“For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, comes not from the Father but from the world.”

1 John 2:16

There is a pattern I cannot stop noticing. The people who seem most marked for something, the gifted ones, the ones with an obvious light on them, are so often the same people quietly undone by something in private. Their enemies did not do it. Their talent did not run out. It was appetite, something they could not put down.

I used to think this was bad luck, or hypocrisy, or the ordinary failure of people we should never have put on pedestals in the first place. I think now it is something closer to a law. The bigger the call, the sharper the test. And the test almost always comes dressed as desire.

When John wanted to name everything in the world that pulls a person away from God, he did not give a long list. He gave three things. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Three doors. Almost everything that has ever taken someone down walked through one of them.

And when Jesus was tested, it was through the same three doors. What has never left me is when the test came. Not in some random low moment. It came immediately after the highest moment of his life to that point. The heavens had just opened at his baptism and a voice had said this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. He hears that he is chosen, and the very next thing that happens is the wilderness. Forty days, no food, and then the tempter arrives.

The affirmation, and then the ambush. As if the enemy waits for you to find out who you are, and moves the moment you take a step toward it.

The first door is the flesh. Turn these stones into bread. Jesus is starving, forty days in, and he is offered the most reasonable thing in the world. Food. We shrink the lust of the flesh down to sex, but it is wider than that. It is appetite of every kind. The body’s demand to be satisfied now. Comfort, sensation, the voice that says you have waited long enough, you have earned this, take it. He refuses. Bread is not the enemy here. He will not let his appetite set the terms of his obedience. The one who is hungriest is the one most easily bought.

The second door is the eyes. He is shown all the kingdoms of the world, and told all of this can be yours. The lust of the eyes is comparison and coveting, and it always begins with looking. David did not fall in the abstract. He fell from a rooftop, looking at something that was not his, at the season when kings were supposed to be at war and he had stayed home. The eyes gather what the heart then talks itself into. In our time the rooftop is a screen, and it does not stop, it shows us other people’s lives, other people’s bodies, other people’s kingdoms, all day, until wanting what is not ours starts to feel like a personality.

The third door is pride. Throw yourself down, and the angels will catch you. Prove it. Make a scene. The pride of life is the hunger to be seen, to be proven, to be spectacular, and it is the most dangerous of the three because it can wear the language of faith. It leaves your calling untouched and quietly turns it into a performance, a gift arranged for applause. It is the temptation of everyone who has ever wanted their gift to be witnessed more than they wanted to be good.

Here is why I think lust haunts the chosen in particular. Ordinary desire is content with ordinary things. But a person with a call has a larger appetite by design. More drive, more hunger, more capacity to want. The same engine that could build something rare is the engine that, left unmastered, quietly consumes them. The gift and the vulnerability run on the same wire. You do not get one without the other.

And no one sets a trap for a person going nowhere. The intensity of the temptation is its own strange testimony. The enemy does not waste his best material on a life that threatens nothing. When the pull is that fierce, there is usually something in you worth stopping. Read the intensity as a map. The fight itself is evidence of the treasure.

I have watched this, and if I am honest I have felt it. Samson had the strength of an army and could not master one appetite, and it cost him his eyes and his purpose in a single night. Solomon was given a wisdom no one else in his generation could touch, and a thousand women turned the wisest heart of an age away from the God who gave it. These were not small men undone by small things. They were enormous men undone by the one room in the house they never conquered.

This is what I mean when I say a man or a woman who cannot take control of lust will live in the shadow of their fullest potential. God does not abandon them. They abandon the larger version of their life for a smaller, immediate pleasure, again and again, until the smaller thing is simply who they have become. Potential rarely dies all at once. It leaks. It goes quietly, in private choices no one sees, until one day the distance between who you could have been and who you settled for is too wide to cross.

So for anyone who feels a call, and I am saying this to myself as much as to anyone reading, self has to be conquered before anything real gets built. Conquered, in the full weight of that word. You cannot simply manage this thing or strike a deal with it and expect it to stay down. The wilderness came before the ministry for a reason. Jesus won privately, with no one watching, before he did a single public thing. The victory that actually mattered had no audience.

We tend to want it the other way around. We want the platform first and the character later. We want to be trusted with the kingdoms before we have learned to say no to them in the desert. But it does not work in that order, and the quiet wreckage of wasted gifts is full of people who were handed the platform before they had won the private thing.

I am not writing this from a mountain. I am writing it as someone still in the wilderness on this, still learning that the same hunger which has built things in me is the hunger that can undo me the moment I stop paying attention. There is no arrival here. There is only the daily, unglamorous work of saying no to the immediate thing so that the larger thing has room to grow into what it was meant to be.

And the tests do not disappear once you pass them. They come back in new clothing. Jesus faced down all three, and Luke says the devil left him only until a more opportune time. Even his victory was not final. It was simply that day’s. I think that is the part we are not told often enough. You do not conquer this once. You conquer it today, and then you get up tomorrow and do it again.

Three things I am carrying out of this

1. The attack came right after the affirmation. I am learning to keep my guard up right after the good moments, right after I feel closest to God, at the doorway of something new. I used to expect the test in the low seasons. It keeps coming at the high ones instead.

2. The same hunger that can ruin me is the hunger that builds me. For a long time I wanted God to just take the desire away. I see it differently now. The desire will stay. What has to change is who is in charge of it. I want to be the one holding it, and not the one being dragged behind it.

3. The victory that matters has no audience. The most important thing I will ever conquer, I will conquer in private, with no one watching and no credit coming. I am trying to make my peace with that, because it is the whole game.

Psalm 30:5

If you are reading this, I want to believe it found you at the right time. That out of everything you could have opened today, you opened this, and maybe that is not entirely an accident.

So let me talk to you as if it is just the two of us, because I think it might be.

You have been asking why me. Not out loud, maybe. But underneath everything, in the quiet part of the day, you keep asking why it has to be you. Why it is always the harder road, the longer wait, the thing that will not resolve no matter how you turn it. Why other people seem to get the straightforward version and you got this one.

I know that question because I lived inside it for a long time. I have asked it over things I built and lost. I have asked it in the middle of the night when nothing made sense and no answer came.

On the outside it seemed like I was functioning. I showed up where I said I would. People looked at me and decided I was handling it, and I let them, because explaining felt like more than I had. The hardest part was never the pain itself. It was carrying it quietly. Smiling in rooms while something in me was on the floor. Being the strong one, the one other people leaned on, while privately wondering how much longer I could hold the weight before I crushed under it.

If any of that is you right now, the being fine in public and the coming apart in private, then you already know I am not speaking to you in theory.

And I am not going to pretend to you that I found a clean reason to the why me question. I did not. But I found something, and I want to hand it to you, because I did not have it when I needed it most.

Why me is not always a sentence being passed on you, because sometimes the season you are most sure will end you is the one quietly setting up everything that comes after it. It feels like the ending only because you are standing too close to it. From where you are, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a wall and a bend in the road.

