Twenty-five came and went. I was still alive. But I kept feeling like I was operating at 10% of my true capacity, even while everyone around me saw someone at 100%.

That worked for a while. Functioning became a kind of armor — proof to myself and to everyone else that things couldn’t really be that bad. I built my entire identity around being the capable one, the strong one, the one others leaned on. Productivity and performance became the evidence that overrode what I actually felt inside. But armor isn’t the same as healing.

As a CEO, I kept showing up maybe a little tired, maybe a little late on a deadline, but showing up. Not many people knew about my depression. I didn’t want to become a burden to my friends. My motto was: take each day at a time, each hour at a time. Fighting extreme depression while masking it in public became one of my strengths until I couldn’t do it anymore. Suppressing symptoms, performing normalcy, pushing through distress all of it takes energy. And one day, the person, meaning me, just burst.

In the last three months, I have done nothing but collapse, over and over. It felt like the usual depressive episode at first, but stronger, a wave bigger than the ones I knew how to ride. More importantly, I wasn't able to work at all. That's when I knew this one was different.

I couldn’t coordinate anything. Tasks that used to take an hour started taking a day not because they were harder, but because starting had become nearly impossible. I couldn’t manage simple daily hygiene. Small decisions, what to eat, what to wear, which email to answer first, started to feel disproportionately heavy. I began going days without eating, which caused other health problems on top of everything else.

I started missing things I never used to miss: deadlines, replies, appointments. My emotional regulation got thinner. Things that used to be manageable a curt email, a sudden change of plans now felt unbearable. I started canceling and isolating myself instead of pushing through, or pushing through in a way that left me completely nonfunctional afterward. Physical symptoms showed up too: exhaustion that sleep didn't fix, changes in appetite, getting sick more often.

When "being capable" is core to how you see yourself, any drop in functioning starts to feel like an identity threat, not just a symptom. That pushed me to try harder instead of resting, which only accelerated the crash. One day I opened Snapchat and saw a memory reminding me that I go through this every single year around this time. And this time, I felt like I needed to die. I MUST DIE. Let me tell you for free that wanting to stay alive while dealing with suicidal ideation and attempts is the hardest thing i have to do. I couldn't handle phone calls. I ghosted everyone my staff, my customers, everyone. I knew I was in deep trouble, but I didn't know where to start, because some part of me still wanted to live and experience a little more of life. I didn't have the will or the desire to die. I just didn't know how to keep going either.

High-functioning depression frequently coexists with lives that are already overextended — jobs, caregiving, financial pressure. There's little buffer, so when capacity drops even slightly, the visible effects can be sudden and severe. Praise for competence and reliability can prop someone up for a long time, but it doesn't touch the underlying experience. Eventually the gap between how someone is perceived and how they actually feel becomes too wide to sustain.

I was determined to break the cycle. When functioning breaks down completely, it triggers a second wave of pain on top of the original depression shame about no longer being able to keep up, fear of being “found out” as not as capable as people believed, grief for an identity that had been built entirely around competence. I felt like I was watching myself fail from the outside, unable to explain to anyone including myself what was happening or why.

I went to my family first and told them exactly how I felt. My dad, being an African dad, said some harsh things to me in that moment, and I remember typing for hours, everything just pouring out of me. He apologized eventually. Then came the hardest part: walking into a general outpatient clinic. I waited about three hours before I finally saw a doctor, who referred me to an emergency psychiatrist.

I’ve been on a psychiatric hold for two weeks now. I want to try to demystify that process a little, for anyone reading this who might need to.

My depression is a specific type, and it doesn’t look the way people expect. It shows up as reckless, unnecessary spending. No motivation to do anything for days at a time. Sleeping nonstop for days, or not sleeping at all for days. No motivation to clean up, or to exist. Randomly wanting to die. Giving things away money, mostly —until I’m completely broke, just to chase a feeling of being good. A pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Pessimism, the sense that there’s no happy ending no matter which way you look at it. Guilt and regret. Suicidal thoughts and attempts. Overeating, or not eating at all, both as a way to try to feel better. Indecision. Persistent headaches. Irritability and poor judgment. Anxiety that has no clear cause and emotions I can’t control.

For a long time, I couldn’t picture myself in the future at all. Not next year, not in five years sometimes not even next month. I lived each day like it was my last, because some part of me genuinely didn’t expect there to be a next one. It sounds almost noble when people say “live each day like it’s your last,” but for me it wasn’t a mindset I chose it was a limitation I was trapped inside. It meant I never planned properly, never let myself commit to long-term goals, never dated anyone, never really invested in a version of my life that stretched further than a day or a week ahead. It quietly shaped every decision I made, and it kept me small in ways I didn’t fully recognize until much later.

On some days, the depression has no trigger at all, and those are the worst ones. You’re fine one minute. The next minute, nothing matters anymore. Worse if you’re suicidal, or if you self-harm.

Five years ago, I wrote a tweet that said: “Depression won’t be my character trait. I’d be able to be more. I want to do more. I will be able to focus on many other things and I will. It won’t cloud my whole head and mess up my whole life and decisions.”

I built my life around proving that tweet true. I kept myself in a strict routine so I wouldn’t have time to be sad always distracting myself with something. And part of the reason is that people don’t always understand depression as an illness. There were days I convinced myself I was overreacting, that I was making too much of it. But every doctor I’ve spoken to has told me the same thing: there was truly a serious problem here. I didn’t want to give it a proper diagnosis, because giving it a name felt like it would make it real like I’d officially be someone diagnosed with something.

There’s a specific kind of guilt that comes with all of this the guilt of watching opportunities pass me by because I simply couldn’t show up for them, and the regret of losing people who could have been good, lasting friends, if I’d had the capacity to keep up with them the way they deserved. I think about those friendships sometimes the ones that faded not because anyone did anything wrong, but because I disappeared, went quiet, or couldn’t explain why I wasn’t responding. It’s a particular kind of grief, mourning relationships and chances that never got a real shot because of something happening entirely inside my own head. And underneath all of it, the anxiety is relentless — a constant, low hum that sometimes spikes into something closer to panic, making even the idea of reaching back out feel impossible.

I wish more people treated depression like what it actually is: an illness. The fact that it doesn't come with physical bleeding doesn't make it any less of one. There's no ideal way to attempt suicide, or to be depressed, or to have a mental illness. There's no correct way to be sick. Different people's symptoms manifest in completely different ways. Depression doesn't look the same in everyone. Policing how someone else experiences their illness is cruel. Having empathy costs you nothing. I promise.

I recently realized that one of my depression’s patterns is giving until I’m completely moneyless, chasing that momentary feeling of being good to someone else. Depression and self-harm can feel like a rabbit hole the harder you try to climb out, the deeper you seem to go, and some days it feels like there’s no help in sight. Even after you “get better,” sometimes all it takes is one trigger, and you’re right back to wanting to end things.

Every time I’m mentally stable for a stretch, I find myself envying people who don’t live with any of this, no anxiety, no depression, no suicidal thoughts. It must be so nice to just live, without any of that running underneath everything. It feels unfair that some mental illnesses have no cure that depression has no clear cause and no cure, just pain, management, and hoping for better days. Depression steals so much from you. Half the time, you’re not even really present you’re just trapped in your own head.

I’m learning to forgive myself for every time I couldn’t show up. It wasn’t until I sat across from my doctors, and watched their faces as they took down my history, that I understood how serious this had really been the whole time.

After weeks in the ward, I feel better. I feel a renewed energy to fight for my life. For the first time in years, I'm waking up without the existential dread of just having to survive another day. I feel so much lighter. I'm going to be on medication for a long while, gotten my diagnosis and for the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to experiencing life through a more regulated lens.

Its day 1 again.

(na everyday be my own day one, nobody forgives me more than me)

"i love music" is an understatement for me to say. i think music is one of earth's best inventions. i wonder what the first person to discover musical instruments must have felt, the chanting, the repetitiveness, the harmony, the conclusion of amazingness. good makes me feel like I'm wrapped in silk. I'm grateful for music. music has saved me on many days, and it keeps saving me. good music makes me so happy i can't begin to explain how much happiness a nicely synchronized arrangement of sounds gives me. i wish i could attach the sounds to my brain.

I used to love music so much I couldn't go a day without spending at least six hours listening. My ears were always plugged. I worked and slept better with the loudest music playing. I would play music and watch movies at the same time.

Sometimes it feels spiritual, like I'm in a trance, I can see the musical notes flying. Sometimes music is colorful. I love listening to instrumentals, without lyrics most times, mostly because lyrics humanify the art. Actually, if a song has a horrible lyric by my standard, I'll struggle to consume the sound. But the beats? I must hear them in my soul. I love the invention of noise-cancelling headphones and AirPods.

I like having a favorite song, even though it barely lasts five days. I lie to everyone and say I don't have one, mostly because I don't want to share, but I have favorite songs I've loved for every genre songs I will end phone calls to listen to. Am I weird, or do other people wake up to play songs too? I remember songs from my dreams and wake up needing to hear them. For every stage of my life, there was a particular album, or five, that saw me through. I count my life in albums. There's always an album for every point — all my heartbreaks, all my successes, or just random days. I am convinced i can get through anything, if i had the right playlists.

i am not religious but i like religious songs, i love how melodious and repetitive they sound, some of those songs are actually very nostalgic for me, they take me back to the place where i really sang those songs because that was my only means of hope and comfort.

i also cannot talk about music without talking about dancing, because for me the two just aren't separate things. the second a good beat drops, my body just knows what to do before my brain even catches up. sometimes very involuntarily. i think dancing is one of the most honest things a person can do, you can't really fake it, your body just responds to what it feels. i dance in my room, alone, in the mirror, in the kitchen, i dance badly and i dance well and i genuinely do not care which one it is in that moment. there's something about moving to a song that makes me feel the music instead of just hearing it, like i'm not just a listener anymore, i'm part of it. i think everyone should dance more, even badly, especially badly, i think we take ourselves too seriously to just move our bodies and feel free. dancing is how i process a good day and a bad day, sometimes it might just be a leg movement here and there, just a little body movement for me.

I love discovering new music. i think that's one of the best things in life finding new music that speaks to you, especially as someone who listens to everything but is still somehow picky with what she consumes. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to exactly how I felt the first time I heard certain songs. I find music deeply nostalgic. I remember the exact point I was at when I discovered a song, who I was with, how the air felt. Songs, for me, are mostly tied to something memorable.

I think sharing your favorite songs should count as a form of intimacy, and I think everyone has a list of forever-favorite songs. I love raiding people's playlists. I love stealing the favorite songs of people I like. If we bond over music, everything else will fall into place. Let's go through your favorite playlist and you can explain how each song makes you feel. We'll sit together for hours and just listen, no conversation, just music.

oh, what's your favorite song or genre? boooorinGGGGGGG —especially when people expect just one answer. For a real lover of music like me, I love every form of it. The only thing I hate is what I don't like. For every season there's a genre, or genres, that interest me.

As a child, of course, I'll refer back to my childhood, because I'm just a bigger form of who I was then. I had no means of entertainment. I was also locked in, almost all of my childhood — no friends, just me. The radio was my source of life and excitement. Even though listening to "worldly" songs was considered bad, that was the only form of rebellion I had as a child. Music was my only escape, and I don't think anybody would understand how deep that went.

My mom used to buy gospel artist CDs and play them on her laptop or desktop. My dad, at some point, started complaining especially about Ayefele and a few other artists for sounding too similar to "the world," to sinners. He called it gospel fuji, and fuji, in his eyes, was a sin. In short, Ayefele songs were a sin. I remember this one day so well: my mom had CDs she played throughout every car drive, she started playing it and my dad started.

We weren't really allowed to listen to the radio in the car, because of the worldly songs that had "infected" it, and if the radio somehow came on (i was the mistake), we weren't allowed to sing along. So I sang under my breath. Ideally, we were only supposed to listen to hymns and songs without much of a beat, more melody than rhythm. Now how was I supposed to listen to Beyoncé's "Who Run the World" in a house like that? I really loved that my mom never stopped playing her songs. She wasn't as strict about it as my dad was.

I had my own personal radio for the house that I commanded — I listened to the Billboard Hot 100 from start to finish, never missed it. I hope that's still what it's called. I never missed the African Top 10 or 20 either. I love African music. I love looking up lyrics and translating them, though sometimes I'm completely fine never finding out what a song truly means.

I had my “Naija Loaded” era, where I illegally downloaded music. That was a real era, because having those songs on a phone I wasn't supposed to be using, as a child, was stressful and problematic it wasn't as easy as the pirated movies I'd burn onto CDs and smuggle into the house.

Shoutout to my secondary school boarding house, where I had access to a TV and smuggled phones, and could occasionally watch music videos and catch up on what I was missing I am a fast learner. I wish my brain worked as fast in general as it did cramming lyrics I'd spit everything out bar for bar, feeling very good with myself.

And yes, at some point, my mom started speaking to me in songs. I won't elaborate.

I have two moods: I either listen to one song for a long stretch of time, or I listen to everything at once. I love something playing in the background. I like hearing sound, artists who play around natural sounds. It’s either very loud and discomforting, like I’m standing by the speaker in a club, or very serene, like jazz.

I listen to music mainly to block out the voices in my head, and it’s mostly extremely loud music. Even if I get a headache, I love my music. I also sleep way better with loud music the moment it stops, i wake up, sometimes singing along before falling right back asleep. my attention span is so short i need to constantly find something new to keep me going, so I'm always searching for new music while still loving the old, i just get bored fast.

I like hearing beats I like. I love a good lyric. I like hearing rhyme, storytelling, literary devices in songs. I like repetitive songs. I tolerate musicians shouting sometimes — Davido, for instance.

i love Nigerian music. i never had a phase of not loving it — i loved it from the jump. i loved alternative and Nigerian music before it was cool to. it was all i had. i miss new music Friday, the way it updated every week and gave me something to live for and look forward to. songs are dropping right now and I'm overwhelmed.

This essay wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t talk about how it’s getting more difficult to like mainstream Nigerian music, because of the new variants of misogyny and “razzness” creeping in even infiltrating the underground scene, where lyrics are being sung that haven’t been sung before.

honestly, i think one of the easiest ways to hack into a mainstream male audience is to be extremely misogynistic, whether in real life or through your art or how you portray yourself as an artist. you'll be rooting for and vibing with someone, and then boooooom misogyny, abuse, always something.

I also think women in music are put under an insane level of pressure to meet standards their male counterparts never have to meet, yes, I must sneak in feminism. Women aren't allowed to have slip-ups. They have to exist in a constant state of performance, and most importantly, they're not allowed to be "ugly." Even when they're talented artists, their music only seems to count when they're conforming to every beauty standard. They get harassed and bullied endlessly, both online and in real life. That's my WHY that's why I will always support women in music. This doesn't really apply to Nicki, though. Exceptions exist.

Stans? Oh my god. With this new era of music, where artists depend more on streaming and live shows than on selling CDs, artists lean more into cultivating a cult following and honestly, I’m on the fence about how I feel about that. Let me be real: if I had millions of people ready to do anything in my name, would I truly reject it? It reminds me of Jesus. But in reality, stans cause a lot of harm, and sometimes it gets so violent and out of control that the artist loses control of their own fans, who then turn around and harm the artist. Artists fanning their stans’ violence is something I’m totally against.

I have Apple Music and Spotify, I think they’re both peculiar in their own way. I need to try YouTube Music. As much as I love music, I have a fear of sharing my taste with a new audience. Please don’t pass me the aux, I will, in fact, disappoint you. My genre isn’t a straight path; it’s high, low, and high again. But I take my DJ tasks very seriously. I love a good playlist or music session, and I take that job seriously. I think it comes from a kind of PTSD around rejection of my music taste I’ve been through it. To be fair, I’ve hated other people’s music taste too.

There’s a recent pandemic of AI music, especially on Spotify it funnels in mostly from TikTok. I went down that rabbit hole once and found people managing multiple AI artists, even ones singing in African languages with local lyrics. Something about that feels so dystopian, but it’s catchy, especially when it goes viral on TikTok. I think I’m one of those people who doesn’t want to accept the technology. I also hate that we don’t own music anymore we rent it from the music companies. I feel like there’s a better way to do this than how we’re doing it right now.

Lately, I have days where music overstimulates me, no matter the genre, and I almost cry. Any little sound feels like my brain is on fire, and I need to breathe and if you know me, you’d know that’s one of the worst things that could happen to me. Even the tiniest sounds stress me out; everything is just too much. I miss experiencing the joy music used to bring me. I think one of the biggest signs that my mental health was slipping was my inability to listen to songs.

It’s getting better.

I know I am fighting an episode. But knowing that, self-awareness does not suddenly make me feel better about it.

My business is struggling. Everybody quit on me last month. To be fair, it is mostly my fault. The structure is missing. I have had a horrible time managing my people skills, coordinating, my mental health, and still trying to show up. I stretched myself thin until I snapped, completely unprovoked.

I know all my triggers, you would think i would avoid them. I was already very overstimulated from the Lagos trip I took for my business, i maxed out on all my social batteries and inverter. To be fair, it was a very eye-opening experience and I am very grateful for the exposure I managed to have. But I needed a bit of time to recalibrate.

