Loss
We tend to think of loss in a mostly linear form-death, the end of a relationship, a fight and breakup. This year, it has come in more subtle but equally jarring forms. It is one thing to think of the adage that “Twenty children cannot play together for twenty years” and another to see it flesh out before your eyes.
It is hard not to hate the Nigerian situation when, in a bid for a better life, every part of your family and friends that mean anything to you are relentlessly chased away from the mouth of the lion. Every month, I have “escorted” yet another friend out of the country, seen another friend’s WhatsApp number change country code, or watched another Snap Map location leap continents. Every relocation is a blocked release valve for me, a friend I cannot go and see at a moment’s notice.
The goodbyes have become a ritual. There’s always a last dinner, a home visit or a sendoff party, where we pretend it’s not really goodbye, just “see you later.” We take photos that will live in our camera rolls as time capsules of a life that no longer exists. We make promises about video calls and visits that we half-believe. We will never be complete at weddings, naming ceremonies and burials. Someone will always be calling in via Zoom from Toronto, or sending their regrets from London, or wiring money from Dubai because they cannot leave their new lives long enough to return to the old one. The group chats remain active, but the conversations increasingly split along continental lines. Inside jokes require more context. References need explanation.
What haunts me most is the arithmetic of it. Each departure reduces the denominator of shared experience. Three years from now, five years from now, what will we have in common except memories of a country we all left in different ways? Some left on planes, pursuing better opportunities. Others, like me, stayed but lost everyone anyway, left behind in a place that increasingly feels like a waiting room where I’m the only one who didn’t hear their boarding call. I keep waiting for my plane but my flight keeps getting delayed.
Olamide and Seyi
There is a song for every season- a reflection of what you feel, your aspirations, fears and dreams. Earlier on, that hunger, that ambition reflected through Badoo’s “Voice of the Street”. Then as times grew dire, we clung to every vestige of reassurance we could get through Seyi’s “God Sent”, echoing that self-belief that there is a nascent talent in you just waiting to explode, or make a positive declaration of what is possible through “Deja Vu” — no man fit block my way. There are the days when even positive declarations feel hollow, when you need to get on your knees and beg. That’s when Pelumi Deborah’s “Gbogbonise” hits different. It’s the sound of desperation meeting devotion, of asking God to do what you cannot do for yourself. No bravado. No hustle talk. Just pure, unfiltered pleading wrapped in worship.
The Discipline of Work
I made a deliberate decision to throw myself into my career this year. For a large chunk of the year, this meant 18–20 hours of work every day while our first clinic was in its early days and I was setting up DermAfricans.
People romanticize hard work, but there’s nothing romantic about it when you’re living it. It’s waking up at 5 AM because you went to sleep at 1 AM and your body has forgotten how to rest properly. It’s switching between coffee and energy drinks. It’s missing birthdays and weddings and lazy Sundays because there are always seventeen things that only you can do.
The first month, I felt invincible. Look at me, I thought, building something real with my life. By the third month, I felt like a machine, all input and output, no soul. Wake up, check my mail, work on the way to work, work at the office, gym, get home, sleep, then wake up midway to continue work. There are many unglamorous, unposted, uncelebrated hours that nobody sees and nobody applauds. A lot of other aspects of my life suffered intensely. I’m not sure if I made the right decision. I’m not sure there was a right decision. I only know that when everything else in my life felt like it was dissolving, the work was solid. It was real. My work was mine. My work was me.
A Great Escape
It is 1 AM on a random Friday night in Victoria Island. I have been feeling the hounds of life’s stress snipping at my heels and, in standard fashion, I have escaped to a conclave of young people like me in Nigeria’s most stressful city.
I am directly in front of the speaker, the bass kicks reverberating in my bones. My eyes are squeezed shut as I try to let the music swallow me whole. The loudness threatens to permanently deafen me while the DJ whips up the crowd to a massive frenzy in front of me. I am in the crowd, but not of it. I just want to soak up the energy of the moment, the reckless abandon of the mass organism in front of me-to wrap it in my hands before going home to pick up my worries I left at the entrance of Praia.
This is the Friday night religion of young Lagos. We gather in these spaces-Praia, Eko Hotel, whatever new spot just opened-not really for the music or the drinks, though those are the excuse. We come for temporary amnesia. For a few hours, we’re not the ones scrambling for dollars or stuck in go-slows or disappointed by the country. We’re just bodies in motion, part of something bigger than our individual anxieties.
I want to feel alive and young. Because most days, I feel neither. Most days I feel like I’m aging in dog years, seven years for every one, burdened by responsibilities that people in functioning countries don’t have to think about. But here, with the music so loud it overwrites thought, I can pretend I’m just 25 and not 25-going-on-40.
If I narrow my eyes enough, I can see the people move as part of one whole. There’s something beautiful about that collective surrender. All of us, from different lives, different struggles, different ambitions, moving to the same rhythm. For a moment, we’re synchronized. For a moment, we’re free.
But all escapes are temporary by definition. The music will stop. The lights will come on. I’ll call an InDrive back to my place, and on that ride through the empty Lagos streets, all the worries I checked at the door will be waiting for me. The unpaid invoices. The friend moving to Canada next month. The persistent question of whether I’m a mad man that left clinical medicine to build something or just delaying the inevitable.
Still, I’ll come back next month. Or go to the museum. Or go to an art exhibition. Because even temporary escape is escape. Even borrowed freedom is freedom. And sometimes, that’s enough to make it through another week.