I could not tell the difference either. A while ago, the life I am living right now would have looked impossible to me. Not improved, not slightly better. Impossible. And I want to be honest about how it changed, because the honesty is the part that might actually help you. It did not change because I finally figured it out. It did not arrive with a warning, or a sign, or a moment where I felt it coming. One season I was in the dark asking why me, and then, almost without explanation, I was not.

I am not telling you this to sell you a happy ending. I have had seasons that did not turn. I have prayed for things that never came, and made my peace with their silence. So I am not promising you an outcome. Nobody honest can.

What I am asking of you is smaller, and I think it is the only thing that matters right now. Do not decide in the dark. Do not sign the paperwork on your whole life on the strength of one terrible night. The night is real, I am not talking you out of it, weeping is allowed to endure. But it endures for a night. It does not become a life sentence just because it is a long one.

Stay one more day. Then, if you can, one more after that. Not because I can promise you the morning, but because you cannot see it from where you are, and you of all people should not be the one who talks yourself out of it before it has had the chance to come. And when the morning eventually comes, you’ll realise the version of you the night produced was exactly what the morning needed.

You have carried more than most people know. I suspect you have carried some of it precisely because you were the one who could. That is not a small thing about you. It is not your weakness that keeps getting tested. Instead, your strength keeps being trusted, whether you asked for it or not.

So hold on. The valley you are standing in has filled before, for people no more deserving than you or me, overnight, with no explanation anyone could give afterward.

It found you today for a reason. Stay.

With you in it,

Bukky

I want to try something different here.

My first few pieces were stories. Seasons of my life with a beginning and an end, written after enough time had passed that I could finally make sense of them. This one is not that. It is the start of a series I have wanted to write for a while: the questions that have been sitting on my mind lately and will not leave. There is no tidy ending here. No answer I can hand you. Just the things I keep turning over in the quiet, and a hope that maybe you turn over the same ones.

I am writing this at 2am, which is usually when these thoughts get the loudest. So I will start with the biggest one.

Lately I keep asking myself what all of this actually means.

I spent eleven years abroad before my first visit back home. When you are away that long, home becomes a picture in your head. And that picture stays still while the real place keeps changing without you. So coming back was not one clean feeling. It was coming home and feeling like a stranger at the same time. But the thing that has stayed with me most is not about me. It is what I see when I walk the streets of Lagos.

You feel the struggle here. It is on every corner. Someone wants to sell you something. Someone wants to carry your bag. Someone wants you to notice them. Everyone hails you and calls you Oga, and asks you to show them love.

When I say they want you to show them love, I mean they want you to give them money. That is what it really means here. Calling you Oga is the hail, the little bit of praise that comes before the ask, said with the hope that you will reach into your pocket and drop something. There is real warmth in it, and there is real weight in it, both at once. And it leaves me with a question I cannot put down. Why are opportunities not evenly distributed?

It is not that there is no poverty abroad. There are poor people in Europe. There are homeless people on those streets too. But the contrast in the everyday reality of an ordinary person is stark, and once you have seen both up close, you cannot pretend you did not. Two people, equal in effort, equal in how badly they want it, handed completely different starting points by nothing more than where they happened to be born.

What makes it heavier is knowing I cannot fix it. I look around and ask myself, if someone really wanted to fix this country, where would they even start? Every problem is tied to ten others. You pull one and the rest get tighter somewhere else. It is enough to make you feel small, and a little useless, standing in the middle of something so much bigger than you.

But if I am honest, the streets are only where the question begins. Seeing the suffering pushes me to something bigger and older, the kind of thing that feels almost silly to say out loud. Why are we here at all? What is any of this for?

I have carried an answer to that for a long time, and most days it holds. I want my being here to leave the world a little better for the people who come after me. Said plainly like that, it sounds vague, almost like something you would print on a mug. What I actually mean is simpler. I want to build things that outlive me. Things that keep working, keep helping, keep standing long after I am gone and my name is forgotten. That is the kind of meaningful life I can believe in. Not to be remembered, but to have built something that still does good when I am not around to see it.

And yet.

Even with that, there are nights when the whole thing feels stranger than I can explain. I wonder if we are all part of one big experiment. Or a movie script that was written before any of us showed up, each of us playing a part we did not choose, saying lines we only think are ours. I am not saying that to sound deep. It is more like a dizzy feeling, looking up and realising how little of this I actually understand, and how sure everyone around me seems to be anyway.

One strange thing all this questioning has done is change what I want. A lot of the material things I used to covet have quietly lost their value to me. I do not think they are bad. They are good, truly. But I keep landing on the same stubborn question. Is this all there is? Because if the answer is yes, then a lot of what we spend our lives chasing does not weigh very much. And if the answer is no, then the chasing was never really the point.

I have not figured this out. That is kind of the whole idea of this series. I am not writing to you as someone who found the answer. I am writing from inside the question, which feels more honest anyway.

Here is where this season has left me, at least for now.

Three things I’m carrying out of this

One.

I cannot un-see what I have seen. Walking these streets has changed the questions I am willing to ask myself. It is harder to hide inside my own comfort now, and I think that is a good thing, even when it does not feel like one.

Two.

I am learning to let purpose be enough, even when I am not certain. I still do not know the full reason we are here. But wanting to build things that outlive me is a direction I can walk in, even in the dark. Lately I am okay holding a direction instead of an answer.

Three.

The things I used to chase have loosened their grip, and I am not rushing to grab them again. There is a freedom in that I did not expect, and I want to sit with it a while before I decide what it means.

So now I want to turn it to you, because a question this big is too heavy to carry alone. What are the thoughts that won’t leave your mind lately? The ones that show up in the quiet, that you have not quite found the words for. Tell me. Maybe someone else is carrying the exact same thing and does not know yet that they are not alone in it.

• • •

Until next time,

Bukky

“We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.” William Osler.

This piece is the most scripture-anchored of everything in this series. The previous pieces touched on faith in passing. This one lives there. I have quoted verses, referenced sermons, and told a story that is deeply rooted in my personal experience of Jesus. I want to honour you enough to say that upfront.

If you are not in faith, or if you are in a complicated place with it, you are still welcome here. I am not preaching at you. I am telling you what happened to me. Approach it with whatever openness you have, even just curiosity, and I think there may still be something here for you. But I want you to know what you are reading.

Trust God with your story.

"After two days He will revive us;

on the third day He will raise us up,

that we may live in His sight."

Hosea 6:2

The 33rd Birthday

When your pastor tells you, on your 33rd birthday, that it is the year of the resurrection, you take that and run with it.

I did. I loved the idea of it. Dead things coming back to life. New things starting. I went into that year believing for restoration, for something to finally turn around. My pastor was wise, because what he did not say, what he left me to discover for myself, was that resurrection requires something to die first.

