The reason you feel stuck is because you self-relegate by taking so much from the world but hardly ever pouring back into it. Consciously or otherwise, you let yourself remain trapped in a cycle of overconsumption and excessive containment, when you were also designed for release—to be an outlet, to form as many paths for your self-expression.

Consider allowing yourself to be more generous. Give freely of yourself and your ideas. Engage in the art of giving back to the world, perhaps even more often than you position yourself to receive.

Create. Share. Dispense

That is the only way to break free from the sense of inertia, which, by the way, is largely a prison of your own making. It is not real. You know what to do, and you are not stuck; you have simply been functioning in opposition to your internal design. You are not a holder, you are a vessel.

Every fire usually leaves two things behind: ruins and remains. Let go of what is gone. Pay attention to what stays. Believe that when you keep your eyes on the things that survive what should have destroyed them, you will see that they are the clues to everything else that is meant to be.

Deep down, you know that your life will turn out beautifully. Somewhere in your heart, you feel that it all ends well. Even when your mind and body sometimes try to betray this feeling, you know it as surely as you know your name.

That assurance did not sneak in dishonestly. It is not disconnected from your reality and the millions of reasons you have to feel uncertain. It is also not merely the product of affirmations or misguided optimistic advice. Your fears are accounted for, your doubts acknowledged, and the beautiful part is that this conviction—that you will absolutely be great—refuses to leave.

If you wonder why, it is because your mind has become a reserve of evidence gathered over years of being alive. All the narrow escapes, the unexpected opportunities, the situations that seemed impossible until they weren’t, the outcomes that exceeded your expectations—they have all left an indelible mark.

These moments have filled the bank of your soul. They remind you that life is rarely as predictable as your fears would have you imagine that it should be. Again and again, events have unfolded in ways you could never have anticipated, and somehow, the way has never failed to open up for your passage.

You have to trust what your own outcomes have already shown you. The first step is abandoning the instinct to arm-wrestle time into solving problems that have not yet arrived. Zoom out and look at the full arc of your journey. You will see the patterns emerge. You will see that much of what mattered most was never something you could have planned for. The people, opportunities, and turning points arrived by routes you could not have strategised for. Trust that Life has the way of carrying you forward.

- Ifeoma.

Inspiration is fleeting because there is an urgency with which we should respond. It is not something we own; it is something we receive.

Every strain of inspiration is an invitation into a closer encounter with something greater than ourselves—an undeserved proximity to the divine. Whenever we feel moved to create, build, draw, write, imagine, or begin, that is Life transferring to us one of the greatest privileges: the chance to touch a more transcendent part of human existence by participating in a reality that stands outside of the confines of our isolated experience.

Ideas are not possessions. They do not belong to us, we do not hold a monopoly over them. At best, we are vessels through which they pass. Ideas are gifts entrusted to us, and it is our acceptance of this reality that produces the humility and responsibility with which we use them. The most colorful among them are breaths of new life—drops of magic transfused into our otherwise ordinary minds. They arrive first for the transformation of our interior world, and then for generous release into the outer world.

This is why we answer the call—not all, but enough of them. Enough to take us back to the point where we are captivated by the significance of small beginnings. Enough to surrender ourselves to the work of digging deep and discovering what is worth building upon.

A meaningful life is often not found by searching for it directly or trying too hard to construct it. More often, it emerges from the times we slow our minds down and become attentive enough to the lightbulb moments, the passing curiosities, and the quiet promptings we might otherwise dismiss. These are the things that reroute us toward the Life we need. And in our awakening, we are also led to the souls who have been waiting, often unknowingly. Souls who, through our response, are themselves rescued and invited into the light we permit ourselves to enter.

- Ifeoma.

A day will come when stability will no longer be your biggest myth; it will be standing right in front of you. You will become a person who is unable to be easily uprooted from the parts of the ground you choose to walk on. Your feet will be firmly planted, your limbs carrying all the strength they need, your fingers will know what it means to hold and to fight.

