I don’t want to win a maybe. I don’t want to be the safe landing after someone else already tried to fly somewhere better and failed. i want to be the sky itself, not the ground someone falls back onto.

Unless it's a hell yes, it's a hell no. I’m not compromising on that, i say, and then i say it again, because i think we all need to hear it more than once. Life is too short for mediocre connections. it really is. i have counted the years i don’t get back and none of them were spent well on almost.

In the space between asking and hearing nothing certain back, another person’s hesitation starts to rewrite the language you use about yourself and you do not even remember agreeing to that translation. it just happens, the way water finds the lowest point in a room without being told to. the way ants seek for moisture in the most unruly places.

someone else’s hesitation can tell you about their fear, their timing, their own unfinished war with themselves. it can tell you what they are able to give right now, in this particular season of their own becoming. it does not tell you anything about your worth. it only felt like one because you were standing so close to the uncertainty that you forgot it belonged to someone else.

I think the hardest thing is holding onto that distinction while it still hurts. it is easy to know the truth in the calm after. it is nearly impossible to remember it while you are still in the room, still waiting on an answer that keeps coming late or not at all. You can know, intellectually, that their hesitation is not a verdict on you, and still feel the sting of it landing exactly like one.

You are allowed to grieve. you can care deeply for someone and still refuse to let their inability to choose you become evidence against yourself. you can wish the answer had been different, mourn the version of the story where it was, and still walk away holding your worth intact, unbruised by someone else’s unreadiness.

the sentence that changes everything is a small one. not i wasn’t enough to be chosen. but i was asking for certainty from someone who could not give it. say that one instead. it costs less than you think and it is the truer one anyway.

i think about how i want to be loved and it embarrasses me a little, if i am honest, because wanting is always a little embarrassing when you say it out loud instead of just hoping and calling it patience. i want to be loved the way you love something you already decided on before you even finished meeting it. i want someone who does not need time to be sure, because they were never confused in the first place. i want the kind of choosing that does not feel like a choice at all, because the alternative was never seriously considered. I want absolute certainty.

i do not want to be someone’s eventually. I do not want to be docked at through process of elimination, the last name left on a list that used to have several. i want to be the first thought, not the reasonable one. i want someone whose hesitation i never have to translate into a question about myself, because there will be no hesitation to translate.

so no. if i am an option, i do not want to be chosen. i would rather be the undebated wanting itself. The kind of yes that never once passed through a maybe on its way to me.

It's the kind of thing people say when they want you to think highly of them. I get it, but I’m not saying it for that reason.

I’ve been thinking about why the distance between that belief and my actual life has been so wide for so long.

I used to blame circumstances, then I blamed timing, then I blamed the people around me and the opportunities that hadn’t caught up yet and a dozen other things that were outside of me and therefore very convenient to point at.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to turn the finger around. The problem, embarrassingly, has always been me. More specifically, my body.

Apostle Paul wrote something that I keep coming back to.

Paul isn’t exactly someone you’d describe as lacking discipline. This is a man who was beaten repeatedly, shipwrecked, thrown in prison, chased across continents, and still managed to write the kind of letters that people are still reading two thousand years later. And even he sat down (should be safe to assume he sat down and wrote this)— and said, there is something inside me that does not want what I want and it's pulling me in the opposite direction.

Which is, if I'm being honest, the most comforting thing I've ever read. Because if Paul was fighting this, then I think the rest of us need to give ourselves a little grace and also immediately get our acts together. Both things

You and your body are not working toward the same thing. This idea that you are one unified person moving toward one goal is comfortable but it’s a big lie.

Your body has its own preferences, its own agenda, and its own very strong opinions about how your life should go.

And its opinions are almost always in direct conflict with anything that requires growth, discomfort, or sustained effort. Just as it’s telling you this piece is too long or boring.

You already know that certain things are bad for you. The carbonated drink you take every day, the junk, the things that taste good and feel good in the moment and do damage over time.

It's how your body subtly wishes it didn't know the Lord because walking with Him hinders you from everything it craves.

Meanwhile, there's a gym, or you could choose to do callisthenics at home, sleep discipline exists, water exists, vegetables exist, self-control exists, and your body treats all of these things like they are optional inconveniences rather than the actual building blocks of a functional life.

Your body would genuinely prefer you to live a small, comfortable, slightly miserable life and die having never pushed past the edges of what felt easy.

You’re fully aware of these facts, they’re at the front and back of your mind, yet that is exactly what your body wants.

I heard someone say recently that the day they found out their body would rather they remain in abject poverty was the day they declared war.

I’d never thought about it so directly. We talk about mindset and discipline and consistency but we rarely just say it plainly: your body is not your ally. It's the thing you have to control every single day if you want your life to look like anything other than the path of least resistance.

And the nothing is so seductive, that’s the part that gets me. It doesn’t feel like giving up, it feels like rest. It feels like listening to yourself, honouring your energy, being reasonable. All the language that sounds wise until you look up and realise three months have gone by and you’re in the exact same place having the exact same conversation with yourself.

Leave a comment

I’ve lost count of the things I didn’t do because I didn’t feel like it. Opportunities I moved toward slowly enough that they closed before I arrived. Things I made and never posted. Work I pushed to tomorrow because today there was a feeling, a flatness, a vague sense of not being ready, and I treated it like a word from the Holy Spirit.

It was in fact not the Holy spirit, it was my body trying to protect the current state at all costs and have a fix.

You know what the next step is, you can see it clearly, and your body fabricates a reason to sit down instead, and you listen.

A week passes and a month passes and you’re still in the same place having the same dialogues with yourself about what you’re going to do when you feel more ready.

Readiness, motivation, and inspiration, are all feelings. Feelings are generated by the body, which, as we’ve established, does not want you to win.

So what do you do with that?

You stop waiting for the feeling. You stop treating your internal weather report as a scheduling system. You decide that the thing gets done regardless of what your body is saying about it today, because your body will always find something to say.

There will always be a reason to wait that sounds reasonable if you don’t look at it too closely. The work of actually evolving into who you’re supposed to be is mostly just the unglamorous daily decision to do the thing anyway, when you don’t feel like it, when you’re tired, when the feeling says not today and you do it today.

I’ve stopped waiting for my body to agree with me about that. It never will. It will keep offering me comfort and familiarity and the very convincing argument that tomorrow is just as good as today. But the thing is, I’m just not listening anymore.

Discipline is something we learn, it’s our daily habits that compound and MAKE US.

You

We can’t be strangers if I know your name.

And I do know your name. I know it the way you know a song you didn’t realize you had memorized until it comes on and your mouth is already moving before your mind catches up. I know it the way you know the smell of rain before it actually falls.

It had settled and by the time I noticed, they’ve already made a home.

So no, we can’t be strangers in this life or the next because the moments we had were moments we cherished the most. Some were thoughts we want to repeat. Some were tiny sparks of dust and lights between our heartbeats. But most of it all are the memories that chained us in cages where we refuse to forget in bits.