There is a gap between receiving a word and understanding what it will cost to see it fulfilled. I walked into 2025 believing for new things. What came instead was a series of losses: a relationship that ended, a job that was not renewed, a startup that slowly lost its momentum, a crypto wallet drained, a season where my health began to struggle and peace became genuinely hard to find. For the full account of what that year held, you can read the previous piece in this series. I am not going to repeat it all here.

What I want to tell you about is what was happening underneath all of that. Because the external losses were the story everybody could see. The internal one is what changed my life.

Where I Was Before

To understand what happened in my 33rd year, you need to understand where I was spiritually before it.

I grew up in a Christian home. My mother is a praying woman in the truest sense of the word, the kind who prays before she worries, and sometimes prays instead of worrying at all. I grew up in church, I served in church, I was on the worship team, I led Bible study, and at seventeen I organised a concert that brought multiple churches together in the city where I was living. Faith was the fabric of my early life.

Then I came to Europe.

I want to be careful here, because this is a story I can only tell from the inside. What I know is that when you leave the environment your faith was shaped in and enter a very different world, questions you had not had space to ask start surfacing. For me, it was an honest kind of questioning. Why did God design things the way He did? Is He actually good? If He is good, why do these things keep happening? I am a curious person by nature, and being in Europe gave me the room to sit with those questions in a way I had not before.

But there is a difference between honest questioning and losing the thread. Somewhere along the years of building the startup, of being deep in a different kind of ambition, of the ordinary drift that comes with being very busy and not very still, I lost the thread at some point in that journey. I was in church, active, serving, playing drums on the worship team. But my spirit was not alive anymore. You can be in church and not be in faith, and that is exactly where I was.

Some of the disappointments I had experienced over the years had done damage there too. There was a job I believed for with everything I had, a role that would have changed the entire shape of my life in Germany. When it did not come, something in me went quiet. Not loudly. But quiet in a way that took years to address. When the thing you trusted God for does not happen, the question that follows you is: can He actually be trusted? I spent a long time not fully answering that question.

The Thing I Did Not Understand

In the middle of 2025, while everything was crashing around me, a close friend called me. He had been through his own difficult season, one I had watched him navigate. But something had shifted in him. He was now the one sending midnight voice notes of prayer, passing along sermon links, interceding for the people around him. He had come alive in his spirit at exactly the season when mine was at its lowest.

Watching that did something inside me in a way I could not fully articulate at the time. It was the beginning of an awakening I did not yet have words for.

Then came December.

I attended the program Ignite Europe. On the morning I was making my way there, two things came to me very clearly, the kind of clarity that does not feel like your own thinking:

Whatever God has not ordained, He cannot sustain.

What was born in the flesh cannot be sustained by the Spirit, and what was born in the Spirit cannot be fulfilled in the flesh.

I stood with those two sentences and felt something shift.

They were not directed at the startup, or the job, or the finances. They went directly to something specific from my past I had been holding on to with both hands long after it had ended. It felt like I had been carrying something I started in my own wisdom and asking God to sustain it, which is an exhausting and ultimately impossible thing to do. And I also understood in that moment that some of the things I carry, the dreams that feel too large and too persistent to be purely my own ambition, those had been given in the Spirit and could not be fulfilled through strategy alone.

I fully let go of everything in that season. Not as defeat. As obedience.

And that was when everything began to change.

The Lesson That Came Around Twice

Looking back across 2024 and 2025, I noticed something.

I had gone through a version of the same hard season twice.

Because there is no skipping class in this life. The lesson you do not learn comes back around, and it usually comes back around louder. The difference between 2024 and 2025 was not the severity of the circumstances. It was what the circumstances produced in me. In 2024, I survived. In 2025, I woke up.

Before the Restoration

Here is the part of the story I think people least expect.

By January of 2026, I had started talking online about my experiences. I was posting videos about joy in tribulations, about counting it all joy, about what it means to trust God in a season that has not yet resolved. I was talking about alignment and seasons and transitions and getting your life back.

Nothing had changed. Not the job. Not the clarity about what was next. Nothing visible had shifted.

But something had changed inside me. And I have come to understand that this, the internal shift before the external one, is the actual miracle. God did not first restore my circumstances and then give me peace. He gave me peace in the middle of the mess. He gave me perspective before He gave me provision. He woke my spirit up, gave me back my voice, and sent me out to speak about joy before there was outward reason to celebrate.

I realized in that season that the greatest gift God could give me was Himself, not things. And knowing that I did not have to carry everything by myself anymore changed something in me.

For most of the building years, I carried everything as though the whole weight of my life rested on my shoulders alone, as if loosening my grip for even a moment would bring all of it down. I did not notice how heavy it had become, because I never put any of it down long enough to feel the ache. What woke up in me that season was the understanding that I was never meant to hold all of it by myself. There is a difference between carrying something and being crushed under it, and the difference is whether you are doing it alone. When I finally handed the weight back to God, the relief was not that my circumstances suddenly got lighter. It was that I was no longer the only one holding them.

I was not pretending. I was not performing positivity from a stage. I was, genuinely, no longer at the bottom of the story. Something had been revealed to me about the season I was in. The light of understanding had come on. And that was enough to speak from.

"Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light." - Ephesians 5:14. That is exactly what happened to me. I had been asleep in my spirit. And then I was not. The waking up came before the turning around. In fact, the waking up was the turning around. It’s probably not a coincidence that my church is called Awakening Church :).

I honestly think that being a church where you can truly grow spiritually is one of the biggest shifts that can happen to a person.

What Was Restored

My pastor has been calling 2026 the year of the resurrection, and I can now say: yes. That is exactly what it is.

What came back first was not money or a job title. What came back first was joy. Purpose. Clarity about what I was actually built for and what I was called to move toward. Energy that had been absent for so long I had stopped noticing it was gone. The ability to wake up in the morning and feel something that resembles fire.

Before, I was waking up sluggish. Going through the motions. Doing everything I could just to survive one week to the next, operating on autopilot in a way I had not noticed because I was too busy keeping everything together to stop and look at myself clearly. Now I wake up and there is something in me that wants to move. That wants to create. That wants to contribute. That is a genuinely different life.

The finances followed. The opportunities followed. Things I had thought were impossibly far away began arriving. The external restoration was real and I do not want to understate it. But I want to be clear about the order: the spirit came alive first. Everything else was downstream of that. Always.

This is the part I want to be careful with.

I am not standing on a stage telling you that if you pray the right prayer or read the right verse your life will turn around in sixty days. I do not believe faith works like a formula. And I know that some people reading might be in genuinely terrible seasons, and the last thing you need is someone making easy promises that cost them nothing.

What I am doing is telling you what happened to me. And inviting you, without pressure, to consider it.

The one thing that made the difference in my 33rd year was not that circumstances changed. It was that my spirit came alive. And when your spirit is alive, something becomes possible even in a hard season. You can move. You can speak. You can hold on to something real.

Whatever you believe, I want to ask you honestly: are you awake right now, or are you on autopilot? Are you moving through your life, or are you just surviving it? Because there is more available to you than survival. I genuinely believe that.