A day will come when you will realise that the more you tried, the more you reached out for the stars and felt like all you gathered back in your hands was air, the more the world gradually opened up to you. And everything that once felt like circling back, breaking down, or being tossed side to side was actually the mapping out of a way for you.

You will then discover that you have finally found your place—your field, your well-deserved sliver of this world—that will materialise in the form of people, things, and places that fit like nothing else ever could. You will no longer negotiate with fear or engage in needless struggle just to earn the right to stay. In that place, no one—not even the version of you that is capable of self-sabotage—will have the authority to remove you from it.

- Ifeoma.

To be privileged, as it is often described, is to possess something loud—to have easy access to the extravagant things of life. Perhaps parents who can afford biannual family vacations, or a demigod of a friend somewhere with the ability to turn the course of an entire situation around in our favour, through just one phone call.

Sometimes, I fall into the temptation of daydreaming about what my life would have been like if my privileges arrived with more precision, in this shape where I did not have to guess. I imagine that I would live life in a constant state of exhale, never having to hold my breath for what storms were going to sweep me next.

I believe that every person is privileged in some way or form. I believe that we all have a special advantage—an intrinsic quality, a certain spark we possess or proximity to someone who can provide us with ease of access into certain realms of the cosmos that would ordinarily have been reserved for an esoteric few. I also believe that the absence of these extravagant kinds of privileges is not absence altogether but a pull into perspective—not disdain for backgrounds and history, but deeper vision of who we are, what is truly ours, and all of the exceptional people we meet along the way.

My sister, , is one of those people. Her existence floods my heart with light and understanding of who I am also going to be. Our sisterhood, now more than ever, awakens me to the intelligent design of the world. It is my unearned benefit here.

Onyeka is absolutely ravishing. I often worried that everyone who insisted that we looked alike needed their eyes tested. But now it’s one of my favorite compliments. She carries a brightness that gathers every room towards her. Although, it astounds me, in an almost uncontrollable way, each time I notice how carefully she purses her lips to speak when she is in public gaze, because in private, the woman I know is given to full-throated speech and laughter.

Yet it is this same ability to carry herself with such deliberate composure that reveals one of the most beautiful things about her: she is a rock and a flower, holding equal measures of strength and softness in ways that inspire me, ways that I sometimes do not have the language to capture.

As I account for my privileges, I am deeply thankful for my sister. She is my unfair advantage, my cheat code to unlocking layers of possibility I may never have discovered on my own. It is indeed a privilege for me to share the same blood—of heaven and by birth—that runs through her. My sister is a mirror of everything I dream of and silently hope to receive the courage to try. In all of the ways that I am like a knock-kneed child, still grappling to stand and become, she already is—unwavering with the discipline of an army of a million soldiers. Through her becoming, I find hope for mine. That if she is, then I, too, can be.

When I was younger, I believed that my heroes were all the people who lived out of reach—the characters who only existed miles away from me, on the other side of the screen, or the page, or maybe even people who were far up in age—because that distance was my greatest illusion, the trap of believing that the wider the disconnect, the more I had something more worthy of aspiring to. I have now lived long enough to realize that the ones who save us are the ones who are near. The ones who can love us in ways we need are the ones who are always there—just like Onyeka. My big sister. The more I go out in the world, the more I come back home to see that my hero is the girl next door, in the room adjacent to mine.

- Ifeoma.

Dear Ademola,

The first time we ever “spoke” was through the anonymous ask-me-anything link I shared on Twitter. Do you recall? You replied, hinting that you had a crush on me and that our mutual friend, Bamise, had always known about the feelings you quietly harboured for me for years. Your response made the strands of my twenty-one-year-old skin tingle. I was young, curious, and caught in your peculiar signal of desire.

Desperate to understand feelings that had apparently existed everywhere except in my awareness, I dashed into Bamise’s inbox. He was the only thread I could follow to unravel you. He knew me as the non-committal friend—the tough one who did not particularly care about attracting or being attracted to men. But it only took a few minutes of teasing before he made the introduction, hopeful that two of his friends would sail into something lasting.

And there you were, crash-landing into my life with two words on screen: “Hi, Oluchi.”