Instead, I went and did what I do best: started something. I had a horrible trauma recollection, confronted the cause, and it went in the most horrible way you can think of. Whatever was left of my mental health worsened. Nightmares I had not had in years returned. I cannot fully speak to how deeply it affected me mostly because I have not processed it. I am just more embarrassed that she is still capable of breaking my heart. There is something almost rewarding and soothing about tugging on a wound that is trying to heal, or a sore muscle there is this familiar ache in it.

The world kept ending for me almost every day. I kept contemplating ending my life every morning, while still making worse decisions. A stage i felt i have moved on from. For the greater part of these, i am very embarrassed i am dealing with this kind of problems. I somehow managed to break out of it at the last minute for my birthday, and I was so grateful even though I wished I had snapped out of it faster. I had to rush all my birthday plans at the very last minute. I would never do that again, because of how unplanned and disheveled everything was. I regretted so many things about the way I did them. I am grateful for my friends who held my hands.

Got drunk, blacked out I cannot remember parts of the night. Something about losing that much on three cocktails didn’t make sense; the symptoms felt less like drinking and more like my drinks were spiked, though I cannot say for certain. Somehow, my mental health deteriorated even further. Let me paint a picture of how bad it can get: not leaving my bed for days, not eating, not socialising, no strength to exist, not responding to anything, self-harm, no hygiene. Et cetera.

Every day, I hope to wake up and feel better so I can fight the world. I keep trying to remind myself to be graceful with myself but at the same time, I am reminded of the harsh reality that life is not stopping for me. Things are happening, and I keep holding myself back. I have had a collection shot since May and until now I have not gone through the pictures.

My major goal is to build a proper structure around my life where nothing is at a standstill if I am not showing up. I think that is my greatest task right now, the one I am currently struggling with especially how to expand sustainably. The more I advance, the more problems I encounter.

I like the concept of taking every day step by step. I like the concept of tomorrow, of sleeping to avoid your problems. Hope keeps me going a lot. I have not always known what to do with a new day. I have wasted them, let them sit on the counter until they went soft. I have also clung to them with both hands. I am still learning which days require which response. Maybe all of them require both.

The world has ended for me many times. I am still a little surprised each time it begins again — and that surprise, I think, is the closest thing I have to gratitude.

I no longer need it to mean something. The beginning, I mean. I used to want it to matter so much, a fresh start. I wanted the new day to say: here is what the previous ending was for. Now I take the day more plainly. It is here. I am in it. Something small will probably happen, tea getting cold, a sentence that comes out right, a laugh at the wrong moment. I might overreact, make mistakes, complain but the most important thing is that I get things done and learn along the way.

The world ends. The world begins. I am learning to hold both facts in the same hand.

This essay is an attempt to get me to stand up, snap out of everything, and start figuring things out again. Even though I know it is not a one-day job — I am also somewhat upset it is taking me this long to figure it out. Trust the process, I guess.

I think I am at the point where I am transitioning from one stage of my life to another, and everything is not fully aligned yet.

I think the part I hate the most is losing friends and relationships I thought would be here forever. Closing chapters without the exact closure i seek.

I sometimes grieve my former self while simultaneously trying to find my new self. I struggle with the nostalgia and attachment of it all, while still navigating the present moment of stillness and a loneliness I did not expect.

My opinions on life are even changing. I am evolving, my views are expanding. I am faced with different challenges and realities I did not even consider existed before. I keep having opinions that seem outright against every normal person’s lifestyle. I feel odd on many days.

My anxiety is at its most numbing peak. It is hindering my daily activities and finishing off what little will to live I have left. I am hitting new heights of vulnerability that has been very distressing for me.

I am also trying to figure out the type of adult I want to be. Who I truly want to be, and how I can truly be my most authentic self.

I am taking it step by step, allowing myself to make mistakes and forgiving myself.

But let us just say I am tired. Tired of complaining, tired of figuring it out.

Tired.

I will try again tomorrow.

Now I have to stand up and show up.

p.s i have less than 30 minutes to get to my friends place, i like the concept of friendships.

I like girls. Not as a confession, not as a disclaimer, not as something whispered at the edge of something but as a simple, warm, unremarkable fact.

I never came out to anyone. I never asked for permission, except from the first girl I kissed consensually who almost ran me mad. That is actually my best summary of the whole thing: liking girls is maddening. And I mean that with the most affection I have ever had for anything.

I think about the girls I was in love with before I had language for what love between girls could even mean. The girl I borrowed money from my parents to buy the entire Hannah Montana set for who did not even regard it. The ones whose approval I wanted so badly and so secretly throughout secondary school that I would have done almost anything to get it. I was knee-deep in compulsory cishet life and didn't even think I had the power or the will to like who I actually wanted. The feeling was just there, living in me, unnamed, burning quietly.

For a long time, liking girls felt like carrying something heavy in a bag you were not supposed to let anyone see inside.

There is a particular loneliness that comes with growing up Nigerian and knowing this about yourself. It is not just the fear though the fear is real, and it is big, and it has teeth. It is the isolation that is the worst for me. It is also losing friends and family that you thought would always be there for you to the disgusting homophobia.

There was no one in my family who had walked this road before me. Or if they had, they had walked it in perfect silence and left nothing behind for me to find. No book in our house reflected this. No aunty pulled me aside and said: I see you. I know. It is okay. The world I grew up in had simply decided that girls like me did not exist — or if we existed, we were an abomination, the way my pastor preached it.

But that never made sense to me, even then. Every sin I could identify in the Bible caused harm to someone. I could not square the logic of queerness as sin from the jump. The problem is that at that age, I did not want to be the outlier. So I conformed. I smiled at the right times. I wore the right clothes. I laughed at the jokes that made my stomach hurt. I let boys approach me at parties and performed something that looked enough like interest that no one looked closer.

I became very good at not being seen.

And eventually whenever it spilled out whenever I spoke about liking women, especially around men it always became fetishized so fast. The way it got sexualized, the way we became entertainment. By we I mean women. That part upset me more than almost anything else.

But this essay is about the joy. I promised myself that. So let me tell you what the joy actually feels like.

Liking girls is noticing the tiny things a girl does that excite you without her even trying. It is watching out of love but also out of pure admiration. It affects your whole mood. The funniest part is you might never even know if she likes girls. That particular helplessness half-wonderful and half-terrifying does not go away no matter how much you grow up. You just learn to live inside it.

I like all types of girls. Masculine, feminine, emo, fairy, Black, white, trans girls, every type, i love girlhood, I like watching how girls exist. i like girls that don’t conform, radical, interesting girls. The beauty in the diversity of how we look, how we move, how we take up space. There is a unique warmth in the way girls connect with each other the emotional depth, the shared references, the way a conversation can shift from soul-baring to hysterically funny over something completely trivial in under thirty seconds. I like spending time with girls. I enjoy it even when we are doing the most mundane thing. Even if we are just sitting and staring at a wall together.

It is finding certain women funny in a way that feels physical. It is the strange loyalty of female friendship, which is its own kind of love, and sometimes you are not entirely sure where one kind ends and another begins and maybe that is okay.

It is admiring women who are brave, or sharp, or soft, or strange. It is rooting for them in rooms where they are outnumbered. It is the specific pleasure of watching a woman be brilliant and feeling something ignite in you pride, maybe, or recognition, or something closer to awe.

Liking girls pushed me outside of every traditional heteronormative expectation I had absorbed. Dating became an open canvas. There are no pre-assigned roles of who pays, who initiates, who takes care of whom. You build something based entirely on who you both actually are. I love that. I love it so much except when I meet girls still struggling with their own heteronormativity. Key takeaway: you cannot change them. Do not try.

My experience of liking girls came entirely from real life. There was no book, no film, no representation nothing outside of lesbianism as sin in my simple church-girl existence. I had to navigate it alone, and it was hard. Almost all my heartbreak with women nearly broke me, genuinely. With men I never really cared much because I realized, eventually, that I never really liked men. But with women it is the closest thing to madness I have ever experienced. And I would not trade it for anything regardless.

Grateful for the specific softness that comes with loving women their complexity, their resilience, the way they hold things together and fall apart and hold things together again. Grateful for the friendships that taught me what intimacy could look like before romance ever showed me.

Liking girls has made me more attentive. More tender. More radical. More willing to sit with things that are hard to name. The closest word I have for what it gives me is warm. Just warm.

I am also not going to romanticise it into something it is not. Women are people with agency and we can be horrible too. There are women who perform queerness for men. Women who hurt and gaslight and disappear. I have met them. Life is not automatically rosier with women, and I hate the idea that a bad experience with a man should send you toward women like we are a soft landing. We are equally capable of harm. The ratio might differ but the capacity is there.

One of the most freeing conversations I have ever had was with my mother, last year. I think something shifted in me that day.

For the longest time I believed I would not be able to live my actual life until my parents were gone. The shame felt that total, that final. And then one random day, my mother asked. Casually, the way she might ask about anything. And I answered honestly. And it went so much better than I had spent years imagining.

It was almost funny. All that time I had been rehearsing a tragedy that never arrived.

I am out to my parents now. My deeply Deeper Life parents did not die. They are still here. I want to say clearly: do not try this at home, results will vary, read the room, know your situation. But for me it was one of the best things that has ever happened, because I feel free in a way I did not know I was allowed to feel. Free to build the life I actually want.

And then there is my baby.

I think I have never really liked anyone the way I like her. Not really. Because I have never scratched any depth of myself the way I do with her. She pays attention to me. She wants to understand me not a version of me, not the performed me, but me at every point. I like liking her so much. She inspires me to become a better version of myself every day and even if I wasn't her lover right now I would be her friend.

Side note I really dislike coming out culture. I do not need a grand announcement. I do not require your approval. Liking girls is just a fact about my life, as ordinary and as extraordinary as any other fact about me. But I also understand why it is celebrated.

And if you are someone who knows this feeling I want you to know that you are so loved. Not in spite of this part of you but because of the fullness of you, all of it, including the part that lights up for girls. I hope you get to experience it without shame, without performance, without shrinking. I hope you find your person and I hope she looks at you like you are the whole point. You deserve softness. You deserve the madness of it. You deserve every single bit of the joy.

Happiest Pride Month to all the queers, the gays and everyone that is still figuring out their sexuality and identity, you matter and you’re valid.

I hope you never lose your spark. And if you lose it, find it fast.

p.s this is my first essay in a longest while, everyone clap.

As a skinny girl who was not conventionally attractive, socially inexperienced from a rigorous religious background that had kept me socially isolated, and carrying the particular awkwardness of someone who had been told, in a thousand quiet ways, that the world outside her household was something to be feared and avoided being liked felt like the only currency I had. I became a people pleaser with a deep, almost constitutional need for acceptance. What I did not understand then was that I was setting myself up to spend years in rooms full of people, feeling completely alone.

When your need for acceptance is that deep, you do not choose friends so much as you attach yourself to anyone who will have you. You do not evaluate whether a person is good for you, you are simply grateful they are there. You make yourself useful. You make yourself agreeable. You sand down the parts of yourself that might create friction and you present the smoothest possible surface, hoping that if you are easy enough, pleasant enough, undemanding enough, the acceptance will hold.

It does not hold. Or rather, it holds, but only as long as you keep paying for it. The moment you have a need of your own, or an opinion that creates inconvenience, or a moment of genuine self-expression that takes up more space than expected, you discover how conditional the whole arrangement was. People pleasers attract a specific kind of person: not the ones who value you, but the ones who value your compliance. And those people are not interested in you. They are interested in what you do for them. The distinction, when you finally see it, is devastating.

It is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from overwork or poor sleep. It comes from spending sustained time with people who do not like you, not truly and pretending not to notice. It is the tiredness of monitoring yourself in rooms where you should feel free. Of laughing a little too quickly at jokes aimed at you. Of shrinking, adjusting, justifying, and returning anyway, because leaving feels more frightening than staying somewhere you are quietly unwelcome. Many of us have lived in that exhaustion for so long that we have mistaken it for just the way things are. It is not. It is the cost of abandoning yourself in the hope that someone else will choose you.

I spent years not seeing it. Or more accurately seeing it, half-seeing it, feeling it in my body before I could name it in my mind, and then talking myself out of what I sensed because the alternative was to admit that what I had worked so hard to build was not what I thought it was. It is extraordinary, the amount of evidence you can ignore when the truth is too costly to accept.

Self-love gets spoken about so often and so loosely that it has lost much of its weight. It has been flattened into bubble baths and affirmations and vision boards as though loving yourself is primarily a private, decorative act. But one of the most concrete expressions of self-love is relational: it is the decision about who you allow close to you. And one of the most radical things you can do for yourself is to stop seeking the approval of people who have already decided they do not value you.

People who dislike you seldom say so to your face, at least not in the early stages. What they do instead is more subtle and, in many ways, more corrosive. They make backhanded compliments that leave you confused about whether you were just insulted. They exclude you from things and offer explanations that almost make sense. They are enthusiastic about your failures and lukewarm about your wins. They remember, with striking accuracy, every mistake you have made, and forget, with equal consistency, everything you have done well. They give you advice that, on reflection, was never really in your interest. They perform friendship while withholding the actual substance of it. And it is never sudden in fact, these people can be remarkably warm at first, sometimes they even come as fans. The mask comes off slowly, and by the time it does, you are already invested.

The insidious thing about this kind of dislike is that it is designed consciously or not to make you doubt your own perception. When you name it, you are told you are oversensitive. When you pull back, you are accused of being difficult. The gaslighting is often the point. If you can be made to distrust your own reading of the situation, you will keep showing up and absorbing the treatment without complaint. You become easier to keep around and easier to use. Recognizing this pattern is not paranoia. It is clarity.

In romantic relationships, this dynamic is amplified in ways that are uniquely destabilizing, because the stakes are higher and the intimacy runs deeper. People say ‘marry your friend’, ‘date someone who likes you’ but nobody intentionally dates their enemy. It is always a gradual process. A partner who does not truly value you has access to information your insecurities, your history, your fears, your softest places that a distant acquaintance does not. And in the wrong hands, that access does not become tenderness. It becomes leverage. The contempt that a friend might express through exclusion or cold politeness, a romantic partner expresses through comparison: you are measured, constantly and unfavorably, against other women. Against an ex. Against some ideal version of you that you are always just falling short of. Against a standard that shifts precisely whenever you get close to meeting it, because the point was never the standard the point was to keep you reaching.

Romantic contempt is also uniquely effective at disguising itself as love, because the gestures of love, the gifts, the grand moments, the declarations can coexist entirely with a fundamental disregard for who you actually are. A person can take you on holiday and still speak to you in a way that quietly communicates that you are lucky to be there. They can tell you they love you and still flinch when you succeed at something they have not. They can want you around your warmth, your labour, your body, your loyalty without actually liking you. Wanting someone and valuing someone are not the same thing, and a relationship built on the former without the latter is one of the loneliest places a person can inhabit.

What makes it hardest to leave is that you are not just walking away from a person you are walking away from the version of the relationship that existed in good moments, and from the future you had already half-built in your imagination. You are leaving a home, even if that home was never fully safe. And the person who does not value you often understands this intuitively. They know that after every rupture, the fantasy of reconciliation is powerful enough to pull you back. So the cycle continues: the contempt, the doubt, the rupture, the apology, the brief restoration of the good version, and then the slow return of everything that made you feel small. Each cycle costs a little more than the last. Each return makes it harder to trust your own perception of what is actually happening to you. I will say this: journaling helps. Writing down what you feel as it happens gives you a record your memory cannot revise. It is hard to gaslight yourself when the evidence is in your own handwriting

Loving yourself enough to leave or never to stay in the first place is not about being hardened or unromantic. It is about understanding that genuine love does not require you to consistently defend your worth to the person who is supposed to see it most clearly. You should not have to make a case for yourself in your own relationship. You should not leave every difficult conversation feeling smaller than when you entered it. You should not lie awake parsing words and expressions, trying to determine whether the person next to you actually respects you. That particular uncertainty is not a normal feature of love.

The harm did not come all at once. It rarely does. It came in accumulation in the backhanded compliments I laughed off, in the exclusions I rationalized, in the conversations that left me feeling inexplicably smaller than when they began. It came in the friends who were warm when they needed me and distant when they did not. In the relationships where I confused someone wanting me around with someone valuing who I was and slowly, quietly, began to see myself through the eyes of people who did not see me well.

That is perhaps the most dangerous thing that happens when you stay too long in the wrong company. It is not just that they treat you poorly. It is that you begin to absorb their assessment of you. You start to wonder if the problem is your hair, your body, your presentation, your personality. You start to work harder spending more, performing more, adjusting more trying to close a gap that was never really about you in the first place. The diminishment gets internalized. And once it is inside, it is far harder to displace than it was to receive.

Staying is almost always more complicated than it appears from the outside. As a gay Black feminist woman, I had convinced myself at various points that this was simply all I could get. That it did not get better than this. That I just had to cope and manage without becoming the confrontational person. I did not stay in diminishing friendships and relationships because I was foolish or lacking in dignity. I stayed because of history years of investment that felt too significant to walk away from. I stayed because of shared social circles, where leaving one person meant navigating the fallout with everyone else. I stayed because I had been taught, early and repeatedly, that needing to be liked was a weakness to be managed rather than a signal to be honored. I stayed because I had confused longevity with loyalty, and proximity with love.

