.

Nobody else’s will work as well.

Self-knowledge precedes agency. You can’t change how you work until you understand how you work

The north star underneath all of this is simple:

Procrastination is a signal, not a verdict.

Every delay carries information about conditions, needs, or mismatches. Your job is not to judge the delay. Your job is to listen to what it is telling you, adjust one variable, and run the experiment.

Shame becomes data. The failure spiral becomes a feedback loop. And the next encounter with procrastination is not the beginning of a battle.

It is the beginning of a research question.

I keep thinking about that morning.

The plan said: three pages by 8am.

My body said: not like this.

Later, in a different place, without the pressure of the plan, I opened the same book—and everything changed. The resistance was gone. Three pages became more. I kept going without forcing it.

By any reasonable standard, that was a win.

But the moment I checked the time, it felt like a failure.

Because it didn’t happen when I said it should.

That’s the part that feels dangerous.

We take real progress—and invalidate it because it didn’t match an imaginary timeline.

We call it procrastination.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if your body wasn’t delaying you…

but guiding you toward the conditions where you actually work?

Later became even later.

But later also became better.

That is not procrastination.

That is your body telling you the truth.

You just finally stopped long enough to listen.

When you procrastinate, what does it actually feel like? Boredom? Overwhelm? Something else entirely? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.

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Thank you for being here :)
— Discovery with grace

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy these:

“First comes thought; then organisation of that thought into ideas and plans;”“then transformation of those plans into reality.”— Napoleon Hill

January. My desk. A mini journal open in front of me.

I had just watched a TikTok about farming.

Not accidentally. I’d gone looking for it, the way you go looking for something when a thought arrives that you can’t quite explain yet. And the thought that arrived was simple, almost embarrassing in its simplicity:

Why can’t I be a farmer?

I’m 17. Studying dentistry. Running a Substack publication where I write long essays about Fibonacci sequences and fractals and the mathematics of memory. I have plans to act in films, after 40, specifically, because I’ve decided that’s the right age for it. I want to write a novel. I want to build a farm. I actually researched which small countries have soil good enough to support it.

I wrote in my journal that January: “I imagine why these thoughts run through my mind, uncaged.”

Uncaged.

I didn’t know it then. But that word was doing something more precise than I intended.

My brain was building realities that didn’t exist yet.

And it turns out, that is the most human thing a brain can do.

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I. The Impossible Animal

Every animal on earth is limited by what physically exists.

A lion cannot convince other lions to die for Nigeria. A chimpanzee cannot go to war over interest rates. A dog cannot believe in democracy, justice, or the value of a dental degree. These animals live entirely inside physical reality, what they can see, smell, touch, hunt, flee from.

And then there is us.

Humans organise entire lives around things that exist nowhere in nature. You cannot find a nation growing on a tree. You cannot hold justice in your hand. You cannot touch money, not really touch it, not the thing money actually is, which is a collective agreement, a shared fiction, a story so many people believe simultaneously that it becomes more powerful than gold.

Yuval Noah Harari calls these things imagined realities. Not lies. Not delusions. Something stranger and more interesting: shared beliefs that become more powerful than physical facts precisely because millions of people hold them simultaneously. The dollar in your pocket is worth something because enough humans have agreed, across enough time, to treat it as if it is. The moment they stop agreeing, it becomes paper.

This is what separates us from every other species. Not opposable thumbs. Not upright posture. Not even language.

Our ability to believe in things that don’t exist yet.

And to make them real through the believing.

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II. What Belief Does to the Brain

Here is what was actually happening when I sat at that desk in January, imagining farms in small countries.

The brain cannot cleanly distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. When you picture something with enough detail and enough emotional charge, the same neural pathways fire as would fire if the thing were actually happening. The visual cortex activates. The motor cortex activates. The emotional centres activate.

The imagined reality becomes neurologically real before it exists in the world.

This is not poetry. This is not motivation. This is what neuroscientists call neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to physically restructure itself around repeated patterns of thought. Every time I imagine myself on a farm, my brain lays down a small deposit of neural architecture toward that future. Every time you imagine yourself achieving something, your brain builds a tiny piece of the road toward it.

The belief is not waiting for reality to confirm it.

The belief is constructing the reality.

And then there is dopamine.

Most people think dopamine is the reward chemical, the thing that floods your brain when something good happens. But this is only half true. Dopamine releases most powerfully not in the moment of achievement but in the moment of anticipation. Your brain rewards the imagination of the future, not just its arrival. This is why sitting at that desk in January felt thrilling. Not because I had a farm. Not because I had done anything practical toward having one. But because my brain was already celebrating something that hadn’t happened, releasing the same chemistry it would release if it had. The possibility alone was enough to make it feel real.

And if you want the most extraordinary evidence that belief creates biological reality, look no further than the placebo effect.

People heal from belief alone. In study after study, patients given sugar pills, told they were receiving powerful medicine, experience genuine measurable improvements. Pain disappears. Blood pressure drops. Symptoms ease. The brain, convinced something was true, sent signals to the body to respond as if it was. The belief did not just change what patients felt. It changed what their bodies did.

Belief is not just psychological.

It is biological.

It rewires. It releases. It heals.

And occasionally, it builds farms in countries you’ve never visited.

III. The Uncaged Thought

I was little when I overheard my father say it.

He wasn’t talking to me directly. I caught it the way children catch the things adults say when they think nobody important is listening. He said: you cannot be two things at once. Life is a one way system. Be a doctor, not an artist and a doctor.

I think now, older, more generous, that what he was really talking about was balance. About focus. About the cost of spreading yourself too thin.

But I was little. And what I heard was: choose.

So I chose. Or I was chosen for. The art got put away. The sketching, the drawing, the part of me that wanted to make things with my hands rather than my mind, that got filed under unrealistic and quietly shelved.

The cage wasn’t dramatic. It never is.

It was just a sentence overheard. A door that closed before I knew I wanted to walk through it.

Most people’s beliefs are caged this way. Not through cruelty. Not through malice. But through the accumulated weight of other people’s reasonable limitations landing on a mind that hadn’t yet learned to question them. What is realistic for someone like you. What people in your position do. What you should want, given everything.

The cage is almost never a conscious thing. That’s what makes it effective.

You don’t feel the bars.

You just find yourself not thinking certain thoughts.

But occasionally something happens.

A TikTok about farming. A late night essay. A question that arrives without permission:

Why not?

Why can’t I be a dentist AND a writer AND a farmer AND an actor after 40?

The caged answer is immediate: because that’s not how it works. Because you have to choose. Because be realistic.

The uncaged answer asks something the caged answer never considers:

Realistic according to whom?

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IV. The Danger

I have to stop here.

Because an essay about belief that doesn’t address what belief can destroy is not an honest essay. It’s a motivational poster.

The same neurological machinery that lets me imagine a farm in a small country also operates in the person who believes they are worthless. In the person who believes a relationship that hurts them is love. In the person who believes a lie told to them so many times it calcified into certainty.

Belief is not inherently good.

It is inherently powerful.

And power without direction is just force.

The brain believes what it is repeatedly told. By parents. By culture. By the stories we tell ourselves in the dark at night when nobody is listening. By the inner voice that says: who do you think you are?

You cannot choose not to believe. The brain is a belief machine. It is always constructing reality, always filling in gaps, always deciding what is true and building neural architecture around that decision.

What you can choose, with effort, with attention, with the kind of honest self-examination that is deeply uncomfortable, is which stories you repeat.

Because the stories you repeat become the pathways.

And the pathways become the person.

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V. The Sketch Pad

Here is something I haven’t told you yet.

I have a sketch pad. Drawing equipment. Pencils, colours, everything needed.

It sat untouched for almost three months.

Not because I forgot it was there. I walked past it regularly. I saw it. I thought about it. And every time, something stopped me, not a voice exactly, more like a pressure. A weight in the chest that felt embarrassingly close to fear.

What if I try and it’s not good enough?

What if the art that got shelved all those years ago stayed shelved for a reason?

What if the cage was right?

I understand now what was happening. The belief in my own artistic ability had been wounded so early, so quietly, that even after I gave myself permission, bought the sketch pad, bought the pencils, created every physical condition for trying, the neural architecture of the old cage was still there. Old beliefs don’t disappear when you decide to change them. The pathways linger. They pull. They make you walk past the sketch pad and feel something you can’t quite name.

This is the part nobody tells you about uncaging yourself.

The cage doesn’t disappear when you decide to leave it.

You have to walk out slowly. Drawing by drawing. Essay by essay. Choice by choice.

Tonight I picked up the pencil.

I drew a horse head.

It wasn’t good. It was the drawing of someone who stopped at twelve and is trying to remember how hands work. Uncertain lines. Wrong proportions. The kind of thing you’d look at and know immediately that the person drawing it was rusty, reaching, uncertain.

I felt ashamed when I finished.

Not because it was bad.

But because I saw, in that bad drawing, everything the one way system had cost me. Years of a self that wanted to make things and was told to make different things instead. An artist who became a dentistry student who became a writer who finally, one night in March, became someone who drew a bad horse head and felt the shame of lost time wash over him.

And then.

Then something shifted.

The shame passed. The way weather passes. And underneath it was something I haven’t felt in years, something clean and light and impossible to fake.

I felt free.

Not from dentistry. Not from responsibility. Not from the six years or the essays or any of the things I’ve chosen and mean.

Free from the cage I didn’t know I was still carrying.

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VI. Back to the Desk

January. My desk. The mini journal. An uncaged thought arriving without permission.

I know now what was happening in that moment. A brain doing what human brains uniquely do, constructing a future self out of nothing but imagination and chemistry and the radical refusal to accept that current reality is the only reality.

Dopamine releasing for a farm that doesn’t exist.

Neural pathways forming toward lives not yet lived.

The impossible animal doing the impossible thing.

But here is what January didn’t know. What the farm fantasy and the actor after 40 and the novel and all the beautiful uncaged thoughts couldn’t yet see:

The most important belief wasn’t the big ones.

It was the quiet one. The wounded one. The one sitting in a sketch pad for three months waiting for a hand brave enough to pick up the pencil.

Because the farms and the novels and the acting, those beliefs were free. Nobody had touched them. They flew easily because nothing had ever clipped their wings.

But the art?

That one had to be reclaimed.

One bad drawing at a time.

So here is my question for you, reader.

Not: what is your biggest dream?

Not: what uncaged thought runs through your mind?

But this:

What did you put away?

What got shelved before you were old enough to defend it? What cage closed so quietly you didn’t hear it shut? What sketch pad is sitting in your room right now, untouched, while you walk past it and feel something you can’t quite name?

That thing.

Not the farm in a foreign country.

That one.

Pick up the pencil.

Draw the bad horse head.

Feel the shame pass.

And then, underneath it, waiting, patient as belief itself:

Feel the free.

—Feranmi

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“We are always in the middle of becoming.”— Erik Erikson, psychologist

I. 4am

I felt a sharp pain in my neck.

It was 4am. The series was still playing. I hadn’t really been watching for the last hour, just existing in its light. I picked up my phone to check WhatsApp. Not because anyone had messaged me. They hadn’t. But because I wanted to start a conversation.

I stared at the names.

And put the phone down.

Not sad. That’s the part that confused me. Not lonely exactly. Just unable. Like the muscle that reaches toward people had quietly gone soft from disuse.

I deleted TikTok. I deleted Facebook. I deleted the games. I did everything right.

And ended up here anyway. 4am. Blue light. Neck pain. Silence.

Somewhere between fixing my attention and losing my friends, I learned something about myself.

I just haven’t figured out yet if it cost too much.

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II. The Substitution

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal

Everyone told me to delete the apps. So I did.

TikTok gone. Facebook gone. Games gone. I felt productive for approximately one day.

Then I found the series.

Nobody warns you about this. All the advice about screen addiction assumes the problem is the specific app. Delete TikTok and you’ll read more. Put down Instagram and you’ll be present. But the advice misses the point entirely.

The screen wasn’t the addiction. The escape was.

I wasn’t addicted to TikTok. I was addicted to leaving. Leaving studying, leaving silence, leaving the discomfort of an unfinished thought. TikTok was just the door I used most often. When I locked that door, I found another one.

Twelve episodes. 4am. Neck pain. Same destination. Different route.

Here is the part nobody tells you about silence.

Neuroscientists discovered something unexpected in the early 2000s when they put people in brain scanners and told them to do nothing. They expected the brain to go quiet. Instead, it got louder. A specific network activated during rest that they eventually named the Default Mode Network. It is the brain’s background processing system, and it runs on everything the conscious mind has been avoiding: unresolved questions, unfinished relationships, the half-formed identity that hasn’t yet found its shape.

The Default Mode Network does not activate because you are bored. It activates because something needs attention. It generates discomfort deliberately, the way a wound generates pain, because discomfort is the signal that something requires processing.

This is what was happening at 4am. Not screen addiction. Not weakness. My brain, in the silence after studying, was trying to do the thing it evolved to do: sit with the unresolved. Ask the uncomfortable question. Process the version of myself that hadn’t yet arrived.

The phone didn’t interrupt that process. It rescued me from it.

And I went willingly. Every time.

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III. The Friendship Paradox

Somewhere in January, a 16-year-old girl in India told me she wanted to disappear from everyone’s lives like she never existed.

I knew exactly what to say.

She had left her childhood school for a better one. Better facilities, smarter students, bigger future. What she found instead was people who saw her as a resource, not a friend. A bright student useful for assignments and copies. When she left that school, her childhood friends had already moved on. Three years without meeting them. Plans for trips that never happened. A promise of forever that quietly expired.

She told me she didn’t have a single person she could call a true friend.

I told her: find solitude with yourself. That is the best feeling. Don’t disappear, but disappear. Be there in your own time. Accept everything that comes with the present, because that is where you always live.

She thanked me. Said she felt better. Came back ten days later saying hopefully better.

I was genuinely happy for her.

What I didn’t tell her was that I was performing wisdom I was still trying to convince myself of.

Because here is the truth: I don’t keep in touch with friends either. Not really. I don’t reach out. When they reach out, I can’t sustain the conversation past a few exchanges. Not because I don’t care. But because something shifted, sometime between secondary school and dentistry, between the boy I was and whoever I’m becoming, and now most conversations feel like wearing clothes that don’t fit anymore.

The friendship doesn’t end dramatically. Nobody fights, nobody disappears. It just quietly loses pressure, like a tyre with a slow leak. You only notice when you’re already flat.

The sociologist Sherry Turkle spent years studying what smartphones do to human connection. Her finding was not that phones make us lonely. It was more precise than that. Phones change what we expect from connection. The constant partial contact, the WhatsApp message, the seen receipt, the occasional voice note, creates what she called ambient awareness. You feel connected without being connected. The sensation of relationship without its substance.