Milan, in the May we first “met” over the phone, sounded pleasant. You never failed to sing praises of European weather and how perfectly it suited your skin. For me, in Lagos, every hour was thick with unforgiving heat and eager text messages from you. If it wasn’t updates about festivals you were attending, it was something about destination weddings you travelled for, or stories about your bike rides and the elaborate skincare routines you swore by. To add, you paid close attention to my random food cravings and made sure they were mostly satisfied, yet you were always dismissive of your acts of service as merely “friendly” gestures whenever I asked what your intentions were.

I remember almost rolling my eyes out of their sockets, convinced that no man on earth—especially not an African man—invests that intentionally without the expectation of a reward in return. Still, I indulged my curiosity. Your Europe and my Africa began to feel only a few steps apart, compressed by the frequency and intensity of our conversations.

I kept asking myself:

Who is this man?

Why have I never met him before now?

How does he seem to know so much about me?

I discovered that we had other mutual friends, and you told me how you had followed my journey from my days as a frontdesk bank staff, to my rediscovery of faith, to my pivot into project management in tech. You reminded me of parts of my story that even I had forgotten. I liked how seen I felt. Or perhaps, I liked how I believed you saw me. I was drawn to what we had—this transcontinental, tempting thrill.

You became more real to me in the summer of 2024 when you returned to Lagos. It was a milestone meeting, especially as we had missed an opportunity to connect in person when I was away in Paris for a quarter. I had returned to Lagos toward the end of that year, and our conversations picked up again. You often joked that my location was responsible for the poor connection during our video calls, so I was eager to finally meet you outside cracked pixels and unstable Wi-Fi.

I remember watching you walk out of the church building in Ikeja wearing a crisp white kaftan—the unofficial uniform of the kind of Yoruba men older women warn young girls about. You looked the same as in every image of you I had seen, but in reality, you were different from how I had imagined—different from what I truly wanted my man to look like. For a fleeting moment, I wrestled with my own expectations. I quickly silenced that instinct, reminding myself of every sermon and piece of advice I had heard growing up—that true love was built on substance, not just aesthetics.

And in many ways, you offered substance. You were articulate. Educated. Intentional in conversation. You stood tall—quite literally, and in ways that suggested some level of reliability, even when subtle signs of uncertainty lived in your posture. I convinced myself that the connection we had built mattered more than attraction, or the absence thereof. And that what we had built emotionally deserved to be honoured and explored physically.

Our time together in Lagos felt electric. You grew on me. From spontaneous late-night drives to long conversations that made our already limited time feel even more insufficient. I remember the day you invited me into your family home in Victoria Island and introduced me to your parents. You told me of the conversations you had with your brother, Dolapo, about how I was exactly the kind of woman you wanted to build your life with. You showed me off to your closest friends and never shied away from making sure I was okay and had nothing to worry about as long as I was with you—even in very public spaces. Nobody had ever been that intentional with me. Not even the man who had once officially been my partner before you waltzed into my life. This felt like progress, our arrival at long-term stability.

Then you returned to Milan, and silence followed you.

“Are you okay?”

“Did you land safely?”

“Please just let me know you’re fine.”

These were some of my messages to you that floated into emptiness. We fell into repeated cycles of high tides that crashed into loud echoes of silence—months, quarters, and years on and off, each with unique displays of the same pattern. It typically began with you disappearing unannounced and returning with a mouthful of apologies I always accepted because “love is patient” and “love suffers long.” That was when I began to understand the language you spoke most fluently: proximity without permanence. Intimacy without commitment. Attention without intention.

There were explanations that did not explain, disappearances that returned without acknowledgement, and a rhythm of confusion disguised as the complexity of getting to know a man like you. Not only did I continue to indulge it, I often initiated and reopened the doors myself. I believed that communication was key, and that clarity was always just one honest conversation away. But I failed to realise that your flickering presence was the loudest form of communication you could ever provide.

