I can still feel the moment the two halves of myself started to split. I was 22, fresh out of school, perched in a glass-walled conference room in a city I hadn’t decided to like yet. The job offer was…
Category: Blogging
Sometimes someone asks, “Where are you from?” and the question lands like a stone dropped into still water. The ripples spread before I can find my voice. I know what they want: a dot on a map, a tidy border,…
On the Complicated Love Between Immigrant Parents and Their Children By Ziona Debisi I was twelve when it hit me that my mother’s love had a built-in goodbye. Not the affection itself—that was always there, fierce and constant—but the nearness…
Most mornings, before the world turns its volume up, there’s a sliver of quiet I’ve come to expect. I’m on the edge of the bed, still half-dreaming, and the first thought almost always lands like a question I forgot I…
I used to fold myself into the smallest version of me I could manage. I’d slide into chairs at meetings already whispering sorry before my body had even settled. I’d angle my shoulders inward on crowded sidewalks, as if my…
Some mornings I wake with a psalm humming somewhere behind my ribs. Other mornings, the only prayer I can manage is a long exhale while I stare at the ceiling. I’ve learned both count. Faith, for me, isn’t a clean…
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….
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…