And over time, ambient awareness recalibrates your nervous system. Real conversation starts to feel like too much. Not because you don’t want it. But because you have been snacking so long that the full meal feels overwhelming. The muscle that reaches toward people goes soft from disuse.

This is why I stared at the WhatsApp names and put the phone down. It wasn’t that I didn’t want connection. It was that ambient awareness had made real connection feel like a weight I wasn’t sure I could lift anymore.

I gave that girl in India the right advice.

I just hadn’t taken it yet.

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IV. The Screen That Fills the Gap

Here is what nobody says about screens.

They don’t steal your attention. They offer you a better life to watch.

I wasn’t watching Vikings because I was addicted to my phone. I was watching Vikings because for twelve episodes a night I was part of a community of explorers. People with purpose, with brotherhood, with enemies worth fighting. Nobody in Kattegat was lying awake at 4am wondering if their friendships meant anything.

All the productivity advice frames screen use as theft. Apps stealing your focus, algorithms hijacking your brain, notifications interrupting your flow. And yes, all of that is true.

But sometimes you hand your attention over freely. Because the alternative is sitting with yourself. With the silence. With the half-formed question of who you’re becoming and whether the people around you can see it.

The psychologist James Marcia spent his career studying how identity forms. He identified four statuses. There is foreclosure, where a person accepts the identity handed to them by family, culture, expectation, without ever questioning it. There is achievement, where a person has searched and arrived. And there is moratorium.

Moratorium is the gap.

It is the state of active searching without having found. You have left the old identity behind but haven’t arrived at the new one. You are between shores. This is not a crisis. It is the necessary condition for genuine identity formation. But it is profoundly uncomfortable. And uncomfortable is exactly what the screen is shaped to resolve.

The person in moratorium reaches for the screen more than anyone else. Not because they are weak. Because the gap they are living in is precisely the shape that borrowed lives fill most easily.

A Viking has his identity. His ship, his crew, his purpose, his enemies. You are still building yours. Of course you watched twelve episodes. The screen offered you the thing the moratorium withholds: the feeling of knowing who you are.

Screens are not shaped like an addiction.

They are shaped like an unfinished identity.

And until you are building something of your own that makes the gap feel full instead of empty, the screen will always fit better than the silence.

V. The Cost

The boy I used to be cared too much.

Not in the noble way. In the scattered way. He reached out to everybody. He was so present in other people’s lives that he forgot to build his own. He was always around people, and completely lost inside them.

I used to think that version of me was more alive. More connected. More human.

But I’m starting to wonder if he was just more afraid of silence. Because silence is where you meet yourself. Really meet yourself, not the performed version, not the one who fills every gap with noise and friends and philosophy optimised for shares. The real one. Unedited. Still figuring it out.

I have learned myself this year. Genuinely. I know how I think now. I know what moves me. I know the difference between a conversation that costs me energy and one that builds it. I know I’d rather write 5000 words at midnight than scroll for five hours. I know I want meaning or nothing.

But learning yourself has a price nobody mentions.

You outgrow things. Quietly. Without drama. Friendships that used to fit start feeling like childhood shoes, not bad, just no longer your size. Conversations that used to feel like enough start feeling like small talk. The old life starts feeling like a costume.

And you’re left standing in the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming.

Most people call that loneliness.

I’m starting to think it’s just growth with nowhere to sit yet.

I have learned myself.

But I have lost who I used to be.

And some days I don’t know whether to celebrate or grieve.

So I watch Vikings instead.

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VI. What I’m Building

Everyone who writes about screen addiction eventually gets to the part where they tell you what to do. Set limits. Use grayscale mode. Delete the apps.

I already deleted the apps. I ended up watching Vikings until my neck hurt.

So I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m going to tell you what I’m figuring out.

The question was never how do I use screens less.

The question is: what am I building that makes the screen less necessary?

Because here is what I’ve noticed. I never reach for my phone when I’m writing. Not once. When words are coming and ideas are connecting and the essay is becoming something real, the Vikings don’t exist. The WhatsApp inbox doesn’t exist. The silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels full.

That is the difference between escape and purpose.

Escape is borrowed life. Someone else’s story. Someone else’s community. Someone else’s adventure that you watch from a distance because your own feels unfinished.

Purpose is building something that fills the gap from the inside.

The Default Mode Network activates in silence because it is looking for something to process. Give it something real to work on and it stops reaching for the escape. The moratorium ends not when someone hands you an identity, but when you build one through the accumulation of honest choices.

These essays. This practice. This slow accumulation of words and ideas and honest admissions at 4am.

This is what I’m choosing over the screen. Not because I’m disciplined. Because I finally found something worth building.

And something worth building is the only thing that has ever made the gap feel like ground.

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VII. 4am

It’s past 4am.

The series is still playing. My neck hurts. The Muslim call to prayer is floating through my window, soft, certain, reaching across the dark city like it has something important to say.

I pick up my phone.

WhatsApp. Same names. Same silence.

I put it down.

But something is different now. Not fixed. Not resolved. I’m not going to text everyone I’ve been avoiding. I’m not going to delete the series or swear off screens or become a different person by morning.

But I wrote this.

And writing this, at 4am, neck aching, city praying outside my window, felt like living. Not watching someone else live. Not borrowing a Viking’s purpose for twelve episodes.

Mine. Messy, unfinished, still becoming.

I used to think the gap between who I was and who I’m becoming was something to fill.

I’m starting to think it’s something to build from.

The moratorium is not the problem. It is the work. The silence is not the enemy. It is the Default Mode Network doing what it was built to do, asking the question that needs answering, waiting for you to stop escaping long enough to begin.

Same time. Same neck pain. Same city praying outside my window.

Different life.

—Feranmi

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‘‘Memory is not a recording. It is a living thing — it changes shape each time you touch it.”— Elizabeth Loftus, cognitive psychologist

I. The Bell

The body keeps the score.” -Bessel van der Kolk, psychiatrist

Memory doesn’t store your life. It selects a fragment; a sound, a smell, a quality of light -and makes that fragment carry everything. A bell woke us at 5:30 every morning. For a year after I left, I still heard it.

Not as a memory exactly, more like a reflex. A sound that had been repeated so many times it stopped being an event and became a condition, something closer to weather than recollection. I would wake in a different bed, in a different life, and for a half-second the bell would ring in the space between sleep and consciousness, and I would already be reaching for my uniform.

That is the thing about certain memories. They do not sit quietly in the past waiting to be retrieved. They live in the body. They bypass thought entirely and speak directly to muscle, to nerve, to the part of you that acts before the mind has caught up.

The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk spent decades studying what happens to memory when the experience that produced it was overwhelming. He found that traumatic memory doesn’t consolidate the way ordinary memory does. It doesn’t get compressed and filed. It stays raw. It stays present. The body, encountering a familiar smell or sound or quality of light, is suddenly not remembering the original moment — it is reliving it, at full resolution, with no editorial distance at all. The past is not past. It is happening.

Your body, in other words, has a memory that precedes your mind’s. A memory that does not narrate or reflect or organise; it simply responds. The bell in my body was not a thought about boarding school. It was boarding school, arriving without permission, depositing itself in my reaching hand before I had time to decide anything about it.

This is where memory begins: not in the mind’s filing cabinets, but in the body’s older and less patient archive. Before you can reflect on what you remember, your body has already decided what it will not let go.

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II. The Mathematics of Forgetting

There is a concept in information theory called lossy compression. When a digital file is compressed; a photograph, a piece of music -the algorithm must make decisions. It cannot keep everything. So it keeps what carries the most signal and discards what it judges redundant. The result is smaller than the original. It is also, in most ways that matter, the same.

The brain does something remarkably similar. Neuroscientists call it memory consolidation — a process by which experience is encoded, filtered, and stored. But the clinical language undersells what is actually happening. The brain is doing editorial work. Of the thousands of moments in any given day, it selects a handful worth keeping. Not the loudest moments. The most emotionally charged ones. The ones that felt, in some register below consciousness, like they mattered.

But here is what most people don’t know about when that editing happens.

It happens at night.

During REM sleep — the deep, dreaming phase your brain enters several times across a night — the hippocampus replays the day’s experiences to the cortex. Not passively, not like a recording being reviewed, but actively: selecting, strengthening some neural pathways and allowing others to decay, deciding what deserves to survive into long-term memory and what the mind can afford to release.

You are being edited every night. The author of your memory is a version of yourself you never meet; the self that works in the dark, while you are gone, making decisions about who you will remember being. Every morning you wake up slightly different from who you were when you fell asleep. Some things are sharper. Some are already beginning to soften. The archive is quietly changing, and you had no vote.

Marcel Proust understood the strangeness of this before the neuroscience caught up. He called it involuntary memory — the way a taste, a smell, a particular quality of afternoon light could collapse time entirely, returning you not just to the memory of a moment but to the felt experience of it. His famous madeleine dipped in tea didn’t remind him of childhood. It gave it back to him, whole. The fragment wasn’t a pointer to the past. It was a portal.

What Proust grasped is that the fragments which survive the night’s editing are not random. They are selected by something; call it emotion, call it the sleeping brain’s own judgment about what deserves to last. The bell survived nights because something in the sleeping version of me kept deciding, night after night, that it was not yet ready to let it go

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III. The First Day

“Memory is the scribe of the soul”- Aristotle

There is a particular kind of confidence that belongs only to children.

It is not the confidence of experience; it has no reason to exist, no evidence to support it. It is something more like innocence wearing the costume of courage.

You are ten, maybe eleven years old. You have been told you are ready. You have told yourself the same thing. And so you believe it, the way children believe things: completely, without checking.

The first day arrives. You step through a gate, or a door, or off a train, into a world that does not yet know your name. Everything is unfamiliar in the specific way that institutions are unfamiliar — the smell of it, the scale of it, the sense that life here has been going on without you for a long time and will continue to do so with or without your participation. Other people move with a fluency you haven’t earned yet. You carry your bags and try to look like someone who belongs.

For a few hours, the confidence holds.

Then something small happens. It is never the large things that break you open. Sometimes,it is always something small. A door you can’t find. A meal eaten alone. The particular quality of silence in a room full of strangers. And quietly, without announcement, the costume slips. Underneath it you find something much younger and much more honest: a child who misses home, who didn’t know that missing home could feel like this, who is surprised, almost offended — by their own sadness.

The tears, when they come, feel like a betrayal. You were supposed to be ready.

But here is what only time can teach: the tears were not a failure of courage. They were proof of it. You stepped into something genuinely hard and you felt it genuinely. That is not weakness wearing the mask of strength. That is the whole thing, in reverse — strength, quietly, wearing the mask of weakness.

Everyone who has ever been deposited into an unfamiliar world and told to become themselves there knows this moment. The specifics vary. The feeling does not.

IV. What the Shards Know

Ask ten people who attended the same school, lived through the same years, sat in the same classrooms — ask them what they remember. You will not get the same answer twice.

One remembers a teacher’s hands. Another remembers the sound of rain on a particular roof. Someone remembers a smell, floor polish, cafeteria food, the specific cold of an early morning. Someone else remembers a feeling with no image attached to it at all, just a texture of time, a quality of light, a sense of being both lonely and alive in a way they haven’t quite felt since.

The events were shared. The fragments are entirely personal.

This is one of memory’s stranger properties: it is not an objective record of what happened. It is a subjective record of what you needed. The brain, in its compression work, is not asking what was important? It is asking something closer to what was important to you? And the answer reveals something the conscious mind rarely gets to see directly: the emotional signature of who you actually were, underneath who you were trying to be.

Stop for a moment. Think about what survives from your own past. Not the achievements, not the milestones, not the events you planned to remember. The ones that stayed without being invited. The ones that arrive uninvited in the middle of ordinary days. The ones that surface in dreams. The charged ones, the quiet ones, the ones where something was at stake that you couldn’t have named at the time.

Notice that list. Notice its shape. What it contains and what it doesn’t. What kind of moments your memory decided, night after night in the editing room you never visited, were worth keeping.

That list is not a random sample of your life. It is a portrait. Not the self you presented to the world, or the self you hoped to become, but the self that was actually there. Attentive to certain things, frightened of others, moved by what moved you and not what was supposed to. Your memory did not record your life. It interpreted it. And the interpretation is the most honest thing about you.

The bell stayed because it wasn’t just a bell. It was the sound of a new life beginning before I was ready. It was repetition becoming rhythm becoming identity. It was every morning I got up anyway, dressed anyway, walked out anyway, even when the ache of homesickness sat in my chest like a stone. The brain kept the bell because the bell carried all of that. One fragment. An entire world compressed inside it.

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V. What the Shards Lie About

There is something the essay has not yet told you. Something that complicates everything said so far, and in complicating it, makes it more true.

The portrait your memory has been painting is not entirely accurate.

Elizabeth Loftus is a cognitive psychologist who has spent her career doing one thing: proving that human memory is far less reliable than we believe it to be. In study after study, she has demonstrated that people can be made to remember events that never happened, not vaguely, not uncertainly, but with the full emotional texture and sensory detail of genuine recollection. Entire childhood memories, fabricated. Crimes they didn’t commit, confessed to with conviction because the memory felt real. Experiences that were suggested to them by a researcher and became, over days, indistinguishable from lived experience.

The mechanism is this: every time you remember something, you are not retrieving a stored file. You are reconstructing it, rebuilding it live, from fragments, filling in the gaps with what seems most plausible. And each reconstruction slightly alters the original. Details shift. The colour of a shirt changes. A person who wasn’t there appears at the edge of the scene. The emotion of the moment intensifies or softens depending on who you have become since.

You are not lying. The brain is not malfunctioning. This is simply how memory works: it is not a photograph. It is a painting, repainted slightly every time it is viewed.

The cold floor of the dormitory — was it that cold?

The particular quality of the bell — was it exactly that sound, or has it been refined by years of remembering into something more precise than the original?

I cannot know.

Neither can you, about your own fragments.

The archive is not a record. It is an interpretation that has been interpreted, again and again, each night, each remembering, accumulating small revisions the way a painting accumulates layers of varnish, each one invisible, the whole altered.

But here is where it becomes something more than unsettling. Here is the thought that makes the instability beautiful rather than frightening:

If the portrait contains invented details, what does the invention reveal?

We do not fabricate randomly. The details we add to our memories, the emotions we intensify, the people we place in scenes where they may not have stood, these are not noise. They are signal of a different kind. They show what we needed the past to mean. What we required the story to contain. The fabrication is not a corruption of the self-portrait. It is the self-portrait’s most unguarded layer, the place where the editor stopped editing and simply expressed.

Memory is authorship. And every author, even the most faithful, is also always writing themselves.