My only mistake was believing that I could understand you into consistency. I believed that if I listened deeply enough, loved gently enough, or waited long enough, you would arrive fully, and then you would stay. But now, I know that almost-love is intoxicating precisely because it never demands full accountability. Love is not easy, but somehow it is also quite simple, and it is never supposed to feel like walking on eggshells or decoding never-ending riddles. And I have you, Ademola, to thank for teaching me that. Till today, I still do not know what your intentions for me were, but even without intending to, you have become my favourite warning sign. You are the perfect archetype for the version of “love” I never want to experience again.

Do you recall our last conversation at Sugar & Roses in September? It was a few days before my birthday, and you had insisted on coming all the way to see me, notwithstanding the blockers and challenges that accompanied that particular day. I could not, for the life of me, fathom how a man could continuously and relentlessly go out of his way for me, move mountains for me, and still never choose me. In our favourite corner of the restaurant, I realised, with startling calmness, that it was the end of my negotiation for emotional stability. And I remember the sheer confusion that rested all over your face. But it was nothing compared to the confusion and unrest that I held within me for years, just trying to make sense of the situation we were in. Walking away was not dramatic; it was honest. Although it should have happened long before, I simply had no energy left to fight, to understand, or even to be my typically curious self. It was as though scales fell from my eyes that night as we ate and talked. It felt like ice-cold water running down my throat on a sunny day, like a quiet walk back home to myself in the cool of the night after wandering away for years.

The easy thing to say would be that I regret meeting you, but the truth is far from it. I loved that I met you, Ademola. In you, I saw a mirror I did not know I needed. You showed me all the parts of me that were begging to be healed while I romanticised inconsistency. You forced me to confront how deeply I wanted to be chosen and how easily I accepted being almost chosen. Because of you, I understand now that love is not measured by the intensity of attention but by the consistency of presence. It does not always have to be filled with grand gestures, exciting activities, or thrilling conversations. It is even allowed to be bland or boring, even. As long as it is peaceful, steady, and clear. You were never the destination, Demz, but I thank you for being my road to freedom.

Today is the 14th of February, and for months I have held my breath in panic, wondering whether I would give in to the temptation of texting you again or stopping by to say hi when I see you in the common spaces we still share, just as I often did every time you disappeared. But I woke up today with a loud exhale because I feel nothing. I have searched, emptied myself, and found that I truly feel nothing for you. I want nothing from you. What a relief—to have finally released you back to the universe, to whatever version or fraction of love you are capable of offering to whoever believes it is all they deserve.

What a relief to not be that woman anymore. To finally walk forward. To step fully into the field of fresh freedom.

What a relief.

“Our mommy is dead,” Onyeka screamed at the top of her lungs as she dashed out of the bedroom to alert me and my brothers, who were glued to the television in the living room.

“Our mommy is no longer breathing!” she cried, her voice shaking with fear.

It was right there and then that my life—my entire life—changed forever.

It was 9:00 p.m. on the 30th day of January. My mother lay bare on the bed, wrapped in an old, faded, flowery bedsheet in my dimly lit bedroom. There she was—weak, her soul slowly drifting from her body—while my sister, Onyeka, hovered around the room in guarded panic. In the corner, Diana Ross quietly affirmed “He Lives in You” through the speakers.

My attention was split between the bedroom, where my mother lay, and the living room, where my brothers remained, watching WrestleMania, completely unaware of what was about to happen. And it was okay, because nobody expected that Carol Obiageli Nwobu—the woman who loved us all as though her life depended on it—would be gone in such a slow, sudden and painful way.

My mother had been sick with cancer for five years, and we had learned to live with it. Every morning, without fail, we greeted her with the same words: “Good morning, Mommy. You shall live and not die.” It was our way of speaking life into her body, no matter how aggressively cancer reared its ugly head. She always survived, and we were always assured of her comeback.

But that night, a cold, foul gloom settled in the air. Our fate had finally caught up with us.

At short intervals, I moved between the bedroom and the living room. I multitasked heavily—running to catch glimpses of two strange men on TV inflicting pain on themselves in a wrestling ring as entertainment, then returning to gaze at my mother’s pale face as she muttered Psalms under her breath. What I did not know then was that these would be her last words.

