I spent the last three days inside a kind of stillness I didn’t plan for. I don’t know if it’s post-vacation blues or just the rare quiet of finally sitting with my own thoughts and my own feelings, but somewhere in the silence, I realized I hadn’t been writing. For two weeks, I’d been voice journaling, talking into my phone, and nothing compares to the act of physically writing things down. They say it releases something. It does. The voice holds it. The hand lets it go.
So I’m here, putting pen to paper again, because I think I’ve been holding my breath for two years and only just remembered how to exhale.
I’ve spent the better part of those two years in a season of discomfort. A season of fear. A season I did not choose. I saw a quote recently while scrolling - a prayer, really, that said…… Lord, help me find joy in a season full of discomfort, a season I did not choose to be in. It landed in me like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples reaching every corner I’d been avoiding. Because that was it exactly. I had been grieving a life I designed that no longer exists. I had been protecting things I should have set down a long time ago. I had been shrinking so that other people could shine (we can unpack that later) until, one day, I realized I never had to.
You don’t realize the deficit your body and mind are running on until you have a moment of stillness. Until there is no distraction left to hide behind.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that only surfaces when you stop. When you’re not a mother, not a partner, not a manager, not someone’s boss, when you’re forced to sit with the quiet question of how to rebuild a life that actually fits the season you’re in. For a long time, I couldn’t hear that question over the noise of everything I was carrying.
I hadn’t slept well in years. Two, maybe three years ago, this was post having my daughter. I walked into my doctor’s office and fell apart. I cried like the weather had moved indoors; like there was a storm inside me I had no hand on the controls for. It might have been five minutes. It felt like an hour. I was freshly postpartum and negotiating my own worth, four months out and already being called fat by the very person who was supposed to protect me. (That’s a story for another day. I can speak about it now because I no longer care to protect it.)
My doctor, Dr. Remi, may her soul rest in peace, sat with me, one Black woman to another, and looked me dead in the eyes. She told me the reason I wasn’t losing weight, the reason I was so foggy, the reason I couldn’t sleep, was that my nervous system was completely dysregulated. I had put so much pressure on myself to be successful, to keep my child okay, to keep the lights on, that I had stopped tending the one foundation everything else was built on. Me. If I weren’t good, nothing around me could be.
Why would you be able to sleep, she asked me, when you are not at rest?
She listed it back to me like a charge sheet: the travel schedule, the uncertainty in motherhood & marriage, the bullying from corporate America, and, somehow, from in-laws too, the flying up and down, the breastfeeding, the juggling of several businesses at once. She said she rarely persuades Black women to take sleeping pills, but she feared that if I didn’t sleep, if my mind didn’t quiet, I’d slide into a depressive episode — and she didn’t want that for me. She sent me for tests to confirm what she already suspected. Every number came back off the charts. I was quietly and politely dying on the inside.
Not long after that, I made myself a promise that I would never shrink again. I would find rest and refuge. It took me about a year to even understand what she had given me. And then I got the phone call that she had passed away. I cried uncontrollably, not out of grief alone, but out of a strange disbelief, because doctors are supposed to be here forever. They’re the ones who heal the rest of us. She healed me simply by seeing me.
So I made the commitment real. I would work less. I would love more. I would guard my peace above everything, even when it disappointed people. And it did. I was called all sorts of things. I was told I was not a family person, too high-standard, cold, and uncaring. The truth is, I had finally started caring about the right things. My wellbeing. My wellness. Making sure my daughter had a mother who loved herself more than she loved the idea of being loved by someone else. I decided I would build that safety infrastructure myself, brick by brick, rather than wait for someone to hand me the blueprint.
I’m writing all of this to say: two years and three days after that conversation, I finally feel like myself again. I didn’t even realize how long it had taken until I counted. Two moments, more than any others, walked me back to myself.
The first was on a mountain in Switzerland — I’ve written about it before. I was with someone, and partway up, they said, simply, “You don’t always have to carry everything alone. I’ve got you”. They held out a hand and waited at the bottom for me to make my way down. I complained. I ranted. I insisted I couldn’t do it. They just kept encouraging me. And for one split second, I was seen for exactly who I am, I was allowed to be vulnerable and still held. Loved, even platonically; it was safety more than anything. That night I slept more peacefully than I had in years. So deeply that, apparently, I snored and got teased for it the next morning. I never snore. But between the cold I’d caught and the safety of that room, my body finally let go.
The second time was recently, in Ghana. Accra moves at a slower pace than Lagos; it’s less frantic, less chaotic, and it gives me room to breathe and room to do absolutely nothing. Friends, local and visiting, simply took care of me. One put me up in an apartment. Another handed me their car and driver. Others offered their restaurants, their homes, their time. And I realized I had quietly built a community of people who loved me and poured into me, and that for years I’d been unable to receive any of it, because some part of me had decided I wasn’t deserving.
I spent the best part of a year praying to God to release the thing in me that kept refusing love. We aren’t built to be fearful. God didn’t put fear in us. The world did.
So in that apartment, I let myself stay still. I didn’t even leave. I watched TV until 4 a.m. I prayed. I journaled. I let my brain do whatever it needed to do to find its way home to itself. And then, for the second time, I fell asleep peacefully - on his chest, mid-Netflix, like a person starved of sleep or starved of love, I’m honestly not sure which. I woke with a jolt and did the thing I always do: I apologized. For sleeping. For taking up time. He asked me why I kept apologizing for being human. I said we were supposed to be watching something. He said, “No, you were supposed to be resting.”
I asked how long I’d been out. It felt like hours; my body felt like it had finally unclenched every muscle it had been guarding for years. He told me it had been thirty minutes. I laughed, no way it was only thirty minutes. But it was. And sitting there, I understood something I’d been circling for a long time: I had spent years designing a life of ease, but I had never let myself actually arrive in it. I had to learn to receive. To be led. To be loved. To be seen for who I am, not who I was forced to be for others.
I don’t entirely know where this is going, and I’ve made my peace with that. I’m rather fond of my offline life now. I like that I’m building something beautiful in the background of what has, frankly, been an ugly season. I like that I protect what I love, daily, with my whole heart. My child is healthy and happy, and more importantly, she has a mother who is healthy and happy too. I’ll keep praying that God stays at the center of every decision I make.
So, I’m popping up for air. Not because everything is fixed, but because my mind feels like it’s working again. I won’t push it past what it can hold. I’m just going to take it one day at a time.
Until I pop up again… maybe with something more, maybe not.
— Tope