There is also something deeper at work. Many of us were never shown what it looks like to be genuinely chosen. If you grew up in an environment where love was conditional where affection had to be performed for and earned, where your presence was tolerated rather than celebrated then relationships that merely tolerate you can feel familiar enough to register as safe. Familiarity and safety are not the same thing. A cage you have lived in for years is still a cage.

The breaking point, for me, was not an explosion. It was a quiet accumulation of noticing. And then eventually, slowly a decision to start trusting what I noticed. Sometimes, There was no single moment. I want to be honest about that, because I think we often wait for a dramatic enough rupture to justify leaving a betrayal so obvious that no one could question it, a cruelty so visible that we do not have to defend our decision to walk away. But most of the time, it is quieter than that.

It is a Tuesday afternoon when you realize you have been dreading a phone call from someone who is supposed to be your friend. It is looking at the guest list for your own birthday and noticing that you feel safer with certain people not there. It is lying awake at night doing the calculations “what did she mean by that?”, “was it intentional?”, “should I say something, will I sound oversensitive?” and realising you have been doing those calculations for years, and you are exhausted.

For Black women especially, the pressure to remain likeable and accommodating even to people who show them contempt is not just personal. It is cultural and political. Black women are expected to be endlessly available, emotionally generous, and slow to name harm when it is done to them. Anger is coded as aggression. Boundaries are coded as attitude. Leaving is coded as abandonment or betrayal. These are not neutral social expectations. They are mechanisms of control that ensure Black women continue to give far more than they receive, and continue to absorb treatment they would never accept from someone they genuinely valued.

To say I love myself too much to surround myself with people that hate me is therefore not simply a personal preference. It is a refusal to perform self-erasure for the comfort of people who benefit from your presence without reciprocating it. It is saying: my company has value, my energy has value, my time has value and I will not continue to give those things to people who have demonstrated, consistently, that they do not agree.

Loving yourself enough to curate your company is harder than it sounds. Leaving is not relief, at least not at first. There is grief in it real, disorienting grief and if nobody warned you about this, you might mistake the grief for evidence that you made the wrong decision. You did not. Grief is simply the honest cost of having cared, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than rushed through. You grieve the version of the relationship you hoped you were in. You grieve the person you thought you knew, or the person you hoped they would eventually become. You grieve the relationship you thought you had. You grieve the version of the person you believed in. You grieve the social world that was built around them the shared circles, the events, the sense of belonging that came as part of the package. You grieve, sometimes, an earlier version of yourself: the one who did not yet know, who was still innocent of the specific disappointment you now carry. That grief is legitimate. It does not cancel out the rightness of the decision. It means you cared, and that caring is not something to be ashamed of.

What helped me was this: I stopped trying to fast-forward through the hard parts and started sitting with what I actually felt. Journaling was a significant part of that. There is something clarifying about putting your thoughts in writing it creates a record that your memory, which is vulnerable to hope and revision, cannot easily overwrite. When you have written down what happened and how it made you feel, it is harder to talk yourself back into something your own words have already condemned.

What it also requires is self-honesty. Not every relationship that ended badly was entirely the other person’s fault. Sometimes we stay because we are afraid of solitude. Sometimes we tolerate what we tolerate because the alternative requires us to sit with ourselves, and that feels harder. Loving yourself is not about positioning yourself as a perpetual victim of other people's smallness. It is about examining, honestly, what you have accepted and why, and deciding you are no longer willing to accept it.

It also requires you to raise your baseline. Many people do not actually know what it feels like to be in the company of someone who genuinely likes them who is happy when you succeed, who holds your confidence carefully, who tells you the truth without using truth as a weapon, who does not assume bad faith, who gives you the benefit of the doubt, who does not need you to be smaller so they can feel larger. Once you have experienced that quality of connection, the alternative becomes genuinely intolerable. Part of the work of self-love is deliberately exposing yourself to it — so that your nervous system learns to recognize it as the standard, not the exception.

One of the most disorienting things about healing from a long pattern of poor relationships is that genuine care, when you first encounter it, feels unfamiliar. Almost suspicious. Someone who is simply and consistently kind to you who is happy when you succeed, who does not require you to shrink, who tells you the truth without wielding it, who extends benefit of the doubt as a matter of course can feel, at first, like they must want something. Because in your previous experience, warmth was always transactional. It always preceded a cost.

Learning to receive genuine care without bracing for the catch is its own kind of work. Your nervous system has been trained to treat love as something that must be earned and maintained through continuous performance, and it does not unlearn that quickly. It takes time, and patience with yourself, and the willingness to stay in the discomfort of being seen without immediately deflecting or minimizing or working to justify your right to take up space.

But once you have felt it real friendships, real love, real connection with people who actually see you and are glad they do you cannot unknow it. The standard shifts permanently. What you previously accepted as normal becomes recognizable for what it was, and you find you no longer have the appetite for it.

There is a fear, embedded in many of us, that choosing ourselves means ending up alone and for me that fear had a very specific face: it looked like going back to the loneliness of my childhood, to the years before I had any friends at all. That fear should be examined rather than obeyed. The loneliness of being surrounded by people who do not see you is a far colder and more disorienting experience than the solitude of being alone and at peace with yourself. One is absence. The other is a slow, quiet erasure.

The loneliness I sometimes feel now, in a life that is more carefully curated and more genuinely mine, is nothing like the loneliness I felt when I was surrounded by people who did not really like me. That loneliness was a specific kind of cold the cold of being invisible in a crowd, of performing yourself for an audience that was watching but not seeing. This is different. This is the warmth of your own company. The quiet of a life that is actually yours. It is often where you rediscover who you actually are, beneath all the accommodating and adjusting and performing. It is where your actual preferences, opinions, and desires not the ones you adopted to make yourself more palatable begin to surface again. Some of the most important work of becoming yourself happens in the spaces between people, in the quiet that most of us have been trained to fear and fill.

You are allowed to be selective. You are allowed to require that the people in your life treat you with basic kindness and consistency. You are allowed to leave situations that cost you more than they give. You are allowed to decide that your peace is worth more than avoiding the discomfort of someone else’s disappointment.

Yes, it can be lonely for a while. But with time, you build yourself and your life in such a way that you can sit with yourself. Your internal validation becomes enough. And when you eventually have people around you, they will be people who truly see you, not manage you, not remind you quietly and consistently that you were never their first choice. These days, I shut it down immediately. Every backhanded statement, every subtle dig I name it and I close the door on it. Not with drama, but with the calm certainty of someone who has already decided what she will and will not accept, i leave the room, i sit with solitude instead of filling it with people who do not deserve access to me.

I will not pretend that getting here was painless or that I have arrived somewhere perfect. Self-love is not a destination you reach and then stop working at. It is a practice, daily and sometimes difficult, of choosing yourself again and again.

People who hate you whether openly or quietly, consciously or out of their own unexamined wounds will not become people who love you simply because you are patient enough, accommodating enough, or good enough to them. That is not how it works. You cannot perform your way into being genuinely valued by someone who has already decided you are not worth valuing. And attempting to do so is one of the most expensive things you will ever do in money, in self-respect, in time, and in the compounding cost of learning, slowly, to see yourself through their eyes.

You are not for everyone. That is not a flaw. The people who are for you will not require you to shrink, perform, or beg. They will simply be glad you are there. That is the company worth keeping. Everything else is just noise you have not yet decided to stop tolerating.

p.s: i am very happy i got around to write this article because it took me a very long time to get here, But I am here now, its amazing here and I am not going back.

So strap in, because I am going to break down the political, economic, and social dimensions of Black hair, and explain why your so-called preferences are not made in a vacuum.

Hair is one of the most intimate aspects of a person's identity and daily life. For Black women, it sits at the intersection of race, class, gender, beauty standards, and colonial history. To reduce it to a trivial personal choice is to willfully ignore all of that context.

Black hair has historically encoded far more than aesthetics. Braided hair was used to keep maps, pass coded messages, and communicate locations, a survival tool, an act of resistance. This is a lineage that deserves respect and care not erasure.

A significant portion of Black people have been conditioned to hate their own features and their hair is no exception. Black natural hair is constantly framed as low class, unhygienic, unkempt, or unprofessional. The result is that many Black women, from a very young age, learn that their hair in its natural state is insufficient.

“Having your hair done” as a Black girl has come to mean that something must be added to it a sew-in, braids with extensions. Our natural hair is treated as an incomplete foundation rather than a finished look in itself. There are socially acceptable Black hairstyles: the presentable kind. And this deeply distorted standard is being passed down to the next generation.

Hairstyles with cultural roots are being forgotten. Black Hair care and tutorials used to be passed from generations to generations, mothers making their daughters hair and all that culture is currently being lost because most mothers can’t take care of their own natural hair. Many Black people including Black hairstylists, do not know how to properly care for natural Black hair, particularly its thicker textures. Stylists will sometimes complain openly when they see a thicker hair type, or charge more for it, which is quietly sinister. It is not your fault your hair is thicker. You don’t need a gallon of gel that leaves your hair flaky for weeks; Skilled Black hairstylists of previous generations could hold hair down neatly without them.

Tutorials, care guides, and products overwhelmingly cater to wigs and weaves. Most of us were never taught to comb, wash, or detangle our natural hair properly, because our natural hair was simply a base layer for whatever was being installed on top of it. The resources for natural hair exist, but the cultural emphasis is almost entirely directed elsewhere and its very intentional.

Hair is a class indicator. Affordable hairstyles synthetic hair, braided wigs, for instance are routinely branded as tacky or cheap or mocked as “sponges.” People record strangers whose wigs don’t meet an unspoken aesthetic standard, posting the footage online to troll them. The only socially acceptable wig is human hair, which comes at a significant human cost.

Wig vendors travel to impoverished Asian villages, shave the hair of young women and girls for pennies, film the process further humiliating these women under the guise of proving authenticity and then market and sell that hair at exorbitant prices. This is pure exploitation.

Hair type and price have become markers of social status. The quality and cost of your wig signal your class position. Poor women aspire to afford it; wealthy women spend extravagantly on it. Much of this hair has no resale value once purchased. You are treated differently based on your hair, and a disturbing amount of content exists where influencers publicly boast about what they spent. Women who wear wigs are stereotyped as high-maintenance, and women who wear synthetic or affordable options are coded as low class.

There is also an obsession with making hair look as though it grows from the scalp hence the proliferation of different lace front styles. Women whose lace lifts or shifts are ridiculed mercilessly. And increasingly, even traditionally natural styles like braids now require human hair extensions to be considered socially acceptable what Twitter has aptly termed the "bussdown-ification" of braids.

We have been taught to hate our natural features. The obsession with laid edges contributes to traction alopecia. Tight hairstyles, daily edge brushing, and drying edge control products are damaging hairlines quietly and consistently. Weaves and adhesives have real cumulative effects on scalp and hair health. Relaxers have been linked to uterine cancer and fibroids this is not speculation, it is documented.

Disliking your own features is not emotionally neutral. Experiencing anxiety because you have not installed your wig, or having your mood significantly impacted by your hair’s appearance, is a symptom of internalized beauty standards and sometimes misogyny with real psychological costs.

i’d go further and say, Natural hair is perceived more positively when the person wearing it fits other conventional beauty standards a specific body type, certain facial features. Women who are not deemed conventionally attractive are penalized doubly. A good example is how low-cut hair on women is generally not accepted in many Black communities. It is, in fact, weaponized as a humiliation ritual: a girl misbehaves, and her head is shaved as punishment. Widows are made to shave their heads in mourning. Yet somehow, that same cut is praised, romanticized, desired or even in some cases fetishized when it is paired with a body that has already been approved, i.e a “fat ass” is the only thing that makes a low cut acceptable on a woman.

Desirability has always been weaponised to keep certain women striving harder, spending more, and shrinking themselves to earn basic social acceptance. Hair is simply one of the most visible battlegrounds for this.

The deeper and more uncomfortable truth is that desirability politics also explains why so many Black women police each other’s hair. When your own access to social capital, romantic attention, and professional opportunity has historically depended on how closely you approximate a certain standard, you develop a survival instinct around it. You start to enforce the standard, even on people who never agreed to it, because deviation threatens the fragile acceptance you have worked to earn. This is not solidarity it is internalized hierarchy. And until we name it clearly, we will keep punishing each other for the crime of simply existing in our own hair.

Whenever a Black woman speaks up about this, she’s termed “aggressive” or “problematic”

It is also worth saying: Blue Ivy Carter, a child, was repeatedly ridiculed for the texture of her natural 4C hair. That is not a an isolated accident. Children have been bullied over time for wearing their hair or even trying new styles with their hair. That is the community expressing inherited self-hatred in real time.

Men and boys are not left out of the conversation too, Dreadlocks were, until quite recently, stereotypically linked to criminality. Black men were harassed and punished because of their hair. The only accepted hairstyle for men is lowcut or bald heads, and again there’s something incredibly sinister and humiliating about making black people shave their heads.

In African communities, the influence of colonialism on hair politics remains severe and largely unexamined.

In many Nigerian institutions, locs are still a punishable offence. Police have arrested people solely for their locs. Schools compulsorily shave children’s heads. There is also the baffling and deeply patriarchal belief that allowing a girl to grow her hair will somehow distract her from her studies.

I saw a girl on TikTok who shared her experience on how she was formally queried at the Nigerian Law School for wearing her hair as an afro. Even in African institutions, the hair deemed “presentable” is slicked back and tightly packed into a bun. It’s respectability politics at its peak: your hair is only "presentable" if it’s slicked back into a tight But what happens when your hair is too short to pack? And what, exactly, is unpresentable about an afro?

We live in a world where the default for professionalism and neatness is rooted in European aesthetics. In many sectors and industries, female staff are informally or formally mandated to wear wigs. The socioeconomic impact is direct: a significant portion of their income goes towards purchasing and maintaining wigs and their associated products money that could have been directed towards other necessities. This keeps women meaningfully poorer. Poorer women are penalized for failing to meet beauty standards they cannot afford. Women are rejected from jobs, queried, or dismissed for wearing their own hair. The illusion of choice does real material harm.

There is a persistent myth that wigs are simpler to manage than natural hair but are they really? The reality is that they require comparable if not more labour and money. Consider what maintaining a wig actually involves: braiding your own hair first, installing the wig precisely enough that the lace does not lift, using a hot comb to keep it flat, constant straightening or curling, and carrying a comb or brush in your bag throughout the day. The time and cost are significant and often undercounted.

I speak from personal experience. I have a wardrobe full of wigs that I do not wear. I do not wear them because of sensory issues the heat, the weight, the process of installation. I have only ever installed a wig once and removed it almost immediately. People have assumed this means I cannot afford them. In reality, I spend considerably more on quality natural hair care and salons that handle natural hair properly. I gave most of my wigs away. But I cannot pretend I have not noticed the difference in how I am treated on the days I wore them versus the days I showed up in my natural hair. That difference is real, it is consistent, and it is the point.

I’ve had ex-friends make backhanded statements about my hair, even refusing to invite me to functions because I "present a certain way." People have told me to my face to "get a wig to look better." For my 25th birthday, my makeup artist spent the whole session complaining because I chose to wear my natural hair in a ponytail instead of a wig.

Let me be direct: the choices we make about our hair are not made freely. Identity is not lived in a vacuum, and neither is beauty. What people want to do is shaped by what they are allowed to do, what they are rewarded for, and what they are punished for. There has been decades of deliberate social engineering and a great deal of money invested in creating and maintaining the insecurity of Black women towards their own features. The human hair industry and the Black hair extension market are worth billions. The choice you believe you are making freely is, in many cases, a coerced one.

Yes, insulting and shaming women for their hair choices will not produce real change. That said, it is not the responsibility of women who wear their natural hair to patiently educate everyone else. Many of them have been severely bullied for years and they still show up as they are. If they are sometimes sharp in their responses, that is not a character flaw; it is context. The resources to learn about and embrace natural Black hair exist. If you can find tutorials on how to install and maintain a wig, you can find guidance on caring for your own hair. There is no secret key. You just have to wear it, and you hold the line when people push back. Your hair shrinking is not a flaw; it is a characteristic.

My dream is a world where Black women can wake up, wash, condition, and walk out of the door without feeling the need to make their hair “presentable.” A world where natural hair is not something to be worn in private but brought out for weddings, graduations, birthdays, and boardrooms without apology.

I want to see Black women experiment more with their natural hair: try locs, try a shave, add beads, cowries, charms, and African accessories, try bolder cuts and styles. I want more natural Black hair in mainstream media shoutout to Tems and Ayra Starr for showing up as they are.

Stop trolling Black women for wearing their own hair and start focusing on content that doesn't glorify exploitation. Interrogate your own assumptions. Ask yourself honestly: why do I do what I do? Who does it serve? Acknowledge your role in this conversation.

At the end of the day, some women will continue to wear wigs, and that is their right. But wigs should be one option among many not the dominant, near-mandatory choice for Black women who want to be taken seriously. When you do buy wigs, consider buying textures closer to your own. Be the change you want to see. Leave bone-straights alone. Sit with yourself and your reflection honestly.

We are all, to varying degrees, victims of the same system. The work is to recognize that, and to dismantle it together.

Shoutout to the Black creator sshoz on tiktok who restarted this conversation despite the bullying and backlash she faced. This discourse matters so much and i hope we never stop talking about it.

p.s this is probably the most serious i have ever sounded on this app and it’s because it’s such a serious subject for me.