For me, the way back to being alive was alignment. Coming into agreement with what I sensed I was actually created for, not what I had decided I should want, not what I was chasing out of pressure or comparison, but what was genuinely mine. And that process, for me, ran directly through returning to my faith. To prayer. To stillness. To the God I had been too busy and too hurt to fully trust.

I also want to name one thing that helped me reconstruct a faith that had been worn down by disappointment: understanding that God was not the cause of my problems. That shift matters more than I can explain. When you have been through hard seasons while being in faith, it is easy to direct the frustration upward. And I needed to sit with the reality that the difficult things I went through were not His doing. He was, in fact, the reason I came through them at all. Left to myself, to my own wisdom and my own capacity for managing things, I do not want to think about where I might have ended up. The grace that kept me was real, even in the seasons when I was barely awake to it.

He is not the cause of the pain. He is the one who walks through it with you.

Three Things I Am Carrying Out of This

One.

Trusting God with a story you do not yet understand is the hardest and most important kind of faith. Not the faith that sees the outcome and says yes. The faith that cannot see anything yet and says yes anyway. That is the faith that changes you, before it changes anything else.

Two.

Death is always the prerequisite for resurrection. If you are in a dying season, you are not abandoned. You are in the part that comes before. Hold on. The third day comes.

Three.

You can have joy in the middle of the storm, before the storm passes. That is not denial. That is not forced positivity. That is what God gives when your spirit is awake to Him. I had it before anything changed. It was the most real thing in my life during that season.

After two days He will revive us.

On the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight.

I want to end with Abraham, because I think this is actually where I am right now. The scripture says he went out not knowing where he was going, because he was looking for a city whose builder and maker was God. He was not running from something. He was moving toward something he could not fully see. That is faith that moves forward without needing a map.

A year ago, I was making plans out of fear. Planning to leave Berlin, go to the UK, disappear into safety, and put some distance between me and everything that had fallen apart. That was running from something. And very clearly, in my spirit, I heard: that is not faith. Come back.

I came back. And what happened in Berlin in those months was irreplaceable.

Now I am moving again, but it feels different. I am not running from something. I am moving toward something. I do not have the full map yet. But I know the difference between fear and faith in my own chest now, and this is faith.

Wherever you are in your story, if it feels like everything has died and you are still waiting for the third day: stay. The reviving comes. The raising up comes. And on the other side of it, you get to live differently. More awake. More aligned. More genuinely alive. 

That is what this year gave me.

I would love to hear from you.

Are you in a season that feels like death before resurrection? What does faith look like for you in the hardest parts? Have you ever received something that only made sense after you came through the fire?

if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,

and that its tender shoots will not cease."

Job 14:7

There was a moment in 2025 where I sat in the quiet and asked myself a question I had never quite asked before. Not the frustrated version you ask after a bad day at work. Not the philosophical one you ask in your twenties when everything still feels abstract. This one came from a different place entirely, the kind that sits low in your chest and does not look for an answer so much as it just waits.

What am I doing here?

I have been through hard seasons. If you read the piece about my ten years in Germany, you would already know some of what those years held. There were seasons that tested me, years where I lost money, years where the gap between where I was and where I thought I would be felt wide enough to swallow me. But 2025 was different. What made it different was not the weight of any single thing. It was that everything arrived at once.

The job I had been doing on contract came to an end. A long relationship ended. The startup I had poured six years of my life into started slowly losing its footing. Money I had managed to make back was drained from a crypto wallet. My health began to struggle. My peace became harder to find.

All of it at once.

There is something specific about losing several things at the same time that is different from losing one thing at a time. When it is one thing, you have somewhere to put the grief. One thing to hold, to examine, to eventually set down and walk away from. But when it is everything, you stop being able to tell the losses apart. They blend into a single season, and that season becomes the air you breathe.

What Grief Actually Feels Like

I used to think grief was only about people. I lost my father over ten years ago, so I know what it is to grieve a person, to sit with an absence that does not fill. But the grief that found me in 2025 was a different kind. I have heard it called timeline grief, and that is exactly the right name for it.

It is the grief of the life you thought you would have.

By my mid-thirties, most of the people I had gone to university with were already married. Some had children. Some had PhDs. Some were deep into careers that had been building steadily for years, while I had been building something else, something that had not yet taken the shape I had hoped. I was not jealous of them, not exactly. But I noticed. And the noticing had a weight.

I had developed a small mental trick for managing this. Whenever the gap between where I was and where I thought I should be started to feel too wide, I would ask myself: if you were ten years younger, would this worry you the same way? And usually the answer was no. If I were 23 and wanted to learn a new skill, change direction, take a risk, nobody would question it. The only thing that had changed between then and now was the number itself. So I tried to carry the number more lightly.

But some days the number was heavier than the trick could hold.

The moment that really captured what that year felt like came when my close friend got a job. A job he had been working toward through a genuinely difficult season of his own, one I had watched him move through. I was so happy for him, the kind of happy that is full and real and uncomplicated. And I was also in tears at the same time.

Because watching him step into something new made me see, very clearly, where I still was. It was not about him. It was about the contrast. It was about the gap between what I had set out to build and where I had actually arrived. I think that is what grief does when it works quietly. It does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just shows up in the middle of someone else's good news and lets you know it is still there.

The Ray of Sunlight

During that season, I prayed a particular kind of prayer. Not the grand ones where you ask God to turn everything around at once. The smaller, quieter ones. The ones where you say: I am not asking you to fix all of this right now. I just need enough to get through the next two weeks. Just a ray of sunlight. Just something.

And usually something came. A moment, a shift, a small thing that loosened the grip of the heaviness just enough for me to breathe. I came to understand those moments as exactly what I had asked for: rays of sunlight in a dark season, not the end of the darkness, but enough to keep moving.

Looking back, I understand them differently now. Those moments were not God removing the season from me. They were God keeping me present in it long enough to come through the other side.

The Turning Point

The turning point was not dramatic. It did not arrive as a single loud moment. It came more slowly, through a combination of things that built on each other.

Going to the UK to spend time with family was part of it. Time with my siblings, and with my nieces and nephew, who carry a kind of joy that I had forgotten I needed to be around. My brother went out and paid for an expensive subscription service to help me through my job search. Being with my sister meant I didn’t have to worry about food. My cousin showed up with help without questions. My family showed up quietly and practically and it meant more than I can say. Being around people who love you without conditions, who do not need you to be successful or sorted or on your way somewhere, does something to you that is difficult to explain. Something loosened in me during that time. For me, that was confirmation that ‘there is love at home’.

December was the month I decided to release a part of the past I had been holding on to. That letting go was its own kind of turning point. There is something that happens when you stop gripping something that is already gone. A grief settles. And then, slowly, you have your hands back.