Where does this urge come from? The need to solve every mysterious thing about this life when the simplest questions haven’t even been answered yet?

And how do you do it?

You’re always so dazzling. Like a star that doesn’t even know it’s being watched. And I keep wondering, is that radiance something you were born with or did God just decide to be generous with you specifically and leave the rest of us to figure out how to exist in your orbit.

The embarrassing part is I’ve actively, deliberately tried to look away and my eyes just find their way back like they have their own agenda that they didn’t bother to inform me about.

Whatever this feeling is, I can’t stop it. It’s coming from somewhere deep inside my soul, from a place I didn’t know was capable of feeling with such intensity. It’s new but for some reason it’s so familiar. Like I’ve been here before in a life I can’t quite remember. Like my heart recognised you before the rest of me remembered.

You’re just so beautiful. And I wish I could play it cool. I really do. Because it’s desperate and all consuming and I’m aware, painfully aware, of how that sounds. But I’m in this. Completely, embarrassingly in this.

Alone or together? I don’t know yet. That part belongs to you.

Still, some were moments we cherished the most. Some were thoughts we want to repeat. Some were tiny sparks of dust and lights between our heartbeats.

This is one of them. This exact moment of not knowing, of feeling something this large and having nowhere to put it yet. Of writing a letter to someone who may never read it, in the slow hours when the feeling gets too big to just carry around.

You make my heart pound so loud and so fast. Got me thinking everyone around me could hear it. That they can see it in my face, in the way I go still when you walk in, in the way I suddenly forget how sentences work.

It’s all your fault.

And the most terrifying and wonderful part of all of it is that you don’t even know. You’re just being yourself, just existing at your particular frequency, and for some perfectly insane reason, that frequency went straight through every wall I had carefully built and found the thing I was keeping still on the other side.

Where does this urge come from? The need to solve every mysterious thing about this life when the simplest questions haven’t even been answered yet?

Like this one this simple, impossible question of what to do when someone makes your whole chest jumble itself just by walking into a room. When the memories you haven’t even made yet already feel like something you’d refuse to forget in specks.

But I know your name. And we can’t be strangers if I know your name.

My first and last letter to you .

With Love, Lydia.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

It’s why I’m writing this at 11:36pm on the 9th of Thursday, 2026, which of course I won’t publish today. One of my thought processes was why I didn’t follow certain people on here.

I’m a Christian. A firm believer that God made us in His image and likeness and that He died for our sake. It’s me and not a background detail, every other thing runs on top of that.

So when I see certain posts from people diminishing Sky daddy, talking down on the one who made me, I feel uncomfortable. I’d have this overwhelming urge to defend Him, but I don’t. Here’s why;

It’s not because I don’t care, I just tend to exclude myself from any religious debates online. Sure I’d read it, but I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes the hard way, that it’s not in my power to change your mind. And honestly, it could be one of two things: either I don’t have the right words, or more accurately, I was never the one who was supposed to change your heart to begin with. Only Sky daddy can do that. I mean, it’s because of Him that I’m even in Him. He didn’t ask me to argue anyone into the Kingdom, so I wouldn’t be engaging with you if you have a rubutal. This isn’t a debate. He asked me to tell the truth and leave the rest to Him. So that’s what I’m doing tonight.

In this book by Cyril Yerifor “The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ” tells us about the entirety of the gospel. So if you need an indebth knowledge, read that.

And let's be direct, some of us don't know what the gospel is. When we go out to evangelize or speak the gospel either to a friend or a stranger, we start with “Repent or you'll go to hellfire” (cue laugh). So think of this piece as a conversation that starts at the beginning.

This is the gospel.

This doesn’t come with a set of rules attached to it, it’s not a version that’s been used to guilt people into giving money or staying quiet or shrinking themselves to fit inside someone’s idea of what a good Christian looks like.

God came down from His throne in heaven to die for every single one of us and here’s why that required a specific kind of intervention.

Man couldn’t cleanse us from sin because the heart of man is wicked and man is himself a slave to it. You cannot free someone from a prison you are also locked inside.

An angel couldn’t do it either. Angels are onlookers. Powerful, yes, but onlookers. They were not the ones who made us and they were not the ones we were made like and they were not the ones with skin in the game.

God Himself, in His full form, couldn’t simply descend on the earth as the supreme being that He is and fix things that way. If He came as what He actually is, He would be completely alien to us. He would be superman. He would be so far beyond our comprehension that nothing about His suffering would reach us. We can’t have someone more invincible than Clark Kent dying for us and call it a sacrifice now, can we? We wouldn’t feel the weight of it. We wouldn’t understand what it cost.

That’s why He came as a man. This all powerful, all knowing God, who could wipe the earth clean with a flick of His hand, decided that He loved us enough to come Himself. He came through a woman, like every single one of us. He learned how to crawl and how to walk and how to eat and how to speak, like every single one of us. He grew up and He got tired. He felt hunger like everyone of us. He felt the weight of being human in a world that is not exactly kind to humans.

Then He grew up to fulfill His mission. He died on the cross. He went to hell and took the keys of Sheol. And He rose on the third day.

That is the gospel. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

But stay with me. If someone walked up to you right now and called you a slave, you’d be offended. You’d probably defend yourself immediately, before you’d even fully processed the word because something in you knows that is not what you are. Something in you rises up against it instinctively.

When the topic of slavery comes up, a whole bunch of people think of the Transatlantic slave trade. Another bunch think of historical slavery. Some think of modern slavery, which is still happening in ways we don’t talk about enough. But most of us think of it as a physical thing which are chains, ships and whips in a period of history.

There’s a philosopher, a great one, probably the one that crossed your mind just now, Mr. Aristotle himself, who genuinely believed that slavery was natural. That human beings were simply either slaves or non-slaves, assigned by birth, and that was the order of things. That some people were born to be governed by others and that this was not a tragedy but simply how the universe was organized.

Then there’s Epictetus. Another philosopher, but one who knew bondage from the inside. He was an enslaved person. And he understood something that Aristotle, for all his brilliance, could not fully access from where he was standing: that bondage was something imposed. Something external that did not define the interior of a person even when it controlled the exterior of their life.

And that tension, between bondage as natural and bondage as imposed, is exactly what the gospel walks into and answers.

The gospel says you were never meant to be a slave to sin or your own worst impulses. Even to the thing you keep doing that you don’t even want to do anymore.

The gospel says the bondage is real. It doesn’t pretend it isn’t. It doesn’t tell you to simply think positive or unlock your higher self or trust the universe. It looks at the human condition clearly and says, yes, something is wrong, and it is wrong at a level that you cannot fix from the inside. Again, you cannot free yourself from a prison you were born into. You need someone to come from outside of it, and Someone actually did.

It wasn’t a system or a practice or a set of principles or a subscription to something. It was a person. A specific person who ate and slept and walked in dust and felt things and then made the choice, with full knowledge of what it would cost, to go through with it anyway.