I feel exceptionally guilty today because I didn't do anything significant work-wise. In fact, I have fallen behind on all my goals for this year. Yes, I track my progress every week, and with the first quarter almost over, time feels like it’s slipping away. To be fair, I was sick the entire weekend—if you're new here, my period is an entire sickness—but I didn't work for four days, and the backlog is starting to pile up. I’m torn between giving myself grace because it’s draining and beating myself up because I should have planned better.

I had a very good month in February, and replicating it in March has been so difficult. I feel that tiredness I always get when things start working out. I haven't been able to keep up with my friends as much as I’d love to; I am very overwhelmed. I haven't even been journaling every day as planned. In fact, that YouTube account I said I would start? Zero progress.

When I said I had a good month in February, let me explain: I launched our first “edit” of the year with themes of friendship, girlhood, and the girls who won’t leave your side. The edit was an ode to female friendship. It was some of my finest work. I handled almost everything: production, styling, creative direction, and makeup (though my friend/model did her own). It was such a low-budget shoot, yet it’s doing beautifully—three best-selling outfits out of four is a high success rate.

It also gave me clarity on how I want my brand, ByOre, to be seen: black joy, African pride, and young, black, queer people in vibrant colors, showcasing gender fluidity and the artisanal design of handmade fiber clothing. I know I have a long way to go, but I love the representation of happy queer Black people so much. I didn’t see a lot of that growing up in Nigeria, and I want to change that in my own little way while still making money in this capitalist society.

Someone asked me last month if I ever let myself celebrate things or enjoy my wins. In all honesty, no. It’s always on to the next thing. I feel relief more than happiness—relieved to be done with a task, but immediately anxious about the next one. One of my goals this year was to do something nice for myself every month, and let’s just say I am not doing well at all. On the other hand, I am kinder to myself; I haven’t been mean or berating lately, so that’s a win of some sort.

However, my eating habits have been horrible. I’m back to going days without eating anything significant. My multivitamins don’t seem to be working, or maybe my anxiety has overridden my appetite. I’ve been working a minimum of 10 hours per day, and it’s about to get worse because prep has started for SS26.

As for my “side quests”? Zero progress there, too. For example, I planned to start tennis properly again, but going out has been hectic. The Abuja sun is 40°C and above, which doesn’t make it easier. I don’t want to be sunburnt or sweating like a goat; even for swimming, the same excuses apply.

When it comes to writing, the excuses are brand new. I’ve been running away from what it feels like to air my soul because I’ve been unpacking many emotions I tucked neatly away. Let me tell you one I recently unpacked: it’s very easy to be friends with someone who detests you—or even to date them. There’s a saying, “date people who like you,” and in my head, I always thought, who intentionally dates their opps? But after some recent introspection, I realized it’s very easy to be surrounded by people who hate you, especially when you hate yourself or haven’t fully accepted yourself.

In my case with the "friends" that hated me, it was a lot of unsolicited opinions, backhanded statements, and being shouted at both publicly and privately, all masked as "care." Now I’m in a much better headspace with friends who wholeheartedly love me, and I am realizing how not normal a lot of the things I went through were. I hate it when those tucked-away emotions hit me on a random day and I have to sit with them. But I’ve realized healing comes from sitting with everything, even when it’s uncomfortable.

I am very anxious about a lot of things this year. I feel like this is my last chance to turn my life around, and that’s putting a lot of pressure on me. Mind you, nobody forced this on me; it’s an optional decision. But how am I going to operate a functional atelier if I don’t work for it? For every moment I didn’t do what I planned, I have a reason, but most of the time those reasons sound like excuses.

What’s the point of this piece? I just came here to hold myself accountable. I want to do better. I am going to spend this week creating better timelines and schedules for myself, figuring out how I am going to achieve everything I set out to do without burning out. Writing makes everything feel realer. As my bio says, I am just here to talk to myself.

Thank you for reading.

I think my next article will be “Who Dates Their Opps?”

p.s its every day i am always figuring out something new… call me the figurine (please laugh): )

I kept trying to pinpoint the exact moment I stopped putting effort into my looks, and my life by extension. I can only trace it back to when I started making so much money that nothing else mattered back when I was making millions a month. There was this nonchalance that came with my newfound confidence; a comfort in knowing you could always throw money at situations. At least, until the money finished.

I remember the first day I club-hopped in Lagos in a baggy outfit sweatpants and a tee the comfort I felt and how everyone treated me like a person. Normally, for a babe in Lagos, clubbing means showing up in the skimpiest outfit. It’s not compulsory, but prior to that day, I didn’t even think it was possible to go any other way. Money really does stop nonsense.

In retrospect, I was a very high-functioning depressed person, i didn’t even know it. Everything came tumbling down right after I finished school, but I looked better when I was depressed than when I was working through it. When I was depressed, I had something to prove; I was also in school, so the schedule and routine kept me going. My depression didn’t come from thin air, of course. I was harassed and stalked, both in person and offline—so many experiences I couldn’t process at the time. I was just moving on because that’s all I could afford to do, until one day everything came crashing down and tumbled me in the process. It heightened my anxiety so much that I was afraid to step out of my house. I was practically hiding.

Eventually, I went broke due to many reasons. But I must say: nothing good comes from hiding yourself or trying to be "mysterious," especially when you’re trying to make a name for yourself. People will forget you. Best case scenario, it takes a long time to find yourself and fit back into the lifestyle.

I have two major moods. On one hand, I like being naked. I like being the center of attention in any room I step into. I like being a tease, putting on a show, and having an audience; the thrill is almost addictive. On the other hand, I hate the attention, the objectification, and the real-life impact of being a hottie. It’s like you become a product. Getting male attention is especially irritating when my target audience is women. I’ll have moments where I hate being seen or touched; I’ll wear the baggiest fits just to disappear in them, hiding my body and myself. Sometimes I don’t leave my house for weeks or months because I’m still recovering from an outing where a man touched me without my consent, making my skin break out in hives. Yes, I am literally allergic to random touches. Or some random person tried to video me without my consent to troll me online—it doesn’t help that I’m somewhat popular.

I also suffered nerve damage that crippled me for a while. Ever since, I haven’t been able to walk in any of the heels I own, which is a problem because 97% of my shoes are heels. I have to build a new wardrobe from scratch. (If any glucose guardians are seeing this, please send new shoes!)

But let’s be clear: this new wardrobe isn’t about mindlessly filling a closet. My fashion and lifestyle are fundamentally anti-consumerist. I’m not interested in the cycle of buying things just to discard them next month. For me, the thrill isn’t in the “newness” provided by a corporation; it’s in the soul of the piece. its styling a piece in various ways. I want to invest in craftsmanship, in African designers who pour their heritage into their work, and in the magic of my own brand.

My aesthetic isn’t tied to conventional beauty standards, either. I’m not dressing to fit into a pre-approved box of what a "babe" should look like in 2026. There are so many things i don’t care for, i don’t care for shaving my legs or even my armpits, i don’t care for my edges, stretch marks or a flat tummy, or microblading my brows, i do whatever that makes me happy at every given opportunity. I am utilizing my free will as much as I want to. If I want to be naked one day and wrapped in ten layers of upcycled denim the next, that is my prerogative. My body is not a trend, and my style is not a sub-genre of a TikTok aesthetic. It is a direct reflection of my autonomy.

I got tired, overstimulated, and somewhat gave up on myself and on life. But I want to start afresh on my own terms. I want to be a fashion girlie. I want to create my own style and enjoy the art of dressing up, looking good, and feeling good. I want to create a vibe—an aesthetic—branding myself in a way that you just know it’s me. I don’t want to be invisible; I want to shine. I want to be vulnerable with my fashion and learn as I go. And if it isn’t already clear: this isn't for any man. There’s a specific satisfaction I get when I look good, and I want to feel that every day. I never want to worry about "overdressing" again because its such a useless construct.

There’s this wave of young people dressing older, more modest, and "chic," as they like to call it, but that has never appealed to me. To be honest, it feels like propaganda—another set of rules telling women how to take up less space. I love maximalism. I love nakedness. I love being a baddie and men are never going to take that word away from me. I want to look back at my 20s and know that I lived. (Mind you, I want to be a hottie until I die. You know those sexy grandmas who you just know had the time of their lives? That’s going to be me.)

I want to try new experiences and find what works for me while enjoying the process. I love shopping and thrifting—fun fact: you get the best outfits when you know how to thrift right. I love upcycling and repurposing; I love multi-purpose, custom, and one-of-one pieces I make for myself. Fashion is whatever you make of it. You can always create your own style at your own pace; the possibilities are endless.

My big plan is to create a new wardrobe. I’m going to stop shrinking myself. I want to mix styles without feeling lost and find my way back to embracing every bit of me—my body and my outfits. Since I own a fashion brand, I’m excited to make my own pieces and buy from other African designers. Almost no fast fashion. I want to be a jewelry collector, too. Fun fact: jewelry overstimulates me, but the more I try, the more I get the hang of it.

I’m going to document the whole process and enjoy the build, step-by-step, making mistakes and learning from them. I’m bringing every outfit in my head to life, one at a time. I am truly excited for this. I am proud of myself for finding a way back to me and for getting my spark back. I can’t wait to see how I evolve.

Healing definitely took its time, but dare I say... I am back?

I immediately replied, "Why?"

She responded that it would be my "first fruit" to show appreciation. I remember vividly how I stated that if I have worked for a full month, I will need my salary; I’d have plans for that money. In fact, that is the money that will get me through the next month. Then, she started guilt-tripping me. She asked my younger sister the same question, and she said "yes" immediately.

My mother went on to quote a Yoruba adage:

"The child who will kill a cow for your funeral and the child who will buy only a fish is known while you are still alive."

I wasn't moved, regardless of all the guilt-tripping yarns, because it honestly didn’t make sense to me. Me wey dey suffer for 30 days, I be fool? My mom couldn’t believe her eyes or ears.

Looking back, I know it’s because she spent a huge bulk of her earnings giving back to her family, her extended family, and even her in-laws (very ungrateful people, I must add). I watched it play out live: the moment she started going through a hard time, resentment set in and their behaviors changed 180 degrees.

Growing up, I realized this is a very normal thing that Black people do. I just saw a post on Twitter (I am never calling it X) that enraged me. It read:

“My little brother just got his monthly payment of ₦28k yesterday, and today he gave me ₦1k and gave our mom ₦10k. He also gave my other little sisters some 🥹 That's how he does it every month. I’m so happy... because he still thinks of me and chooses to give from his little earnings... He's 22 now, and he's planning to start college soon.”

Let me break down why this pissed me off so badly. The minimum wage in Nigeria ₦70,000, He is 22, working 10-hour days in manual labor, and just gave away nearly 40% of his income (₦11k+) before even touching his own needs or his college fund. In an economy like Nigeria’s, that isn’t just "generosity"; it’s the mathematical sabotage of a young man’s future.

This relationship is transactional, masked as familial..

In its simplest form, "Black tax" is the financial support that Black professionals and high-earners are expected to provide to their parents, siblings, and extended family. But in reality, it’s not only high earners who are burdened.

In many African homes, you’re expected to submit your salary to your parents, especially if you’re still living with them. It’s almost an unspoken requirement. It’s one thing when a child gifts their parents, but it’s another when it's almost by force. The resentment sets in the moment you stop.

Black children don’t just earn for themselves; they earn for the entire family, sometimes even the entire community. It feels mandatory—a cost of upward mobility that peers from wealthier backgrounds don't have to pay.

There is a direct mathematical link between "Black tax" and the persistent wealth gap.

People see you as a wallet once you start "making it." Everyone suddenly has a request, yet there is no teaching about budgeting, investing, or emergency funds—just rationing money, distributing it, and waiting for the next paycheck. It builds deep-seated resentment, and I am here today to tell you to fight it.

In most cases, the money is meager, but you’re supposed to give it without complaint. You’re expected to pitch in for various responsibilities.

Black women—specifically daughters—are taxed twice. You are expected to be the breadwinner and the housekeeper simultaneously. You have to prove that the money is not getting into your head and you’re still humble. All at the detriment of yourself and your goals.

In many African households, a son who brings home money is treated like a king; he is served, his clothes are washed, and his rest is prioritized so he can "go back out and earn."

However, a daughter who brings home the same amount (or more) is often still expected to: Go into the kitchen immediately after a 10-hour workday, Serve the brothers, the father, and the extended male relatives and still manage the emotional labor of the home (resolving conflicts, organizing events).

This is a productivity killer. While the men are using their downtime to rest, network, or learn a new skill, the women are using their downtime to perform labor that has zero ROI (Return on Investment).

If you spend 3 hours a day cooking and cleaning for a household of five, that is 21 hours a week. In a year, that is 1,092 hours. If you spent those same hours on a side hustle, a professional certification, or even just high-quality rest, your earning potential would skyrocket.

By demanding this labor, your family is essentially stealing your "capital"—which, in this case, is your time and energy.

Money is not made by giving everything away. Unlike generational wealth, which flows down from parents to children (via inheritances or down payments), Black tax usually flows upwards and outwards. It’s worse when you are the only one who "made it" in your family; you find yourself being a cash cow..

Money is made by keeping it and doubling it; that is basic economics. In many cultures, this isn't "charity"; it's a social contract. You're told you have a moral obligation to pull the rest of the family up with you. At a communal level, it’s a mechanism of resilience that prevents destitution for the elderly, but at the individual level, it creates a "leaky bucket" effect.

For a first-generation earner, the ability to save for a home is curtailed by these outflows. While a white professional might invest $1,000 in a retirement fund, a Black professional might send that same $1,000 home to fix a parent's roof, resulting in a massive divergence in compound interest over decades.

The earner often experiences "survivor’s guilt," feeling they have no right to enjoy their earnings while kin struggle. This leads to a life of perpetual austerity despite professional success. It’s common for professionals to take out "payday" loans for family emergencies, leading to a cycle of high-interest debt.

At the end of the day, you find a person who has been working for years with nothing to show for it—emotionally burnt out, exhausted, and unable to achieve their goals.

My solution? Learn to say no. Gifts are beautiful, and givers never lack, but giving shouldn’t be at your own detriment.

Budget based on your own economics. Give "fishing rods," not just fish. (e.g., funding a trade school rather than providing ongoing cash handouts).

For women, daughters, STOP THE UNPAID LABOR.

My advice is to "let everything scatter" it’s a radical oh but a very necessary form of boundary setting.

Women are raised to fear being called "lazy," "disrespectful," or "unmarriageable." But in reality If you do everything, everyone else becomes comfortable in their incompetence. When you stop, the initial chaos (the "scattering") is actually the family finally being forced to take responsibility for themselves.

The guilt of seeing a sink full of dishes or a brother who hasn't eaten is a weapon used to keep you in place. But as you read in my mother's story, sacrifice does not guarantee loyalty. The same people you "slaved away" for will often be the first to complain that you haven't achieved "enough" in your career, conveniently forgetting that they were the ones weighing you down with domestic chores.

To every daughter being crushed by the weight of expectations: your worth is not measured by how well you serve others at your own expense. A home that requires your exhaustion to function is not a home; it is a workplace where you are the only employee not getting paid. Reset the standard. Let the dishes sit. Let the floor be dirty. Reclaim your time and your life.

Realize it is not your job to cater to every extended family member. To truly break the cycle of poverty, the ladder of success must be made easier to climb. The weight of an entire family should not rest on a single pair of shoulders.

You aren't being "selfish" or "un-African." You are being an economist. You are recognizing that you cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot pull a family up a ladder if your own hands are tied by debt.

And currently? My mom calls me her biggest blessing and her biggest investment. I have given back x100,000 of my first salary so far—not because I was cajoled or guilt-tripped into it, but because I genuinely want to. Because I refused to be drained early on, I was able to build the foundation and the capacity to give back so much more later.

Genuinely, that is how it should be.

I love my friends, but when it comes to romantic relationships involving sex, I can’t say I’ve ever dealt with anyone out of love. I get infatuated, yes. I meet people and want to get to know them; I get intrigued, then I get bored, and then I move on to the next exciting, shining person. Or, I just sit with myself.

I barely like people. I don’t like talking to strangers or the process of "getting to know" someone; I see it as a pure waste of time. I have never prayed for anyone—in fact, I’ve never wanted anyone that badly. I enjoy using my free will to just fuck. I do it out of pity, boredom, curiosity, excitement, vulnerability, frustration, guilt, jealousy, or loneliness—but never love.

I never let relationships get serious. I leave or sabotage them before they get out of hand. I play it safe, calculating every possible outcome.

To me, the "love" and romance portrayed in movies and media are propaganda—performative at best. That’s why people feel betrayed when it falls apart, it’s also why everyone relationships feels the same, they have the same aesthetic even down to proposals and marriages, it’s more like a playbook, no individuality but I digress-

I don’t believe love is blind; I think that’s a narrative pushed on people (specifically women) to make them accept mistreatment. I also don’t believe in love at first sight.

To me, love is an intentional choice: picking the same person over and over again, knowing there will always be someone "better" out there. Love is not enduring abuse under the guise of affection. Love is an informed choice, and so far, I haven’t chosen anyone.

Maybe it’s age, or peer pressure, or whatever you want to call it, but as silly as it is to admit, I want to experience that "head over heels" feeling.