It felt as though I could sense her spirit departing, but like a child—especially one who had watched her recover time and time again—I believed she could not go. After all, she was my mother. And mothers are always present.

“Our mommy is dead,” Onyeka screamed as she burst out of the bedroom. “Our mommy is no longer breathing!”

It was right there and then that my life—my entire life—changed forever.

My mother was a special woman. Not because this is the kind of thing one is expected to say about the woman who bore you and gave you life, but because the more I encounter the world, the more convinced I am that very few people live like her—with ruthless faith and uncanny strength.

Her beauty was one of a kind. Distinct. Quietly commanding. Rooted in character, class, and an unshakeable sense of self. I remember how she would say, “It is just hair. It will grow back,” after enduring countless rounds of the blood-sucking, hair-thinning monster that is chemotherapy. And it always did—growing back silkier, longer, and more tender than the strands before.

My mother’s heart was made of gold. I saw this in how she raised other people’s children as though they were her own. On Sundays and Wednesdays, my siblings and I watched her work quietly behind the scenes in the children’s church, caring for babies while the main service carried on in the auditorium—never seeking applause.

My mother had style. She wore many hats (literally), embraced extravagant dresses with boldly padded shoulders, and loved the colour red—right down to the different shades of lipstick that melted beautifully over her darkly lined lips. For years, I wondered where my own love for red came from, until I flipped through old photographs of her and realised that perhaps such traits are passed down genetically too.

Today makes it fourteen years since my life changed, and I often find myself returning to the sheer force of who my mother was. How could I forget her, even if I tried? Every time I look in the mirror, I see her—a beautifully jointed mosaic of my mother—staring back at me.

I am never in doubt about who I am or whose I am, because I am made of her. Her blood still steadily flowing through me.

I read often about women who do not wish to be like their mothers, out of fear of repeating cycles of pain and trauma. But my story is different. Maybe because there is something about grief that shifts your focus away from the frailties of life, and steadies it upon more eternal things— things that will matter beyond the things we fear today.

I love my mother, I want to be like her. I love my mother so deeply that I ache knowing I did not have enough time to show her how much I did, how much I still do. I wish I had been given the chance to put language and action to the depth of admiration I carry for her. I want to be like her in as many ways as my memory will allow. I want to remember her always, because the truth is—sometimes, I forget. And I am disgruntled by the fact that I do.

The few memories I have of her—her sweet, beautiful face; her tender voice—sometimes feel as though they are slipping away. But I will fight to keep them alive. I will continue to immerse my identity in those fragments. Even as I try to make more “evolved” choices, even as I attempt to fulfil her desire that her children be far better than she ever was, I choose to mirror my mother.

And I am glad that, at my core, I do.

Carol, it has been fourteen years since you returned to the heavens—to the One who sent you to us. I hope you look down and smile at how much I have become like you.

I am now a full-blown Nwanyi Unwana. Like you, I cry freely when I pray, and many people do not understand why. I still have my quirky eating habits, and I still cannot stand the smell of fish—the kind you knew I hated so much that you would cook an entirely different pot of stew with chicken instead, just for me. As for my attention span, I am still working on it, but at least, I have not watched a wrestling match since that day.

The frail spaces in my body have grown stronger, Mommy. I now walk, talk, move, and even exclaim like you.

Thank you for giving me your heart. For planting in me deposits of the Spirit that now lives inside me. Ari, Obi, Onyi, and Neme are all doing alright. Nne’m oma, anyi di OK.

No matter how much I evolve, no matter how sophisticated I become, I want to be remembered simply as your daughter. As nwa Carolu. The more I discover who I am, the more I realise and I am thankful that I am not so different from you.

And that is the most daring, beautiful way I can ever be.

I had just picked up my mobile phone to engage in another round of observing people’s lives through virtual windows. It was approximately the hundredth time I was rescinding on my promise to read a book instead.

At the exact second I typed in the last digit of my phone password, a sharp knock landed on the door.

I grudgingly stood up and swayed across the room to find out who it was. I twisted the door knob open, standing in between my little sanctuary and this person who was now standing right in front of me.