For me and for you. For the people posting the things that make me want to close my app and go outside for air and touch grass.

I don’t know who is reading this tonight. I don’t know where you are with God or whether the word God even touches down gently for you or whether it comes with too much weight from too many bad experiences with people who claimed to represent Him. I genuinely don’t know.

But I know what I believe, and I believe that even with the questions and the doubts and the moments where the vortex in my head was about faith itself and not just the things around it. And no, I don’t just believe it because I was raised into it and never questioned it.

I also believe that if you want to know someone, if you indeed want to know God, you should seek Him out. Get to know Him like you’d try to get to know that person you’re into.

The gospel, this specific, costly, deeply human and deeply divine gospel, is unlike anything else I have ever encountered. It doesn’t ask you to become better first. It doesn’t put you on a waitlist until you’ve sorted yourself out. It comes for you in the middle of the eddy.

I’m not going to tell you what to do with this. That was never my job. My job was just to tell you. So I did. Now I’m going to try to sleep.

But even from that comfy distance, even as someone who has never once argued about formation or transfer windows or whatever it is people are passionately raving about on football Twitter or in groups, I have managed to witness enough of the Nigerian football fanbase to know that it is not a place I will be visiting and here’s why.

The World Cup happened and I watched some of it, mostly because the atmosphere is impossible to ignore.

Somewhere between the matches, the tweets and highlight reels, I found myself watching something else entirely. I was watching what Nigerians had reduced Cristiano Ronaldo to.

And I mean reduced in the most literal sense of the word.

This is a man who has spent the better part of three decades building one of the most disciplined athletic careers in the history of sport. He worked relentlessly. Obsessively even. In ways that most of us will never fully understand because we have never wanted anything badly enough to pay that particular price.

And in the World Cup, when Portugal’s journey ended in a way that clearly broke something in him, when the cameras caught the rawness of a man confronting the possible end of something he had given his entire life to, the internet took that moment and made it a joke.

What was being mocked was grief. Actual, visible, human grief. A man grieving what he couldn’t get back and people, sitting comfortably in their homes, having contributed absolutely nothing to the spectacle they had just been entertained by, decided that the appropriate response to that was a punchline.

And before anyone decides this is bias speaking. I am a Messi fan. Have been for years. I find the Ronaldo versus Messi debate exhausting, but if you forced me to choose a side I know which one I’m on.

Subscribe now

And I’m also not writing this because I think Ronaldo is above criticism or because his career has been without controversy. He is not a perfect man and I never claimed otherwise. But who on this planet is?

There’s a distance, a vast and important distance, between having a genuine critique of someone and what I watched happen online. Between preferring one player over another and deciding that the one you don’t prefer deserves to be humiliated in his worst moment. Between not being someone’s fan and being the kind of person who makes a meme out of their tears.

I happen to think Messi is the more naturally gifted player. I also happen to think that what Ronaldo has done with what he was given is one of the more remarkable stories in modern sport. Both of those things are true at the same time and they are not in conflict.

Social media football fanbase seems to disagree with this logic entirely and I think that says something much more interesting about us than it does about either of those men.

A little background insight. Most professional footballers begin serious training between the ages of six and ten. Children who have barely learned to read are already being assessed, selected, and placed into academies where the structure of their entire childhood will be shaped around a ball and a dream. In the UK, the Premier League academies alone assess thousands of children every single year. Of those thousands, roughly one hundred and eighty will be offered academy places. Of those one hundred and eighty, less than one percent will go on to play professional football at the top level.

Less than one percent.

The rest will spend years of their adolescence in pursuit of something that the system was always working against, and then they will have to find a way to grieve that and build a life anyway.

Leave a comment

In Nigeria and across Africa, the numbers are even lower. There are football academies in Lagos, in Abuja, in Aba, in cities and towns across the country, filled with boys who wake up before sunrise to train, whose families have rearranged their finances and their futures around this one possibility. Some of them have parents who sold land or siblings who stepped back from their own ambitions to redirect resources. Some of them have travelled hundreds of kilometres from smaller towns, alone, as teenagers, because someone saw something in them and they could not afford not to follow it. Some of them ran away from home because their dreams were deemed childish. Saying you want to be a footballer in some Nigerian homes means you want to throw away your life.

Out of a hundred boys in any given academy, you might get one who reaches a professional league. Out of every professional league, you might get a handful who reach the international stage. And out of all of those, the ones whose names we actually know, whose faces appear on our timelines and whose jerseys are sold in shops, are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. The elimination is brutal and it is continuous and it does not care about how much you want it or how early you started or what your family gave up. Nobody cares about your sacrifices.

Cristiano Ronaldo grew up in Madeira, in a struggling family. He has spoken about going to bed hungry as a child. He has spoken about what it cost, not just him but the people around him, to chase what he was chasing. He left home as a teenager, went to Lisbon, trained in conditions that would break most adults, and then continued training even as he became successful in ways that should have made discipline feel optional. There’re footages of him, at the height of his career, staying behind after full team training sessions to take hundreds of additional free kicks alone.

I still struggle to see how he’s been reduced to nothing. I think about empathy a lot as something you either build or you don’t. And I think one of the casualties of the internet age, and specifically of the way we consume sport and celebrity, is that we have completely lost the thread between the entertainer and the human being inside the entertainment.

Football, in particular, does something strange to that thread. Because it is a game, and games are supposed to be fun, and fun is not supposed to carry the weight of someone’s entire life purpose. So we watch with a certain lightness, a certain permission to be careless, because it’s just a match and there will be another one next week and nobody is supposed to take it this seriously.

Share

But a man stands on a pitch and cries with his whole body and we forget, or we choose to forget, that this is not just a game to him. That it has never been just a game to him. That the thing we tuned in to watch for entertainment has been, for him, the entire organizing principle of his existence since he was a child who went to bed hungry in Madeira.

It’s easier to forget because it inconvenient. Why are we so out of touch with empathy? Online, particularly in spaces like Nigerian football Twitter, there is a herd energy that makes cruelty feel like community. When everyone is making the same joke it’s just easier to participate in it. Like you are simply speaking the shared language of the moment. Right? The meme isn’t mean, it’s just funny. Everyone else finds it funny. What kind of person doesn’t find it funny? Lighten up, It’s just football.

But it is not just football when you are the one on the pitch. And it is not just a joke when you are the one being joked about. And the fact that we have to keep reminding ourselves of this, the fact that it does not come automatically, is worth examining.

I have also been thinking about what it does to young Nigerian footballers aspiring to be as great as one of these players. The ones who are training right now, this morning, on pitches across this country, with dreams that are entirely reasonable and entirely fragile at the same time. What does it do to them to grow up watching the fanbase that is supposed to celebrate football treat its highest achievers this way?

Leave a comment

Sport already asks enough of people. It already demands a sacrifice that most of us will never make and never dream to understand. The least, the absolute least, that the rest of us can offer in return for being entertained is our basic humanity.