VI. The Body That Won’t Compress

The mathematics of forgetting is elegant. Lossy compression. The night editor. The fractal signal extracted from the noise of lived experience. It is a beautiful account of how memory works, and it is true.

But it is not the whole truth.

For some experiences, the compression never happens. The night editor arrives and finds something that refuses to be reduced. Something that will not submit to the process of distillation, that stays at full resolution, raw, present, insisting on its original weight.

Van der Kolk’s research revealed why. When an experience is overwhelming, when the nervous system is flooded beyond its capacity to process—the hippocampus, which normally handles the encoding of memory into narrative, goes partially offline. The experience is recorded, but not narrated. It is stored in the body, in the older and more primitive systems that don’t deal in stories. It lives there not as a memory you have, but as a state you enter.

A veteran who hits the floor at the sound of a car backfiring is not remembering a battlefield.

He is on one.

The body’s memory has overridden the mind’s. The compression never ran. The editorial process that would have turned the experience into a manageable fragment, into signal extracted from noise, into something that could be held at a useful distance, never completed. The original is still there, all of it, waiting in the nervous system for a trigger it cannot ignore.

I include this not to darken what is otherwise a meditation on memory’s strange beauty.

I include it because any honest account of how memory works must make room for the memory that doesn’t work the way it should. That resists the mathematics. That will not be authored.

Because this too is a form of the self-portrait. The part that couldn’t be compressed is the part that was most alive, most overwhelmed, most present at the edge of what could be survived. The body keeping what the mind couldn’t process is not a malfunction. It is fidelity of a different and more demanding kind.

The fractal gives us beauty. The body that won’t compress gives us truth. Both are real. Both are memory. And any account of what we are that leaves out the second is only telling half the story.

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VII. The Strange Mathematics

We tend to think of forgetting as failure. As subtraction. As the slow erosion of something that was once whole.

But what if we have the mathematics exactly backwards?

In fractal geometry, there is a principle that seems, at first, like a paradox: a shape can be infinitely complex and yet generated by a surprisingly simple rule, repeated. The coastline of a continent, the branching of a lung, the growth pattern of a fern, vast, intricate, irreducible, and yet underneath each one, a small set of instructions, endlessly repeated at different scales. Complexity arising not from accumulation but from pattern. Not from keeping everything, but from repeating what matters.

Memory works in something like this.

What you remember is not a diminished version of what happened. It is a pattern extracted from it.

The bell is not a pale copy of those years at boarding school, it is the rule that generates them. Sound it in your mind and the whole landscape reassembles: the cold floor, the half-asleep classmates, the ache, the resilience, the particular loneliness that quietly became self-reliance without you noticing the transition.

One fragment. The whole shape, implied.

This means forgetting is not the opposite of remembering. It is the condition of it.

You could not carry everything. No one can.

There is a neurological condition, hyperthymesia, in which the sufferer cannot forget. Every day of their life is available in perfect detail, retrievable at any moment, impossible to compress or file or release.

People who have it do not experience it as a gift. They experience it as a prison. The past is always, completely, present. They cannot abstract from experience because every experience is still happening. They cannot generalise, cannot move through time with any freedom, cannot let a wound become a scar because the wound never closes.

The rest of us forget. And in forgetting, we distil.

What remains is not the residue of what was lost. It is the essence of what was lived. The brain, in its quiet editorial work across years and decades, in those nightly sessions while you sleep, has been doing something that takes writers entire lifetimes to learn: keeping only what earns its place.

Making, from the raw and overwhelming material of a life, something with shape. Something with meaning.

Something like a story.

And the story contains things that happened, things that were reconstructed, things that were quietly invented in the reconstruction, and all of it, every layer, is honest in its own register. The record, the interpretation, the fabrication: all of them authored by the same self, trying to make sense of the same life.

You did not choose your fragments. They were chosen for you, by fear, by love, by longing, by the particular frequency of what moved you, and by a sleeping version of you who worked through the night making decisions you’ll never know were made. Which means the story your memory has been quietly writing, all this time, without your permission or your input, is the most unguarded thing you will ever produce. More honest than anything you could have composed deliberately. More true than the self you constructed for the world to see.

The mathematics of memory is not subtraction.

It is authorship.

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VIII. The Return

“The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to mind when we want them.”- Friedrich Nietzsche.

I don’t hear the bell anymore.

I’m not sure when it stopped. That’s the thing about absence — it doesn’t announce itself the way presence does.

There was no final morning, no last phantom ring I recognised and held onto. It simply became quieter, and then one day I noticed the quiet, and understood that something had been finished without my knowing.

For a long time I thought that was a loss.

Now I think it was a completion.

The bell had work to do. It carried a world I wasn’t ready to put down — the cold floors and the half-dark mornings, the homesickness I had been too proud to fully admit, the slow surprise of becoming someone slightly different from who I had arrived as.

It rang in my mind for a year after I left because I hadn’t yet understood what that world had made me. The memory was holding the material open, the way you hold a book open before you’re ready to close it.

And then, at some point, I understood. Not all at once. In the gradual way that real things settle. The ache became a fact. The fact became a part of the shape of me. And the bell, having delivered everything it was carrying, having been reconstructed and reinterpreted and quietly altered by nights in bed , having served as the rule that generated a whole landscape whenever I needed it, went quiet.

What it left behind was not its sound. It left behind what it always was: not a bell, but an argument. Evidence in the case the night editor had been building, patiently, without my knowledge, for years. Evidence about who I was at ten years old, reaching for a uniform in the dark. About what I feared and what I survived and what I was capable of before I knew I was capable of it.

The portrait was painted while I slept. Revised each time I remembered it. Complicated by things I invented without knowing I was inventing them. Held in the body at a resolution the mind couldn’t always access. And still, underneath all of that complexity, still pointing somewhere true.

We think we are the ones who remember.

But perhaps it is closer to the truth to say: memory remembers us. It watches what we fear and what we love and what we cannot put down. It takes the long view. It edits in the dark. It fabricates where it must and keeps faith where it can. And when it finally lets something go, when the bell stops, when the fragment dissolves, when the shard you carried for years quietly returns to silence, that is not the end of the story.

That is the story, complete.

— Feranmi

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I have thought about this topic so much that I have spent a lot of time researching what is known as a never ending pattern …

To those reading my work for the first time, I want to tell you about myself before we go further into today’s discussion. My name is Akinlo Oluwaferanmi Hector, but you can call me Hector. I am 17, Nigerian, and in my first year of college studying to become a dentist 🦷. I started writing last October, and since then I’ve been trying to show up consistently. This year, I set a goal to write biweekly essays. Writing every week felt like it might drain me, so I chose a rhythm that would allow me to balance school and writing without exhaustion.

Although last month my momentum waned, I didn’t know how the wind caught up with me. I suddenly lost the urge to write. I couldn’t sit down like I used to. It felt like I had a screw loose, and even the best of mechanics couldn’t fix me. I lost focus, and unfortunately I learned to stop putting down my thoughts. I reflected on that moment and felt awful for almost letting the one habit I was building slip away.

But today-today being a new month-I have decided to change the narrative. Yes, I have picked up the pen, and its ink will flow endlessly. My words will no longer be trapped in hesitation; they will breathe, they will dance, they will remind me that silence is not my destiny.

This month, I choose consistency over doubt, progress over pause, and expression over suppression. I will write not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. My pen is my compass, and with it, I will chart new paths, one line at a time

I welcome you once again, readers old and new, to my space. I hope you find meaning in what I share today and in the future.

Just as I have chosen to pick up my pen again, I find myself drawn to the idea of patterns- those rhythms of life that repeat, sometimes fading, sometimes returning stronger. And that brings me to today’s subject: fractals.

Fractals are more than just mathematical curiosities; they are never-ending patterns, shapes that repeat themselves at different scales. They remind me of the cycles we go through as humans-the pauses, the restarts, the growth that comes from repetition. In the same way that a fractal reveals beauty through its infinite layers, I believe our habits and creative journeys reveal meaning when we keep returning to them, no matter how many times we stumble.

So today, I want to explore fractals not only as a concept in mathematics and nature, but also as a metaphor for persistence, creativity, and the endless flow of words that I hope to keep alive in my writing.

This essay is a fractal.

Each section is a smaller version of the whole. Each idea branches into smaller ideas. Each paragraph mirrors the structure of the essay itself. I'm not being clever. I'm showing you how fractals work-by being one.

But I didn't understand fractals until I looked inside myself. Literally.

I Found a Fractal in My Lungs

I'm a first-year dentistry student. Which means I spend a lot of time staring at anatomy diagrams, memorizing structures, trying to understand how bodies work.

Last month, I was studying the respiratory system.

Trachea. Bronchi. Bronchioles. Alveoli.

Standard stuff. Boring, even.

But then I saw it.

Self-similarity.

The respiratory tree; trachea splitting into bronchi, bronchi splitting into bronchioles, bronchioles splitting into alveolar ducts—wasn't just branching randomly.

It was following a pattern.

A dichotomous repeating pattern. Like a tree canopy. Like a fern.

Each branch splitting into two smaller branches. Each smaller branch splitting into two even smaller branches. Again. And again. And again.

Twenty-three times.

Until you reach the alveoli; tiny air sacs where oxygen enters your blood and carbon dioxide leaves.

And here's the wild part:

There are approximately 600 million alveoli in your lungs.

Six hundred million.

All fitting inside your chest cavity-a limited thoracic volume because of fractal geometry.

The branching pattern maximizes surface area for gas exchange while minimizing the space required.

It's not random. It's optimized.

It's a fractal.

And I stopped.

Because I realized:

I'm breathing through math right now.

Every inhale. Every exhale. Every moment of my life.

My lungs are following a pattern that appears in trees, ferns, rivers, coastlines, galaxies.

I am made of patterns.

And that's when it hit me:

It takes enough connection to breathe, to live, to grow.

Not just physical connection (alveoli to capillaries, oxygen to blood).

But connection at every scale.

Ideas connecting to ideas. Moments connecting to habits. Habits connecting to years.

Patterns repeating at every level.

That's fractals.

And once you see them, you can't unsee them.

What Are Fractals?

A fractal is a pattern that looks the same at every scale.

Zoom in. Same pattern.

Zoom out. Same pattern.

It's self-similar; the part resembles the whole.

Examples You Can See Right Now:

Ferns: Look at one frond (leaf). Notice the shape. Now look at each tiny leaflet on that frond. Same shape. Smaller scale.

Coastlines: Open Google Maps. Find any coastline. Zoom out—jagged line. Zoom in—still jagged, MORE detail appears. Zoom in again—infinite complexity reveals itself.

Trees: Trunk splits into branches. Branches split into twigs. Twigs split into smaller twigs. Same branching pattern, different sizes.

Your lungs: Trachea → bronchi → bronchioles → alveolar ducts → alveoli. Same splitting pattern, twenty-three levels deep.

The Math (Don't Worry, I'll Keep It Simple):

Fractals are generated by simple rules repeated infinitely.

Example: The Koch Snowflake

1. Start with a triangle.

2. Add a smaller triangle to the middle of each side.

3. Repeat step 2 on every new side.

4. Repeat forever.

Result: A snowflake shape with infinite perimeter but finite area.

The pattern is simple. The result is infinitely complex.

That's fractals.

Simple rule + infinite repetition = complexity beyond comprehension.

Why Your Lungs Are Fractal (And Why That Matters)

Let's go deeper into the lungs.

Because this isn't just cool biology. This is life-or-death optimization.

The Problem Your Lungs Solve:

Your body needs oxygen. Constantly.

Every cell in your body is burning fuel (glucose) to create energy. That process requires oxygen.

But oxygen is in the air outside your body. Your cells are inside.

How do you get oxygen from outside to inside?

Surface area.

The more surface area your lungs have in contact with air, the more oxygen can transfer into your bloodstream.

But here's the constraint: your lungs have to fit inside your chest.

So the question becomes:

How do you maximize surface area while minimizing volume?

Answer: Fractals.

How Lung Fractals Work:

Your lungs don't have one big balloon where air sits.

They have 600 million tiny balloons (alveoli) connected by a branching network.

The branching follows a fractal pattern:

• Trachea (1 tube) splits into...

• Bronchi (2 tubes) split into...

• Bronchioles (millions of smaller tubes) split into...

• Alveolar ducts split into...

• Alveoli (600 million air sacs)

Each split doubles the number of tubes.

Each level increases surface area exponentially.

By the time you reach the alveoli, the total surface area is approximately 70 square meters.

That's the size of a tennis court.

Inside your chest.

All because of fractal branching.

Why This Is Genius:

If your lungs were just one big sac, you'd need a chest the size of a room to get the same surface area.

But fractals let nature pack massive surface area into tiny volumes.

Efficiency.

Just like Fibonacci spirals in sunflowers (maximum seed packing), fractal lungs give you maximum oxygen transfer in minimum space.

Nature doesn't waste.

It optimizes.

And the tool it uses, again and again, is patterns that repeat at every scale.

Fractals Everywhere (Once You Start Looking)

Your lungs aren't special.

Well, they are. But they're not unique in being fractal.

Fractals are everywhere.

In Nature:

Trees:

Trunk → branches → twigs → leaves. Same splitting pattern. Different scales.

Why? To maximize sunlight capture without using excess material.

Rivers:

Main river → tributaries → streams → rivulets. Fractal drainage networks.

Why? To collect water from maximum area with minimum resistance.

Blood vessels:

Arteries → arterioles → capillaries. Fractal branching.

Why? To deliver oxygen to every cell in your body efficiently.

Mountains:

Large peaks have smaller peaks have smaller ridges have tiny bumps. Self-similar roughness at every scale.

Why? Erosion follows fractal patterns—water carves smaller channels within larger channels.

Lightning:

Main bolt splits into branches. Branches split into smaller forks. Fractal discharge.

Why? Electricity follows the path of least resistance, which creates fractal branching as it ionizes air.

Snowflakes:

Six-fold symmetry. Infinite variation. Self-similar structure.

Why? Ice crystals grow following simple molecular rules, repeated at every scale.

In Your Body:

• Neurons: Dendrites branch fractally to maximize connections with other neurons

• Intestines: Villi and microvilli create fractal surface area for nutrient absorption

• Kidneys: Nephrons branch fractally to filter blood efficiently

• DNA: Double helix structure has fractal properties at molecular scale

You are made of fractals.

Every system optimized for efficiency.

Every structure repeating patterns at every scale.

As Above, So Below (The Philosophy)

Here’s where it gets deep.

Fractals aren’t just biology or geometry.

They’re a principle.

“As above, so below.”

Ancient hermetic wisdom that turns out to be... mathematically true.

What happens at one scale happens at all scales.

The part reflects the whole.

