rejection f*cking sucks.
there’s a softness to me, a softness that i cannot crack. a slow softness that reminds me of the break of dawn, the effervescent smell of the promise of a new day. the promise of hope. a gentleness, a marriage of empathy and this thing called love. there’s a quaint to me - a silencing to anger. my heart constantly philandering joy. an awareness of a life larger than this. a disposition that i was made to love and be loved not existing in contrary but in joint unison.
i like to think of myself as an answered prayer, but whose prayer? i do not know.
i do not have the twinkle of my mothers eyes or the silence of my fathers tongue. i do not posses the slowness of the man my mother called father nor the fastness of the woman my father called mother. it must have been a silent prayer, i must exist because someone prayed me into will. sometimes i think of me as vengeance, strong and opinionated, angry too. mostly angry but beneath it, there’s softness. it’s a boy listening way more than he speaks. a boy that hugs himself every night before he sleeps, a boy that texts twice and says i love you daddy. in full. ‘daddy’ could never be cringe to him neither could ‘mummy’. i would always say it out in full - a remembrance to how they’ve given me life and love and everything in between - in full.
there’s a softness to me that i cannot crack and maybe that’s the problem, that beneath all this anger and shame and want. that beneath the ambition there’s just a boy that wants to be held in softness and in kindness. in wholeness.
we don’t talk about this often but rejection fucking sucks. few days ago i stayed on the phone with someone i’ve been too quick to call friend and when this person said “if you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be”. i paused and for the first time i heard my heart actually beat. not felt. heard.
there’s a silencing and the thing with a silencing is everything becomes louder.
“empathy…my empathy ….i’d change my empathy” sometimes i lay on my bed thinking ‘the fatal design flaw in humans are our inability to turn our emotions off’. how do i know? because i’ve tried- because i’ve lived my whole life trying. trying to not feel. do you know how chaotic that is? how sad it is? to not want to feel. there are scattered days where i lay in my scattered bed with no tears left to cry, mummuring “why me”. saying it so silent in my heart, that the big man in the sky does not hear me, because how ungrateful am i to not be grateful? to not be grateful that i am alive and well. how ungrateful am i to want more. to dare want to not be myself. how ungrateful am i?
the thing with rejection is it’s slowness. it’s painful reminder of it’s robust prescence. “rejection weighs heavy in my heart”. i’ve always found it beautiful people who can express themselves devoid of their emotions. almost like my emotions do not hold me by my chest and control every part of my body. almost like i could choose. almost like to me rejection was not a soul crushing feeling, that left me worn out on most days. no ability to write or think or fall or even stand. just a sadness. a sadness that weighs my softness.
rejection is such a funny emotion because while other emotions tell you how to feel, rejection does not. it demands you wreck yourself, it demands you reduce yourself to a nothingness. it demands you remind yourself that you’re not good enough and worse? you’ll never be. such a god damn awful emotion. such a reminder that you’re only as good as you’ll never be.
i lay on my bed in lagos, i don’t know if i’ve ever mentioned this but i love my bed. not just the shape, or the fact that there’s no bed frame or that it’s home to my dreams, it’s everything but sometimes i don’t want to be on my little bed. i don’t want to be in lagos. i want to dream, to see and to become.
i should be writing this from paris, nestled somewhere in rue montorgueil or the champs-élysées drinking hot chocolate and eating pastries i cannot pronounce just like i’ve read in books. maybe i’d finally try coffee and enjoy it, because sometimes we change and we bend and we never remain the same. in the middle of february a consulate of a certain country reached out to me. they loved me and wanted me to speak in france at a conference for them, all expense paid, all i had to do was say yes. but unfortunately i am also nigerian and when you’re nigerian the yes isn’t always yours.
i applied for my visa and i was denied, i got my visa denial letter a day before my first exam in the nigerian law school, it’s been a while since i felt like nothing but that day i did. it’s been about three months but i haven’t forgotten it. this is when i’d have been in paris.
what i considered the biggest break of my career synonymously blended into how i saw myself, nothing.
do you see it? how silent rejection often is, how it exists in the sides of our head never taking too much space. just barely there, barely existing, at the back of our mind, seating, waiting until one day it’s the middle of may and all you can remember is the rejection, all of it.
but perhaps rejection is redirection. perhaps sometimes it doesn’t feel so lonely when we’re alone. maybe we get to the point where it no longer hurts. when people and opportunities leave maybe we eventually get to stay whole.
rejection fucking sucks. but to be honest; what doesn’t?
this is a cute pic from this magazine i shot for, i can’t wait for you to see it.
i’ve missed you my love. and i’ve been up to so much - i dropped my film with hauwa. can you do me a favour and watch it? type in GOOD BAD WAHALA ON YOUTUBE, i’d also link it but before i forget - how is your day going joor?
wow.
this is so achingly beautiful😭 and honest that i’m almost afraid to respond, because i don’t want to disturb its stillness. but i will, softly.🥹
i feel the softness in you, the quiet kind , the kind that speaks volumes in silence. the kind that folds itself around rejection and anger and still manages to stay tender. and you’re right: rejection does suck. it’s loud in its silence, isn’t it? it makes everything else quiet, even the things we want to hold onto the dreams, the little joys, the reminders that we are enough.
you are enough. you are the answered prayer of someone, maybe even yourself, whispered so softly into existence that it was easy to forget. easy to think of yourself as an accident or a misstep when you were always, always a deliberate bloom.
i see you in your softness, your strength, your heartbreak. i see you in your Lagos bed, dreaming of a Paris that could have been. i see you trying so hard to turn off your feelings, to quiet the empathy that makes you who you are. but maybe the thing isn’t to crack the softness or crush it into something sharper. maybe it’s to sit with it, to let it hold you when rejection tells you you’re not worth holding. maybe the softness isn’t a flaw, but your way of loving yourself, wholly, fully, as you are.
and yes, rejection fucking sucks. but so do a million other things. and maybe, the softness we carry is what will keep us from breaking completely.
thank you for writing this. it’s a gift. and you are too.
There is a time when a tree knows it must bend, not because it is weak, but because the wind is unrelenting. And still it stands. Not because the world is kind, but because it must. I have read your words, and I tell you now: softness is not your flaw. It is your spine.
You know, I once said, the yam that will feed the village must first sleep beneath the soil. Maybe that's you. Still under. Still becoming. But necessary. Needed. Nourishing, in time.
You call yourself an answered prayer, and yet you ask, “whose prayer?” Perhaps the prayer was whispered not in words but in need.
You say empathy is the part of you you’d change, and I wonder how do you curse the very thing that makes you whole? Empathy is not your ruin. It is your rebellion. In a world that teaches numbness as survival, to feel is revolution.
Rejection, yes, is cruel. But let me tell you something you may already suspect: rejection is not always a verdict. Sometimes it is a mirror showing you how much you cared, how much you dared to want, how far you’ve come. You say “the yes isn’t always yours.” But even this this pain, this denied moment does not define you. You are not the stamp on a visa letter. You are not the silence after an unanswered text.
You are the boy who says “daddy” in full. You are the boy who hugs himself at night. That is power, not pity. That is legacy.
“Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am and what I need is something I have to find.” You are not lost. You are in motion.
You were made to love and be loved not in contradiction, but in harmony.
Be kind to yourself no one teaches you that