The Courage to Start Again in Your 30s

Starting again in your 30s has a texture that starting again in your 20s does not. In your 20s, uncertainty feels like possibility. In your 30s, it can feel like you are late. Like everyone else has already built the thing, and you are standing at the starting line while they are halfway through a race you were supposed to be running beside them.

I had moments in that season where I thought about the six years I had put into the startup. And I would wonder: what would have happened if I had put that same energy into a more conventional career? I know myself well enough to know that I am not a lazy person. I would have built something. And for a while, that thought had a grief of its own.

But here is what I have come to understand, and what I want to say clearly to anyone in the middle of their own starting over: you are not starting from scratch. You are starting from experience. The six years, the difficult seasons, the lessons that had to be learned twice and sometimes three times, they are not wasted. They are the material you are building with now. They have shaped your judgment, your resilience, your capacity to hold uncertainty without collapsing. That is not nothing. That is everything.

Starting again, for me, looked like sitting down with a blank page and asking honestly: where am I, what am I carrying, what do I need to let go of, and what do I actually want to move toward? It looked like enrolling in a bootcamp to sharpen my technical skills. It looked like deciding to start speaking publicly about my process in January, talking about seasons and transitions and the courage it takes to get your life back, while nothing had yet changed on the outside.

The movement began before the destination was visible. I think that was actually the point. You do not wait until everything is sorted to start living your way toward something.

Not giving up does not always look like the triumphant kind. Sometimes it just looks like holding on long enough to see the tide shift. It looks like letting yourself cry, and then coming back to the table. It looks like asking: okay, what can I actually do about this today? That question, not how bad is this, but what am I doing about it, was one of the things that kept me going.

There is a piece I came across once about the question "why me." When things are hard you ask it as a complaint. But this piece turned it around. Why me? So that when someone else finds themselves here, they can see in my story that it is survivable. That is part of why I am writing any of this. If these pieces can sit with someone in the hardest part of their season and say: you are not the only one, and there is something on the other side, then all of it means something.

Three Things I Am Carrying Out of This

One.

Grief is not linear, and losing several things at once is its own particular weight. When everything falls at the same time, the grief blurs in a way that can be disorienting. Give yourself room for that. Some things take time to grieve separately.

Two.

You are not starting from scratch. You are starting from experience. Everything that felt like a detour, like wasted time, like the wrong direction, was shaping the judgment and resilience you are now going to need. That is not a consolation prize. It is actually the truth.

Three.

Not giving up does not always mean fighting. Sometimes it means staying. Staying present, staying alive to the possibility that this is not the end. The tree was cut down. It still sprouted. That is the promise, and it is an honest one.

There is hope for a tree.

Even when it has been cut down.

Even when the season has been long and the losses have been many and you are standing somewhere in your 30s wondering if you missed the window.

The tender shoots do not cease.

That is not a metaphor I hold lightly anymore. I have been the cut-down tree. I know what the early shoots feel like when they start coming back.

If you are in the middle of a season like this, I want you to know: you are not the only one who has been here. And the fact that you are still here, still reading, still asking the questions, that is already something.

I would love to hear from you.

Have you had a year that broke you open? What did it teach you about yourself on the other side of it? What do you wish someone had told you at the hardest point?

in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your path."

Proverbs 3:5-6

A quick note: I made a deliberate choice to keep this piece accessible and readable. There is a much longer, more detailed version of this story. This is not that version. My goal was an honest entry point, not a lecture. The deeper layers come in the pieces ahead.

The most common question I got after the shutdown post was the same, regardless of who was asking.

Why?

People reached out in DMs, in comments, in voice notes, in emails. Some were sad. Some were curious in a more analytical way. A lot had used the app and felt the ending personally. But almost all of them, at some point, wanted the real answer. Not the one-line post, but the actual story.

So here it is.

The simplest honest answer? We ran out of momentum. Not funding. Not a bad idea. Not a market that wasn't there. Momentum. And I know that might not sound dramatic enough to justify six years, but stay with me.

Building in the Hardest Category

Consumer social is, objectively, one of the hardest bets in tech. I knew this going in. I watched other founders working on similar problems, trying to help people make real friends, meet in real life, build genuine community in cities that can be surprisingly lonely, and I watched them quit. Some quit early. Some got partway in, saw what was ahead, and made a rational decision to stop.

What they saw was not hard to see. Building consumer social costs enormous capital. It is almost always a B2C play, which means sustained, heavy marketing spend. And before you even get to whether people like what you built, you have to convince them to install an app on a phone that is already full.

Then comes the real complexity: you need people to not just download it, but to actually show up in real life. To make plans with strangers. And you need that experience to be good enough that they come back.

So many places for it to break down.

And yet, none of that stopped me.

There is something particular about the person who keeps going after the rational case for stopping has already been made. I am not sure it is always wisdom. Sometimes it is stubbornness. Sometimes it is calling. Sometimes you only find out which one it was by looking back.

Because I genuinely cared about this problem. Loneliness, the difficulty of making real adult friendships, the lack of spaces where people could organically find their people in a new city. I had lived this. I wanted a solution that actually worked, and I was willing to keep going when others dropped out.

We were not building entirely alone either. We went through the Founder Institute programme, where we met mentors who helped sharpen the idea and the pitch, pushed our thinking, and introduced us to networks and perspectives we would not have found on our own. Some of those mentors remain some of the most formative people I met through the whole journey.

Real things happened through Cliqup. I know people whose entire Berlin social circle was formed from the app. I know of relationships that started there. We were close to our users and we understood what they needed. That part, I will always be proud of.

But understanding a problem and having the speed to actually solve it are two different things.

How the Momentum Slipped

At some point, we made a deliberate decision: pause events, go into full building mode. Both my co-founder and I were navigating significant life changes, different priorities, shifting energy, things outside the business that demanded real attention. We wanted to reduce the noise and focus entirely on building the v2 of the product.

That is where things slowed down significantly.

We had developers, mostly freelancers and a rotating group of interns from Germany, Poland, and a few other countries, but none of it produced the speed we needed. In the world of product, speed and execution are everything. And we were not moving fast enough.

There were also costly misses with the wrong technical people. I learned something difficult here: if someone is not a true co-founder with genuine skin in the game, equity alone rarely purchases the urgency the work requires. During a build phase, whether a product lives or dies is largely on the technical person. You need someone who goes home still thinking about the problem. Who stays up for it. Equity does not reliably buy that.

In the middle of all this, we ran a community raise on a platform called Odin, designed to let everyday people become investors. The math felt right. Two hundred and fifty thousand euros in pre-seed capital sounds like a lot until you break it down: it is 250 people writing a one-thousand-euro check. Within Berlin alone, within the diaspora communities we had spent years building alongside, there were young working professionals who had that kind of money and a few of them had told us directly they believed in the idea. We had real relationships. We knew real people. This felt like it could work.

Some people showed up.