In a way that I found rather strange, we shared a resemblance. We had the same figure, same shadow and silhouette. But I brushed the thought off, concluding that it was just my sleepy brain making an association with this tall, slender, dark female figure. After all, it was a common thing many people did.

I leaned in nonetheless, eager to get a closer look at their face. It was paler than a ghost caught in midwinter, eyes frozen even when they tried to crack a smile. It was like a blank canvas with facial features.

“We definitely do not look alike,” I thought to myself in relief.

If anything, I appeared happy in general. Everyone around me knew me for my skin that radiated and my eyes that were always filled with life. Whoever this person was, they looked pretty dead—not just in comparison to me, but dead altogether.

“Who are you, and why do you look so… worn out?” I asked, trying my best to remain kind.

“Call me Numbness. I am worn out because I have been waiting,” they replied.

My eyes twisted in sharp confusion. Numbness had a strange presence. Like they were there, but you could not feel it. I was curious to ask what exactly they had been waiting for.

“For you,” they immediately added, reading between the lines of my subtle frown.

“I’ve been waiting for you to schedule time for us to talk. We have a pending discourse that is long overdue. It did not seem like you were ever going to make the time, so I decided to visit.”

Their voice was not just a sound—it was both a warning and a cry for help. It had a calmness to it that was also quite concerning.

“I’m sorry, I should have…” I started.

“Don’t be. I’m not here to remind you of yet another thing you need to be doing. I’m here to free you, to help you understand what you have been avoiding. Because I know it all too well.”

“Free me? How?” I whispered.

“By giving words to your unspoken emotions.

I know that you are taking your time, and this place…” they said, looking into the room from over my shoulder, “…is all you have ever known. But you will eventually need to come out of it, and that will be impossible if you cannot put where you are now into the right words.”

I felt seen. Exposed. And it was the first time I had felt that way in a long time.

“I have questions,” I admitted.

“I know.”

The atmosphere immediately changed. I felt a heavy cloud of nothingness run through my veins.

“You have reached a limit,” they continued. “But everyone makes it feel like a crime to be here. Everyone is making some kind of progress but you. You are at an edge, and instead of pausing, you are still forcing motion. You are trying to show up for people in places you do not belong—not as an act of kindness, but to prove that you are worthy of remaining relevant.

“To these people, you seem functional. Yet in reality, you are frozen, withering away, and at the point of breaking.”

“Is there a way out?” I asked.

They let out a loud sigh.

“There is always a way out.” Their voice thickened, and I felt the walls beside me move.

“The way out is to acknowledge that this, right here, is where you are. That you feel nothing, yet are somehow also overwhelmed by everything.”

“Go on,” I said in a surrendered tone.

“This feeling of nothingness is a feeling too. And if feelings are visitors, you must at least let me in as well.

“Your acceptance of weakness right now is the strength you need to continue. Your acknowledgment of not knowing what to do is the wisdom you need to forge ahead.”

“Why now?” I asked. “Why did you come now?”

“I did not just arrive. You only just noticed. There have been multiple manifestations of what you feel now, before me.

“Discouragement walked in one warm afternoon in May, through the ‘no’s that came in from every side. Then Misery stopped by in June, when you realised that you were starting all over again. Fear reared its ugly head in July, holding you back from taking a bet on yourself.

“Now, I am here in August as a sign that the cup is full. And you need to let many things go. You need to be still and realise that your stillness is not the stumbling block to your progress—but your stubbornness, and your insistence on your current method of running away, could be.”

The entire air froze, and a teardrop finally cracked through the walls of my stiffened heart. My words stuck like a huge knot in my throat, but I finally gathered the courage to say to Numbness:

“Come in. If I do not face you, I’ll never escape you.”

The door opened slowly. And there–familiar, yet foreign–stood myself. This version of me was the visitor all along, but I just hadn’t noticed through the veil of the nothingness that I had been feeling.

Suddenly, I jolted awake. I had dozed off again during my endless scroll into other people’s lives. It was my quiet, ineffective hope for an escape from this season of my life.