Let there be Light
Some mornings, I wake up later than my schedule and, as a result, have to forgo the normal bus-hopping of the Lekki-Epe Expressway in favour of passing the Lagos-Calabar Coastal road to get to work.
As we drive by the beach, my eyes usually lock on that far-distant horizon where the water meets the sky while my mind never fails to marvel at the audacity of man. Our ability to mimic God when he said “Let there be light” by looking at an undeveloped area and saying “Through this waterlogged and undeveloped area, I am going to tame nature and build a physical edifice.” The ability to tame the raging force of the water by throwing in enough stones to slow down that wildness.
There’s something almost biblical about watching construction on that scale. It makes me feel good to think that we have a sliver of His Divine Will in us to create, conquer and transform. That the same species that once cowered in caves now builds bridges across impossible distances, that we look at the sea and say “I will make you a path.” Every morning I take that route, I’m reminded that creation is not a miracle reserved for Him alone, but for me too.
Faith and Delusion
I wish I could lie and tell you that everything will be alright in the end. But everything will not be alright. You must make do with your wins and tolerate your losses. What is the difference between faith and delusion? The outcome. It is easy to have faith when things are panning your way.
Real faith is what you cling to when the evidence suggests you should quit. Faith is delusion that, through sheer force of will and circumstance, occasionally proves itself right. But how do you know which one you’re operating on? You don’t. Not while you’re in it. The entrepreneur who finally gets funded looks prophetic; the one who runs out of money looks foolish, even though they worked just as hard, believed just as strongly. The difference between visionary and crazy is just a matter of timing and luck.
This year taught me that faith means admitting you don’t know if you’re building something meaningful or wasting your youth. It means making peace with the possibility that you might look back in ten years and realize you were chasing illusions. But what’s the alternative? Cynicism? Safety? A life so carefully constructed that nothing can go wrong because nothing is attempted?
The older I get, the more I respect the delusional. The people who think they can change things. None of them will know which group they belong to until it’s too late to change course. So we walk forward, blind, calling it faith because faith sounds better than admitting we’re winging it as we go.
The Illusion of “Luck”
I was incredibly lucky this year regarding a lot of projects and things I worked on. But on further introspection, a lot of the lucky breaks have seemingly come after a lot of unseen hard work that seems unfruitful at the time. I got a job after four months of job applications and six interviews. Ironically, the contact who referred me for the role came because I had built V1 of DermAfricans. I got an internship because I was “lucky” to attend a physical event at a very inconvenient time.
Luck is real, but it’s not random. It’s the compounding interest of preparation meeting opportunity, and most people never accumulate enough preparation to cash in when opportunity knocks. They see the moment of connection-the right person at the right event, the referral that leads to the job-but they don’t see the four months of applications that taught me how to interview. They don’t see the nights spent building DermAfricans V1, which was objectively bad but proved I could ship something.
The real secret of luck is that you have to be in the room. You have to be in motion. You have to generate enough surface area that fortune can find you.
Looking back at my “lucky” year, I see a pattern. Every break traces back to something I did when I had no idea if it would matter. The side project nobody asked for. The connection I maintained when it would have been easier to let it fade. The event I attended when I was tired. The email I sent when I was sure it would be ignored.
You cannot engineer luck, but you can create the conditions for it. You build. You show up. You maintain relationships. You do work that nobody’s paying you for yet. And then, sometimes, the universe notices. Not always. Not fairly. But often enough that the people who keep doing it eventually get called “lucky” by people who never saw them when they were just called “trying.”
The BDSM of Ambition
If you are blessed, or cursed, enough to want to do great things, I must confess I feel sorry for you. Even worse if it is innate, and not tied to a pathological need to look good in the eyes of man.
Ambition is a beautiful prison. The bars are made of potential, and every day you spend not reaching it is a day you feel like you’re failing yourself. There’s no parole for good behavior because good behavior means continuing to strive, and striving means never being satisfied with where you are.
People with normal levels of ambition can be happy. They get the promotion and celebrate. They achieve the goal and rest. But if you’re cursed with the kind of ambition I’m talking about, every achievement is immediately recontextualized as the baseline for the next one. You build; now it needs to scale. You launch the platform; now it needs to be profitable. You reach the summit and immediately start scanning the horizon for a higher mountain.
The worst part is that you can’t turn it off. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be content with good enough, to quiet the voice that says “more, better, faster.” But it’s like trying to stop thinking about breathing once someone mentions it. The ambition is autonomic now, part of my operating system, and removing it would mean becoming someone I no longer recognize.
What makes it a curse rather than a blessing is the isolation. Most people don’t understand why you can’t just be happy with what you have. Yomi reminds me to always remember and be happy. They see the progress and wonder why you’re not satisfied. They don’t understand that for the truly ambitious, there is no “enough.” There’s only “not yet” and “what’s next.”
And if the ambition is innate-if it’s not about impressing anyone but about answering some internal call you didn’t choose-then you don’t even have the luxury of blaming external pressure. You’re doing this to yourself. You’re running a race where you keep moving the finish line, and the only person making you do it is you.
I don’t know if this curse ever lifts. I don’t know if there’s a level of achievement where the hunger finally quiets. I suspect not. I suspect that people like us die still reaching, still striving, still convinced that we’re just one more project away from finally being satisfied.
But we wouldn’t have it any other way. Because the alternative-a life without the drive, without the hunger, without the curse-would feel like death by another name. We are most alive when we’re pursuing the impossible. The pain is also the pleasure. The curse is also the point.
Originally published on Medium ↗