I’ts Been A Little Heavy Lately

An attempt to name what I’ve been carrying, and what I’ve never said out loud

I’ve been putting this off for an embarrassing amount of time. Not just this piece, but writing in general. I say that like it’s a mystery why I haven’t been writing, though I suspect I know exactly why and pretending otherwise has been part of the delay. Anyway, this is a rough map of the things I’ve been thinking about and will keep returning to in the days ahead, so I encourage you to stick with me.

For more than a year now, I’ve carried around a persistent feeling of melancholy. The kind that isn’t loud enough to justify concern, but simply refuses to leave. No amount of money I’ve made, no relationship I’ve tried to manufacture, no distraction or connection I’ve leaned on has managed to dissolve it. It hovers. I can look away, but every turn of my head meets the same tender, unwanted kiss on my forehead.

I live with the strange awareness that I feel too much especially for a man who looks the way I do, moves the way I do, occupies the kind of physical space i do; a space that invites assumptions about emotional density. My body and my interior life simply do not match. My physicality moves through the world with confidence, but inside I am constantly absorbing, over-processing, feeling things at a volume that never quite shuts off. I feel so much. Too much, maybe. Enough to exhaust myself.

Recently, I came across a line from Gail Sheehy that lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable in me: “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.”

It explains a lot and also nothing. What, exactly, have I left behind? And what am I actually moving toward?

Lately, I’ve been afraid that I’m losing the things that once made me me. Case in point is how I no longer write out of compulsion or joy. Writing has become transactional; something I do best when it comes with compensation, a deadline, or a measurable outcome. Passion, when it appears at all, feels like a luxury I can’t quite justify. And yet tonight, I’m writing anyway. Not because it’s profitable. But because I don’t think I can keep pretending that this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing. So maybe in some sense, it is indeed profitable.

I haven’t written a single personal paragraph in over a year. Still, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about writing one, so lets change that, shall we?

I look at my life and want to talk about it. I look at the work I do and the compromises I have to make, the quiet ambition or the lack thereof, the constant negotiation between my dignity and my need to survive in Tinubu’s economy and I want to write about it. I think about my faith, and writing feels like the only place I can explore that honestly, without posturing or performance.

I want to write about what it means to be a man in his late twenties in an aggressively sexual world while quietly not participating in it. I want to write about love; and its future in my life.

Some days, I feel like John Wick; a man who has lost everything and continues fighting. I mean this guy has four movies of survival, but what is he trying to survive for? At some point, just let it go bro.

I think about my mother often. A little less often than I used to, which frightens me more than the early, relentless grief ever did. People like to say she’s “asleep in the Lord,” but sleep carries the promise of waking. Others insist she’s in a better place, though I can’t imagine any place better than one where she’s still beside me. My mother is dead, and that kind of finality doesn’t resolve itself with time, or with borrowed phrases meant to console, words repeated so often they begin to lose their meaning; meaning i can argue they never had in the first place.

I’m troubled by how grief fades not necessarily how the pain disappears, but how the sharpness of it all dulls. I don’t know whether that’s healing or forgetting. Oh God, i hope its neither.

I think about my friendships. I love my friends. I’m grateful for them. And yet, I’ve come to accept that life changes and I often require more than people are willing or able to give, especially as life progresses.

People I’ve known for fifteen years marry women they’ve known for two, and almost overnight the center of their lives shifts. The friendship loses momentum. New priorities arrive, and you slip from first to second thought, and then, years later, as children enter the picture, to fifth. Then obligations for them stack neatly on top of one another until you realize you’ve become a deferred presence — traces of what we once were and a promise of a future that will never be. I’ve kept showing up in ways that won’t be reciprocated, and I’ve frankly stopped waiting for symmetry.

I’m unsettled by how much progress quietly takes from us, and how normal we’ve all decided that loss should feel.

I think about my life as a long search, for purpose, for money, for warmth, for belonging, for love. And in quieter, darker moments, for an ending. Not in a dramatic sense, sometimes I just have an occasional need for rest.

Still, in all of this, I find in myself, an irony. A few years ago, I was afraid of wanting anything at all. Wanting felt dangerous. Wanting led to trying, and trying exposed you to loss. I avoided competition, avoided new rooms, avoided beginnings, not because I lacked fire, but because I didn’t trust myself to survive failure. I’d spent too much of secondary school and university negotiating with low self-esteem, and somewhere along the way I decided that protecting what little I had was safer than risking its collapse.

That’s changed. Now I want to try, not because I’m certain I’ll win, but because I finally understand that my worth isn’t tied to outcomes. My esteem no longer belongs to a person, a title, or any one moment. It’s mine. And because of that, I’m no longer afraid of seeing what happens when I step forward.

I want to document my life more, not because I think it’s extraordinary, but because it’s interesting to me. I want to try things publicly and fail without turning that failure into a verdict. I want to be seen attempting, learning, becoming.

I have also dreaded the idea of being looked up to. That fear shaped my decision not to want children, I was terrified of being someone’s example but even that has softened. Now I want a full house. I want children who can watch me try, fail, recover, and keep moving. I want to show them that a meaningful life isn’t one without loss, but one that doesn’t retreat from it.

I used to be committed to never leaving home. Now all I want is to see new cities, unfamiliar streets, long flights, different versions of myself unfolding in places I’ve never been.

Life now feels different. It carries possibility. The kind that comes after uncertainty loosens its grip. I don’t expect everything to work out. I really don’t need it to.

So this is me beginning again.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about my life, the things I’ve survived, the things I’ve avoided, the things I’m still trying to understand. Some of it will be true. Some of it will be fictionalized. The line between the two will be thin, and occasionally intentional.

You’ll just have to read to find out.