One person had messaged me weeks earlier: "If you ever want to raise, let me know. I really believe in what you're doing." A few others had used the app, seen what it could do, and wrote checks without much convincing needed. But the person who stayed with me most was a senior mentor I had just met for the first time. I sat across from him in his living room, told him about Cliqup, explained what we were building and why it mattered, and before I had even finished, he committed. He wired two thousand euros without ever seeing a single slide deck.

That kind of moment stays with you.

There is something particular about someone who commits before they have seen the full picture. It is rare. And when it happens, it tells you something both about that person and about the signal you are giving off even when you cannot feel it yourself.

There were others who wanted to be part of it but got stuck on the platform’s onboarding process, which had more friction than we anticipated. Someone who had lined up for five thousand euros eventually did not come through because of it. There were also certain rooms I tried to get into, connections I reached out for, and felt the door held just slightly closed. The gatekeeping from people who had the access and means but chose not to extend it sat differently than a straightforward no.

In the end, we did not reach ten percent of the target. The decision to return the money rather than keep what we had came from a simple place: if the funds were not enough to get us to a meaningful next step, they were not funds worth taking. We had bootstrapped the entire six years on over twenty thousand euros of personal money between my co-founder and me. That money was gone, written off as the cost of trying. Taking someone else's two thousand euros and failing to make something real out of it was a different kind of cost.

Months later, I heard through another startup that my mentor had talked about us. He told them he was deeply impressed with how we handled the return: the communication, the transparency, the integrity of it. He said if I ever wanted to raise again, he'd back me.

That meant more than the money ever could have.

We returned the funds. And then we kept building.

The Decision

After the fundraising, we did not stop.

We were rebuilding what v1 had done, but on a better tech stack, with a meaningfully better user experience. No full rebrand: the logos and colours stayed the same for now. But under the hood, we had invested seriously in building it properly. We did a lot of work. And at some point, that version was essentially complete.

I had a close friend who had been a power user from the early days, someone who genuinely loved the app and what it was trying to do. He would check in and say: "Just give us what you have. Release it. I wasn't complaining about v1, so just give me this version. We'll use it." He was not wrong about wanting it. He just did not know what I knew about why it still was not enough.

Because a prettier v1 was not what we actually needed to build.

What I wanted to test in v2 was a real hypothesis: that AI-powered personality matching and a proper friendship formation model could solve the retention problem that v1 never could. In v1 we had done impressive things. We got over three thousand downloads on the platform. But the hard truth was that most users were not creating plans independently. We were keeping the community alive by organising events ourselves: showing up, facilitating, creating the reasons for people to come out. Without us in the room doing that work, activity dropped.

That is not a self-sustaining product. That is a team running an events operation and calling it an app. I felt like we were pouring into a leaking basket. You could keep pouring, and the basket would stay full as long as you kept going. But the moment you stopped, it would empty.

So when we looked at where v2 stood, I had two honest problems with shipping what we had.

The first: releasing a nicer version of v1 still would not let me test the hypothesis I actually cared about. The personality matching, the friendship formation model, was still untouched. I would be launching a product that looked better but had the same core limitation.

The second: I knew what relaunching would take. I had lived through getting v1 to three thousand downloads. That was a full marketing push, events, sustained outreach, real effort. In v2, starting again after going quiet, we would have had to win back users we had already lost and acquire new ones. I was not prepared to invest that much into something still missing the core.

My co-founder had pulled back significantly by this point. I was trying to close the gap on my own, building with AI tools, seeing how far I could get. For a while, that was enough to keep things moving.

And then one day, sitting with all of it, the version we had, the version we still needed, the effort it would take, the energy that had been draining for longer than I wanted to admit, I made the call.

Pack it up.

Most endings do not happen dramatically. They happen quietly, in the accumulation of days when the energy is not there and you stop pretending otherwise. If you have ever had to honestly admit that something you built, or stayed in, or believed in for a long time had already ended before you said it out loud, you know what that moment feels like.

I genuinely believe it is never too late to stop, no matter how far you have walked in one direction. If I had let the weight of six years of investment be my reason to keep going, I would have. But I had to ask myself honestly: do I still have it in me to take this where it actually needs to go?

The answer was no. Not because the problem is unworthy, I still think it is one worth solving. But because this chapter of it had run its course.

What I Know Now

If momentum is the thing that ended Cliqup, it is also the lesson I will carry furthest. The moment you and the people around you stop feeling genuinely excited about what is being built, you are in serious trouble. Excitement is not naive optimism. It is the fuel. When it leaves a team, no strategy fills that gap.

I have thought about this outside of startups since then. In most things, the energy you and the people around you bring to something is one of the most honest signals available. Earlier than you want to hear it, usually.

I also learned the hard way that building with the wrong people, or people who are not truly bought in, costs more time than it saves money. If you cannot pay someone well and they are not a genuine co-founder, equity alone rarely delivers the urgency the work needs. In the era of AI tools we are in now, I would honestly say: build the first version yourself before you bring anyone in. Prove the concept. Speed matters more than most founders admit early.

Do not leave your job until the timing is genuinely undeniable. I made a high-risk move to go full time on Cliqup without a strong safety net, partly because of the belief in startup culture that investors will not take you seriously otherwise. What I learned: investors want traction, not sacrifice. If funding is genuinely coming, you can have the full-time conversation then, not before.

And validate early, deliberately. Either monetisation or adoption: pick one and build toward it intentionally. Most investors want to see extraordinary user numbers, or proof that someone will pay. We did not move fast enough on either front.

Do I still care about the problem Cliqup was trying to solve?

Yes. Genuinely.

If I ever return to this space, it will not be as Cliqup. That story is complete. But the problem, adults struggling to make real friendships, the quiet loneliness of cities where people co-exist without connecting, I still think about it. I think it deserves a real answer.

Just not this version. Not now.

What Comes Next

For now, Cliqup is fully closed and done.

There is some travel ahead for me, connecting with nature and family, letting things settle properly before I think too hard about what follows. But the thinking has already started, quietly. I have a sense of what the next version of this problem could look like, and a few other directions I want to explore, carrying everything I know now into them.

One thing I am certain about: if I were to build another version of this app, or a new product in this space, I would register it as a US company. The regulatory environment, especially in the AI era, makes so much more possible there. And that would be the market I target from the start.

But there is no rush. I believe there is a call on my life to respond to the problems I see in the world, and I want to be intentional about where I direct that energy next. I still believe there are lots of problems and real opportunities to go after. I am taking it one step at a time.

Something will come up.

Three things I'm carrying out of this

One.

Momentum is the most honest metric you have. Not traction numbers, not your pitch deck, not how long you have been at it. When the people building the thing stop genuinely feeling it, you already know what is true, even before you are ready to say it out loud.

Two.

It is never too late to stop. The six years I put in are real. But continuing without the right energy would have cost more, not less. Sometimes the bravest thing is the clean ending. It is also an act of respect, for the people who believed in you and for yourself.

Three.