The micro mirrors the macro.

Your Daily Habits = Your Life Trajectory

One day of discipline doesn’t change much.

But repeat that day.

One day → one week (pattern emerges).

One week → one month (habit forms).

One month → one year (identity shifts).

One year → one decade (life transforms).

Small patterns compound into large patterns.

Your life is a fractal of your days.

Your decade is a fractal of your years.

Zoom in: one choice.

Zoom out: one destiny.

Same pattern. Different scale.

Your Family = Society

The way you treat your siblings mirrors how groups treat outsiders.

Power dynamics in your household mirror power structures in governments.

Communication patterns in your family mirror communication patterns in organizations.

Micro social structures reflect macro social structures.

If you want to understand society, look at a family dinner.

If you want to change society, start at your own table.

As above, so below.

Your Cells = Ecosystems

A cell maintains homeostasis (balance).

Your body maintains homeostasis.

Ecosystems maintain homeostasis.

Same principle. Different scales.

A cell regulates what enters and exits through its membrane.

Your body regulates what enters and exits through your skin, lungs, digestive system.

An ecosystem regulates what enters and exits through borders, seasons, food chains.

Self-similarity across biology.

The pattern that keeps one cell alive is the same pattern that keeps a forest alive.

Your Thoughts Branch Like Trees

One idea splits into two thoughts.

Each thought splits into questions.

Each question branches into possibilities.

Your mind is a fractal.

This essay started as one thought: “Lungs are fractal.”

That thought branched into:

• What are fractals?

• Where else do they appear?

• What does this mean philosophically?

Each branch split into smaller branches:

• Nature examples

• Body examples

• Life examples

Each smaller branch split again:

• Trees, rivers, lightning

• Neurons, blood vessels, intestines

• Habits, families, thoughts

And here we are.

Twenty-three branches deep.

Just like your lungs.

Patterns repeating at every scale.

It Takes Enough Connection to Breathe, to Live, to Grow

This is what stopped me when I saw the lung diagram.

Connection.

Your alveoli connect to capillaries.

Oxygen connects to hemoglobin.

Blood connects to cells.

Cells connect to tissues.

Tissues connect to organs.

Organs connect to you.

At every level, connection = life.

Break the connection anywhere—alveoli to capillaries, oxygen to blood—and you suffocate.

But it’s not just physical.

Mental Connection:

Ideas need to connect to become understanding.

One isolated fact is trivia.

Two connected facts become insight.

Three connected insights become theory.

Five theories become philosophy.

Connection creates meaning.

Social Connection:

You need connection to others to grow.

Not surface-level. Deep.

One meaningful relationship is better than a hundred shallow ones.

Because depth = branching.

One friend connects you to their ideas, their experiences, their world.

That connection branches into new perspectives, opportunities, growth.

Isolation = stagnation.

Connection = expansion.

Creative Connection:

Writing is fractal.

One essay connects to another.

Each essay branches into ideas.

Each idea connects to readers.

Each reader branches into their own interpretations.

The pattern grows.

My Fibonacci essay connected to this fractals essay.

This essay will connect to the next.

Each one a branch on a larger tree I’m still growing.

And I can’t see the full shape yet.

Because I’m inside the fractal.

But the pattern is working.

Connection by connection.

Branch by branch.

The Dark Side: When Fractals Trap You

Not all fractals are healthy.

Some patterns need to be broken.

Anxiety Spirals

One worry → two thoughts → three fears → five scenarios → eight catastrophes.

Each fear branches into smaller fears.

Zoom in: “What if I fail this exam?”

Zoom out: “What if I fail this year, drop out, disappoint my family, waste my life, die alone?”

Fractal panic.

Same pattern of catastrophizing, repeating at every scale.

The spiral tightens until you can’t breathe.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Your lungs are fractals that help you breathe.

Your anxiety is a fractal that makes you suffocate.

Doomscrolling

One video → two videos → three hours gone → five regrets → eight more videos to numb the regret.

Fractal procrastination.

Each scroll branches into more scrolls.

Each regret branches into more avoidance.

The pattern repeats.

You zoom in (one more video).

You zoom out (entire afternoon wasted).

Same pattern. Different scale.

And here’s the trap:

Bad fractals compound just like good ones.

One day of doomscrolling → one week → one month → one year of lost time.

The pattern scales.

How to Break a Bad Fractal

Fractals are generated by simple rules repeated infinitely.

Koch Snowflake rule: Add a triangle to each side. Repeat.

Anxiety fractal rule: Ask “What if this goes wrong?” Repeat.

Doomscroll fractal rule: “Just one more video.” Repeat.

To break the fractal, change the rule.

Instead of: “What if this goes wrong?”

New rule: “What if this goes right?”

Repeat that. See what fractal emerges.

Instead of: “Just one more video.”

New rule: “One intentional choice.”

Repeat that. Watch your day transform.

Small rule changes = massive pattern shifts.

Because fractals compound.

Good or bad.

Choose your rules carefully.

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You Are a Fractal (Choose Your Patterns)

Let's bring it all together.

You are a fractal.

Your DNA is a fractal (double helix → chromosomes → genes → base pairs).

Your lungs are a fractal (trachea → bronchi → bronchioles → alveoli).

Your blood vessels are a fractal (arteries → arterioles → capillaries).

Your neurons are a fractal (dendrites branching infinitely to connect with other cells).

Your thoughts are a fractal (one idea branching into infinite possibilities).

Your life is a fractal (each day a smaller version of your year, each year a smaller version of your story).

And maybe—just maybe—you're part of a larger fractal.

A family.

A community.

A nation.

A species.

A universe.

Each level reflecting the others.

As above, so below.

Patterns repeating at every scale.

Infinite complexity from simple rules.

So Here's the Question:

What rules are you repeating?

Because whatever you do today, you'll do tomorrow.

And the day after.

And the year after.

The pattern will scale.

If your rule is: "Study one hour, doomscroll five hours."

Repeat that for a year.

You'll have a year of shallow learning and deep regret.

If your rule is: "Write 500 words, even when I don't feel like it."

Repeat that for a year.

You'll have 180,000 words. That's two books.

If your rule is: "Show up for one person. Deeply."

Repeat that for a decade.

You'll have built a community.

Small patterns compound into large realities.

That's not motivation.

That's not inspiration.

That's fractals.

That's math.

That's how life actually works.

The Fractal Continues

I'm writing this in my first year of dentistry.

Studying anatomy. Memorizing structures. Trying to understand how bodies work.

And I keep finding patterns.

First Fibonacci (spirals in sunflowers, DNA, growth).

Now fractals (branching in lungs, trees, thoughts).

I'm starting to see the world as patterns repeating at every scale.

And maybe that's what learning is.

Not memorizing facts.

But recognizing patterns.

Seeing how one thing connects to another connects to another connects to everything.

Connection by connection.

Branch by branch.

Breath by breath.

It takes enough connection to breathe.

Alveoli to capillaries. Oxygen to blood. Blood to cells.

It takes enough connection to live.

Ideas to understanding. People to community. Moments to meaning.

It takes enough connection to grow.

One essay to another. One day to a year. One choice to a life.

Patterns repeating.

Scaling infinitely.

As above, so below.

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You are breathing through a fractal right now.

You are living inside a fractal right now.

You are building a fractal right now.

So choose your pattern carefully.

Because it will repeat.

And repeat.

And repeat.

Until it becomes everything.

Welcome to the fractal. 🌀💚

— Oluwaferanmi

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P.S. Next time you take a deep breath, remember: you just moved air through 23 levels of fractal branching to reach 600 million alveoli. Your body is doing calculus every second without you even thinking about it. Respect the math. Respect the pattern. Respect the connection.

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P.P.S. If you find yourself in an anxiety spiral or doomscroll fractal, remember: you can change the rule. One different choice. Repeat it. By Watch the pattern shift. You're not stuck. You're just repeating the wrong rule. Change it. The fractal will follow.

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Writing isn’t just something you do. It’s how you think. Stop writing and the thinking doesn’t pause instead, it piles up, unexamined, going nowhere. I didn’t understand that until I stopped.

It’s 3:38 a.m. I’m lying in bed, both hands on my phone, typing faster than I can think.

My exams were supposed to start February 16th. I posted a Note saying I’d take a break to focus on studying. Then the exams were postponed. To February 26th. Ten more days.

And in those ten days, somewhere between waiting for exams that kept getting delayed and trying to hold momentum that kept slipping — something happened.

The writing stopped.

Not paused. Stopped.

. . .

II. The Specific Kind of Empty

It wasn’t the “I’m tired” kind of empty.

Not the “I need a break” kind.

It was the “something is missing and I don’t know how to get it back” kind. The kind that doesn’t announce itself — it just settles, quietly, like dust.

I thought I was being responsible when I stopped. Protecting my energy. Prioritising what mattered. Dentistry over writing. Grades over essays. Future over present.

That’s not wrong. But somewhere between “I’m taking a break” and “exams got postponed again,” I stopped writing entirely. Not just essays. Notes. Observations. Journal entries. I stopped noticing patterns. Stopped asking questions. Stopped paying attention to the small things that usually make me pick up my phone and type: “Wait, that’s interesting.”

I went silent.

And in that silence, I understood something I hadn’t known before: I wasn’t just taking a break from writing. I was taking a break from myself.

. . .

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III. What I Lost Without Realising It

When I write, I process. I connect dots. I turn chaos into patterns, confusion into clarity, noise into meaning.

When I stopped, I stopped processing. And everything started piling up.

Exam stress. Time anxiety. The weight of expectations. The fear of falling behind. All of it just… sat there. Unexamined. Unspoken. Unwritten.

Normally I’d write through it. Here’s how fractals explain my anxiety spirals. Here’s what Year 1 is teaching me about patience. Here’s why growth feels slow right now. Writing would have turned the mess into meaning.

But I wasn’t writing. So the mess stayed a mess.

Then there’s you.

My readers. The people who choose to be here. I told myself: they’ll understand, they’ll wait. And maybe you will. But what I didn’t account for was how much I need this connection — not in a needy way, but in a this-is-how-I-make-sense-of-the-world way.

When I write, I’m not just talking to you. I’m discovering with you. Every essay is a conversation, even when you never comment, even when you just read in silence and move on. You’re still there. And knowing you’re there changes how I think.

Without you, I was thinking in a vacuum.

Vacuums are empty.

. . .

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IV. The Habit That Withers

I started writing in October 2024. By January, I had a rhythm: one essay every two weeks. It structured my weeks. It gave me something to build toward. It reminded me: I’m not just a dentistry student. I’m also a writer.

When I stopped, I felt it the way you feel a muscle you haven’t used in weeks. Still there. But softer. Less sure.

Writing used to feel automatic. Now it felt like something I had to remember how to do.

That’s what two weeks without writing taught me: a habit doesn’t die when you pause it. It withers. Quietly. Without announcement. And by the time you notice, it already feels harder to return than it should.

· · ·

V. The Watering

I don’t want to wait until after exams to come back.

Exams don’t start for another nine days. And if I wait until they’re over, that could be late February, early March, maybe longer. That’s too long to stay silent. Not because I owe you essays — though I do want to give you good work. But because I owe myself the practice. The habit. The act of turning thoughts into words and sending them out into the world.

So here I am.

3:38 a.m. Lying in bed. Hands on phone. Writing because I missed this.

Not perfectly. Not with a 5,000-word philosophical deep-dive. Just honestly.

I used to think writing was something you did when you had something to say. But I had it backwards. You write to discover what you have to say. The writing isn’t the record of the thinking — it is the thinking. Stop it, and the thinking stops with it.

I didn’t lose two weeks of essays. I lost two weeks of myself.

And at 3:38 a.m., that felt like enough reason to come back.

— Feranmi

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I just picked up my pen, and words started forming; about my workout, my family, the small noises of life around me. Somehow, in between the sweat and laughter, I discovered something new.

Myself.

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Before This Night

I'd never written anything longer than a school essay.

English class? I passed. But I didn't enjoy it. Writing felt like something you did because teachers told you to, not because you wanted to.

I had no interest in journalism, no dreams of being an author, no secret journal hidden under my bed filled with profound teenage angst.

Writing wasn't on my radar.

Books? Sure, I read them for exams. Essays? I wrote them for grades. But writing as a practice, as something you do for yourself, as a way of thinking—that concept was foreign to me.

I wasn't even admitted into college yet. I was waiting to patiently to study either Dentistry or Medicine. I cared about anatomy, physiology, maybe figuring out how to survive six years of school without losing my mind.

Writing? That was for other people. The "creative" ones. The ones who knew what metaphors were without Googling them.

Not me.

And then,October 2024, a random workout, a restless night …. everything changed.

This discovery isn't over but now is a great time to share. Or You want to keep reading ? Okay o. Enjoy.

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Every Day Now

Every day now, I want to focus on three things.

They aren't the major things in life but they matter to me.

After studying God's word in the morning, I want to do three simple things:

Workout. Shape my jawline. Move my body.

Here I am, rewriting from my journal—my jotter.

This is my first piece, and I'm certain that whoever reads it will love it.

(I wouldn't be amazed if someone lurks into one of my socials and asks me about a line from my next chapter—Haha 😂. I have this feeling it'll be a lady who engages me first. I doubt it... but still, it's wild how these thoughts flash through my mind as I write ✍️. Like my imagination is already building a reader before the story's even done.)

Forget the Order in Which I Wrote This

I started writing while doing the swimmer and superman exercises.

According to my phone, they help strengthen the butt and lower back but I have to admit, I'm struggling with them.

I just learned the meaning of reps (repetitions).

I did 24 out of 30 repetitions of the long-arm crunch and by the end, I was gasping for air.

At first, I thought I only had to repeat it 10 times.

I hit 10... but my phone kept ticking 11... 12... 13...

I laughed, refusing to give up. Sweat rolled down my cheeks as I reached 20, like raindrops sliding down a window during a storm steady, relentless, impossible to ignore.

And then it dawned on me: it would end at 30 seconds.

Continuing From Where I Left Off

I was so tired at that moment of the exercise, but there's more coming.

Next up: Jump Squats.

I'm taking a short break to update my workout app before I continue. I'll tell you the name after we finish the jump squats.

As I write, it's dark outside.

Midnight in Lagos carries a quiet chill.

I was so lost in the moment that the last word I wrote before dozing off was moment.

I woke up feeling unsettled. I wanted to sleep a little more, but I couldn't.

It's 1:33 a.m. here in Nigeria.

I just went to my dad's room.

I didn't have connection anymore. Probably because I slept with my phone still on. Some apps must've updated themselves while I was out. I needed his hotspot to be turned on.

He's been coughing lately, and part of me wonders if it was disrespectful to wake him.

But I did it anyway.