I’ve realized the intensity I bring to the table is often too much for people to handle, so I’ve learned to keep those parts of myself hidden. I’ve diluted myself to fit the narratives others have of me until it became a character I play.

I became so many different things to different people that I started losing who I actually am. I found myself constantly apologizing whenever even a sliver of my real personality showed through. I hated that, so I just stopped altogether.

Now, I want to let someone love me and feel that same way about them. It’s not a desperate need—I can live without it—but I want to experience something different. I am emotionally burnt out from fleeting connections. I want permanence.

I want an intimacy I can keep, the kind that never actually leaves. The kind where, even in conflict, the love remains. Even if we stopped speaking, there would be a lasting admiration. I want to experience someone choosing me over and over. Someone to hold my hand regardless of how sweaty it is; someone who will bite me (occasionally). I want something that feels so safe and patient that I don't feel the need to run away.

I want to choose someone who is kind, not just "nice." Someone I can sit with in silence, or yap my head off with when the moment strikes. Someone who sees me—and sees through me.

But if it never happens, that’s okay. I am perfectly fine being alone.

Today is the first day I’ve truly had the chance to rest. I just finished putting together my first mini-collection for the year: the Valentine’s edition. I am listening to music in bed; the national grid is down, but the weather is still so cool because of the Harmattan. I love the silence of the night. No generator, just quietness while watching the skies.

The last couple of months have been full of ease. I was going through my goals for 2025, and one of the major themes was "ease." I am enjoying the ease I have right now.

I did it.

I feel so loved. I have been secretly waiting for it to disappear because these things usually feel like a fever dream for me—one day happy, nine days sad. It almost felt like a punishment for feeling happy. But it hasn’t left for so long (I hope I don’t jinx it).

I woke up this morning feeling so loved and seen. My friend made breakfast; we ate, watched a movie, and went back to sleep. This time last year, in 2025, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I had just left a "somewhat" relationship that I had no business being in in the first place, but I didn’t have the chest to stand up for myself—or maybe it was just very comfortable.

I had such horrible friends that I felt constant anxiety around them. All their actions pointed to the fact that they hated me, but again, there’s something so "hot" about someone who hates you (don’t judge me). But it got to the point where they started badmouthing me to people we have in common—people I actually care about.

I was heartbroken through and through. Everything was happening at the same time: my health was deteriorating, and I was heartbroken, sad, and sick. I couldn’t even cry. I didn’t even have the luxury of making bad decisions (my usual coping mechanism).

My business wasn’t doing well either; I fell into a different strain of depression. I felt so alone even though I was always surrounded by people. I felt like nobody would ever understand me. It broke me, especially because these were the same people I had explained my soul to.

For most of last year, I isolated myself, trying to piece together why everything happened the way it did. I was somewhat able to work through my own issues and understand myself better—what informs my decisions and how I relate to people.

December 2025 was so different. I experienced a different kind of love, the type that didn’t come with anxiety. I was with a friend who saw me. She was gentle and kind. For the first time, someone understood my ADHD perfectly. We also had the exact same politics; we could yap about everything and anything. We were both "woke" people. It was so healing and validating; even if we disagreed, it was still out of love. I even overstayed my stay because of how warm the experience was. We cooked, danced, went out, ate, and stayed up all night to yap. I met her friends, she met mine—it was my perfect kind of intimacy.

It was a far cry from the previous December, when someone was calculating everything she did for me and telling all of Lagos that I finished her Nasco cornflakes (I offered to pay her back and she rejected it). So many things happened. At first, I felt so much shame. Why did I let people I called my friends treat me like this? What about me gave them the inkling that it was okay to treat me so horribly? Was I overreacting? Did I deserve it? Was I the problem?

To be honest, what I did differently was spend time with the friends who saw me for who I really am and never judged me for it. I didn’t have that typical, cut-throat anxiety. Also, that was the first December I spent without going clubbing. I did more work and focused the rest of my time on building new relationships, which is rare for me because I hadn’t made a new friend in more than five years.

I think a bulk of my current happiness comes from the fact that I am out to my mom. I always felt I could never reach a certain level of happiness or live the way I wanted until my mom died (at an old age, not prematurely). But the last time she visited, we had a conversation about my queerness in the most dignified manner. She didn’t try to pray it away; she just affirmed that she always knew, and she knew I would never marry a man (hehe).

She has even seen my tweets about my imaginary wife. Right after that conversation, she sent me money. If you know me, you know how affirming this was, even though I never really admit it. I really want my mom to like me, and this is the closest I have ever gotten. It felt so freeing and refreshing.

You may not have met the version of the person that will love you—even within the same person.

The friends I have right now? They are angels. I am so blessed and grateful that they decided to love me the way they do. I feel surrounded by love. I wake up every morning feeling so proud. I am clear-headed enough to see the difference between the person I was when I felt I had to "work" to earn people's love. I felt I had to show them, or buy their affection; it’s insane how it stopped the moment I stopped "paying."

I also learned the importance of being comfortable with being misunderstood. I’m not "clearing" anything anymore; not everyone will understand you, and it’s not your responsibility to explain yourself.

I think the most important part of this was that I started loving myself—seeing myself and deconstructing why I am the way I am, not from a judgmental place, but from a place of wanting to understand. It made it easier to recognize patterns. I stopped putting myself in situations that made me hate myself, and if I do happen to lose my way, I know I can always leave.

In this moment, if you opened my head, you'd only find love inside. And I am very grateful for that. I am grateful that I don’t have to do it alone anymore. I am grateful I have people I can share my deepest fears with who actually understand me.

You will definitely meet people that will hate you but what is surer than that is that you will always find people like you, you will find people that will love you, even if you are a terrible person you will find your tribe and it is very important to find them because you cannot do everything alone, it is not fun, take it from me. And when you find them, its very important you “match their freak”.

I am praying that I can be a good friend in return and love them exactly how they love me, or even more. I hope I can show up for them as much as they do for me. I hope life is very easy for them.

I feel as free as a bird, ready to soar as high as I want to. Life is great right now, and it can only get greater.

P.S. If I ever come back in another life (I won’t), I’d be a bird.

In a general sense, to decenter something means to move it away from the “middle” or the primary focus of a system, conversation, or identity. When you decenter a concept, you are essentially saying: “This is no longer the lens through which I view everything else.”

For centuries, a woman’s worth has been tied to how many children she can create, nurture, and raise until they are “properly trained” members of society. In many cultures, motherhood is seen as the “completion” of womanhood.

It starts with the pressure to marry. Once you reach a certain age, the “illusion of choice” vanishes. Strangers, family, and friends begin pestering you. If you are already in a relationship, they are calculating the years for you. There is an unspoken rule that after a certain amount of time when dating, you should have “secured the ring.” Lack of a ring is seen as a personal failure, a sign that you “let a man waste your time.”

Once the ring is secured, marriage becomes the single most celebrated humiliation ritual across cultures. Women spend years dreaming and saving for this one day because they have been prepped their entire lives for this singular celebration with numerous parties for the same reason marriage.

Once married, the “biological clock” a deeply misogynistic concept, as women are not products that expire starts ticking loudly. There is an immediate expectation to prove your “womanhood” and prove you aren’t “barren” (a word I detest).

In fact there will be a major problem if a child hasn’t arrived within three or four years into your marriage especially in our culture Nigerian culture, this was the plot for many Nigerian movies, its the lived reality for many. In some cultures, even the gender of the child is scrutinized; you are still viewed as “barren” if you haven’t produced a son. This mindset ignores science, common sense, and logic. It places the entire responsibility of procreation on the woman.

Infertility is seen as a woman’s problem, barrenness, you hear people speak on the quality of a woman’s womb in relation to her worth and or sexual purity While men contribute to about half of all infertility cases, you don’t see pastors holding “Touch My Scrotum, Oh Lord” crusades or special ministries for male sperm health. Instead, it’s always a seven-day “Fruit of the Womb” prayer on a mountain. When fertility is at the center, the inability to conceive is often experienced not just as a medical challenge, but as a total identity crisis.

Its almost like a shamefully thing, Religious and capitalist systems have taken full advantage of this shame. Pastors fake pregnancy testimonies or, worse, harass and rape women under the guise of "spiritual healing” exploiting these desperate women but sometimes its way more sinister than this, Some women are injected with hormonal drugs that mimic pregnancy symptoms, leading them to wear fake bellies and eventually participate in "miracle" births that are actually the result of kidnapping or adoption fraud. This desperation fuels baby factories across Nigeria that exploit young girls, runaways, victims of rape, and those trafficked. These girls are robbed of their childhoods and used as literal incubators until they can no longer produce. The children are then sold to the highest bidders.

This market is an insane crazy market.

Sometimes even the children are not saved from the harm, they are often maltreated because these people don’t have the decency to treat children that are not their biological children as children, in some cases when the mother eventually conceives the long awaited child and the “other child” is thrown out or expected to be thrown out in some communities or treated as less.

Motherhood is a lifelong job with no breaks, no leave, and no retirement, even after giving birth, a life altering process you’re still responsible for that child until you die, (ideally).

Motherhood is a life long responsibility and a role that’s not appreciated at all in my opinion even when they are grown the responsibilities never stops. There is a common adage in Yorubaland: A bad child belongs to the mother, but a good child belongs to the father. Women who should never be parents are bullied into birthing children just to prove they are "complete." In my opinion, you have no business birthing a child if you haven't worked through your own traumas. Children are not accessories; they are not just "mini-mes."

Motherhood can’t be previewed it is a universally unique experience even within your kids, child A pregnancy, birth and character might be so different from child B. Everyone always speaks on a “mothers love”, women are tagged nurturing, caring, motherly by default without leaving room for any other ideal. Women that for whatever reason don’t want or can’t have kids are punished severely for it. Many women don’t realize how much they don’t want kids until they have them WHEREAS there’s a lot propaganda on how you’ll fall in love with the child once you have the child. it is in the media, its all over but by that time its already too late and that’s why women are often pushed to have kids at an early age before their brains are fully formed and they are well informed to make life changing decisions.

Centering fertility is killing women. It has been a running joke on how women especially black women are gaslighted and laughed at by Medical practitioners, especially males and their pain minimized because of an imaginary husband, boyfriend or children. Some women are denied life-changing hysterectomies, other surgical procedures because a doctor is centering an "imaginary husband" or potential children over the woman’s actual life and health. I am one of those women.

There’s so much shame and misinformation, around women reproductive health, that’s why i appreciate all the women that have been speaking freely on their experiences with motherhood, child birth, pregnancy, PCOS, endomitosis and their body anatomy and symptoms as a whole. I hope they never stop speaking, through them we have been able to find out so much, destigmatize and unveil the hidden stories about pregnancies and child birth making women to make informed decisions, especially in the the media giving birth is projected as the best thing that can happen to you, peak womanhood but women are now finding out on the internet how dangerous child birth is and the entire pregnancy process, shout out to the “girl with the list” who basically collated over 1000s reasons why she wont be having kids and exploring how dangerous pregnancy truly is.

It is also very sinister that many women die in the pregnancy period because of abuse by their significant other, actually you’re more susceptible to die by your partners abuse than the pregnancy itself.

I am here to say that having a child is NOT that important. It is not a necessity. Infertility is not a disability; it is simply a feature you don’t have, and that is okay. You don’t need kids to stay alive—in fact, ironically, pregnancy can kill you. Birthing a child shouldn’t be at the cost of another woman. Kill the need to have ‘a mini me’. Reproduction is an ability not a human function or purpose, it should be an informed willing choice, instead its a trend in some societies, a rite of passage in others.

Separate your worth from your ability to procreate, you are more than just a womb, you’re a person, yes i agree bringing a child to this world is such a task, a death sentence in some instances, its almost a miracle but it is a feature that not everyone will have or want to explore and that’s okay too.

I know its easier said than done considering the stigma that comes with infertility, women are mocked and threaten with it, but i think that’s why i am writing this essay, start deconstructing your bias that unconsciously ties womanhood to motherhood, stop monitoring married women for signs of pregnancy, stop asking people stupid questions about pregnancy, having kids or their bodies in general, i can go on.

Women that intentionally decide not to have kids are one of my favorite types of women, child free women, I admire them, It is revolutionary and shows incredible clarity and conviction. Motherhood should not be the sum total of any woman’s life, there’s more to life. I personally believe everyone desire or goals in life is as important as the next person and no one person goals trumps the other and everyone should be celebrated, if a woman’s dream is to become a scholar, she’s not smaller than the mom of 5.

Children are and should be a communal effort, a lot of families right now have children that need care that other family members that really want a child can join in to take care of this children, what is not right however is paying someone to use their womb, the victimization of poor women is very evident in both surrogacy and adoption. Personally, i have gotten woke enough to know that both surrogacy and adoption are very violent systems instilled to exploit women and children in most cases. There’s no amount of money that can fairly compensate. My theory is that in a working society there won’t be any children to adopt or buy, every family will take care of their children whether immediate or extended family and the society will step up in situations where the parent can’t, i will write another essay on this.

As a woman if you decide to have a child, have that child for yourself and only for yourself, so many things can go wrong, be prepared and ready for the lifelong task, have and build a community with women who will assist you on and throughout the journey, it really does take a village, research, read up, learn and be very vocal about what you want for yourself and for the child or children, be ready to be a single mother at any time even in your marriage, life truly does happen.

If you’re a woman that doesn’t want children, be firm, be strict not the performative type but be ready to shut down conversions, to be somewhat mean to the nosy elders, you don’t owe any body an explanation on why you don’t want to use your womb for whatever reason you have decided, stop answering questions, stop debating your validity.

Now you’ll meet partners that really want to persuade you to have a child, in fact in some cases coerce, manipulate or punish you into having a child but its is very important to remember why you didn’t want to in the first place and leave whatever situation that’s threating your peace of mind, yes its a threat, treat it as that. I know it is harder said than done but its for the best, i suggest you leave the very first time they suggest it, especially if you have been very vocal about your decision to not have children all of a sudden they start suggesting it? run don’t walk, its hard oh, but it is worth it.

i have read, watched and seen child free women portrayed as finally loving the child when they have one, i swear its just propaganda, there’s this fake euphoria surrounding child birth and the idea that you’ll fall in love once you eventually birth the child in fact its instantaneous, but honestly i don’t believe in it, some mothers hate the children off the bat and i feel like it is not discussed enough.

One thing i hate in books and movies is when they throw in a child somewhere into a woman’s character that has been very vocal about her child free nature, all of a sudden a baby pops up might be in the last season or pages, i hate so so much, but in reality that’s how some women who set out to be child free are cajoled into having children, its propaganda, its very intentional, they want you to birth children to increase the birth rate by all means without providing the facilities as a society to cater for children.

In another essay, i will speak about how horribly and oppressed children are as a class.

And If you got to this point? thank you for reading and let me know what you think.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to subscribe.

I wish I could pause everything and stop the world for six months just to sleep. I have a massive backlog I haven’t started, feelings I haven’t resolved, and business I haven’t finished. There is so much to do, and yet, the new year is already here.

Usually, I would make a thread of my achievements on Twitter. But for the first time, I want to write out and examine the year in view—or at least, my year in view.

Let’s dive in:

2025 January.

I was battling serious depression; the entire month was filled with a heavy heart. I was heartbroken, tired, burnt out, and exhausted. I started the year meeting with a so-called investor who got upset once I removed his hands from my lap mid-pitch. I should have known from the jump that he didn’t care about anything I had to say.

He did say something that stayed with me, even though it was delivered in a dismissive tone: he said I was running my business as a talent or a creative outlet, rather than a business. Essentially, I didn’t want to scale at the expense of the handmade value I’ve stuck to all these years. He wanted me to switch to machines because it was faster and more profitable.

I’ve realized I can’t break down the entire year—a lot was happening at once—but let’s recap my goals: the ones I met and the ones where I fell short.

I romanticized my life a lot in 2025. It felt like personal "hopecore" content: taking random pictures, taking walks, finding beauty in everything I did, and learning something new every day. I journaled more than I have in a long time, made many playlists, and went on numerous solo dates. I prioritized myself and my health many times.

I didn't grow my Instagram to 100k or my TikTok to 50k, nor did I post every day. But In fact, I tweeted my thoughts so much that half of Nigerian Twitter blocked me. I offended almost every demographic: the Christians, TERFs, religious people in general, men, and random people on various topics.

I took many creative pictures that I never posted, and while I set up a studio in my house, I haven't taken a single major picture in it yet.

I bought only one makeup product toward the end of the year—an eyeshadow palette that I ended up loving with all my heart. It was one of my best purchases of the year, though I did lose many lip glosses and eyeliners.

I wore more accessories. As a "Deeper Life" girlie (a church some would describe as a cult), I struggle with accessories. It’s worse because I get overstimulated easily and tend to take them off hurriedly, losing them in the process. Still, I wore more accessories in 2025 than ever before. I also had a total of 11 hairstyles and experimented with colors—I loved every bit of that.

I didn’t smoke for ten months. Did I relapse? It was more like "quitting my quitting journey." I missed my quarterly health check-ups, but I ate plenty of fruit, slept at least six hours a night, and practiced self-care.

A win I am incredibly proud of is my emotional regulation. I used to feel so bad about my mental health and how long it took me to adjust. But this year, I spent time understanding myself, my triggers, and my emotions. I handled everything differently, and I am so grateful. Mastering emotional regulation is everything. Only one incident made me "crash out," and to be honest, it was very valid (according to my friends). Self-soothing is a vital skill; you need to learn how to hold your own hands and walk yourself across the darkest bridges. I also realized that managing stress better was the key—and I managed stress by avoiding it.