And I get that he’s not universally liked and he knows it. His personality has always been polarising. He does not show humility in the ways we tend to reward. He is loud about his excellence in a way that some people find arrogant and others find, a little too honest about how much wanting something can consume a person. I understand why he is not everyone’s favourite. I understand why some people find Messi’s quietness more appealing.

But disliking someone’s personality is not the same as disliking them as a human being. And it certainly does not license cruelty at the moment of their pain. If anything, the fact that he has never made himself easy to love should make the grief more poignant, not less. Because it tells you that the thing he loved was football.

And watching him confront the possibility of that ending, regardless of how you feel about the man, should have squeezed at your chest a bit.

That it became a meme instead says everything about us and nothing new about him.

I said at the beginning that I am not much of a football watcher, but I have a deep respect for what it takes to do anything at the highest level of human capability. To decide on something when you are a child and then wake up every single day and choose it again, through injury and loss and public failure and the years when nothing goes right and the critics never shut up, and keep choosing it anyway.

Of course, the memes will keep coming and nobody will stop to ask whether the person on the receiving end of all that racket is okay.

I have, however decided that my empathy is not optional.

Tens of millions of movies and film productions out there, with at least 10 million being a conservative estimate but that one scene still orbits round your mind since you saw it.

In English it’s called “Indelible” for a scene and “Earworm” for a song. For this piece, I’ll call it “Eyeworm”. Seems more suitable.

Now my eyeworm is from a scene in crazy rich Asians.

It’s the wedding scene. Araminta begins her walk down the flooded aisle, water rippling beneath her feet as Can’t Help Falling in Love fills the room. Everyone is watching the bride.

Well everyone, except Nick.

Nick is staring at Rachel. Right there, in the middle of all that beauty, he mouths to her, "I love you," and Rachel smiles before silently mouthing it back.

Hands down, it is the most convincing portrayal of assurance I have ever seen.

And to Jon M. Chu, I’m guessing all those vacations as a kid when you got to be the cameraman but decided that shooting sci-fi thrillers and murder mysteries was the best use of your time instead of taking pictures of your family with the Eiffel Tower, paid off.

That moment alone, that Intricately choreographed moment was crazy. Crazily beautiful, even if the author decided that the only thing crazier than love was family.

Vanja Černjul’s cinematography skills should be studied.

Okay let’s go backup to the eyeworm. The fleeting moment they gazed at each other and Nick mouthing “I love you” to Racheal, in that moment the assurance was clear.

When I came across this scene, it blew me off my feet in ways that nothing else could compare. It took over my life, from my daydreams to the imaginations I have before bed. The whole trajectory of my life was in constant loop of that scene. For months. And it was totally worth it.

For a time it was enough, but then I needed another fix and like a druggie I watch another movie, and it’s not terrible, but it’s just not the same, so I got another fix and another and another and this is where I say , until I find that feeling again. Ten million films out there and not that I could finish them in this lifetime or the next one.

So it fills me with grief when people say Love isn't enough.

How tragic is that?

The greatest thing in the whole world happens to not be enough?

I know they’re talking about communication, compatibility, timing, maturity, sacrifice, finances, shared values, healing, commitment. I know they’re trying to say that love alone cannot build a life if everything else is falling apart.

I understand the logic. But it still sounds unbearably sad because what they’re really saying is that the greatest thing we know how to feel can still lose.

Out of every human emotion, every ambition, every invention, every dream we’ve chased since the beginning of time, love is the one we have written poems about for centuries.

We have crossed oceans for it, heck we even started wars over it, ended wars because of it. We have built songs around it, painted it, sculpted it, prayed for it.

We spend our entire lives looking for it in one form or another.

It’s like discovering that the brightest star in the sky still can’t light the earth by itself.

That the strongest pair of wings cannot always outrun the storm.

That the greatest force in your universe has limits because life is oh so painfully large.

I originally had the idea to write about what I heard and this is the perfect chance to.

Anyways, that’s how I missed my chance to personally know a celeb, my brethren!

But it just goes to show how two people can be in the same room, hear the exact same thing and walk away with completely different paradigms.

Before I get into the real gist, let’s talk about The SheCan DoMore Conference.

It was founded by Dr. Ezinne Ezeani, this movement has grown into something magnificent over seven outstanding years, and they have successfully empowered over 8,000 women and girls.

Let’s leave all the juicy details for later.

Now, back to the “not so back and forth.”

‎I want it to be clear that this was in the context of marriage. And I know the kind of marriages that have been popularized have not been the ideal type. They’re definitely not the type anybody wants to mirror.

So when Fela and Tara came up as a power couple, it must have triggered something in us. Me included because most of the marriages we’ve seen are just performative.

Fela Durotoye was one of the speakers, and he dropped a bomb about the three types of men in marriage.

He stood there, celebrating 25 years of marriage to his wife, Tara, and explained that a man’s purpose is found in his “garden”.

Let me break down these three types of men, because boy, was he accurate:

• The Hunter: This is the man who finds a woman who is successful, thriving, and flourishing, but he has a major problem. See, a hunter doesn’t take his prey home to keep it alive; he has to “kill” it to feel safe. In a marriage, the Hunter kills his wife’s career, her dreams, and her confidence so he can boast about the “carcass” of the woman she used to be.

• The Scavenger: This type is even more interesting and it was definitely not in a good way. The Scavenger is like a vulture; he only looks for “dead or dying things”. He is actually intimidated by a thriving wife, so he seeks out women with low self-esteem that he can put down and keep down.

• The Gardener: This is the ideal. The Gardener understands his purpose is to make sure what is planted in his ground bears maximum fruit. He nourishes, waters, and protects his “garden,” and he measures his own success by how much his wife “blooms”.

Fela went on to speak about the importance of aligned values to avoid future confusion. He shared a story that had the whole room hanging their mouth.

He was offered a 5-billion-naira contract (which should have cost 1.3 billion) to do an “ethical leadership training”.

The irony, am I right? He was being pressured to pad a contract for billions while the subject was ethics.

Why did he refuse to change his life and the lives of his great-great-grandkids with that money? HIS VALUES!

He knew that accepting it didn’t line up with the man he swore to be. And the most interesting part? When the pressure from the corrupt officials kept coming in, he told his wife, Tara. She went ahead to take his phone and kept it for three days until the fire died down.

‎She didn’t say “Ah? Baby, what do you mean you’re turning down 5billion? Are you okay!?” No my brethren, she collected his phone and gave it to him when the pressure stopped.

That is a woman whose values are aligned with his. As Fela said, “Every conflict in marriage always starts because there is a conflict in values”. So, if you’re looking for your “Gardener,” make sure his values and your values are speaking the same language!

And honestly the person you decide to be with, despite the analogy either helps you grow or bring you down. There’s no middle ground and this is especially if you were already successful because Tara was. And you’ve seen so many marriages where the woman has built something successful but it just dies down when she gets married.