Ending something you believed in is not the same as being wrong about the problem. The loneliness of building real adult friendships in a new city is still a problem worth solving. What I built across six years gave me the knowledge to eventually attempt a better answer. That is worth something, even if the company is not.

Proverbs 3:5-6 keeps returning to me in this season. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your path.

The path curved in ways I did not plan. But I am beginning to understand that that is also a kind of direction. And that is enough to keep going.

I would love to hear from you.

Have you ever built something and had to make the call to stop? What made you finally do it?

Or more broadly: what is something you stayed in longer than you should have, and what gave you the clarity to walk away?

If you are a founder, a builder, or just someone who has had to walk away from something that cost you a lot, drop a comment or reply to this email. I read everything and I will do my best to respond.

Ecclesiastes 7:8

A quick note: ten years is a lot of life, and I could write a book about this. I am not writing that book today. This is the version I can give you now, honest but light enough to actually finish reading. There is more depth where this came from.

I came to Germany at 24. I am leaving at 34, on my birthday.

There is something poetic in that symmetry, though it did not feel poetic at the time. It felt like something becoming true that had been quietly becoming true for a while.

The job came through on a random Wednesday. Fully remote, good pay, more flexibility than I had spent months trying to find. Better, actually, than the role I had survived eight rounds of interviews for at a different company earlier that year. I sat with the offer for maybe twenty minutes. And then, before I had thought about contracts or start dates or telling anyone, one thought arrived clearly:

It's time.

Not maybe. Not let me think about this over the weekend. Just time. I booked a flight to Lagos before I had told most people I was leaving.

I had not been back to Nigeria in eleven years. This would be my first time.

Ten years is a long time to be somewhere. Eleven years is a long time to be away from home. This is my attempt to count both honestly.

How I Ended Up Here

Germany was not the plan.

I came to the UK at 23 for a master's degree in Glasgow. The program required a second year abroad, in either Germany or Denmark. I had never been to either country. Germany seemed like the more interesting choice. I arrived in Hamburg, Germany at 24 thinking I would be here for one year.

My plan was to return to the UK after the degree. I had a two-year UK student visa that covered both years of the program. That plan ended when the university notified the Home Office that I had finished my time with them. The visa was curtailed. Just like that, the path I had spent thousands of pounds in tuition fees preparing for was no longer available to me.

A friend in Hamburg promised to recommend me for a working student job. That job never materialised, but the conversation was enough to keep me in place for a few more months, learning enough German to be useful in an interview, applying to anything that seemed possible. And somewhere in those months, the question of when I would leave quietly became the question of what I was actually building here instead.

The Years

The decade sorted itself into phases, each with its own particular flavour of difficulty and grace.

The early years in the south of Germany were a specific kind of humbling. I had done an internship with a major pharmaceutical company, sitting in meetings with consultants, doing work that felt like a preview of a career I was about to have. I was sure I was on track for a graduate training programme. They said no. The rejection did something to my confidence, and honestly to my faith, in ways that took years to work through properly.

Most of us have a version of this: the door we prepared hardest for, the one we were most certain would open. When it does not, it does not just close an opportunity. It makes you question your whole map. The question is what you do next, when the plan you had built everything around is no longer available.

What followed was a season of work I had not planned for myself: production jobs, warehouse shifts, food delivery by bicycle. I remember in those earlier years while studying in Hamburg, I was cycling back one night from a delivery in the rain, completely soaked, quietly crying in the particular way you cry when the gap between where you are and where you thought you would be is too wide to look at directly. I had just delivered food to an office building, the kind with good lighting and people at their desks who looked like they were exactly where they were supposed to be. Someone opened the door, took the bag, barely looked up. I had left everything I knew to come here. And I was the one bringing these people their dinner. There is dignity in every kind of work, and I mean that sincerely. But there is a particular silence that settles when you know you are not yet living the version of your life you came here for. I kept cycling. What else do you do? Those nights have a texture that does not fully leave you.

There is a specific kind of humbling in holding two truths at once: the person you believe you are capable of being, and the life you are currently living. I do not know how many people reading this have had their own version of that bicycle in the rain. But I suspect the feeling is not unique to me.

But something was being built. I just could not see it yet.

During my time in the south of Germany after the failed Graduate Trainee attempt and many other opportunities that never materialised into employment, I decided to start a second master's degree and I eventually got a working student position in an engineering company, which became a full-time job once they learned the master's was just me passing time and that I could do more work with them. While I was grateful for it, I felt I was still not where I was meant to be, and I felt it in my bones every day. The language was a wall I kept running into. Most of my peers were in consulting or graduate programmes; I was doing good work in a job that was not quite the right shape for me.

The financial mistakes of those years I will acknowledge without cataloguing. Getting my first car and finally having to let it go two years later because it felt like I had bitten too much than I could chew. Getting into stocks and crypto while trying to fund what I was building, making real gains (upwards of €30,000 in profits at some point) and then losing more than I made. My ‘Crypto bros’ know this too well. These are lessons that come through experience, not instruction. Being financially stretched for extended periods while also trying to build a company and hold your sense of self together is its own kind of education. I do not recommend the curriculum.

I will say this though: there is a version of struggle that looks like poor decisions from the outside and feels, from the inside, like doing everything you can think of to change your circumstances. The two are often the same thing. If you are in that season, or have been, you already understand something that no comfortable year can teach you.

One thing that made a difference throughout this season though was finding my people. Mine were almost always in church.

I had good community when I arrived in Hamburg. When the difficult years in the south of Germany were at their hardest, it was a church community that gave me somewhere to land, and that community was directly part of how I found my first real job. My later years in Berlin were also strongly shaped through church community.

I play the saxophone, piano, drums and I sing. Music and faith ran alongside almost every chapter of this decade. They were not always the loudest things in the story. They were the most consistent.

The other thing Germany gave me, the thing I did not expect, was Cliqup, the social app I founded.

The startup happened specifically because of where I was: in that particular city, in that particular season of career dissatisfaction, at a campus founders event where someone pushed me to shape an idea I had been sitting with. A mentor at a Canadian incubator I joined remotely, later told me that what I was doing with the app was actually called product management. That was the first time I had heard those words applied to myself. That conversation redirected my career entirely. I went on to work in product roles in Berlin, building and shipping things I am genuinely proud of. None of that exists without the specific frustrations and redirections of Germany.

The opportunity to gain German citizenship was the quiet culmination of everything it took to earn the right to be here. After all of that, the document gives me the freedom to choose to leave. There is something worth sitting with in that.

Why I Never Went Back

Eleven years away from Nigeria. I have said that to people and watched them go quiet.

It was not one reason. It was a different reason each time the question came up, and somehow the different reasons always added up to the same answer: not yet.

In the early years, it was pure survival. I was just trying to stay afloat, and going home felt like a luxury I had not earned. Then when I got the first real job and things stabilised, the finances were too stretched to justify the flight. Then I came to Berlin and started building the startup in earnest, and it always felt like I was in the middle of something too important to step away from. That I owed the thing I was chasing the courtesy of not stopping until it was done.

