There is a difference between being alone and feeling alone. I learned that tonight. The hard way. For the past three months, my life has become a predictable cycle of exhaustion.Wake up.Fight traffic.Work.Fight more traffic.Get home late.Repeat. Sometimes I wonder if adulthood is just paying bills while sitting in increasingly worse traffic. I work in
There are three things I see every day. Passports.Hope.And desperation.Not necessarily in that order. I work at a visa application centre in Ikeja. Officially, I process documents. Unofficially, I watch dreams queue up before sunrise. Every morning, before we even open the doors, there are already people waiting outside.Students.Business owners.Families.Newlyweds.Retirees.Young professionals.People who have sold land.People
I have always believed in rules. Not because I am a lawyer. Well, maybe partly because I am a lawyer. But mostly because rules are the only thing standing between civilization and what I can only describe as a highly organized form of madness. And nowhere is this more obvious than a BRT queue in
Some people are born brave.I was not. I know this because brave people do not spend three days rehearsing a conversation they haven’t even had yet. Brave people do not practice speeches while sweeping the compound.Brave people do not whisper arguments to themselves while bathing.Brave people definitely do not almost faint every time they imagine
There should be a manual for being nineteen. Not a proper textbook. Just a small booklet. Something that explains all the things adults expect you to magically understand the moment you leave secondary school. How relationships work. How feelings work. How to know when somebody means what they say. How to know when they don’t.
People think journalism is glamorous.It isn’t. Nobody tells you that most investigative reporting involves sitting in uncomfortable places for unreasonable amounts of time while questioning your life choices. For instance: At the moment I am writing this, it is 2:17 a.m. Mosquitoes have declared war on my existence. My back hurts. My phone battery is
Most people don’t expect to die on a Tuesday.Especially not before lunch.I certainly didn’t. The day started the way most of my weekdays start: with disappointment.Specifically, disappointment in myself. My alarm rang at 6:00 a.m.I ignored it.It rang again at 6:15.I ignored it with even greater confidence.By 6:30, my alarm and I were no longer
People say honesty is the best policy.Personally, I think honesty is expensive. Honesty gets you into trouble.Honesty starts difficult conversations.Honesty forces you to explain things. Lies, on the other hand, are efficient.Elegant.Convenient.Like shortcuts. At least that’s what I believed until last Thursday.Now I’m not so sure. The funny thing is that I’ve never considered myself
I used to have festivals.Let us begin there. Because if I begin with my current circumstances, I may become emotional. And gods should not become emotional. It ruins the image. Three hundred years ago, people crossed rivers for me.Entire villages prepared for my arrival weeks in advance.Drums echoed through forests.Goats disappeared mysteriously.Priests suddenly became very
Dear Diary, Apparently there are several hours missing from my day. I find this unacceptable. Not because I particularly wanted those hours. But because they belonged to me. And I have always been uncomfortable with losing access to things that belong to me. Time. Information. Control. Particularly control. The last thing I remember is standing in a boardroom