In other’s case however, they keep growing. No matter how you want to look at it, the person you marry has the tendency of either helping or dragging you down.

Subscribe now

Tara became this version of herself in part because the man beside her had the capacity to draw it out. That does not erase her success, hard work or her sacrifice, not even a little. She did the work and showed up. She became. But a garden still needs good soil, and Fela was that for her.

Marriage is sacred, the whole concept of it is to make two people one. And if the other part doesn’t let the other part grow, of course they’ll fall.

It is why the concept of marriage is scary and people drag their ears when telling you to find someone who’s best for you.

Her success is his success and vice-versa. The best love story is the one where you both just keep making each other better.

And it’s perfectly okay if you don’t agree with this analogy. Do what’s best for you.

Till next time minnows.

Do I have the right to miss you?

I think about you, Gbolahun. It doesn’t happen all the time. It happens in moments where my mind is unoccupied and drifts on its own. We were not the closest of friends, at least not in the way people measure closeness, yet we had something that felt real enough to stay with me.

We sat on the school balcony railings, legs hanging over the edge, talking and laughing about things that felt important then. We spoke about the future like it was something we would both arrive at, like we would meet there again and continue where we left off. You are not part of that future anymore, and that absence lingers in a way I cannot fully explain.

I almost did not write that I miss you. I paused over it for longer than I expected, deleted it, typed it again, and hovered over the words like they needed permission to exist. It felt like something I had to earn, like there was a certain level of closeness required before I could claim it honestly. I kept asking myself if I knew you well enough, if we had shared enough, if I was allowed to feel this way without it sounding misplaced. The more I posed with it, the more I realized how strange that question is. Feelings do not wait for justification before they settle into you.

Did you know you would leave so soon?

The question feels useless, stupid even but it still finds its way into my thoughts. No one knows when they are going to die, and yet I keep circling back to it. I try to remember when it happened, the exact moment your name shifted into something past, and I cannot place it clearly. That gap unsettles me. It makes everything feel unfinished, like a conversation that ended without either of us realizing it was the last one.

I’ve been close to death before, close enough to recognize how it can exist. My grandmother stayed with us before she passed, and now there’s a particular scent that brings it all back instantly. It’s strange how memory works. Faces blur, timelines fade, but something as simple as a smell can carry everything back with sharp clarity. When it returns, it brings a heaviness with it. A reminder that some things do not leave completely.

But you’re different. You’re not tied to a scent or a single place. You’re tied to moments that felt ordinary at the time. Sitting outside the classroom, talking about random things, laughing for no real reason. Sometimes we said nothing at all. You were comfortable in silence, and that lingered with me more than I realized back then.

Silence never felt awkward or uncomfortable with you. It felt full in a serene way. I think that is why I kept sitting with you. In the middle of everything loud and demanding, you felt like a pause I could step into without explaining myself.

I wonder if I mourned you when it happened. I do not think I did, at least not in a way I recognized. I remember the shock, how distant it felt, like something that had happened somewhere far away. I was younger then. Death did not feel real in the way it does now. It was something abstract, something that happened to other people. You didn't fit into that understanding, so my mind moved around it, left it untouched, unfinished.

And now, years later, you return in fragments. A passing thought. A memory that surfaces without warning. A wondering about who you would have become. Sometimes I imagine running into you somewhere, a brief pause before recognition, then laughter. Other times, I find myself thinking you might still be out there, living somewhere beyond what I know. It doesn’t make sense, but the thought dawdles anyway.

Is this grief? It feels different from what I expected. It's not demanding my attention or overwhelming. It stays for a while, then leaves without making a scene. There’s a softness to it, but also a weight that sits beneath it. An understanding that something existed, something mattered, even if I did not fully understand it at the time.

I think about who we were then. Young, unaware, moving through life without the words to name what we were building in small, ordinary moments. I considered you a close friend, even if I never said it out loud. There was ease in your presence. A kind of calm that did not ask for anything. I understand now how rare that is.

I ask myself again if I have the right to miss you, and the question feels less important now. Missing you is not about how well I knew you. It is about the space you occupied in my life, however brief, however undefined. It is about the conversations we had and the silences we shared. It is about the way you existed in my world, and the way that world shifted when you were no longer in it.

I hope you are okay, wherever you are. I can still picture your smile, the way it came easily, without effort. Calm and uncomplicated. Steady in a way that made everything around it feel less urgent.

You were my friend. That feels clear to me now in a way it did not before.

And I think it is enough to say this without hesitation, without editing it down or questioning its validity.

I miss you, Gbolahun.

Authors note: was up at 4am and I couldn’t just let this thought pass.

Leave a comment

Everyone loves saying “just be yourself”. It sounds simple, empowering, and kind of motivational. But here’s the truth: there is no “real” you hiding under the surface.

Life is a constant performance, and your so-called authentic self is more like a costume you’ve been wearing since birth, stitched together by society, culture, and other people’s expectations.

Who we are is not some fixed, untouchable essence. The things we think we like, the instincts we trust, and the choices we call our own were all learned from the world around us.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that there is no backstage self waiting to be revealed. Everything about taste and preference comes from socialization, and we’ve just forgotten it. Even Stanford psychologist Brian Lowry reminds us that the self is always changing. You can’t be yourself alone. You’re constantly shaped by the people and environments around you.

So when someone tells you to “just be yourself,” they are assuming that “yourself” exists independently of everything else. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Identity is fluid, changeable, and heavily influenced by social forces. There is no unchanging, pure version of you tucked away somewhere.

This isn’t just snobbish behavior you can ignore. Distinction works like gravity. Whether you notice it or not, it shapes everything you do. Imagine showing up to the Met Gala in sweatpants, a ball gown, or even your pajamas. Whatever you wear, you are sending a message.

There is no neutral choice. Even doing nothing communicates something about your place in the social hierarchy. Cultural capital, the invisible set of social advantages, constantly signals who belongs where, and you can’t opt out. Ignoring this doesn’t protect you from it, it just makes life harder to navigate.

So the bottom line: “just be yourself” is great advice if you like comforting lies. In reality, who you are has already been shaped by systems you didn’t choose. Your tastes, instincts, and even your quirks are social creations.

The fun comes when you accept life is a performance. You can’t escape the show, but you can learn the script, improvise, and maybe even enjoy it.

There is no “real you,” only a self shaped by everything and everyone around you.

Subscribe now

Girls like us by Zoe Wees

I think about how recent this freedom is. How new it is for women to be told they do not need to be liked and accepted in order to be protected. How absurd it is to expect us to shed instincts shaped over centuries, simply because the language around them has changed. We are asked to perform progress without being given the grace to transition into it.

That expectation shows up everywhere. In conversations, online debates, passing jokes that land a little too easily. A woman does something that reads as approval/attention-seeking, accommodating, eager to be chosen or pleased, and suddenly she is reduced to a label, “she’s such a pick-me”. As if that word explains her entirely. As if it did not once explain all of us.