On finances: I didn't invest, I failed at budgeting, I spent my emergency funds on myself, and I didn’t save $10k. In fact, I ended up in more debt.

However, I met new people—preferably gay and non-religious. I went out of my way to reach out to people I felt compatible with and explored new connections with an open heart. I am more empathetic and more assertive with my needs and boundaries. I now speak up almost immediately when I am offended (EVERYBODY CLAP FOR ME!).

I started writing again this year and completed a total of 18 essays in six months. I love that I've found my way back to writing.

2025 was the year of forgiveness. I forgave my mom; as I get older, I’ve started to understand her more and have deeper conversations with her about life. I see now that she was navigating a patriarchal system the best way she knew how. I forgave a friend who really hurt me years ago—a heartbreak so painful I had ghosted everyone in my life. I even forgave one person who tried to kill me that year. Fun times.

Practicing forgiveness brought peace to my chest. I let things go and stopped letting them define me. I didn’t, however, nurture existing relationships as much as I wanted to. I was so overwhelmed with trying to get my life together that I didn't reach out enough. I will do better this year.

I remained as self-aware as usual, but I’ve accepted that I don’t always have to know what to do with that self-awareness. I didn’t move into a new apartment—I’m quite lazy when it comes to house hunting—but I did buy a new phone and laptop (still no iPad, though).

I mastered a new skill: knitting (both machine and hand-knit) and even sold some pieces. I also read more books than I have in the last six years. On the business front, OreAkinde Ltd is now a registered company in the USA—perhaps my biggest win. Stripe is integrated, and I launched the first collection for my second brand.

I held three brand pop-ups this year. Despite selling only one product at the first event, still pushed forward with two more.

In review, I feel I didn’t do anything too audacious. I feel stuck in a repetitive cycle, playing it safe. I want something different for 2026. I need new experiences. I want to get back into sports, dress up, and document every moment. I want to travel just to try new meals. I want to sleep for eight hours, earn money that aligns with my values, and read for an hour before bed. I want a bedtime. I want to curate my life solely for my own enjoyment.

It is January 10th, and I haven’t started working yet. The fog of 2025 is still blocking my view, and I’m struggling to get over what I could have accomplished differently. It is NOT a waste of time, but rather a moment of reflection.

The picture of my future is clearer now. I finally know what I want, and now I have to chase it while having as much fun as possible along the way.

Hi, if you’re a new subscriber: I am Ore Akinde—a designer, fiber artist, fashion entrepreneur, intersectional feminist, 26-year-old influencer (adjectives dey cry). This year, I want to write more, share more experiences, and build a community of like-minded people. I can’t wait to share more of my designs here on Substack.

One of my themes for this year is to be daring:

• -Daring to be vulnerable.

• -Daring to fail.

• -Daring to be authentic.

My motto? Time will pass regardless.

I will be sure to update this post in 6 months on my progress so far.

E GO BE👀

Here is the list of content I no longer digest:

The Romanticization of Black Women’s Suffering

I have stopped consuming content centered on Black women’s suffering. In these stories, women endure the worst treatment and live the hardest lives, yet their pain is framed as their only option, and they are labeled "strong," "virtuous," or "resilient." I firmly believe we must stop romanticizing women’s pain. Women deserve more, and suffering is not a badge of honor. A prime example of this is much of Tyler Perry’s content; for instance, I made the conscious choice to skip Mea Culpa.

Homophobia and "Tough Love"

I am done with violent homophobia and "tough love" narratives. I would much rather spend my time consuming "Gay Joy" and happiness. There is already so much hate in the real world; I don’t need to invite it into my entertainment.

Trauma Porn and Graphic Violence

In the same vein, I avoid all forms of violence, trauma porn, and depictions of sexual assault. I believe viewers don’t need to see the full extent of violence to understand that it happened. Too much media focuses excessively on the suffering of marginalized groups without providing a path to recovery or systemic insight. It leaves me feeling hopeless and sad rather than empathetic.

Rage-Bait and Toxic Relationship Cycles

I avoid rage-bait content. A common example is the "horrible partner" trope: women share stories of being treated terribly by men, but when the audience offers empathy or solutions, the creators lash out, claiming people are trying to "ruin their happiness" or their (often toxic) marriage. It is deeply frustrating to witness, I also know better than to comment or respond in frustration, so I avoid these stories entirely to protect my own peace.

Romanticizing Toxicity

I detest shows that frame stalking, control, manipulation, and violence as "passionate love."

Dating Shows

I no longer watch "Pop the Balloon" or "Love Island" style content. The "audition" format makes me sick; it feels like women are being treated as products.

Conflict.

I also avoid content where people simply fight, scream ant each other and argue repeatedly. There are better things to do with one’s time.

Misogynistic Patrons

I have completely cut out misogynistic creators. I no longer listen just to respond or correct them; they are strictly blocked. They know exactly what they are doing, and they don't deserve my engagement. Most of these people monetize their accounts and profit off the rage of women that are engaging and fighting back. If I must engage for educational purposes. I will minimize them and not directly engage their content.

Outrage-Based Reaction Content

I detest "reaction" creators who spend their time mocking others, especially when their targets haven't done anything wrong. These creators often invite an insane amount of bullying onto people who are just being themselves. They usually have no original content of their own and simply profit off of mockery. Yuck.

Overconsumption and Out-of-Touch Hype

I've moved away from overconsumption media

specifically from out-of-touch, wealthy creators (like "Becca Moore" types). I don't find these lifestyles interesting or aspirational. Similarly, I reject "Hustle Culture" that suggests you must monetize every waking moment. The "work until you die" or "I’m making money while you’re sleeping" rhetoric is incredibly annoying.

Audience Bullying

I refuse to consume content from creators who talk down to, insult, or threaten their audience. This includes business owners who use degrading comments to bully people into paying attention to them.

Body-Checking and Calorie Counting

"What I Eat in a Day" videos and calorie-counting content offer me no value. This type of media fuels body dysmorphia by encouraging people to measure their real bodies against unrealistic "inspo" bodies. I love eating, and I love my body—belly and all. I am comfortable in my skin and refuse to consume anything that makes me feel otherwise.

Conspiracy Rabbit Holes

While some conspiracy theories can be funny, I’ve limits. When It gets to a point where you’d have to turn off your brain count me out.

AL SLOP

I am also firmly anti-AI. I believe we need much stronger regulations and laws guiding our digital spaces.

On the other hand, the content I love most is Black women winning—especially those who defy societal pressures. I am inspired by child-free women, women who choose not to marry, and women who are rich, successful, and impactful. I love their content deeply.

I have a confession: when I see a rich woman, I am genuinely excited and happy for her. But when I see a rich man, I automatically find myself wondering how many people he had to oppress to reach that position.

This year, I learned that it is okay to drop the phone, put it on "Do Not Disturb," and read a book instead of doomscrolling. I’ve read more this year than I have in a long time, and I’m grateful for that. I’ve transitioned from a constant need for background noise to being very comfortable with occasional quietness.

Sometimes, you need that silence to hear the voices in your head.

I tried countless strategies, including various types of ads, but they didn’t convert as much as I’d hoped. I released a collection that, on the surface, should have done well because I introduced various new techniques, but we ran into countless obstructions and obstacles. At one point, I had to let a lot of my staff go; I simply couldn’t afford to pay them out of my own pocket anymore.

Yes, I understand the economy is challenging, and my largest market is the US. The expensive shipping rates, which quadrupled due to a subsidy removal, worsened things. Customers couldn’t afford to spend $300 to $500 on shipping and taxes.

My breaking point was the pop-up event we hosted where only one person showed up—my friend—who bought the only product sold that day. I had invested so much faith and capital into that pop-up. It made sense that the turnout was low, since our audience is mostly international, but preparing for something, and holding onto faith and hope, was what kept me going. I broke down. At this point, the business my major source of income was running on air. By extension, I was running on empty. To be honest, I wasn’t running anymore; I was crawling, financially and emotionally.

But somehow, this is actually my best year. Let me explain:

Money used to rule me. Money dictated my mood, my wants, my taste, my reactions, and even how I perceived myself. My business ruled me. My happiness depended on the likes on our social media posts; a bad review could ruin my head for weeks. Capitalism owned me, and it was so hard to not let it bother me.

This year, I couldn’t even “crash out” because I had no strength left to do so. I started experiencing myself without money, navigating life as someone who used to have money, and it has changed me in so many ways.

Firstly, it removed the importance I felt money held over me. Don’t get me wrong, money is very important in the capitalist system we live in, but I didn’t have it this year, and I didn’t die. I was always operating with a scarcity mindset, panicking that my money was about to finish. I used to beat myself up so badly when I overspent. Instead of panicking, I now approach money as something that comes and goes. It will always come back; I just have to plan better for the rainy days.

I used to love my rich self; I could be irresponsible at times. When I had money, my shoulders would be so high; you literally couldn’t say anything to me. On the other hand, I hated my broke self. When I was broke, I used to be so angry, irritated, or just downright sad. Last year, I let people mistreat me so badly, and it felt like it only happened because I didn’t have money. People shouted at me. I saw and heard things that had never been said before, witnessing the very wide contrast between how I was treated when I had money and now that I didn’t. This was because I had tied my self-worth to money. Money or not, I deserve respect. I am a person, and that is enough.

DECENTER MONEY OH

I leaned into my community more. Instead of ghosting and feeling sorry for myself somewhere after I had pushed everyone away, I opened up, explaining my situations to them. If you can’t open up to your friends, family, or community, it’s finished. Also, let me tell you for free: collecting money from your parents is sweet once you can get over that first shame of the giver who has now turned the beggar. God bless my parents; there was no time I called that they didn’t come through. My friends? The very best. Everyone has been so understanding, encouraging, patient, and helpful. We literally stay up brainstorming. My community kept me alive this year; it is a blessing I don’t take for granted.

My best friend said something that stuck with me when I was ranting about how broke I was. He responded that I have skills and talents that transcend money and will always create a stream of income for me no matter what.

I also had time to research and ask myself important questions: Why is this happening? What is the way forward? How do I navigate life now? The fear of going broke is mostly gone because I have lived, experienced, and survived it.

Next year, I plan to navigate this capitalist world better. Here are my plans:

Diversify Income: I will not fully depend on my brand for my major stream of income. I will add more skills to the ones I currently have and explore my other interests.

Save Better: Ten percent of all my income will be saved away for emergency funds. Some percentage will also go into paying my debt back.

Budget: Everything will be budgeted for. I’ve never budgeted a day in my life, but I started this year. Everything will be on a strict budget. This doesn’t mean I will deprive myself of things I want; it just means planning better to get them.

No Waste: Everything will be totally accounted for. This is a huge problem for me because I shop in excess. I always buy everything in bulk, even things I don’t need yet, because one day I might need it, tying down funds that could be used elsewhere. It’s insane because I live alone and don’t eat that much, plus I hate refrigerating certain foods, and if something stays too long in my fridge, I throw it out. I grew up with my mother buying everything in cartons and bags, but there were only two children. I picked up that habit, and while it worked in school when I could give things out to neighbors, as a spinster, I have to be resourceful. I need to plan and budget properly to include a little excess, but nothing above the budgeted amount.

Self-Regulation: When I get broke, instead of crashing out, I will self-regulate and wait for things to get better because they always do.

The Power of ‘No’ and ‘Yes’: Saying “No” more often and sticking to it is crucial. Conversely, I’ll say “Yes” more often to “free money.” I have a terrible habit of rejecting money (gifts), but prioritizing myself at every turn includes accepting help.

Cut Unnecessary Costs: I’m cutting down so many unnecessary costs. For example, I hate working and don’t like public transport, especially how it works in Abuja, where I live, so I literally take Uber rides everywhere, even for a five-to-ten-minute walking distance. That’s an unnecessary cost I’ve cut down on. I take walks more often these days—yes, because of the sapa (financial hardship), but especially in the evenings, it helps me clear my mind. Listening to music and taking a walk has been healing. Sometimes, I even take keke (tricycle taxis), something I never really did up until now.

Practice Giving: I want to practice giving more, no matter how little, not because it will come back, but because there are people who need help. Also, I want to start gifting my friends and family every time I see them. It’s not the quantity that matters, but the fact that you thought about them; it builds your community.

Keep Pushing: Keep hustling. Even when it seems like nothing is coming. You can re-strategize, but always go back and push. The one who gives up messes up.

Prioritize Self-Care: Taking care of myself is a major priority. Making money is not worth the expense of my life, my health, or my values. At the end of the day, if I spend a bulk of the money on my health, it’s a lose-lose situation.

Organized Regime: Next year, I will be operating under a very organized regime. If it’s not on the calendar, I won’t be there. Every minute is totally accounted for so that I make the best of my 24 hours.

In summary, my shift this year can be defined by three practical changes:

1. Money as a Utility: Money is a utility, a means of exchange necessary for survival in a capitalist ecosystem. Practically, I aligned my financial habits with my core personal values rather than societal expectations. for instance “community” is a core value, then my money will be spent on enriching those connections (gifting, hosting, supporting others). This shift ensures that every dollar spent or saved is a direct investment in the life i wants to live, not an attempt to impress, compensate, or avoid perceived failure.

2. The Strategic Abundance Mindset: I replaced the scarcity mindset with a strategic abundance mindset. This is not about blind optimism, but the confidence derived from competence: the belief that my skills, talents, and work ethic will always generate new income streams. Everything will work out for me. Money is acknowledged as cyclical: it leaves to pay bills and invest, but it is expected to return. This belief structure moves the focus from panicking about money finishing to planning for its inevitable flow.

3. Radical Organizational Discipline: This is the structure that enforces the new philosophy: budgeting every cent, diversifying income, and saving a fixed percentage. These mechanical acts create structural boundaries that prevent emotional volatility from entering financial decisions. Budgeting becomes an act of self-care and respect, defining future wants rather than reacting to current impulses. I am basically taking care of my future self.

I will be consciously investing in these four capitals:

Social Capital: The strength of one’s community, relationships, and network. The pop-up was an eye-opener; if I had built a community, more people like my awesome friend would have showed up for me. A robust social capital friends who brainstorm with you, parents who support you is a genuine safety net that financial capital alone cannot buy. It provides emotional investment, encouragement, and practical assistance during crises.

Cultural/Skills Capital: The knowledge, talents, and unique abilities one possesses. My best friend’s insight that my skills transcend and will always create an income stream speaks directly to this. Investing in learning new skills or deepening existing talents yields returns that are immune to market crashes and economic policy shifts.

Health Capital: The physical and mental well-being that allows me to execute plans and sustain effort. Prioritizing rest, exercise, and mental clarity over another twelve hours of work is an investment in health capital that prevents the ultimate loss of funds to illness and fatigue.

Experiential Capital: The store of lived experience, wisdom, and perspective gained through challenges. Living through the financial low point this year and surviving it has given me a form of capital the knowledge that I am resilient, that cannot be taxed or spent.

Hot Take: This needed to happen because I lost the plot and direction, and it helped me find myself. Next year is for greatness and serious motion. I need to make the money that never leaves.

P.S. This piece is a straight-up rant from my heart. This is the first Substack article I’m writing on my laptop, I still prefer my phone!

Everything made sense later.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has profoundly affected my life in many ways, but for the sake of this article, I’ll be speaking solely on navigating my sex life.

Growing up in a cult-like religious background (Deeper Life), I had no idea what sex was or how to have it; we received no sexual education. In fact, sexual education was heavily frowned upon. The only "facts" I learned were that if you hugged a man, you’d get pregnant, and you must never enter secluded or hidden areas with boys.

Up until after high school, sex truly didn't interest me. I would occasionally read erotica and romance novels, but I barely got "horny." My life in high school was very interesting, so I never felt like I needed to engage in it.

The funny thing is that students had sex everywhere in my high school. I remember seniors recruiting me to watch out for them while they were in classrooms or at the "love lane" (yes, we had a dedicated driveway for romances and sexcapades).

Condoms would be littered all over the administrative block toilet if you went at a certain time. I was watching live sex happen from my Junior Secondary School 1 year, not from a perverted perspective, but from a purely fascinating one. I was intensely curious: Why were people rubbing against each other so much, with no personal space, so much spit, such aggression? Why were they so interested in doing this over and over?

When I got my first boyfriend in my first year of university, I used to have mini panic attacks before kissing. There was always a voice in my head telling me I was a sinner; hellfire would flash in my eyes every time I tried to savor the kiss. We often had to take breaks because my chest would literally feel like it was going to explode.

(This article should actually be named The Sex Life of Ore, hehe.)

Eventually, I started regulating my anxiety better and tried to enjoy it, but the problem was that he was so aggressive and forceful. I always left him with swollen, heavy lips—at one point, bleeding lips. Then he migrated to kissing my breasts, leaving my nipples sore and bruised. It used to take me three to five days to recover from his injuries.

I remember thinking to myself, Why did it hurt so much? Is this why the church warns against it? Is it supposed to be this painful? I couldn’t ask or tell anyone at that time; I was young and "sinning." I started avoiding my boyfriend, and immediately, as I withdrew, he became abusive. It felt like the only way to connect with him was to have sex. I hated everything about it. I tried breaking up with him, but he refused, saying we could work it out, only to break up with me himself a week later.