What Is This Feeling?

Writing to discover or discovering to write?

Maybe it's because this is my first time.

But I feel energized again YEAH.

I have a reason to continue.

Why This Matters

I didn't know it then, but something shifted that night.

Between the superman exercises and the sweat, between my mom's unexpected interruptions and my dad's cough, between midnight and 1:33 a.m. something began.

I wasn't trying to become a writer.

I was just trying to finish my workout and maybe document it in my journal.

But words kept coming. Thoughts kept spiraling. And suddenly, stopping felt impossible.

That's when I realized:

Writing isn't something you decide to do.

It's something that decides to do you.

You don't plan it. You don't prepare for it. You just... start. And then you can't stop.

A Line I Wrote That Night

I looked back at what I wrote that night.

Most of it was scattered half-thoughts, incomplete sentences, observations about sweat and time and whether my mom's farting habits were appropriate dinner table conversation.

But one line stood out:

"What is this feeling? Writing to discover or discovering to write?"

I didn't know what I meant when I wrote it.

I was exhausted. It was 1:33 a.m. I'd just woken my coughing father for hotspot access. My brain wasn't exactly running on full capacity.

But three months later, I understand.

Writing isn't a tool I use to discover things.

Writing IS the discovery.

The act of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) reveals what I think, what I feel, what I didn't know I knew until I wrote it down.

That question I asked at 1:33 a.m.?

It wasn't rhetorical.

It was the beginning of an answer I'm still figuring out.

And maybe that's the point; good questions don't demand immediate answers. They open doors. They start spirals.

That night, I asked a question.

And three months later, I'm still living inside the answer.

Three Months Later

I’m still here.

Still writing.

Still figuring things out; writing, life, dentistry, everything in between.

But it feels good to have started.

Good to know that on one random night in October 2024, between a workout and a nap and a trip to my dad’s room for hotspot, I discovered something I didn’t know I needed.

A voice.

A practice.

A reason to stay awake at 1:33 a.m. even when I’m exhausted.

This was my start.

Messy. Unpolished. Written between crunches and farts and 1:33 a.m. frustrations.

But real.

And maybe that’s what makes an origin story worth telling not that it was perfect, but that it was true.

What's YOUR 1:33 a.m.?

Maybe it's not writing.

Maybe it's painting. Or coding. Or baking. Or starting a business. Or learning a language. Or finally reaching out to that person you've been thinking about.

Maybe it's something you've been avoiding because it feels too big, too uncertain, too late to start.

But here's what I learned that night:

You don't need permission to begin.

You don't need the perfect moment, the perfect tools, the perfect confidence.

You don't need to know what you're doing or where it's going or if anyone will care.

You just need 1:33 a.m. and the willingness to stay awake for what's calling you.

So I'm asking you

What's YOUR 1:33 a.m.?

What's the thing that keeps you awake, that won't leave you alone, that whispers "start" even when you're tired, even when it doesn't make sense, even when you're in the middle of superman exercises and your mom just farted for the second time?

Whatever it is

Start.

Messy. Unplanned. Imperfect.

Just start.

Write the first sentence. Paint the first stroke. Send the first email. Take the first step.

And see what happens.

Because the best beginnings? They're never planned.

They just... happen.

And then they become everything.

If you're reading this now whether you're my first reader or my hundredth thank you.

For being here with me.

For witnessing this messy, beautiful beginning.

Everyone has an origin story.

This is mine.

I started writing by accident.

Now I can't stop.

And I hope somewhere in these words you find permission to start your own thing. Your own messy, unplanned, 1:33 a.m. discovery.

Because three months ago, I had no idea I was a writer.

Now I can't imagine being anything else.

Thanks for being here with me, discoverers. Subscribe for free to receive new post and support my work.

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— Feranmi

(October 2024 | Lagos, Nigeria | 1:33 a.m.)

P.S. If a lady does end up asking me about a line from a future chapter, I'll come back and update this. Just to prove that 17-year-old me's imagination wasn't completely off. 😂

P.P.S. And if you found YOUR 1:33 a.m. because of this essay? Drop a comment. Tell me what it is. I want to know. Because your beginning might inspire someone else's. That's how spirals work.

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Finish secondary school. Get into university. Graduate by 20, maybe 21. Get married by 22. Become a man. Whatever that meant.

Simple. Linear. Achievable.

At 17, I’m in my first year of dentistry. And I’m doing mathematics. Again. For the third consecutive year.

Physics. Chemistry. Biology. Subjects I’ve been studying since 2021.

I’m tired.

I thought university meant moving forward—learning anatomy, understanding root canals, maybe even touching a tooth (professionally, in a lab, with supervision, obviously). Instead, I’m spiraling through the same material, solving quadratic equations and balancing chemical reactions, wondering when the “real” dentistry begins.

Anatomy? Physiology? Clinical practice? Those feel years away.

And honestly? I’m impatient. I want to skip ahead. I want Year 3, not Year 1. I want to be rushed into the interesting stuff—mandibles and molars and bite mechanics—not stuck calculating the velocity of falling objects.

But then I remember what I wrote in my last essay about Fibonacci: you can’t skip from 1 to 89. Growth doesn’t work that way. The sequence demands every number. No shortcuts.

So here I am, stuck between what I know is true and what I feel.

This is what studying dentistry at 17 is teaching me about patience—whether I like it or not.

The 15-Year-Old’s Dream (When Life Felt Like a Straight Line)

When I finished secondary school in 2023, I was 15 years old. My WAEC results were good. Not perfect, but good enough. I felt unstoppable.

I had this vision: university by 16, graduate by 20 or 21, married by 22, settled by 25. The whole trajectory mapped out in my head like a straight road stretching into the distance.

Looking back, I was probably too young to think appropriately. 😂 But at 15, the future felt simple. Predictable. Linear.

I didn’t account for:

• Getting accepted to study Anatomy, only to realize it wasn’t what I actually wanted

• Rewriting JAMB while juggling first-year courses

• Waiting for LASU (and waiting... and waiting...)

• Writing post-UTME exams that placed me BACK in Anatomy (God forbid bad thing)

• My parents suggesting Nursing

• Finally landing in Dentistry at a private university

I thought life would be: School → University → Career → Success.

A straight line. Clean. Fast. Efficient.

But life had other plans.

Life spiraled.

And now, two years later, I’m 17—not 15 anymore, but not 22 either. I’m in Year 1 of a 6-year program, doing subjects I’ve already done, feeling like I’m moving in circles instead of forward.

The straight-line dream? Yeah. That didn’t survive.

Year 1 Dentistry = The “1, 1” Stage (And Why I Hate It)

Let me be honest with you, angels.

I’m doing mathematics right now. In dentistry school. MATHEMATICS.

Not “dental mathematics” or “applied calculations for oral surgery.” Just... math. The same algebra and trigonometry I studied in secondary school. The same physics I learned preparing for JAMB. The same chemistry I’ve been balancing equations for since 2021.

For the third consecutive year.

And I’m exhausted.

I don’t want to calculate the trajectory of a projectile. I want to learn about the mandible—the jawbone, its structure, how it connects to the skull, why it moves the way it does when we chew.

I don’t want to memorize the periodic table (again). I want to understand anesthetics, how they work, why some patients need more than others.

I don’t want to solve for x. I want to study root canals and gum disease and the golden ratio in smile design (yes, that exists, and yes, it connects back to Fibonacci, but we’ll get there).

But no.

Year 1 is foundations. Basics. Groundwork.

It feels like standing still.

Worse—it feels like going backward.

Every time I sit in a math lecture, a small voice in my head whispers: “You’ve done this already. Why are you here again? When does the real dentistry start?”

And I don’t have a good answer.

But Here’s What I’m Slowly Realizing

Universities are designed this way on purpose.

You can’t skip Year 1. You can’t jump straight to clinical practice without understanding:

• Chemistry (how anesthetics interact with the nervous system, how fluoride strengthens enamel)

• Physics (pressure, force, torque—everything about how teeth withstand bite forces)

• Biology (tissue regeneration, immune responses, wound healing)

• Mathematics (dosage calculations, statistical analysis of treatment outcomes)

The “boring” subjects aren’t obstacles.

They’re the foundation.

Just like Fibonacci.

In my last essay, I wrote about the Fibonacci sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...

The sequence starts SLOW. The first two numbers are both 1. It feels repetitive. Like nothing’s happening. Like you’re stuck.

But those two 1s? They’re not wasted. They’re necessary.

Without them, there’s no 2. No 3. No 89.

Year 1 dentistry is my “1, 1.” The slow beginning. The part where it feels like I’m doing the same thing twice for no reason.

And I hate it.

But I need it.

Time finds bloom

Wait meets truth

Slow shows life

Hope wakes up

What Patience Actually Means (And Why It’s Harder Than It Sounds)

Here’s what I’m learning, even though I don’t like it:

Patience isn’t sitting quietly and accepting boredom.

That’s resignation. That’s giving up.

Patience is active trust in a process you can’t see the end of yet.

It’s showing up to math class even though you’d rather be in an anatomy lab.

It’s doing homework you’ve done before because THIS time, it’s building toward something bigger.

It’s trusting that Year 1 → Year 2 → Year 3 → Year 4 → Year 5 → Year 6 is the ONLY real path to becoming Dr. Feranmi.

There’s no shortcut.

No way to skip from 1 to 89.

And honestly? That’s terrifying.

Because I’m 17 and impatient and I WANT to be in Year 3 already. I want to hold a dental mirror and look at real teeth and understand pathology and start feeling like a dentist instead of a high school student repeating classes.

But I can’t.

Because impatience is wanting the result without the process.

And patience—real patience—is trusting the process even when it feels unbearably slow.

Even when you’re tired.

Even when you’ve “already done this.”

Even when every fiber of your being screams, “CAN WE PLEASE MOVE FASTER?”

The Hardest Part

The hardest part isn’t the math itself.

It’s the waiting.

It’s knowing that anatomy is coming—just not yet.

It’s knowing that clinical practice exists—just not for another four years.

It’s sitting in a chemistry lecture thinking, “I will use this information someday, but that day is not today, and I’m so tired of waiting.”

Patience doesn’t mean I stop wanting to move forward.

It means I keep moving forward even when the steps feel small.

Even when the spiral looks like I’m going in circles.

The 6-Year Reality (And Why I Can’t Skip It)

Dentistry school in Nigeria is 6 years.

Not 4. Not 5.

Six.

I’ll be 23 when I graduate.

Not 20 or 21 like I dreamed at 15.

Twenty-three.

Older than I wanted to be. But also—and this is what I’m trying to accept—exactly the right age to have actually learned dentistry properly.

Because those 6 years aren’t arbitrary. They’re structured in layers, like tooth enamel building up over time. Each layer depends on the one beneath it.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Years 1-2: Basic Sciences

The foundation I’m complaining about right now. Math, physics, chemistry, biology. The “boring” stuff that makes everything else possible.

Years 3-4: Preclinical Studies

Anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology. The stuff I’m desperate to learn. The part where dentistry starts feeling REAL. Where I’ll finally study the mandible, the maxilla, the structure of teeth, the diseases that affect them.

Years 5-6: Clinical Practice

Actual patients. Real procedures. Supervised, of course, but REAL. This is where theory becomes practice. Where knowledge becomes skill.

You can’t do Year 5 without Year 4.

You can’t do Year 4 without Year 3.

And you can’t do Year 3 without... Year 1.

The one I’m in right now.

The one that feels like wasted time.

But it’s not wasted.

It’s just the beginning of the spiral.

The Thing About Spirals

Spirals LOOK like you’re going in circles.

From above, it seems like you’re covering the same ground over and over. Like you’re not getting anywhere.

But you’re not moving horizontally. You’re moving vertically.

You’re ascending.

I’m not repeating math for no reason. I’m building the base of a structure that will hold for the next 50+ years of my career as a dentist.

I just can’t see it yet because I’m still at the bottom of the spiral, looking up, wondering when I’ll reach the top.

But the spiral doesn’t have a top.

It just keeps going.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...

Each number building on the ones before it.

Each year of dentistry school building on the last.

Slow.

Then faster.

Then suddenly, you’re in Year 6 wondering how you got there so quickly.

At least, that’s what I’m told.

Right now, from Year 1, it doesn’t FEEL fast.

It feels like forever.

Five Things Dentistry Is Teaching Me About Patience (Even Though I Don’t Want to Learn Them)

1. You Can’t Skip Steps

Even when you’re tired of them.

Even when you’ve “already done this.”

Even when it feels redundant.

The foundation matters more than speed.

If I skip Year 1 and jump straight to anatomy without understanding chemistry, I won’t know HOW anesthetics work. I’ll just know that they do. And that’s not enough when you’re holding a syringe near someone’s nerve.

2. Slow Doesn’t Mean Stuck

Year 1 feels like 1, 1—like I’m repeating the same number twice, going nowhere.

But those two 1s aren’t stagnation.

They’re preparation.

They’re setting up 2, 3, 5, 8.

The spiral is working even when I can’t feel it moving.

3. Impatience Is Normal. Trusting the Process Anyway Is Growth.

I WANT to rush.

I want to skip to the interesting parts.

I want someone to hand me a dental degree and say, “Here, you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

But wanting ≠ needing.

I need Year 1. Even if I hate it.

And learning to show up even when I’d rather skip ahead? That’s not patience. That’s maturity.

(I’m still working on it, obviously.)

4. Six Years Sounds Long—Until You Realize It’s Building a Lifetime

I’ll be Dr. Feranmi at 23.

And then I’ll practice dentistry for 40-50 years after that.

Those 6 years of school? They’re 10% of my career.

A foundation for the other 90%.

When I think about it that way, 6 years doesn’t sound long anymore.

It sounds... necessary.

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Like the time it takes for a tooth root to fully form. You can’t rush it. It develops in stages. And if you try to force it faster, the structure weakens.

(Yes, I looked that up. And yes, even tooth development follows patterns. Fibonacci would approve.)

5. Patience Isn’t Passive Waiting. It’s Active Trust.

This is the one I’m still learning.

I’m not sitting around “being patient” like some enlightened monk who’s above frustration.

I’m frustrated. Daily.

But I’m also showing up.

Doing the homework.

Taking the exams.

Trusting—even when I don’t want to—that Year 1 → Year 6 is the only real path.

And maybe, just maybe, by the time I’m in Year 3 looking back at Year 1, I’ll understand why the math mattered.

Why the “boring” foundation was necessary.

Why I couldn’t skip the 1, 1 stage.

Maybe.

Or maybe I’ll still be annoyed that I had to do trigonometry three times. 😂

Either way, I’ll be further along the spiral.

The Spiral Continues (Whether I Like It or Not)

I’m writing this in my first year of dentistry.

