I used to think faith meant having no questions. That if I really trusted, I wouldn’t lie awake at 3 a.m. with a chest full of worry, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the road I’m on even exists….
Category: Blogging
Some mornings a prayer slips out before my feet touch the floor. On other mornings the silence just hangs there, thick and stubborn, and the words won’t come. I used to think that meant something was broken in me—that a…
There’s a lonely kind of exile that settles in when you can stroll into just about any room but never quite sink into its furniture. I’ve been the new girl in more cities than I care to count, the visitor…
The Mirror Moment I was standing in the bathroom of a coworking space, reapplying lip gloss before a networking event. Two women walked in, laughing about something in Yoruba, and my shoulders went tight. For a second, I didn’t know…
For a long time, I kept two versions of myself on hand. One was for the rooms where I needed to seem “professional”—the voice a little higher, the words wiped clean of any cultural texture, the laugh barely making it…
I remember the first time I walked into a conference room and felt the air shift. A gray Tuesday morning—the kind that makes you reach for a second coffee—and I’d prepped for the meeting like it was a final exam….
I was at a friend’s dinner party last month, and someone asked me about jollof rice. Not in the casual, “Oh, you’re Nigerian, I bet you make great jollof” way. It was more like, “So, what’s the definitive Nigerian take…
I used to think home was a point on a map. A single set of walls, a familiar creak in the floorboards, the exact slant of afternoon light through a particular window. That was before I started moving. Before I…
The first time I tried to make my grandmother’s jollof rice without her standing beside me, I froze. I was twenty-three, in my own kitchen, staring at a pile of tomatoes and onions, and my mind had gone completely blank….
There is a particular kind of silence that follows the words “You’re the first in our family to—” It swells in the space between pride and bewilderment, between celebration and a quiet, unspoken fear. I have heard that silence so…