I remember meeting the person who taught me how to kiss. He was so gentle and took his time to teach me without any judgment. He would occasionally tease me. However, he was a student pastor and would always kneel beside the bed to pray for forgiveness after our kisses. I remember getting the ick, but I was on a mission to learn. I took my lessons and ghosted him.

Sexual relations from then onward felt like an experiment. I was curious. I was eager to learn. I genuinely wished there was a way that sex education was provided knowledgeably—and I'm not talking only about STDs, STIs, and pregnancy. I'm talking about how to have sex, pleasure points, your right to say no, and so much more.

⚠️ Trigger Warning: Rape, Assault, Blood. You can skip this section. warning: rape, assault, blood. You can skip this bit.

(The first person who had sex with me penetrated me without my consent. I thought it was just the regular kissing and making out. It was wicked and strange. My body wanted it, but not in that manner. It took him what felt like ages to eventually stop. With the next person, I bled so much I passed out, holding the heaviest clots of blood.

The next person after that was a woman whom her friends drugged me in a private party with a cocktail of drugs (date rape drugs, drugs that affect your libido, and drugs that cause memory loss). I had literally just escaped a man (whom I knew) who was trying to finger me in my drugged state and ran into her. I felt like she was a safe space. She took me to a room, carefully undressed me, bathed me, got me safely into bed, and then started touching me. I was in and out throughout, but I felt that because she was a woman, it somehow didn’t count as much as rape.

However, it traumatized me a lot because I wanted my memories back; it was like there was a hole in my mind. I felt like something had been stolen from me. Afterward, she called me to threaten me not to report it.)

All of my first four or five experiences were without my full consent, which deeply marred the experience for me. But in the moment, I wasn’t processing. I was in shock. I was just getting by, determined to have a "nice" sex experience.

With the next guy, I communicated with him. I explained exactly how I felt, my past experiences, and my fears. He was ready to try with me and be patient. On many nights, I was too tight, and it wasn’t working, even with lube and everything. It felt like his patience was running out because he wasn’t being "rewarded" for sticking with me. At this point, I had convinced myself I had a problem and shouldn't be having sex at all. We were just people who had sex; there were no relationship aspirations.

One day, I was feeling good, and we tried. It was going well for a minute. He was so excited, then he decided to start going very fast. I was in pain. It took a lot to muster the courage to tell him to stop because his "dreams were coming true," but I was hurting so badly. After I told him to stop, it took even longer to get him off me, and then he muttered something I’d never forget about how I was doing this to punish him. By the time I got to my hostel, I was bleeding profusely.

At this point, I stayed off completely and got busy with my life.

Eventually, I tried again, but this time, on my own terms. I'll save you the long story and tell you all I discovered:

My mind wanders off during sex a lot. For a very long time, it felt like sex was happening only in the back of my mind. I was physically present, but mentally, it was a real hustle getting myself to be in the moment. I could be thinking about anything—random things. I constantly find myself trying to settle down and enjoy the experience. I have the urge to blurt out random thoughts that are in no way related to sex, which would obviously turn the other person off.

I often seek sex when I am bored, and I’m hyper-focusing on sex itself. But sometimes, I get bored of the sex while having it. When I’m in this state, sex is almost obsessive, like a drug, and it needs to be consuming. To genuinely enjoy it, I have to be the one in charge—the one doing things, an active participant. That way, I am occupied, and there are things to keep my mind focused. Sex sometimes helps with stress and anxiety.

I hate when I suffer some sort of sensory overload during sex. I get so irritable, sometimes exhausted; everything is too much in that moment, and I need a break—sometimes a very long break—from that person. One of my personal triggers is sweat. I used to hate sweaty bodies; it irritated me so much, but I had to learn sweat was part of sex. I find moans very overwhelming. Too much light, the texture of the bedsheets, your skin, and sometimes even eye contact can be overwhelming.

Ironically, when I feel truly safe with you, I often sleep off during sex. I trust that you’re not going to harm me. Most people take it as a failing of some sort, but I’m tired of explaining that it wasn’t them; it’s me. Most times, I have explained it, and my explanation has been weaponized against me.

Someone breaking, removing, or damaging a condom mid-sex without your explicit knowledge and consent is called stealthing, and it is a form of sexual assault and a crime in many jurisdictions.

Use high-quality, designated personal lubricants (lube) to enhance comfort and pleasure. Never use substitutes like saliva/spit, Vaseline (petroleum jelly), baby oil, or lotions as lubricants. These can degrade condoms (leading to breakage), disrupt natural pH balances, and significantly increase the risk of infection or irritation.

Sex is Not Supposed to Hurt: Pain during or after sex is not normal. If you experience pain, stop immediately and communicate with your partner.

Bleeding is Not Normal: You are not supposed to bleed during or after sex (outside of menstrual cycles). See a doctor or healthcare provider immediately if this happens to you, as it could be a sign of infection, injury, or other medical issues.

Use Your Words: Clearly and confidently tell your partner what you want, what feels good, and what you do not like. Your partner cannot read your mind.

Have Safe Words: Establish clear safe words or signals with your partner. These words are an immediate instruction to stop or change the activity, no questions asked.

Your Right to Stop: You have the absolute right to stop sex at any moment, for any reason, without guilt or explanation. Consent must be continuous and can be withdrawn at any time.

Sex is for Enjoyment: Sex is meant to be enjoyed, not merely managed or endured. You deserve to be enjoying the experience just as much as your partner is.

Find Your Pleasure Points: Take the time to discover your own body and map your pleasure points (through self-exploration or with a trusted partner). Knowing what you like is the first step to receiving it.

Most people recommend grounding techniques to help me focus on sex when I'm finding it so hard to concentrate, but I'd rather just stop. If I'm fighting that hard to be in the moment, I'd rather stop; we can always try again later.

Sex got better for me when I started prioritizing my health, my self, and my orgasms. I started learning my body. I will always encourage women to touch themselves and study their bodies—even occasionally tasting yourself. I stopped trying to have sex with people who didn’t care for me (not the ones who faked it).

Navigating sex with an ADHD brain is a journey of continuous discovery, but finding a partner that understands your needs, can work in perfect sync with you, deals with you with compassion and empathy is essential for transforming intimacy from a challenging management task into a source of mutual pleasure and deep connection, allowing the inherent intensity and passion of the ADHD brain to flourish safely.

For sex to work perfectly, you need to feel safe and comfortable.

Remember to ALWAYS GIVE YOUR SELF GRACE AND FORGIVE YOURSELF.

*** I debated not sharing this piece because of the prevalence of slut-shaming and the ease with which this material could be weaponized. Also, I think this piece is all over the place but it’s the vulnerable honest truth and I hope someone reads this and learns something or not hehe🙂‍↔️

The monthly menstrual cycle is often framed in cultural narratives as a simple, manageable fact of female biology, an inconvenience, perhaps, but ultimately a sign of health and fertility.

For me, however, this simplistic narrative is a cruel lie. My period is more than a mere biological event; it is a recurring, debilitating crisis that feels, in the most literal sense, like it is "ruining life."

I dread the experience of my period, and that dread is almost constant. I have pre-menstrual symptoms, a horrible menstrual period, and post-menstrual symptoms.

My body spends most of the month getting ready for my period, experiencing my period, or getting over my period. Before my period, I feel cramps that feel less like discomfort and more like violent internal contractions, rendering me incapable of standing, working, or concentrating. These are not the mild, dull aches advertised in pain reliever commercials; they are episodes of intense jolts of pain that demand immediate surrender(I have to leave every thing)

When the period finally comes, the agony gets worse. I sometimes pass out from the pain, throw up, and experience diarrhea and back pains. This is coupled with debilitating fatigue, nausea, migraines, and heavy bleeding that requires constant, disruptive management. For context, I use two packs of tampons per cycle.

In my family, my mom's period lasts for about three days tops, with two major days; my sister is the same. Imagine my mom's shock when my puberty started and my period used to last for nine to eleven days non-stop. It was a running joke that I had "the issue of blood."

When I was almost eleven, my mom took me to a doctor who conducted several tests on me. The doctor was supportive but ultimately dismissive, concluding that we were overreacting and that this was simply "normal puberty."

High school (secondary school) was a horrible experience. I was almost always stained to the point that some boys in my class suggested creating a calendar to track my cycle.

The girls, meanwhile, projected their secondhand embarrassment onto me, as if it were something I was supposed to hide and be ashamed of. I couldn't explain that I was almost constantly bleeding. I learned to wear two pads at once, which would soak through in one or two hours, forcing me to change them frequently. The courage to always leave class at least 4/5 times a days in school hours was exhausting.

I would retreat to a hidden spot in front of the dorm, always wearing a sweater to cover the back of my uniform gown. It was draining, to say the least.

Yet, I carried it with pride; I think that's when I started destigmatizing periods on my own personal journey, realizing it wasn't my fault my body behaved this way.

At first, when I sought help, everyone thought I was exaggerating my pain level, irresponsible, or lazy, which caused me to feel shame and stop telling anyone about it. It wasn't until I started passing out from the pain that I began taking matters into my own hands, overdosing on pain medication just to get through the day. I indulged in every available painkiller, anything to keep the pain away.

I tried a popular drug called Felvin in secondary school, but it never worked for me; I had to take it in extra doses, which eventually started messing with my cycle, so I stopped. (A crucial tip: the trick for any analgesic is often to take it beforethe pain starts, but always consult your gynecologist before taking any pills.

The quality of pads in Nigeria is often horrible. I remember a friend who traveled and got me heavy-flow pads from Germany; it was one of the best menstrual experiences I had in high school. They felt comfortable and warm, unlike the itchy, rash-causing, unpleasant pads I was used to that caused friction and a pin-like effect.

Later, in university, my symptoms worsened. My cycle reduced to six days, but they were six incredibly heavy days of bleeding and staining everything. I started seeing these days as sick days. The need to excuse myself from meetings, leave class early, or cancel social plans due to pain became routine.

Eventually, I started isolating myself whenever my period was coming until I was fully recovered. When I discovered tampons, I never looked back. They were more convenient, and the best part was that I didn't see the huge blood clots anymore, and my thighs weren't wet from the bleeding. My period got much better, even though I sometimes had to wear two at once; I’d still pick it over wearing two pads.

I often wonder how young girls with heavy periods and without access to proper products are coping. I try to donate to every "buy a girl a pad" campaign I see because the prices of pads and tampons are ridiculously high. I believe tampons and pads should be free and accessible to young girls everywhere. It should be part of healthcare, and not just any pads, but the best, most absorbent ones accessible to all girls and young women.

Trigger warning: self harm

As I grow older, managing one symptom only seems to give way to another. It’s like I can’t win. For the past five years, the time leading up to my period has been the worst. I normally feel occasional sadness, but it’s debilitating when my menstrual period is near. It gets so bad that I can’t get out of bed for days. I can't even cook or take care of myself.

I spend all my days sleeping as an escape, then wake up and agonize over the fact that I’ve wasted my time. I feel so uncomfortable that I only want to sleep again, starving myself the entire time, trying to convince myself not to end it all. My dreams are vividly traumatizing; I often dream of hurting and cutting myself.

I feel a radical shift in my mental landscape. My rationality gives way to extreme irritability, anxiety, or a crushing, inescapable despair. This is not just the regular "feeling moody"; it is a profound instability where minor stressors become monumental crises, resulting in uncontrollable emotional outbursts. My previously balanced self feels entirely lost, only to disappear when bleeding starts, leaving behind a trail of apologies, shame, and the crushing realization that this process will inevitably repeat every month.

It ruins my plans, damages my self-esteem, and makes it agonizingly difficult to maintain consistency in work and personal goals. It might feel predictable, but it’s really not. It’s only when my period finally comes that I eventually realize the deranged feeling was a hormonal hoax and that I don’t really want to end my life.

My month is truly divided into four distinct, unequal quarters: one week of pain, bleeding, and recovery; another of emotional turmoil; the third, a brief, glorious window of stability and productivity; and the fourth, the building anxiety as the cycle begins again.

The stable, productive 'self' only gets a fraction of the month, perpetually playing catch-up to the chaos caused by the cyclical collapse. It is this forced, recurring discontinuity that creates the overwhelming sense of ruin the feeling that I am perpetually behind, perpetually apologizing, and perpetually living a life that is fundamentally dictated and limited by my body.

One day, scrolling on Twitter, I saw a thread (God bless her) a woman made about PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder). here I immediately started researching it. read this.

PMDD, or severe Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS), is a severe, chronic, and debilitating mood disorder that occurs during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. The International Association for Premenstrual Disorders (IAPMD) estimates that approximately 115 million individuals worldwide may be affected by PMDD, but honestly, I think it’s far more common. I discovered that the symptoms i am feeling wasn’t normal.

I have tried getting medical help in recent years, but the two gynecologists I saw were horrible to me, leaving me further scarred. The one I went to in my final year was so insufferable; he kept insisting I was trying to investigate because of my "current nonexistent boyfriend" and made disgusting, misogynistic jokes. I left angrily and never went back.

The next one was generally confused, acting as if I was inventing jargon and calling sickness onto myself. I wanted a laparoscopy badly to check for endometriosis due to my symptoms, but he dismissed me, gaslighting me by saying I was overreacting and warning me how dangerous the procedure was. He gave me some birth control pills for two years straight. Ignoring all the other side effects.

I stopped using them because I couldn’t keep up, and quite frankly, I gave up. It was a lot to manage, considering I have other conditions. But I have found my voice and I am ready to fight again. I am currently on a hunt for a woman that’s a gynecologist to help me navigate my symptoms and this journey.

I also once had a partner who was the first person I felt comfortable being around while on my period. However, I remember the anxiety she made me feel when I stained the bed. I dreaded staying around her or staining the sheets because she made it seem like it was because I wasn’t careful or wasn’t making enough effort.

It was like my secondary school experience all over again. I used to dread my periods around her. It was insane to me because she, too, was a girl and was supposed to understand periods, until I realized she felt the same about her own body, it was as if periods disgusted her.

Some people have an internalized hate for their own body and self and project a lot. In some cases, they haven't come to terms with it yet, but you deserve someone who will listen to you, care for you, and be your safe space during your period. You should never feel shame, dread, or disgust. It is a normal occurrence and should be treated as such.

Periods should be destigmatized. The taboo and hush-hush culture surrounding menstruation should not exist. Speak about it freely. As I am writing this right now, I am on the fourth day of my period, still heavily bleeding on my second pack of heavy-flow tampons.

This piece was inspired by this particular period because my cycle was late for over a week, and the depression that was supposed to last only a week before my period ended up becoming almost three weeks. I nearly lost my mind.

After the first week, I realized it was the monthly period, but I couldn't fix it; I felt even more despair. This is why I believe women should be entitled to paid menstrual leave every month. I work for myself, running my own company, so it was easier for me to break down for three weeks. But what happens to women who can’t? How do they face something so horrible and still show up at the required capacity?

The argument that paid menstrual leave will discourage employers from hiring women is false. In countries where employers offer paid menstrual leave, the economy and the companies are doing just fine. Refusing to hire women is based on bias and prejudice. Leave will, in fact, improve the productivity of the women in the workforce.

We urgently need to recruit more scientists, prioritize dedicated funding, and focus investigative efforts on the unique biological mechanisms that govern female-specific health issues. When medical professionals dismiss severe symptoms, it is often because the science to fully understand, diagnose, and treat these conditions is critically underdeveloped. Prioritizing this research is not just an ethical imperative; it's essential to closing the diagnostic gaps, preventing years of debilitating pain, and improving the overall productivity and quality of life for half the global population: women.

I am writing all these to show that you’re not alone. If you’re in a similar situation, sending you hugs and all my love. 🫂

My first mistake.

I felt like I understood her and her insecurities. I mean, I’d felt insecure around people in the past (though I never told them), but I thought she was so brave to tell me how she actually felt.

I then drew her closer like a project I had just found, spending hours trying to build her esteem, confidence, and self-worth. I started hanging out with her friends and eventually made her friends mine by extension.

I could see why she felt that way. Her friends were often mean, sometimes violently homophobic. She had an abusive boyfriend who used to beat her. Her mother was sometimes cruel, and her father was absent.

She is so beautiful. The more I got closer to her and spent time with her, the more I started discovering her.

Eventually, one night I kissed her. It was nice, sweet, and lush. Her body was so soft and warm; I wanted to hold her forever. It was my first consensual kiss with a girl. I like to kiss; I liked kissing her.

I don’t necessarily need many emotions attached to it before I do. I’m not one of those people who think sex is deep or spiritual or anything more than sex.

But we didn’t have sex; we just kissed almost all night. It was fun. I enjoyed it.

Then she ghosted me. I spent days trying to contact her. She was ignoring me—all my texts, calls, literally everything. I was running mad. Did I upset her? Was I too fast? Did I do something she didn’t like? Anxiety was killing me. I reached out to her mom. Everyone. She ignored everything.

Eventually, one day, I texted her that I was tired and going to accept it for whatever it was. That night she came over, and we had sex.

This was the beginning of my chest pains.

I liked her a lot at this point, so a lot of things didn’t really matter to me. I started noticing this pattern of her mirroring me. Again, it felt cute at first, but I soon realized she was literally becoming me.