Still doing mathematics.

Still frustrated.

Still impatient.

But also: still here.

Still showing up.

Still trusting—even when I don’t want to—that the spiral knows where it’s going.

At 15, I thought life was a straight line. Simple. Predictable. Fast.

At 17, I’m learning it’s a spiral. Slow at first. Repetitive. Circular.

But moving upward.

And spirals? They take time.

If You’re Reading This and You Feel Behind

If you’re 17 or 27 or 47 and wondering why growth feels so SLOW—

If you’re stuck in your own “Year 1,” doing things you’ve already done, wondering when the real work begins—

If you’re tired of hearing “trust the process” when the process feels like it’s taking FOREVER—

Here’s what I’m learning:

You’re not behind.

You’re at 1, 1. Or 2. Or 3.

The acceleration comes later. At 8. At 13. At 21.

But you can’t skip to 21.

You have to earn it.

One step. One year. One subject. One frustrating math class at a time.

The spiral looks slow from the inside.

But it’s working.

Even when—especially when—it feels like nothing’s happening.

What I’m Trusting (Even When I Don’t Feel It)

Six years feels long when you’re standing at Year 1.

But I’ll get there.

One year at a time.

One subject at a time.

One spiral at a time.

And when I’m Dr. Feranmi at 23—when I’m holding that dental mirror, examining a patient’s molars, understanding exactly what I’m looking at and why—I’ll look back at 17-year-old me, exhausted in a math lecture, and maybe I’ll finally understand.

Maybe I’ll see that the foundation mattered.

That the “boring” years built the structure.

That patience wasn’t passive waiting.

It was active trust in a process I couldn’t see the end of yet.

Or maybe I’ll just be relieved I never have to take another trigonometry exam. 😂

Either way, the spiral will have done its job.

And I’ll be ready for whatever comes next.

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So Here’s to the Slow Years

To Year 1.

To the math classes I don’t want to sit through.

To the chemistry homework I’ve done before.

To the biology exams that feel redundant.

To the physics lectures that make me wonder if I chose the wrong field.

To the impatience that won’t go away.

And to the trust—fragile, frustrating, but growing—that this is all building toward something worth waiting for.

Six years, angels.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Let’s grow slowly together—even when we hate it. 🌀💚🦷

P.S. If you read my last essay about Fibonacci, you already know: spirals don’t move in straight lines. They loop. They circle back. They make you feel like you’re covering old ground.

But you’re not.

You’re ascending.

Year 1 is my “1, 1.”

And I’m learning—slowly, reluctantly, but learning—to trust that 2, 3, 5, 8 are coming.

Even if they take longer than I want.

Even if the wait feels unbearable.

The spiral knows what it’s doing.

I just have to keep showing up.

And so do you. 🌻

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Nature is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose.”— J.B.S. Haldane, biologist

. . .

I was at my reading table on a Saturday afternoon when it happened.

I had finished a physics assignment the day before and felt quietly satisfied with myself — the kind of satisfaction that only lasts until you open the next chapter. I picked up my mathematics textbook and flipped to where I’d left off. Arithmetic progressions. Geometric sequences. Patterns I’d been working through all week without finding anything in them worth stopping for.

Then I turned the page.

Fibonacci sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…

I stopped. Read it again. And something shifted — not in the mathematics, which I’d seen before, but in me. Because for the first time I wasn’t reading a sequence. I was recognising one. Something in those numbers felt less like information and more like a reminder. Like a pattern I had always known was there but had never had language for.

I sat with it for a long time. Then I started writing.

What follows is what I found.

📖 The Story of Fibonacci: The Merchant's Son Who Changed Mathematics

The Fibonacci sequence is named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci which roughly translates to "son of Bonacci." But here's the twist: Fibonacci didn't discover this sequence. He introduced it to Europe.

Born around 1170 in Pisa, Italy, Leonardo was the son of a merchant. His father, Guglielmo Bonacci, worked as a customs official in North Africa, and young Leonardo traveled with him throughout the Mediterranean Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily. While European mathematicians were still struggling with Roman numerals (try multiplying XXIV by XVII without crying), Leonardo was learning the Hindu-Arabic numeral system: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

That zero? That concept of nothing being something? Revolutionary.

In 1202, Leonardo published Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculation), which wasn't just a math book … it was a middle finger to the old system. He showed European merchants how to calculate faster, trade smarter, and think more clearly using these "new" numbers.

Buried in this practical guide was a seemingly simple problem:

"A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?"
Let's break it down:

• Month 1: You start with 1 pair (newborns can't breed yet)

• Month 2: Still 1 pair (they just matured)

• Month 3: Original pair breeds → 2 pairs total

• Month 4: Original pair breeds again, first offspring matures → 3 pairs

• Month 5: Original + first offspring breed, second offspring matures → 5 pairs

• Month 6: Three breeding pairs → 8 pairs

The sequence unfolds:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144...

Each number is the sum of the two before it. Simple, right?

But here's what Leonardo couldn't have known: this "rabbit problem" would become one of the most profound patterns in mathematics, nature, art, technology, and human thought.

The sequence was his footnote. It became his legacy.

(Side note: those rabbits would've overrun the planet in real life. Fibonacci's rabbits are immortal, always fertile, and apparently very committed to the schedule. If only my workout routine had that consistency. 😂)

Question for you, reader: Have you ever stumbled onto something small that turned out to be massive? Drop a comment—I want to hear about your "Fibonacci moments." 💬

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🌻 Fibonacci in Nature: The Universe's Silent Algorithm

Nature is the first classroom where Fibonacci teaches. But here's what stopped me cold: nature doesn't know math. A sunflower doesn't study geometry before arranging its seeds. A nautilus doesn't calculate logarithms before spiraling its shell. And yet and yet they follow Fibonacci with a precision that would make mathematicians weep.

The Sunflower's Secret

Look at a sunflower. Really look. Those seeds don't scatter randomly across the flower head like confetti at a celebration. They spiral in two directions simultaneously often 34 clockwise and 55 counterclockwise. Both Fibonacci numbers. Sometimes it's 55 and 89. Sometimes 21 and 34. Always the sequence.

But why?

Here's where it gets beautiful: the sunflower is solving an optimization problem without ever thinking about it. If seeds arranged themselves in straight lines, there'd be gaps .. wasted space, missed opportunities for growth. If they spiraled at simple angles like 90° or 180°, they'd still leave holes. But the golden angle, approximately 137.5°, derived from Fibonacci's golden ratio creates the most efficient packing possible.

Each new seed appears at 137.5° from the last, spiraling outward. This creates two sets of interlocking spirals, and the numbers of these spirals? Consecutive Fibonacci numbers. Every. Single. Time.

The sunflower doesn't plan this. It doesn't have a blueprint. It simply grows according to the path of least resistance and that path carved by millions of years of evolution is Fibonacci. The flowers that packed their seeds most efficiently survived droughts, outcompeted neighbors, passed their genes forward. Natural selection discovered calculus before Newton did.

I think about my writing practice. That first night at 1:33 a.m., I didn't plan to write more. But one word demanded another. One sentence pulled the next. I wasn't calculating .. I was spiraling outward, following an invisible algorithm etched somewhere between instinct and compulsion. Maybe that's what Fibonacci really teaches: optimal growth happens when we stop planning every step and start trusting the pattern.

DNA: Life's Double Helix, Fibonacci's Double Imprint

Now zoom inward—from the macro (sunflowers) to the micro (DNA).

The DNA molecule, that elegant double helix carrying the code for everything we are, has Fibonacci written into its very dimensions. One complete cycle of the DNA helix measures 34 angstroms long and 21 angstroms wide. Both Fibonacci numbers.

This isn't decorative. This isn't the universe showing off. These proportions create structural stability. The width-to-length ratio approaching the golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618) gives DNA its strength and flexibility allowing it to coil tightly in chromosomes, unzip for replication, withstand chemical stress and, still maintain its integrity across billions of cellular divisions.

Think about that: the molecule responsible for life itself is built on Fibonacci's framework. Every time a cell divides, every time genetic information transfers, every time your body heals a wound or grows a hair Fibonacci is there, humming quietly in the background.

But here's where order meets chaos: DNA mutates. Errors happen. Cosmic rays, chemical reactions, copying mistakes .. chaos constantly attacks this ordered structure. And yet the Fibonacci proportions help DNA maintain stability through the chaos. The golden ratio isn't rigidity; it's resilient flexibility. It bends without breaking.

This mirrors something I've noticed in writing. When I force structure too rigidly ;"This paragraph must be exactly 100 words, this section must have exactly five points", the work dies. But when I let ideas spiral naturally, building on each other like DNA base pairs stacking along the helix, something organic emerges. Order doesn't fight chaos. It dances with it.

The Spiral Gallery: More Fibonacci Everywhere

Once you see it, you can't unsee it:

Pinecones spiral in Fibonacci numbers—8 in one direction, 13 in the other. Or 5 and 8. The exact numbers depend on the species, but always consecutive Fibonacci.

Pineapples have three sets of spirals: 8, 13, and 21 ; three consecutive Fibonacci numbers intersecting on a single fruit.

Romanesco broccoli that fractal vegetable that looks like something from a science fiction film, also displays Fibonacci spirals at every scale. Zoom in on any bump, and you'll find smaller Fibonacci spirals. Zoom in again: still Fibonacci. It's spirals all the way down.

Hurricanes and galaxies swirl in logarithmic spirals that approximate Fibonacci curves. The Milky Way's spiral arms, the eye of a storm—both follow the same mathematical signature as a nautilus shell.

Human body proportions: The ratio of your forearm to your hand, your hand to your fingers, even the cochlea in your inner ear, all echo golden ratios derived from Fibonacci.

Why Does Nature Love Fibonacci?

Because Fibonacci represents efficient growth.

In nature, energy is expensive. Every organism faces the same fundamental challenge: maximize growth while minimizing waste. Fibonacci sequences emerge because they represent the optimal solution to this problem across countless contexts.

A leaf positioning itself on a stem needs maximum sunlight with minimum shadowing of other leaves. The Fibonacci angle (137.5°) solves this perfectly.

A mollusk building a shell needs to grow bigger without changing shape (so it still fits inside). A logarithmic spiral based on the golden ratio solves this perfectly.

A seed head needs maximum packing density. Fibonacci spirals solve this perfectly.

Nature is lazy but efficiently lazy. It doesn't do more work than necessary. And somehow, across millions of years and billions of iterations, the path of least resistance keeps landing on the same numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...

The Philosophical Gut Punch

Here's what makes me pause, what made me blink twice and whisper "this is deep":

If the universe has no consciousness, no intention, no grand designer and yet Fibonacci appears everywhere from galaxies to genes—what does that mean?

Maybe it means the universe has a vocabulary, and Fibonacci is one of its most frequently used words. Not because anyone decided it should be. But because when matter and energy and time interact, certain patterns simply... work better.

Or maybe, and this is what I believe; it means there IS a Designer, and Fibonacci is part of the signature left in creation. A pattern so elegant, so efficient, so universal that it points beyond itself to something intentional.

Either way, Fibonacci isn't imposed on nature. Fibonacci emerges from nature,whether by chance or by design."

And maybe .. just maybe .. when I sat down at 1:33 a.m. and felt compelled to keep writing, when one sentence demanded two, when two ideas gave rise to three insights, when my thoughts spiraled outward faster than I could type, maybe I wasn't creating something new.

Maybe I was just tuning into a pattern that's been humming since the first stars spiraled into existence.

Maybe writing isn't invention. Maybe it's recognition.

(Okay, deep breath. That got heavy. Time for a breather: If DNA is Fibonacci and I'm made of DNA, does that mean my procrastination spirals are also mathematically optimized? Asking for a friend. 😅)

Your turn, reader: Where have YOU seen Fibonacci in real life? In plants, architecture, your own body? Comment below—let's build a list together. 🌱

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🧠 Fibonacci and Human Thought: The Mathematics of the Mind

Now let’s spiral inward. Our thoughts don’t move in straight lines. They expand like Fibonacci.

Think about how ideas grow:

• One insight (1) sparks another (1)

• Together they form a new concept (2)

• That grows into a theory (3)

• Then into a philosophy (5)

• Then into a worldview (8, 13, 21...)

Creativity itself is Fibonacci.

The Psychology of Spiral Thinking

Psychologists have a term for this: associative thinking. One thought triggers another, which triggers two more, which trigger three more. This isn’t random—it follows predictable patterns of neural activation.

When you learn something new, your brain doesn’t file it away in isolation. It connects that new information to existing knowledge, creating webs of association. Each connection strengthens over time, making certain thought-paths more likely. This is why expertise develops gradually: 1 fact leads to 1 insight, which together form 2 connections, spawning 3 applications, revealing 5 principles...

The neuroscience backs this up. Studies using fMRI scans show that creative thinking activates the default mode network; the brain’s “background processing” system. This network doesn’t think linearly. It spirals through memories, concepts, and possibilities, making unexpected connections.

Ever notice how your best ideas come in the shower, during walks, right before sleep? That’s your default mode network spiraling freely, following Fibonacci-like patterns of association without conscious interference.

Emotions Spiral Too

Love begins as one feeling—attraction, curiosity. Then it doubles—attraction plus comfort. Then it triples—attraction, comfort, trust. Soon it’s 5 things, 8 things, 13 interconnected feelings so tangled you can’t separate them anymore. That’s why “falling in love” feels like spiraling—because it literally is.

Anxiety works the same way, but darker. One worry becomes two (”What if I fail?” + “What if people notice?”). Two become three (add “What if I can’t recover?”). Three become five. Five become eight. Before you know it, a single concern has spiraled into a hurricane of catastrophic thinking.

Fibonacci is the mathematics of the human heart for better and worse.

Learning and Memory

Here’s something wild: memory consolidation follows Fibonacci-like spacing intervals.

When you’re trying to remember something, the optimal review schedule isn’t daily. It’s spaced out in expanding intervals. Study something today, review it tomorrow, review again in 2 days, then 3 days, then 5 days, then 8 days...

This is called spaced repetition, and it’s based on the forgetting curve. Your brain naturally forgets information at predictable rates, but each review strengthens the memory and extends the time before the next review is needed. The intervals expand just like Fibonacci.

Apps like Anki and SuperMemo use algorithms based on this principle. They’re not explicitly using Fibonacci numbers, but the underlying logic is the same: optimal growth happens through expanding, rhythmic repetition.

When I started writing daily, I noticed this. Day 1 was hard. Day 2 was hard. But by day 3, something clicked. By day 5, I craved it. By day 8, not writing felt wrong. The habit spiraled from effort to instinct, following an invisible rhythm.

