selah
the clouds in my life are shifting
Mo, you’ve been living outside your head. Your thoughts no longer consume your reality, and even when you are alone with them, you don’t feel trapped. There is space between your mind and what goes on in front of you. You have outrun what was never chasing you, and the life of a firstborn daughter in a Nigerian home, with all it has asked of you, is finally easing from your shoulders.
There are no rocks in your chest. No numbed pain. Your nest is finally cradled in nurture, not weighed down by burdens.
You are not carrying the future on your back. You are not scanning your parents’ faces, trying to figure out how to save them from systems, repay their sacrifices, or be everything they need.
Your nervous system is no longer caught in fight or flight. You are not tallying what comes next, the work, the pay, the timing of everything you must do. You are not living by the expectations of man, including your own.
You are not crying from feeling too much. You are not afraid of feeling too much. You are not drowning in your emotions. You are not weeping out of distress or from the love you carry for life. Your soul is not crying out of weariness. Your brain isn’t yelling over your heart.
You are here. Present. Alive. You feel each breath filling your soul and spilling out with gratitude. Your fingers rest on your legs instead of drumming in anxiety. Your mind isn’t opening tabs it cannot close. You are not chasing a version of life you thought you owed to anyone.
You are not hiding from yourself or from God. You are not replaying sentences or feeding on the lies you tell yourself after reading too much into people’s words.
You are not twisting your tongue, thinking too hard about how to make your voice comfortable for others. You are not trying to breathe too much life and clarity into an accent that tells stories.
You criticize your voice before it even leaves you, thinking too hard about how it will sound. This time, you are not overthinking what it means to be Nigerian or American, not caught in the expectations, not stuck in the contradictions of why you are never fully either.
Validation has forced you to believe you are a better writer than you are a speaker. Now you are learning to do both well. Your shoulders are not heavy. You allow them to drop, to rest where they are meant to be.
Mo, you are a firstborn child, not an outlaw. Being firstborn should not break you like this.
Mo, your handwriting is beautiful
My Mo, this is so beautiful and freeing. Every line feels like a deep exhale 🫂💗