But underneath all of those practical reasons there was something else. Something I did not name until much later. The unspoken sense that going home was an accounting, not just a visit. That home was somewhere you returned when you had made good on what leaving had cost. Not because anyone at home had said so. Not because my family was waiting with a scorecard. Just the weight of the story I had told myself when I left, and the quiet pressure of making that story true before I went back to account for it.

There’s the feeling that going home meant being seen, and being seen meant having something to show. Nobody at home said this, but I had built an imaginary scorecard, somewhere in my head, and it kept raising the bar each time I almost felt ready. And so the years passed. And I stayed. And home waited. There’s a grief attached to that, the grief of time with the people who made you that does not come back, and it sits quietly underneath a lot of what I am describing in this piece.

I remember some ‘family friend’ saying to my mother that he knew people who had gone to Canada and were building houses back home within two years, and so what was I doing? My mother, in the way that only she can, told me not to pressure myself. Not to run ahead of my timing. She prayed. She encouraged. She has always been the one going through the thing who turns around to carry the person who was supposed to be carrying her. I want to give her a proper shout out somewhere in this series, because she deserves it. She is one of the strongest people I have ever known.

But still, for a long time, I felt it. The quiet pressure of a life that was not measuring up to the timeline I had imagined when I left Nigeria prevented me from going back.

I read a post by Eche Emole, co-founder of Afropolitan, that stopped me mid-scroll and did not let me go. He wrote about a friend who had not seen his mother in ten years. She died last month. He could not fly home for the funeral. Immigration papers.

"This is the price we don't talk about," Eche wrote. "We leave home at 25, planning to return when we make it. By 35, we've missed every birthday. By 45, we're strangers to our siblings' children. By 55, we're burying parents we haven't hugged in decades. And we call this winning."

And then the math: if you see your parents twice a year and they live another fifteen years, you have thirty visits left. Not thirty years. Thirty times.

"Every Western Union receipt is a hug we didn't give. Every promotion is a family dinner we missed. Every visa renewal is another year of photographs instead of presence."

That landed differently than I expected. Because I could afford the flight. I had been able to afford the flight for years. The thing that kept me was not the money. It was the permission. The feeling that I had not yet become enough to go back.

The post ended with this: you can always make more money. You can never make more time.

I sat with that for a long time. Thirty visits. Thirty times. The arithmetic of presence reduced to a number small enough to hold in your hands, and suddenly all of the reasons I had given myself for the eleven years felt less like reasons and more like delays.

Why Now

I had been thinking about leaving before I admitted it to myself.

While I was job hunting earlier in the year, I started looking for opportunities outside of Germany. I even posted on social media asking whether people would recommend going back to Nigeria for a few months, framing it as a casual question. The way people responded told me something about what I was already leaning toward.

Then the opportunity showed up. Exactly the kind of work I had been looking for, including the version I had spent eight rounds of interviews chasing at a different company. And when it arrived, the first thing I felt was not relief that I could finally settle in Berlin. It was permission.

When you know, you know. It sounds like a cliche until you feel it: that quiet certainty in your spirit that is not anxiety or impulsiveness but something more like a compass finding its direction. I got the role, and the first thought was to book the flight. So I did. First to Nigeria. Then to see where the road goes.

This departure is different from the ones I had imagined over the years. I am not going back to show anything. I am not going back having built the thing I thought I needed to build first. I am going back because it is time. Because thirty visits is a number that concentrates the mind. Because my mother is alive and I want to hug her in person, not through a phone screen. Because some things do not wait for you to feel ready, and the wisdom is knowing when the season for waiting is over.

I think many of us wait longer than we need to for permission to do the thing we already know we need to do. We wait for the savings account, the right timing, the external signal that says it is finally okay to move. The job was my signal. Whatever yours looks like, I hope you recognise it when it comes and do not talk yourself out of it.

I am going on my birthday. Arriving in Germany at 24. Leaving at 34. Ten full years between those two versions of me. This is the season for something new.

What I'm Carrying

Germany built my resilience. If I had to find one word for what this decade gave me, that is the word. Not the kind that sounds good in a job interview. The kind that is built from actually going through things: from production floors to product teams, from crying on a bicycle in the rain to closing a company I built for six years with integrity and grace. That arc is not nothing.

I am not taking the averageness with me. Germany has a talent for building a life that is stable and sufficient and structured, and quietly suffocating if you are the kind of person whose soul requires more than sufficient. I say this with real gratitude for the stability it gave me in the seasons when I had nothing else. But I am not made for the box, and maybe the country was always going to be a chapter and not the whole story. Time will tell!

It is worth asking, wherever you are: is what you are living a season, or has it quietly become a ceiling? There is a difference. Only you can tell which one it is. And the honest answer is usually one you already know.

What I am taking: the people. The church friendships that became family. The mentor who committed money to my startup without seeing a slide deck. The community I built through Cliqup, the thousands of people who found friends and partners and belonging through events I organised in this city. The professional experiences and the product instincts and the hard-won understanding of what I am actually good at.

And the passport. That too;)

Three Things I'm Carrying Out of This

One.

The doors that closed were not punishments. The visa that was curtailed, the rejection from the graduate programme I was sure I would get, the jobs that said no across ten years of trying. All of them collapsed the path I thought I was on and opened different ones. I could not see it at the time. Looking back, the redirections were the route.

Two.

Resilience is not a personality trait. It is something built. You do not discover you are resilient until you have had enough reasons to need to be. The years that felt like failure were the years that built the capacity. I would not trade them, even knowing what they cost.

Three.

Belonging comes in forms you do not expect. I spent years looking for the kind of friend group I had romanticised. I found my deepest community in churches, in a startup I built, in conversations at 2am with people I met through an app I created because I felt lonely in a city of millions. It did not look like what I imagined. It was still real.

Better is the end of a thing than its beginning.

At 24, arriving in Hamburg with a curtailed visa and no clear plan, I would not have chosen that verse. At 34, leaving on my birthday with a direction that finally feels like mine, it is the only one that fits.

Ten years. Three cities. Two careers. One company built and shut down. A faith tested and held. A flight booked.

The beginning was uncertain. The end is proof.

I'd love to hear from you.

Have you ever ended up somewhere you didn't plan to stay and found yourself there years later? What kept you, and what eventually called you elsewhere?

Or: is there a door that closed on you, a rejection or a detour, that, looking back, led somewhere better than where you were trying to go?

Drop a comment or reply to this email. I read everything and I will do my best to respond.

This is Roads & Reflections. It’s where I document life in transition: startups and shutdowns, a decade in one city and the decision to leave, a year that broke things open, and faith that held through all of it.

I’m not writing from the other side of everything. I’m writing from the middle of it. I think there’s more honesty in that, and I think honesty is what the internet could use more of.

The first essay is already up. Start there.

I’m glad you’re here. This is going to be a real conversation.

Bukky