The uncomfortable truth is this: at one point, we were all that girl. Maybe not invariably loud, or publicly, maybe not in ways we like to admit now, but we learned early that being liked was not vanity, it was strategy. Approval meant safety. It meant access, it meant fewer consequences in a world that has never been temperate with women who refuse to be legible.

Life, information, and distance helped some of us unlearn parts of that conditioning. Exposure to better language, friends who asked different questions, books that named what we felt but could not articulate, time that created space between who we were taught to be and who we are trying to become. None of that happened because we were morally superior. It happened because something changed course around us.

This is why the shaming feels so misplaced. Growth has somehow turned into a hierarchy. The moment we recognize a pattern in ourselves and step away from it, we want to burn the bridge behind us. We want to pretend we never crossed it. But the anger we direct at women who have not unlearned it yet is rarely about them. It is about the parts of ourselves we are still trying to outrun.

I am not interested in defending harmful behavior. Some patterns deserve to be challenged. Some beliefs need to be confronted. But there is a difference between speaking up and tearing down. Education does not require humiliation. Empowerment does not need cruelty. We can name patriarchy without using its tools against one another.

The programming does not simply disappear because we now have better words. The body does not update at the same speed as the mind. From a brain science perspective, this makes sense. The nervous system is designed to repeat what once kept it safe. Survival strategies get stored deep, beyond logic. Trauma reinforces familiarity, not correctness. You cannot shame a nervous system into healing. You cannot mock your way out of conditioning that was rewarded for years.

This might explain the intensity of our reactions. Seeing another woman enact a version of survival we are trying to shed can feel like being dragged back into a past we are embarrassed by. Shame is reactive like that. It convinces us that distance equals progress. That judgment equals growth. That if we are hard enough on others, we will never have to look too closely at ourselves.

Subscribe now

I realized this more clearly when I rewatched *Wicked: Part One*. The ending lingered differently this time. Two women choosing separate paths, neither fully right nor fully wrong, and the line: “I hope you’re happy in the end.” I mean there was no approval or condemnation. Just an acknowledgment that survival looks different depending on where you stand. It struck me that this is the grace we struggle to offer other women. We want sameness. We want alignment. We want proof that our way is the correct one.

It is not the point. As women, we cannot judge another woman solely for how she chooses to survive in an oppressive world. Especially when so many of us once made similar choices under different names. The reflex to shame often comes from recognition. From seeing a version of ourselves we have not fully forgiven. From wanting to bury that memory so deeply that no one can dig it back up.

It was uncomfortable to admit that judging women for not being as far along in their unlearning as I am is, in itself, misogynistic. It replicates the same rigid expectations we claim to resist. It assumes a linear path where none exists. It forgets that access to knowledge, safety, and alternatives is unevenly distributed.

Leave a comment

We do not need to romanticize the past versions of ourselves. But we do need to remember them. To speak with honesty instead of contempt. To correct without condescension. To offer tools instead of labels. That is how real change happens. Not through public punishment, but through shared understanding.

The freedom we are learning to inhabit is still fragile. Still new. Still being tested. Perhaps the work is not proving how far we have come, but making the road less brutal for those walking behind us. Perhaps progress is quieter than we think. Less about performance. More about patience.

And maybe that is enough for now. To say, without superiority or shame, we are all unlearning something. At different speeds. In different ways. With varying degrees of grace. And to hope, sincerely, that in the end, we find a way to be both freer and kinder than what we were given.

This is your sign to quit calling a girl “pick-me”. :)

Cover picture <> Muse by Marie

Sometimes Substack feels like throwing a message in a river. You publish, close your phone or laptop, and hope the current carries it somewhere. Other times the flow feels alive and strangely generous. Your work shows up in places you never expected. The truth sits somewhere in the middle. The feed is not magic. It follows patterns

.

What Substack explained in “Demystifying the Feed”

The Substack team describes the feed as a place for discovery. Not a timeline, not a ranking board, but a space where readers can meet writers they have never seen before.

A few points stood out:

What writers themselves say in the comments

• Across Notes threads and the comments under “Demystifying the Feed,” writers keep repeating the same observations:

• Early engagement gives a post momentum. Even five comments or restacks in the first few hours can carry a piece further.

• Being active in Notes creates visibility. Writers who reply, restack, and show up often report more profile visits and more discovery.

• The ecosystem matters as much as the algorithm. Most writers say readers find them through other writers, not through the feed alone.

🧋Buymealatte✨

• Posts tend to fade when a writer publishes and then disappears. Presence makes a difference.

• Conversations create traffic. A thoughtful comment on another writer’s work sends curious readers to your page.

• These are not rules, only patterns. But patterns become obvious when enough people notice them.

So what actually helps your writing move?

Here is the simplest way to put it:

• Write something worth lingering on. Time-spent matters.

• Be present after you publish. Show up in Notes and respond to people.

• Comment on writing you genuinely enjoy. It places your name in active spaces.

• Restack work you like. It signals that you are part of the community.

• Connect with writers. Relationships travel further than algorithms.

• Be consistent. A steady rhythm helps the feed understand your work.

• Bring traffic from outside when you can. It strengthens every signal the feed uses.

None of this guarantees virality, but it builds momentum and makes your work discoverable.

The feed is not a puzzle. It is a reflection. It responds to how you write, how you show up, how you read others, and how you take part in the community. The platform lifts what people stay with, talk about, and share.

Write what you love and feel, what drives you. Show up often. Engage with intention.

I’m not an expert but THIS is the entire engine.

Too sweet - Hozier

There is a certain kind of calm person that the world gravitates toward because they listen in a way that makes silence feel safe. I used to be that person. The therapist friend. The one you call when the night feels too long. The one you run to when your heart starts folding in on itself. I held everyone’s stories like delicate glass, careful not to drop anything.

At first, it felt like purpose. It felt like I had meaning because someone needed me. I would listen, nod, ask gentle questions, offer words that softened the edges of whatever they carried. I thought I was doing something noble. I thought this was what connection was supposed to look like. Two people sitting in the dark, trusting each other with the parts they hide from the world.

✨ Buy me a latte🧋🫦

I wish someone had told me it was not a good idea. I wish someone had warned me about the price of being everyone’s safe place.

Ninety five percent of the people who opened up to me eventually grew attached. They confused comfort for chemistry, understanding for intimacy. They would say they liked me, but I knew it was not love. It was not affection. It was the illusion of closeness you feel when someone finally listens to you in a world that barely does. It was attraction born out of attention, not compatibility.

Maybe it was the way I handled things. The way I would speak softly even when the truth was sharp. The way I let people unravel without judgment. The way I sometimes held their emotions more carefully than they held their own. I do not blame them. People fall in love with how you make them feel, not who you actually are.