(Pro tip: If you want to build any habit writing, working out, learning a language track it in Fibonacci intervals. Day 1, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 5, day 8, day 13. If you hit day 13, you’ve probably locked it in. If not... well, at least you learned some math. 🤓)

Question for readers: Have you ever noticed your thoughts spiraling, either productively (creative breakthroughs) or destructively (anxiety spirals)? How do you guide the spiral in the right direction? Drop your strategies below.

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🏛️ Fibonacci in Architecture and Design: Building Beauty by the Numbers

Architects and designers have been obsessed with Fibonacci for centuries, and for good reason: it leads directly to the Golden Ratio (φ ≈ 1.618).

Divide any Fibonacci number by the one before it, and you'll approach this ratio:

• 3/2 = 1.5

• 5/3 = 1.666...

• 8/5 = 1.6

• 13/8 = 1.625

• 21/13 = 1.615...

• 34/21 = 1.619...

The higher you go, the closer you get to φ.

Ancient Architecture

The Parthenon in Athens built around 447 BC uses golden rectangles throughout its façade. The ratio of its width to height, the spacing of its columns, even the placement of sculptural elements all approach the golden ratio.

The Great Pyramid of Giza has golden ratio proportions in its dimensions. The ratio of the pyramid's height to half its base length is approximately φ. Whether this was intentional or coincidental remains debated, but the pattern is undeniable.

Modern Design

Today, designers use Fibonacci consciously:

Logos: Twitter's bird, Apple's apple, Toyota's overlapping ovals ; many iconic logos are built on golden spiral grids derived from Fibonacci rectangles. These designs feel balanced because they are balanced, mathematically.

Website layouts: Responsive web design often uses Fibonacci-based column widths. A layout might use 8 units for the main content, 5 for the sidebar, 3 for margins. The proportions feel "right" because they echo natural ratios our brains recognize subconsciously.

Smartphone screens: The aspect ratio of most phones approaches golden proportions. The iPhone's screen dimensions, button placements, and interface elements are designed using Fibonacci-based grids.

Why Does It Work?

Designs based on Fibonacci feel harmonious because they mimic the proportions we see everywhere in nature. Our brains have evolved to recognize these patterns as "natural" and therefore aesthetically pleasing.

When something violates these proportions for example, a door that's too wide for its height, a logo with unbalanced spacing, we feel it instinctively, even if we can't articulate why.

Fibonacci isn't just decoration. It's a shortcut to beauty that evolution pre-installed in our visual cortex.

(Random thought: If golden ratios make designs beautiful, does that mean my face needs a Fibonacci makeover? Asking for... actually, asking for myself this time. 😂)

Reader challenge: Look around you right now. Find something designed. It can be a book, a window, a picture frame. Measure its proportions. Is it golden ratio-ish? Comment your findings! 📐

🎶 Fibonacci in Music: The Rhythm of Beauty

Music is math in motion, and composers have long intuited Fibonacci’s power—even before understanding the mathematics behind it.

Classical Composers

Mozart’s Piano Sonatas often have movements structured around Fibonacci numbers. The number of bars in sections, the placement of key changes, the timing of climatic moments. Fibonacci appears again and again.

Béla Bartók was explicit about using Fibonacci. His “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” has 89 bars (Fibonacci) divided into sections of 55 and 34 bars (consecutive Fibonacci numbers). The climax occurs at bar 55 .. exactly at the golden ratio point.

Debussy’s “Reflets dans l’eau” (Reflections in the Water) places its climax at the golden ratio point of the piece’s total duration. Whether conscious or intuitive, the pattern creates a sense of inevitable beauty.

Modern Music

Tool’s song “Lateralus” is a Fibonacci love letter. The time signature changes, the syllable count in the lyrics, even the rhythm of the guitar riff—all follow Fibonacci:

“Black (1) / then (1) / white are (2) / all I see (3) / in my infancy (5) / red and yellow then came to be (8)...”

The syllable count per line follows the sequence. It’s deliberately constructed to mirror the spiral.

Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” uses unusual time signatures that create a spiraling, recursive feel. You can’t quite count where the beat lands, yet it feels right. That’s golden ratio proportions in rhythm—unpredictable yet inevitable.

Why Do We Respond to Fibonacci in Music?

Because rhythm is pattern recognition. Our brains predict where the next beat will fall, and when music follows Fibonacci patterns, those predictions feel satisfyingly fulfilled—but not boringly so.

Linear repetition (1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4) becomes predictable quickly. Random patterns (1, 7, 2, 9, 4) feel chaotic. But Fibonacci patterns? They’re predictable enough to follow, complex enough to stay interesting. They spiral between order and surprise.

That’s why Fibonacci-based music feels like breathing natural, essential, alive.

(If I wrote this essay to a Fibonacci beat, would it be easier to read? Someone test this and report back. For science. 🎵)

📱 Fibonacci in Technology and Algorithms: Code That Spirals

In our digital age, Fibonacci isn’t just philosophical—it’s functional.

Data Structures

Fibonacci heaps are advanced data structures used in network optimization, scheduling algorithms, and shortest-path calculations. They’re more efficient than binary heaps for certain operations, and they’re used in everything from GPS routing to internet traffic management.

Fibonacci search is an algorithm for finding items in sorted lists. It divides the search space using Fibonacci numbers, which surprisingly, can be faster than binary search in certain scenarios, especially on large datasets.

Financial Modeling

Fibonacci retracement is a technical analysis tool traders use to predict support and resistance levels. After a price movement, traders draw horizontal lines at 23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8%, and 100% of the move—ratios derived from Fibonacci relationships.

Does it work? Debatable. Some traders swear by it. Others call it numerology with extra steps. But the fascinating part is that because so many traders use Fibonacci levels, the levels become self-fulfilling prophecies. The market moves toward Fibonacci ratios because traders expect it to.

That’s a wild recursive loop: Fibonacci predicts market behavior, which causes market behavior, which validates Fibonacci, which strengthens belief in Fibonacci, which...

You get the spiral. 🌀

Computer Graphics

Procedural generation in video games and CGI uses Fibonacci spirals to create realistic natural environments. Trees branching, rivers meandering, clouds forming ; programmers use Fibonacci-based algorithms to simulate organic growth patterns.

In 3D modeling, the golden ratio helps position lights, frame camera shots, and design character proportions that feel “right” to viewers.

Social Media Algorithms

Viral content doesn’t spread linearly, it spirals. One person shares to two friends. Those two share to three more. Those three reach five others. The growth pattern of truly viral content often mirrors Fibonacci expansion: slow at first, then explosive, following the natural rhythm of networked growth.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok optimize for this spiral. Their algorithms identify content that’s beginning to spiral (1 → 1 → 2 → 3 → 5 shares) and boost it further, riding the Fibonacci wave to maximize engagement.

(Side note: Does this mean my post about my mom farting—God bless her—could theoretically go viral if it hit the right Fibonacci moment? Asking for science. Again. 😆)

Read about my mom's farting on here

Reader poll: Have you ever seen something go viral? At what point did it explode—gradual then sudden, or instant? Comment your observations! 📲

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💡 Advantages of Fibonacci Thinking: Why This Pattern Matters

✅ Natural Growth

Fibonacci models organic expansion. Businesses, gardens, relationships—all thrive when growth is steady, not rushed.

Startups that try to scale too fast (jumping from 1 employee to 50 overnight) often collapse. But companies that grow in measured steps .. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 employees, build sustainable foundations.

Your workout routine works the same way. You can't go from zero pushups to 100 in a day. But 1 the first day, 1 the second, 2 the third, 3 the fourth... suddenly you're at 21, and it feels earned.

✅ Harmony and Balance

Designs based on Fibonacci feel balanced. They're pleasing to the eye and calming to the soul.

This isn't subjective, it's neurological. Our brains process golden ratio proportions faster and with less cognitive effort. Beauty isn't random. It has a formula, and Fibonacci wrote it.

✅ Predictability

In chaos, Fibonacci offers structure. It's a way to forecast, to anticipate, to plan.

Whether you're analyzing stock charts, planning a garden layout, or structuring an essay (hi, that's me right now 👋), Fibonacci provides guardrails without cages.

✅ Universality

From galaxies to genomes, from ancient temples to modern apps Fibonacci is everywhere. It's a language that transcends culture and time.

When you learn to see Fibonacci, you unlock a universal decoder ring. Suddenly the patterns in your life make sense. Growth isn't random. It's rhythmic.

⚠️ Disadvantages and Limitations: When the Spiral Goes Wrong

❌ Over-Romanticization

Not everything is Fibonacci. Forcing it everywhere blinds us to other truths.

Sometimes growth should be exponential (2, 4, 8, 16). Sometimes it should be linear (1, 2, 3, 4). Sometimes it should be random. Fibonacci isn't a universal answer—it's one tool among many.

❌ Complexity in Application

In computing, recursive Fibonacci algorithms can be wildly inefficient. The naive recursive approach recalculates the same values repeatedly, leading to exponential time complexity. (Computer science students know this pain intimately.)

The solution? Dynamic programming, memoization ; techniques that store previous values. But the point stands: Fibonacci's elegance in theory doesn't always translate to elegance in practice.

❌ Misuse in Finance

Traders who rely too heavily on Fibonacci retracement ignore other indicators; market fundamentals, news events, macroeconomic trends.

Fibonacci becomes a crutch, a way to impose order on inherently chaotic systems. Markets don't care about golden ratios. Sometimes a stock drops because the CEO tweeted something dumb at 3 a.m., not because it hit the 61.8% retracement level.

❌ Rigidity

Strict adherence to Fibonacci can limit creativity.

If you're writing and you think, "This section must have exactly 8 paragraphs because that's Fibonacci," you've missed the point. The pattern should guide, not dictate.

Fibonacci is a compass, not a cage.

(Confession time: I originally planned this essay to have exactly 13 sections. Then I realized that was silly and added more. Sometimes you gotta break your own rules. Growth isn't always Fibonacci. Sometimes it's just... more. 😂)

🧘🏽‍♂️ Fibonacci and Mindfulness: Math as Meditation

Fibonacci isn’t just intellectual, it’s experiential.

Breathing Exercises

Try this: Inhale for 5 seconds. Hold for 3. Exhale for 8. Hold for 2. Repeat.

Those are Fibonacci numbers creating a rhythm that naturally calms your nervous system. The golden ratio between inhalation and exhalation mirrors the proportions your body already prefers.

Visualization

Close your eyes. Imagine a spiral expanding with each breath. 1 breath. 1 more. 2 breaths total. 3. 5. 8. 13. Feel the spiral growing from your center outward, each loop wider but still connected to the one before.

This is active meditation—using mathematical patterns to quiet the mind.

Journaling

• Write in Fibonacci bursts:

• 1 word (Today)

• 1 sentence (I felt overwhelmed.)

• 2 ideas (Work stress. Family tension.)

• 3 reflections (I need rest. I need help. I need perspective.)

• 5 observations about what helped...

• 8 small actions I can take tomorrow...

The structure doesn’t constrain you—it frees you. You’re not staring at a blank page wondering what to write. The spiral guides you inward, then outward.

🌍 Fibonacci in Modern Life: Spirals All Around Us

Think about startups. The ones that grow too fast collapse. Venture capital pumps millions into companies with 10 users, expecting hockey-stick growth. Most crash.

But companies that expand step by step—1 product, 1 market, 2 features, 3 markets, 5 partnerships, 8 revenue streams—they survive. They spiral sustainably.

Content creation follows Fibonacci too. Your first video gets 1 view (your mom). Your second gets 1 view (still your mom). Your third gets 2 views (your mom twice). But slowly—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…. the algorithm catches on. The spiral accelerates.

Relationships grow in Fibonacci rhythms. First date: 1 conversation. Second date: 1 more. Third date: 2 topics deepen. Soon you're sharing 5 secrets, 8 dreams, 13 fears. Love is a spiral that tightens until two people become inseparable.

Even life stages mirror Fibonacci:

• Childhood: Learning 1 thing at a time

• Adolescence: 1 identity after another

• Young adulthood: 2 paths (career, relationships)

• Adulthood: 3 responsibilities (self, family, career)

• Midlife: 5 priorities...

And on it spirals.

Reader question: Where do you see Fibonacci in YOUR daily life? Morning routine? Career growth? Relationship dynamics? Hit the comments I'm genuinely curious. 🌀

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🌀 Fibonacci as Philosophy: The Spiral of Existence

Okay, here we go deep. Grab a coffee. ☕

Fibonacci is more than numbers. It's a metaphor for existence itself.

Growth Isn't Linear—It's Spiral

We tell ourselves lies about progress: "I'll improve 1% every day" (linear thinking). But real growth doesn't work that way.

Some days you plateau. Some days you regress. But over time if you keep showing up, the pattern emerges: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. Slow, slow, then suddenly explosive.

I see this in writing. My first essay: 500 words, awkward, clunky. My second: still 500 words, slightly less awkward. My third: 700 words, finding rhythm. My fifth: 1,200 words, confident. My eighth: 2,000 words, flowing.

The growth wasn't linear. It spiraled.

Order and Chaos Dance

Fibonacci sits at the intersection of order (mathematical precision) and chaos (natural unpredictability).

DNA follows Fibonacci but it mutates.

Sunflowers follow Fibonacci but each flower is unique.

Music follows Fibonacci but each performance is different.

The pattern provides structure. The variation provides life.

This is the philosophical sweet spot: rigid order is death (crystals, machines). Pure chaos is meaningless (static, noise). But order-within-chaos, chaos-within-order, that's life.

Fibonacci is the universe's way of saying: "Yes, there are rules. But within those rules, infinite possibilities."

Patience vs. Speed

Modern life screams "FASTER! MORE! NOW!" But Fibonacci whispers: "Patience. One step. Then another. Trust the spiral."

You can't skip from 1 to 13. You have to pass through 2, 3, 5, and 8. Each stage builds the foundation for the next.

Startups that skip stages collapse. Relationships that rush burn out. Bodies that overtrain break down.

Fibonacci teaches patience—not passive waiting, but active accumulation. Each small step compounds. The spiral looks slow at first, then suddenly you're at 89, wondering how you got here so fast.

Inward and Outward

Spirals move in two directions: outward (expansion) and inward (focus).

Life requires both.

Outward: learning, growing, exploring, connecting, building.

Inward: reflecting, consolidating, integrating, understanding, resting.

Too much outward spiral; you scatter, burn out, lose yourself.

Too much inward spiral; you stagnate, isolate, shrink.

Fibonacci spirals both ways simultaneously. Each number grows from the two before it (looking inward) while creating space for the two after it (looking outward).

That's the balance: honor your past (inward), build your future (outward), exist in the present (the spiral's center).

