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…
Category: Blogging
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…
Some mornings the distance sits on my chest like a stone. I wake up in a city with foreign seasons, surrounded by accents nothing like my mother’s, and the first thing I grab is my phone—scanning for a message that…
There’s a question I hear all the time, usually served with a smile that’s trying to be kind but ends up somewhere closer to curious museum mode: “So, where are you really from?” I used to keep a tidy answer…
Some moments don’t really end. I keep finding myself back in my grandmother’s kitchen in Lagos, watching her hands work the stone, grinding peppers with a rhythm that felt older than both of us. She was humming something slow, something…
Growing up, I thought cultural identity was something you could file away inside a tidy box. A box with a neat sticker: “Nigerian” or “British” or, if you were feeling generous, “Nigerian-British.” I’d tick it on forms, wear it like…