The truth is that I never knew how to talk about my own problems. I did not know how to say I was drowning too. I did not know how to ask for help without feeling like I was making noise. So instead, I made them talk. I let them fill the silence. I listened the way I wished someone would listen to me. Attentively. Fully. With all their focus. I became the therapist because it was easier than being the patient.

There was excitement in the beginning. A strange thrill in being the first person to hear what lived inside someone else’s mind. A kind of power, soft and fragile, that made me feel necessary. I liked being trusted. I liked being chosen. I liked being the person someone thought of at their lowest.

But tenderness has a weight. And eventually, I felt it.

The late night calls. The crises. The emotional emergencies that were never mine but somehow landed on my chest. The way people leaned so heavily on me that I forgot what it felt like to stand on my own. I started shrinking. My voice got smaller. My needs grew quieter. I could not hear myself anymore.

I wanted me for myself. I wanted the version of me that was light and curious and unburdened. I wanted a life where my worth was not measured by how much pain I could absorb without breaking. I wanted friendships that were balanced. Conversations that went both ways. People who asked how I was doing and meant it.

The truth is that the therapist friend rarely gets held. We are the sunlight, but no one notices when we start dimming. We are the safe place, but rarely the person anyone thinks to check on. We are the ones who say you can tell me anything, while secretly wishing someone would say that to us too.

I am learning to step back now. I am learning to let people handle their own storms. I am learning that I am allowed to keep parts of myself for myself. I am learning that I deserve friendships where I do not have to carry the whole room.

I am still soft. Still gentle. Still someone who listens with intention. But I am no longer offering pieces of myself for free.

There is a difference between being kind and being consumed. I am finally choosing kindness towards myself.

Boo

And the sweet part is that you do not need to spend much. Most of the things that ground you are free, or close to free. What you need is curiosity and the willingness to try.

Here are twenty hobbies that can fit into any life and make it feel softer, fuller, and more intentional.

1. Solo morning walks

When you walk before the world wakes up, you hear yourself more clearly. The roads are gentle, the air feels honest, and you learn to start your day from a place of calm. It is movement without pressure.

2. Journaling

A simple notebook becomes a mirror. The more you write, the more you understand the quiet parts of yourself. It is a slow conversation with your mind, and it costs almost nothing.

3. Thrifting

There is joy in digging for pieces with history. You find clothes that feel like little stories, and in the process you build a style that is uniquely yours. It is creativity on a budget.

4. Reading one chapter a day

This is reading without guilt. No rush. No finishing goals. Just one chapter, one moment, one idea that stays with you.

5. Cooking one new recipe every week

Trying new meals teaches patience, skill, and a little pride. You watch yourself improve in tiny ways. And your kitchen becomes a place of comfort, not stress.

Buy me a latte🧋

6. Pilates or yoga from YouTube

Your body learns strength in gentle ways. You do not need a studio. You do not need a subscription. Just a mat or floor and the willingness to stretch.

7. Phone photography

You learn to see beauty in corners, reflections, shadows, random things that once felt ordinary. Your eyes sharpen. Your world becomes richer. Take pictures of the sky, colour hunt.

8. Digital decluttering

Deleting things you no longer need is a quiet act of release. Less noise. Less chaos. More mental space. Your phone becomes lighter and so do you.

9. Skincare

Not complicated routines. Just care. Cleansing, hydrating, protecting. You learn consistency and patience with your own face.

10. Learning a new language

Free apps. YouTube teachers. Podcasts. Small daily effort that expands your mind and makes you feel capable in unexpected ways.

11. Running

It starts hard, then becomes addictive. The clarity. The sweat. The way your breathing finds rhythm. It teaches you discipline and forgiveness at the same time.

12. Painting or drawing

You create something with your hands and watch your feelings take shape. It does not have to be good. It just has to be yours.

13. Volunteering

You step outside your world for a moment and help someone else. It shifts something inside you. You become softer and stronger. It could be in your community or church or school. Just step out of your comfort zone.

14. Dancing alone in your room

The freest form of joy. No audience. No pressure. Just you, your body, and a song that makes you feel alive.

15. Collecting something small

It could be thrifted books, postcards, quotes, ticket stubs. Little items that become a quiet archive of who you were at twenty.

16. Redecorating your space

Moving your bed. Adding photos. Rearranging shelves. Your room changes and suddenly you feel like you can breathe again. Small shifts can transform the way you live.

17. Meditation

You sit still. You breathe. You learn that peace can be simple. Five minutes a day becomes a soft reset for your mind.

18. Podcast listening

There is a podcast for every mood and every version of you. Some teach, some comfort, some keep you company. You fill silence with something meaningful.

19. Learning basic finance skills

Budgeting is not glamorous, but it is empowering. You learn how to protect yourself. Future you will be grateful.

20. Writing letters you will never send

To old lovers. To old friends. To the version of yourself you outgrew. It is closure without confrontation and a hobby that empties your chest gently. Be a Lara Jean.

Some things don’t stop hurting just because you understand them.
Some endings don’t stop stinging just because you saw them coming.
Love has this wild way of reopening the same door, even when you swear you’ve locked it. Heartbreak only repeats where your heart once bloomed.

It’s one thing to fear being hurt. It’s another to fear being known.
To fear someone spotting the soft, unguarded parts you’ve kept stitched up for years.
Letting someone see you is always a gamble — but sometimes the right people walk in gently,
as if the room of your life is sacred.
And that changes everything.

Loving deeply means living deeply.
And living deeply means feeling the full weight of things — the joy, the ache, the longing, the loss.
But love multiplies meaning just as much as it multiplies pain.
And most of us, even knowing the cost, still choose to love anyway.
That says something about the human heart.

Share

Storms don’t always disappear when you want them to.
But some days, you find yourself breathing calmly in the middle of the chaos,
as if your soul knows something your body doesn’t —
that you’ve survived every storm so far,
and you’ll survive this one too.

Blue has never been a lonely color.
It is made of every warmth it once touched,
every brightness it had to let go of.
Some feelings don’t vanish when they fade;
they settle quietly inside us,
reminding us that even the calmest shades
were born from something that once burned bright.

There are places inside us that tremble when touched.
Rooms we rarely enter, because the memories echo too loudly.
But love — real love — does not fear the brokenness.
It sits with us in the quietest corner,
holding the parts we hide from the world,
as if to say you are still worthy here,
even where you feel undone.

✨BUYMEACOFFEE☕️

Sometimes the world roars around you, yet something inside stays still.
A quiet that refuses to be touched by the noise.
A reminder that even in the darkest weather, your spirit knows how to keep a small light burning.

Some joy is born from sorrow.
There are people who move through life with grace
not because they are untouched by pain,
but because they have learned to carry it
like a hidden pearl against their skin.

There are people who become so close
that hiding from them feels like hiding from yourself.
Their presence turns the truth soft.
With them, honesty is not a duty,
but a natural form of breathing.

Some places feel like refuge for tired hearts.
Quiet water, slow wind, a sky that asks for nothing.
It is a longing to disappear for a moment,
not out of despair,
but to be held by something gentler than life.

