Author: Harold Little

There’s a moment, often in a crowded room or a quiet meeting, when I feel the air shift. It’s not something I can chart or prove with a timestamp. It’s a subtle, almost imperceptible change in how eyes land on…

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being visible. Not the exhaustion of being ignored—though that stings in its own way—but the exhaustion of being noticed, of carrying the weight of representation when all you wanted was to…

There’s a tiredness that has nothing to do with how much you slept or how long your to-do list is. It’s a low hum that starts in your shoulders the moment you step into a room and feel the air…

I grew up thinking community was something you inherited. A last name, a street you never left, childhood friends who knew every embarrassing chapter. But life—messy, restless life—kept moving me. New cities, new jobs, rooms where I was the stranger….

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. I’ve felt it in rooms full of people, at dinner parties where the conversation never left the surface, and during those long, quiet stretches in a…

I used to think community was something you were born into, or something you had to build, brick by careful brick. A tight circle of childhood friends who knew your parents’ landline. Colleagues who became a second family after years…

There was a time when sitting on my couch in the middle of the afternoon felt like a small betrayal. Not of anyone else—just some invisible scorecard I carried around in my head. I remember looking out the window, the…

I used to think being strong meant never letting the cracks show. Showing up for everyone, voice steady while my insides screamed, pushing through exhaustion because somebody had to keep it together. That somebody was always me. I wore reliability…

For the longest time, I treated my cultural identity like a smooth stone I could hand over and say, “Here, this is me.” I’d tell people, “I’m half-Nigerian, half-American,” and brace for the nod. The nod usually came, polite and…

The first time I opened the notebook, my grandmother’s voice still lived in the margins. Not her actual voice—she has been gone seven years now, her Yoruba long softened into the Ibadan earth—but the rhythm of it. The way she’d…