The Universe Recognizes Itself

Here's the wildest thought:

When you observe Fibonacci in nature, you're not an outside observer. You're part of the pattern.

Your body is Fibonacci (DNA, proportions, spirals).

Your thoughts are Fibonacci (associative, expanding).

Your life is Fibonacci (slow growth, sudden leaps).

The pattern is looking at itself through your eyes.

Consciousness, the universe becoming aware of itself might be the ultimate Fibonacci spiral. Matter arranges into stars (1). Stars create elements (1). Elements form molecules (2). Molecules organize into cells (3). Cells cluster into organisms (5). Organisms develop brains (8). Brains create consciousness (13). Consciousness studies the universe (21)... and discovers Fibonacci was there all along.

We're not separate from the pattern. We ARE the pattern, spiraling infinitely inward and outward, trying to understand itself.

(Okay, that got REALLY deep. Time to surface for air. If you're still with me after that philosophical spiral, you deserve a medal. Or at least a cookie. 🍪)

Serious question for the comments: Do you think we're just pattern-recognizing machines that happen to find Fibonacci everywhere? Or is there something genuinely fundamental about these numbers? I'm curious where you land on this. 💬

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🔮 Final Thoughts: The Spiral Continues

So there I was, reading arithmetic and geometric progression, when Fibonacci tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Look deeper."

And I did.

And now I see it everywhere, in the way I think, the way I write, the way I grow.

In the sunflower turning toward the sun.

In the DNA coiling in my cells.

In the way my writing practice spiraled from one awkward sentence to this 5000-word meditation.

In the way my thoughts build on each other, 1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, spiraling outward.

Fibonacci isn't just a sequence. It's a philosophy. A lens. A mirror.

It reminds us that:

• Growth isn't linear—it spirals, slow then sudden

• Beauty has a rhythm—and we recognize it instinctively

• Order and chaos dance together—neither can exist alone

• Patience compounds—each small step builds the next

• Life spirals—outward in growth, inward in reflection, upward in ambition

Sometimes we expand too fast and break. Sometimes we slow down and find balance. But always, the sequence is there .. whispering, guiding, reminding.

The Invitation

Next time you see a sunflower, pause. Count the spirals.

Next time you're building something; a business, a habit, a relationship … resist the urge to rush. Trust the spiral. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8...

Next time you're overwhelmed by how far you have to go, remember: you don't have to jump from 1 to 144. You just need to get to 2. Then 3. The spiral will carry you.

And next time your thoughts spiral into anxiety, remember: spirals can move in any direction. Inward or outward. Up or down. You choose which way to ride the curve.

What Now?

Here's my challenge to you:

For the next 13 days (Fibonacci number, obviously), notice Fibonacci in your life.

• Day 1: Find one example in nature

• Day 2: Find one example in design

• Day 3: Notice it in your thoughts (2 examples)

• Day 5: Track your habits or routines (3 patterns)

• Day 8: Look for it in relationships, conversations, growth (5 observations)

• Day 13: Share everything you discovered in the comments

I'll be reading. I promise.

Because here's the thing: this essay isn't finished. It can't be. Fibonacci spirals infinitely. So does understanding.

You reading this you're the next number in the sequence.

Your insights + my words = something new.

That's how spirals work.

🌀 A Final Final Thought

Remember that night at 1:33 a.m. when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep? When one sentence demanded another, and I followed the spiral until I'd written my first real piece?

That was Fibonacci.

Not because I planned it. But because growth, whether real, organic follow patterns deeper than planning.

The universe speaks in mathematics. Fibonacci is one of its favorite words.

Learn to hear it. Learn to trust it.

And most importantly: learn to ride the spiral.

Because life isn't a straight line from birth to death.

It's a spiral; sometimes tight, sometimes wide, always moving, always expanding, always returning to itself while reaching for something new.

So next time you see a sunflower, a staircase, a galaxy, or even your own thoughts spiraling—smile.☺️

Fibonacci's got you.

Stay curious.

Stay spiraling.

Stay growing—1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...

✍️🌀

💬 Your Turn, Reader

Seriously, I want to hear from you:

1. Where did you first encounter Fibonacci? Math class? Nature? Art? Random internet rabbit hole at 2 a.m.?

2. What's YOUR Fibonacci moment? That time something small spiraled into something massive?

3. Where do you struggle with patience vs. speed? Are you trying to jump from 1 to 89 too fast?

4. What spirals in your life right now? Habits? Relationships? Creative projects? Anxiety? (It's okay, we all spiral sometimes.)

5. Did anything in this essay surprise you? Change how you see patterns? Make you want to count sunflower seeds? (Please don't actually count sunflower seeds. Your time is valuable. 😂)

Drop your thoughts, observations, arguments, or random musings below.

Let's build this spiral together.

Because the best part about Fibonacci? It's never finished.

Each number creates space for the next.

Your comment might be the next number in this sequence.

Let's find out. 🌻✨

Leave a comment

P.S. If you made it this far, you just read 5000+ words about a mathematical sequence discovered by contemplating theoretical rabbit breeding. You're either deeply curious or deeply procrastinating. Either way, I respect it. Welcome to the spiral. 🐰🌀

I'm writing this on Christmas Day, 2025.

While the world celebrates, I'm here at my reading table, refining this essay for you. Polishing sentences. Making sure the spiral is clear.

By the time you read this, it'll be January 1, 2026. Christmas will be behind us. A new year will be unfolding.

But right now, in this Christmas quiet, I'm thinking about patterns. About how one Saturday discovery became weeks of reflection became this essay you're reading.

That's Fibonacci too. One moment leads to another, leads to two more, leads to three insights...

The spiral never stops.

Merry Christmas in arrears. Happy New Year in advance.

Let's spiral together, angels. 🌀💚

— Ferannmi

Is it December already?

Yes, it is.

Earlier this year, I prayed the most ridiculous prayers—

“A car, Lord.”

“A house, Lord.”

“A soft life, Lord.”

All I wanted was for this year to be my best year.

What I didn’t know was that this would be the year I’d become… a writer on Substack. Life is funny.

This year has taught me many things, but the loudest lesson is this:

Wishes don’t always manifest the way we expect, but sometimes they open the doors we truly need.

Last November, I got admission to study Anatomy. I loved it as a university course, but not as a career path. Deep down, I knew it wasn’t mine. My parents liked Medicine. I liked Medicine. But something in me kept whispering, “This isn’t you.”

So I rewrote JAMB.

Scored 288/400.

Not proud.

Not ashamed.

Just somewhere in the middle — because juggling Anatomy while studying was chaos. My parents still called it “determination.” 🙈

By August, after my first year, I knew I wasn’t going back. I tried LASU. I waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing.

Then my parents suggested a private university — this time for Nursing. But to get in, I had to write post-UTME. I was scared. Not because the exam was hard, but because I didn’t want to read 😭.

Still, I wrote the exam without studying… and passed well.

Guess what I was given again?

Anatomy.

Again 😂.

My parents almost fainted.

“Maybe this is God’s plan for Hector.”

Me? I refused to believe God was recycling destinies like water bottles.

Later we found out the exam was supplementary — they just needed people to fill empty spaces in less–wanted courses. Anatomy was one of them. God forbid bad thing.

My readers — yes, my readers — I say this with my full chest:

Never give up.

In Nigerian pidgin, we say:

“Na who give up, fuck up.”

Meaning: If you stop walking, you never arrive.

How you walk — fast, slow, dramatic, with background music — is your business.

Just walk.

I prophesy you will arrive sooner, not later. Amen. 🕊️

In October, everything shifted.

I asked my Sunday school teacher,

“What skill can I focus on besides graphic design or video editing?”

She said,

“Have you thought of writing?”

That suggestion became the beginning of this moment — you and I here.

Later in October, my dad attended a burial, saw the Lead City University signboard, entered to make enquiries, and returned home with three options:

Physiotherapy, Nursing, or Dentistry.

I chose Dentistry.

One day, one of you will book an appointment with Dr. Hector. How strange 😄.

Now here I am — in my apartment, doing chores, reflecting, and writing to you.

Has this year been good? Absolutely.Not because everything worked out, but because everything worked me into who I’m becoming.

And now, as December closes in, I’m grateful for every detour that led me here — even the ones that tried to drag me back to Anatomy. 😄🦷

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📘 Glossary (For My Readers Who Need Context)

JAMB – Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board.Nigeria’s national university entrance body. They conduct the UTME exam.

UTME – Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination.The actual exam written by students applying to university. Scored over 400.

WAEC – West African Examinations Council.

A major final secondary school exam taken by West African students. Equivalent to high school finals.

Post-UTME / Screening Exam

An additional exam universities conduct after JAMB to select candidates.

LASU – Lagos State University.

A competitive and well-known university in Lagos, Nigeria.

Supplementary Exam

A second-chance exam written when a school still has extra spaces in certain courses.

Anatomy (as a course)

A science program that studies the structure of the human body.

Private University

A non-government university. Usually more expensive but sometimes more flexible.

Physiotherapy

A medical field focused on movement rehabilitation and physical therapy.

Dentistry

The field of medicine that deals with oral health, teeth, and mouth treatment.

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About the Author

Akinlo Oluwaferanmi Hector is a young Nigerian writer, storyteller, and evolving creative voice behind Discovering With Grace. He writes honest, humorous, faith-leaning reflections about growth, purpose, student life, and becoming.

Hector is currently a Dentistry student, a former Anatomy survivor 😄, and an unexpected writer who found his voice in October 2024. His mission is simple: to awaken growth, spark curiosity, and remind readers—young and old—that becoming is a journey worth documenting.

When he’s not writing, Hector is probably overthinking, learning, laughing at his own jokes, or dreaming wild dreams that don’t always make sense… until they do.

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It has been good today for me, and I think I am in a good position to write to you, lovelies. It’s 12:19 in the middle of the night. I hear my friend chuckle from the room opposite mine.

Earlier today, we had GST 101. This means English-language studies. It is for us who are in our sophomore year at the university. I do not know her name — the teacher. She was a brilliant lecturer. She completely understands the message she passes on to us students. She could reflect on her experiences and shed light upon the experiences we — the lectured (her students) — face today.

The topic was reading. I wrote in my note today, “we are all here to study and hold.” WOW, just wow. I must say she is a very brilliant mind. She said something that I wrote in my English notes. I read: “reading skill is directly proportional to the way you pass your exams.”

(I AM STILL HEARING LAUGHTER FROM THE OTHER ROOM — I THINK HE IS TALKING TO A FRIEND... IT IS NO PROBLEM LOL.)

I am going to rewrite what she said in class today because of the laughter I heard from Henry and which I still hear now. She was saying our exams are directly proportional to your relationship with your parents, your exams, your self-esteem, and also the relationship you have with your friends.

Do you understand what she said? I will explain according to the way I reason, which is smart.

We, her students, were in attendance to pass the subject she teaches us. It is the No. 1 language spoken in the world today. It is the English language. She mentioned reading skills. In the next paragraph, I am going to explain reading skills according to what I know — I said this in another context earlier in this publication.

Reading skill is the ability to understand, interpret, and engage with written text effectively. It involves decoding symbols (letters and words), comprehending meaning, and thinking critically about what is read.

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Decoding — recognizing written words and converting them to spoken language.
Comprehension — understanding the meaning of words, sentences, and entire texts.
Fluency — reading smoothly with appropriate speed, accuracy, and expression.
Vocabulary — knowing the meaning of a wide range of words and phrases.
Retention and recall — remembering and using information from what has been read.
Critical thinking — interpreting, evaluating, and forming judgments about the text.

You have adopted this skill, and you need it to talk well with our parents. That is why it is directly proportional to the relationship you have with your mummy and daddy. This skill sharpens you up as a soon-to-be family man.

You have adopted this skill, and you need it to talk well with our parents. That is why it is directly proportional to the relationship you have with your mummy and daddy. This skill sharpens you up as a soon-to-be family man.

I think my father and mother understand my point of view. And though as a child I thought I knew all, when I implement what they paid money for — which is to learn in this prestigious institution — we suddenly become good friends.

Trust me, readers, your parents always know when you are getting the best of what they are paying for because, of course, the literate amongst them did economics in school. The summary of the statement I recognized above proves that reading skills are directly proportional to the relationship you have with your parents.

In her saying, she talked about self-esteem. This clearly means that as one improves, so does the other. Reading skills boost self-esteem by making you feel confident in communication. Effective communication helps to know what is going through our minds — our thoughts — clearly.

In her saying, she talked about self-esteem. This clearly means that as one improves, so does the other. Reading skills boost self-esteem by making you feel confident in communication. Effective communication helps to know what is going through our minds — our thoughts — clearly.

René Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”
Reading fuels thinking. Thinking affirms being. Therefore, reading empowers existence.

---

I will continue this piece later, of course; it is way late. I wish I were getting paid. I would have created more time for you all. Regardless, it is nice to write to you all.

I know you had a great time reading this piece — unless you are seeing this publication 4 hours past the normal sleep time. It was 2:25 before now. I will go to bed now.

Have a nice day.

Leave a comment

Growing up, I always felt like my mouth had its own agenda. I would try to explain something, and before I even finished, my words would go on freestyle mode saying things I didn’t mean, skipping important parts, or sounding somehow. Many times, I walked away from conversations thinking, Why did I talk like that? That’s not even what I meant. Talking felt like a race. Writing felt like breathing.

Then one day, I wrote something small—nothing serious. But while reading it back, I had this strange, warm pause. It was the first time I heard myself clearly. No noise. No pressure. No confusion. Just me. I didn’t have to rearrange the words or drag them out of my throat. They came out already arranged, as if they had been waiting for this moment.

Writing turned my thoughts into something I could actually understand. Overthinking became paragraphs instead of storms. Confusion became sentences instead of headaches. Even the things I didn’t know how to say out loud like fear, hope, gratitude, and the quiet struggles suddenly had names. They had shapes. They had language.

And it shocked me how peaceful it felt. I wasn’t writing for likes or validation. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I wasn’t even trying to “be a writer.” I was simply trying to understand my own life, and writing became the only place where everything slowed down enough for me to catch it.

With time, writing became my safe space. It's becoming the place I can reflect. The place where I hear myself the loudest. The place where I can tell the truth without shaking. The place where God drops small lessons I didn’t even know I needed. The place where grace shows up gently, every single time.

At 17, I’m still figuring out who I am, what I want, and where I’m going. But I’m sure of one thing: my voice lives in the quiet, in the pages, in the soft honesty that comes when I sit down to write. Writing didn’t just teach me how to express myself. It taught me how to meet myself.

And maybe that’s what finding your voice really is—not shouting louder, but finally hearing the sound you’ve been carrying all along. I thought I was looking for words. Turns out, I was looking for myself.

—feranmi☘️

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