There is a kind of love that cannot bear hesitation.
A love that wants truth, even if it breaks something.
Anything but silence, anything but watching someone
stand at a distance when your heart is reaching for them.

Some loves feel inevitable.
As if the world narrowed down
to one person’s presence
and nothing else ever made sense again.
A devotion that answers every question
with the same name.

There is a sorrow in realizing
how many moments someone carried alone.
A tenderness in wanting to know the wounds
not to expose them,
but to honor the pain your absence left behind.

Some days the world feels too sharp.
And the softest desire is simply to rest,
to let the noise blur for a while,
to wake up when the heart is steady enough
to face life again.

Some souls need nothing more than gentleness
to unfold.
A soft word, a steady hand, a little warmth,
and suddenly everything they kept hidden
begins to bloom again.

Some love refuses to end.
Even in silence, even in loss,
it breathes in the spaces between memories.
The kind of love that can raise the dead parts of you
with just the sound of her name.

There are loves so deep
that the truth becomes a riddle.
A devotion too vast to confess plainly,
so it hides behind gentle words,
hoping the heart it belongs to
will understand anyway.

Some softness is carved from survival.
A quiet strength shaped by every hurt endured.
To be gentle after everything
is its own kind of miracle,
a tenderness sharpened by the past
yet unafraid to remain open.

There is a light that comes not from the face
but from the mouth.
The beauty of kindness, of sincerity, of truth.
Words that soften the air around the person who speaks them,
making them unforgettable without trying.

When I say it’s hard, I don’t mean inconvenient. I mean the kind of hard that shakes your foundations.

Because faith teaches surrender. Feminism teaches voice.

And sometimes, those two feel like opposite directions.

I was raised to believe that reading the Bible meant trusting it completely, no questions, no second thoughts. But as I grew older, I began to notice things that didn’t sit quietly in my chest anymore.

Eve blamed for curiosity.

Sarah’s pain turned into a symbol of faith. Hagar cast out into the wilderness like her life was an afterthought.

Women in wars taken, silenced, erased, while men were called chosen and favored.

Then I came across verses that left me breathless for different reasons. In Leviticus 12, it says that after giving birth, a woman is unclean.

If she gives birth to a boy, she’s unclean for seven days. If she gives birth to a girl, she’s unclean for fourteen. As if even in childbirth, in creation itself, a woman carries double the impurity.

Subscribe now

And in Deuteronomy 22, it says that if a girl is raped, the man who violated her must pay her father and marry her. Her pain becomes a contract. Her assault becomes a vow. And somehow, that was seen as justice.

When I read of women taken as spoils of war, of daughters offered as peace offerings, of a mother waiting ninety years only to watch her husband almost sacrifice her son I struggle to find kindness in those pages.

It began to dawn on me that the same Bible that teaches love and justice also reflects a world built on hierarchy.

A world where men’s voices were preserved and women’s were often forgotten.

And somehow, that same structure followed us here, to the pews and pulpits of today.

Being a feminist and a Christian means waking up to that tension every day.

It means reading “There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” and then flipping the page to “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man.”

It means hearing “You are fearfully and wonderfully made” but being told your purpose begins and ends in service and submission.

And I remember thinking, if God values me equally, why does His house feel built on uneven ground?

Sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t God, but the system built around Him. Maybe He never asked for women to shrink maybe we were just easier to manage that way. But the Bible doesn’t always make that easy to believe.

And still, I love the idea of faith. I love what it can mean. That somewhere in the divine, there’s a God who made both male and female in His image.

That maybe what we’ve inherited is not His truth but human translation.

Share Lydiainherthoughts🌸

There’s something haunting about that one scene in Loki when he said, “Without them, where do I belong?”

That line has been sitting with me for months now. I don’t even know if it’s sad.

Or maybe it is. My heart broke for him and how I relate to him because it felt like an echo of something I’ve never said out loud.

I think I’ve been grieving the people who still exist.

We’re told people have their own lives, that we shouldn’t hold them down or keep them from living it.

And somehow, that hurts more.

Belonging, for most of us, isn’t something we build.

It’s tied to people, roles, and moments that make us feel momentarily safe, like the version of us that makes sense around them.

When that version no longer fits, when the rhythm breaks, we don’t just lose that person, but who we were with them.

That’s what I saw in Loki’s face when he said it. The exhaustion of someone who finally realized that belonging can vanish without betrayal.

You can understand every reason for why things changed, and still ache like you’ve been left behind.

For Loki, belonging wasn’t a place or a person. It was a moment, a fragile, flickering second of connection that already ended. And he’s doomed to replay it, again and again, knowing it’s gone.

I’ve done that too.

Replaying conversations that ended months ago, that one where I said it was fine, but my voice cracked halfway through.

Rehearsing what I could’ve said differently, knowing the ending doesn’t change.

So when Sylvie said, “Go write yours,” I felt it in my chest. It could be mistaken for comfort but it was confrontation.

And I’ve never liked confrontations.

How do you start over when you’ve already lost the framework that made sense to you?

How do you write something new when your hands are shaking but still holding on to the old script?

That line  “Go write yours”  feels like the universe saying, I won’t give you what you lost. I’ll give you a blank page instead.

And that’s the cruelest mercy of all. I don’t want a blank page. I want the story I knew. I want the familiar pain, the one I’ve already learned to survive.

Starting over means inventing a new language for love, for meaning, for myself and that’s terrifying.

It’s funny, people think grief only follows death. But there’s a quieter kind that shadows the living.

The grief of distance. The grief of changed frequencies. The grief of realizing that even understanding doesn’t always bridge difference.

I used to think belonging was about finding people who spoke my language. But now I think it’s about learning how to stand in translation, to stay when everything around you has changed dialects.

Maybe that’s what Loki was asking, really: If I’m no longer who I was to them, where do I belong? And maybe the answer isn’t somewhere.

Maybe it’s someone new. Maybe belonging isn’t about who stays, but who I become after everyone leaves.

That’s what I tell myself when the silence gets heavy, when I start to reach for ghosts who still breathe. That maybe, like Loki, I’m not lost. Maybe I’m just at the beginning of the next chapter — the one I have to write myself.

Subscribe

As a kid, you always side with the brave one

the outspoken character in the movie who sees

something wrong and calls it out without hesitation.

You love them for their boldness, their certainty, their clear sense of right and wrong.

But somewhere along the way, that clarity fades.

You grow up and realize that things aren’t that simple anymore.

You can’t always tell who’s good or bad, right or wrong.

You stop choosing sides and start trying to understand.

You begin to see that people don’t just become villains or heroes.

Something happens first — something breaks, bends, disappoints, or hardens them.

And suddenly, survival starts to look a lot like morality.

It’s not that you stop caring about what’s right.

You just start realizing that in the real world, whoever survives long enough to tell their story usually gets to be the one who was “Good”.