She started acting like me, would borrow my clothes and wigs, tag herself in my social media stories, follow everyone who followed me from those stories, and start relationships of some sort with them. Sometimes she would go through my socials on my phone, ask me about random people, and then add and proceed to text them.

Looking back now, it seems so crazy, but back then, I love "crazy" women (still do); it was hot (I know I sound insane). I gave her so much grace considering her background. It kept getting worse, by the way.

She was so male-centered she refused to believe men just gave me gifts, so she tried to get the men who gave me freebies to follow her and gift her, too. They always came back to tell me everything that happened.

She would leave my house a couple of times to sleep with various men for ridiculous amounts of money. And these men would come back and boast to me about it. I always shut it down, but it was very hurtful because most of the time, I didn’t even know—she just told me she had to leave.

I remember when we were on a trip I curated, and she gave a random guy her number—the same guy who harassed me throughout the mall for mine, after watching me scream at him to leave me alone.

She also suffered from repressed religious guilt. At some point, she would stop talking to me because she felt like a sinner, and it used to mess with my head because I was just navigating my sexuality openly and wholly. She kept reminding me that she could kiss a girl but never marry one.

I have so many stories. I used to cry to my friends so much about her, and my friends kept telling me I should leave her alone. But at the same time, she always told me that everyone leaves her, so I didn’t want to be part of them.

I remember telling her one day that I had enough and was done. Then she started crying, saying I should give her one more chance to prove herself. I did. The only thing that changed is that she started cleaning for me, even though I already had a housekeeper. It started feeling like she was performing heteronormative behavior in whatever we had.

I got the ick.

Everything just kept on piling up in my head. I can’t even remember the final straw. All I remember is that we eventually went back to being strangers who would just pass each other, never saying a word.

I felt like I failed. I could not change her. I couldn’t make her see that she deserved better, that she was beautiful, and should be treated as such. I really did my best. I put myself in situations I could have avoided just to prove myself.

You can’t help those who don’t want to be helped. You can’t even help those who can’t see the problem in the first place.

I recently had a conversation about her, and it turns out she went after everyone I ever liked or told her about—people I didn’t even know she started something with. It wasn't just me; it was everyone.

The insane part is that I miss her. Nobody gave me so much grief like she did.

I've always had a computer, from the days of a desktop monitor with a "hunchback" and a separate CPU tower, keyboard, and mouse—the entire four-or-five-component setup. We had about three or four of them since my parents were academicians, and at one point, my mom even ran a cybercafé.

Eventually, we graduated to laptops that got smaller in size. Televisions and phones were a sin but I had Encarta Kids, Paint, and Mavis Beacon on the computer. I occasionally stole my mom's modem to surf the internet, mainly on Yahoo. I was so excited and ready to use the internet.

With the advent of social media, I came alive. An avenue to meet people without meeting them? Sign me up. I was everywhere—Baddo, 2go, Facebook, and my first Twitter account. I felt I needed to open an account with my name before anyone else stole it.

I remember using 2go because it was the favorite app for kids my age. Your rank grew the more you used it, and you had to shorten everything you typed, "lyk dis 2," sound important. Eventually, I outgrew it, and Facebook became the popular thing in senior secondary school one (SS1).

Mind you, I never had a phone, but I always found a way. I'd open my account on people's phones, including my mom's. I remember gaslighting my mom one day when she read my best friend's and my chat. I claimed she had broken my privacy. She went crazy because how could she break my privacy on a phone I didn't have permission to use? But it did the job because she never brought up the content of the chat again.

Eventually, when I started using social media on my phone, my first phone, I was overjoyed. I enjoyed Twitter the most because it was just text, with no constant media; nobody needed to see my face, I just needed to be funny or relatable. My Instagram was mostly locked because of nosy people, but my Twitter account was where it was at. I was Bovi, Basket Mouth(comedians)—literally anything I wanted to be.

Then I started getting followers. It was so fun; it was like a hobby was paying off, so I went in harder, constantly retweeting and quoting. Basically, what we would call "banger behavior" now, but I couldn't care less because the numbers were doubling. I was 16 at this point, and I started making friends off the app and making a name for myself.

Then I started a business. It was amazing. I utilized social media as much as I could. I sent broadcast messages to everyone I had met along the way, asking them to repost for me, and their friends even reposted it. It became a network so fast.

I started flourishing, making money; it felt like heaven. I started buying myself nice things and eating better. I went on a weight-gain journey to seem more appealing on social media so I could post more confidently because, up until that point, I felt like weight gain was all I needed. It worked, even better than expected. My pictures started getting viral. Oh, but I couldn't waste the opportunity. I was always, always wearing crochet outfits (I make crochet products). I would always wear my brand.

By 2020, I was getting bigger; my butt was bigger, and it became my favorite accessory. By 2021, it was my entire personality. I was hot, so nothing else mattered, and I was making money, so everything was good.

Unknown to me, I was packing male followers, people who only followed me for my face and body, and that's all I showed them. To maintain or grow this audience, I felt pressured to lean into a certain aesthetic, post more revealing photos, or create content that pandered to a superficial gaze. This compromised my artistic integrity and steered me away from the work I was passionate about.

Research has shown that women are often the primary purchasers in many consumer categories, Women are responsible for 85% of all brand purchases, totaling approximately $7 trillion annually in the U.S, alone. They are more receptive to detailed information, emotional appeals, and experiential consumption. A brand built on pandering to a male-only audience is commercially and financially brittle.

I had this "mentor," an older man who, in retrospect, basically groomed me. He would monitor my tweets and tell me what to tweet and what not to tweet. According to him, I should just be a pretty face without opinions; that is what sells. Nobody needs to hear my thoughts. He would call me on various occasions and instruct me to take down my tweets, sometimes on feminism, world change, or politics, literally anything and everything he felt was too much or that he disagreed with.

It worked, honestly. Men would buy my products not because they needed them but to get an audience with me. I had people buying, but no customer reviews to support my sales margin because they were ghosts, hungry, horny men.

But I didn't mind; I was getting paid, and that's all that mattered. A woman's artistic output can be overshadowed by her physical appearance. The focus shifts from the quality of her work to her body, her looks, or her perceived availability.

A lot of people reduced my work to something that signaled that my brand was based on sex appeal rather than skill. It wasn't translating into valuable professional networks or collaborative opportunities. There was no real meaningful engagement.

A male only audience can be transactional, treating the creator as a form of entertainment or a one-sided fantasy rather than a real person with a craft. Women tend to engage with content on a deeper, emotional level, provide constructive feedback, and be repeat customers for products, merchandise, or tickets more than men. My lived experience.

Sometimes, I'd fight him vehemently and eventually yield because I thought he had my best interests at heart. Other times, I'd keep the tweets up, insisting that I was right. You see, there was a reward system in place. If I agreed, he would be very pleased and send me money, gifts, or whatever I wanted. If I didn't, he would keep silent until he was satisfied.

I met the roughest men on the internet, abusers and men who would come to "demystify" you. They mostly always took the business route. They'd say they had an opportunity for me that would never eventually exist, by the way. They would create companies, send proposals, and have online meetings, putting in so much effort and time, mostly for a nonexistent project because the male character just wanted an audience with me. It was demoralizing. I had important male figures telling me to ‘loosen up’ because I didn’t want them to molested me.

Nudity isn't such a big deal to me. I'm always naked; it's something I enjoyed more as I got older. It's freeing, and I also find it very therapeutic and hot. I think women's bodies are heavenly in every shape or form. So, the older I grew and the more weight I gained, I started posting more raunchy content that made men objectify me even more, not my goal, I swear.

The most profound danger of the male gaze is not simply external objectification but the internalization of that gaze by the creative herself.

"Degenerate" males also found my account more. It became a thing to zoom into my pictures, finding faults and errors that I didn't even think were errors, affecting my body image that was already regressing because of the extra weight I'd put on. I had people in my comments sections, DMs, and texting me on my private number to lose some weight and how I was becoming unattractive and how my breasts had started to sag.

They would even Photoshop my pictures, putting lewd things that didn't even exist before. They would import my pictures from other apps with smaller audiences to bully me even further. Some women blamed me, saying it was my fault; if I didn't post the type of content I posted (my own pictures, by the way), this wouldn't be happening to me.

An audience that views the artist primarily as a sex object can create a toxic and even dangerous environment. In my case lead to harassment, stalking, and inappropriate behavior, which can took a significant toll on my mental health and sense of safety.

Then the sex-worker allegations started. I watched how I went from being a favorite jester to a person that disgusted people in real-time. I would see messages of people begging me to kill myself, that the world would be better without me. People were sending me death threats. Some outrightly threatening to r^pe me.

The more they started hating me, the bolder I got. I realized I had nothing left to lose, so I started tweeting all my thoughts and all my feminist ideas. It only got worse; now they had a real reason to hate me. At this point, I didn't even consider them feminists or agnostics. I was tweeting and pointing out things that didn't make sense to me.

Half of my quotes would just be people calling me a slut in 15 different ways and languages, ignoring whatever point I was making. Then I got used to it. I have a thing for rebellion; it's one of my favorite things in life. I don't really like the structures of society as they are, and I don't hide that, so the hate became a booster, almost my entire personality.

Men started monitoring me in real life, hunting me down—men who thought I was too proud and ill-mannered because I said no, and they felt I had to be humbled and taught a lesson. Men started seeking me out, catfishing as women. I started becoming very paranoid, not trusting anyone until I became a shell of myself.

Throughout 2021-2022, they opened various Telegram channels with thousands of men, and the sole aim of those channels was to distribute unsolicited media of women. They would buy and exchange nude content of women and girls, and there was no way to shut them down. Trust me, I tried. It was a strong network of thousands of horny, unstoppable men.

This was the beginning of my anxiety. Every week, there were at least 10–15 men asking them for my nudes. Now, I post almost all the content I take, few bikini pictures, and a few times (twice or so), my nipple was out. I don't see nipples as a sexual object, especially in clothes, but everyone went crazy. The men were expecting me to have more. My anxiety got worse daily because my one fear was, "What if they manipulated or manufactured it?"

I started becoming a shadow of myself and slowly lost the joy and excitement I found in the social media space and community. Everyone felt like one of my stalkers. My trust issues were insane. They started targeting my business and took down my website at one point. I was past crying. I couldn't let them know they won, so I fought even harder, but I was very weary. You see, reading death threats and horrible comments about yourself every day takes a huge toll on your mental health, even if you're strong.

Then I fell very sick and lost weight, just as everybody wanted, but it wasn't within my control. Then everything changed. Some people were obsessed with my new weight and body; they reminded me at each point. They would write me messages asking for my routine, but how would I explain that it was sickness? So I ignored them. Others hated it; they didn't fail to ask me what had happened and how I needed to get my body back as soon as possible because I was "falling off."

At this point, my marketing strategy that relied heavily on my body was failing, so I had to hire models and start running another model of marketing. Everyone hated it. Customers who had solely purchased because I was wearing the products stopped (mostly men). Men would ask me to put on products that were on the mannequin. The retweets stopped. Most of my comments were from men asking me to wear the clothes. This was the pit I had dug for myself.

In a parasocial relationship, these men feel they have "co-authored a narrative" of the my life and felt a sense of betrayal when I started deviating from this narrative by simply showing their humanity. Wanting to evolve my brand or create a new type of content, my male dominated audience didn’t follow me, as they were never interested in my artistry to begin with.

At this point, I hated my body because I only lost the fat in some particular areas, and I wasn't as attractive as I used to be. The few times I would post my pictures, the comments would solidify my internal hate and shattered body image. But one thing I wasn't going to do was let it show at all. I acted like I was still in charge.

Then, I lost weight again. I fell sick again. At this point, I almost lost my life, and I just realized, "It's never this deep." I don't know these people. I should not let their projections affect me. It's easier said than done.

I felt watched. I was ridden with anxiety. I was afraid of everything and everyone. I hated this era of myself. I became so paranoid I couldn't post most of my experiences. I stopped posting so much that my influencer career died. You see, influencing is mainly about consistency. The moment you stop being trendy and relevant, you're forgotten so quickly. But I was struggling to even stay alive.

Historically, female artists were confined to "feminine" genres such as still lifes and portraits. In the modern context, there's a similar pressure to conform to specific content archetypes, such as being a "sexy gamer" or adopting the imagery of a "tradwife," especially as a content creator or influencer.

Back to my story: if you don’t form a very strong opinion of yourself, you’ll end up internalizing everyone else’s perception of you. When you stop trying to be understood by everyone, you begin to feel free.

I used to curate every part of myself to be seen in a certain way, creating an extremely specific aesthetic. But I don't want to live in a Pinterest board life; I want to live in my body. I want to like my body and, by extension, myself without worrying about other people's perceptions that have distorted my self-image. I want to feel grounded and real.

The most important question is: How can we expect anyone to perceive us exactly the way we want? And more importantly, why does it matter if they don’t?

There's an odd freedom in being misunderstood. I used to think it was something I had to fix—that if someone didn't get me, I needed to over-explain and clarify. I thought understanding was the bridge to acceptance. But now, I don’t feel the need to be understood by everyone. It’s not their job to “get” me, and it’s not my job to perform legibility. Let people misunderstand and misjudge you. Let them build their own stories. Let them sit with the version of you they think exists.

How did I save my brand?

To understand why I was in the business and to truly grasp the process of business, I took courses in the operations of fashion companies, luxury brands, marketing and management. These courses helped and shaped my perception of business. This knowledge armed me with the skills to build a brand that was professional and resilient, rather than one that depended on external validation.

I got a new mentor who recommended these courses and provided a network for me to build on. She always encourages and motivates me. A mentor who genuinely supported my growth and professional development, a stark contrast to the "mentor" who tried to control and objectify me.

I prioritized my mental health and established clear boundaries with my audience to prevent the sense of entitlement that can lead to harassment. I set expectations around communication, personal space, and acceptable fan behavior. I stopped using WhatsApp for business purposes to reduce the amount of unsolicited messages and harassment I got from men. I will frequently ‘drag’ men for sending me unsolicited nudes. Naming and shaming them. I fought for myself on various occasions, more women joining me realizing the horrors I’ve been dealing with. Women are amazing by the way and as a creator, you need a community with women.

I shifted the brand's focus from being about me alone to being about the wearable artworks. I hired models to show the outfits on various body sizes. The value of your brand is in the quality of my crochet products, not in my physical appearance. This change allowed me to attract customers who genuinely appreciated my artistry.

I stopped using my main account for advertising exclusively, started using the business social media accounts more and started sending newsletters and more diverse marketing content to bring in new customers. I reached new customers and I am building, a more reliable customer base that wasn't solely driven by a superficial gaze. This move transitioned my business from a performance-based model to a sustainable, customer-centric one.

I am honestly very grateful for all the experiences i had that led me to this point of self discovery and growth. I still post my pictures but to my private circle of friends that will appreciate my body not objectify it. I am learning to use the social media as a scrap book, as a digital diary to show my life experiences, not just a particular aesthetic but my life in art form. Adding my touch to every thing. No anxiety just sharing whatever i am comfortable with. Substack really helped me with that.

If you read to this point, thank you so much for reading. This is probably my longest yap essay so far.

What's the point of a fantasy if it's not becoming a reality soon?

Recently, life has been hitting me from all sides, and fantasy has been a very rewarding escape. It helps me get to sleep at night, a wonderful place in my head where I can just imagine an alternate world.

In my fantasy, I'm a simple girl. I'm not popular or rich; I'm just very comfortable, enough to afford everything I want. I just don't ever want to stress or be anxious about money again.

I'm able to explore all my hobbies, not as a means of survival, but as an outlet and an experiment. My creations aren't based on what my customers want, but rather what I'd love to make, nothing conventional.

I'd overdress, create new ways to enjoy my life, take up space, be active, exercise a lot, eat healthily, and have an amazing, healthy lifestyle.

I occasionally dream about buying a house by the beach to hear the waves and watch the sun rise and set every day, to be as far away from the noise and busy life of a city as possible, to feel the sand on my feet, and to watch my reflection in the water. Visiting the beach is fun, but I want to live there.

I'd use the internet, not as a workplace but as an occasional form of entertainment. I can rest and not have to keep up with trends.

I'd travel around the world, but not for a "3-4 day vacation trip." Instead, I'd move to a new country for a minimum of six months to explore the countryside and the cities, meet new people, learn new languages and skills, try new meals, and expand my taste buds.

I would dance without rhythm, just moving my body in whatever direction I'm moved to. I'd take aesthetically pleasing pictures as memories, without any pressure to post them. I'd savor all my "firsts" and simply exist because there would be no performance, just me living.

I'm alone in most of my fantasies. I can't predict anyone's actions. Actually, scratch that: my wife and my best friend exist in my fantasy. In this case, "my wife" is a title; she can change at any time, but in any case, she brings me the most peace.

Do you know one thing that won't be in my fantasy world? Anxiety. I'll have so much peace within. I'll handle emotions better, letting them pass through me without overwhelming me.

I won't be afraid of anyone. Whatever people say or do won't bother me not the fake "it won't bother me" where I spend a good amount of time obsessing over how I could've acted differently. Instead, nothing will actually bother me, because I literally won't care.

Life is very rewarding in this world; I can eat anything without an allergic reaction. I can be anything in my fantasy.

The major question is, "Why am I not living here right now?"