Relief

If you are reading this, you are stepping into my reflection. Maybe, by the time you reach the end, you will know me without ever having met me.

It all started when Yunuz was genuinely happy for me

We had just crossed a hurdle we had been battling for well over a year

I thought I should feel happy too

Instead, I just felt… relieved and moved on

Like there was one less thing sitting on my chest

I felt good, don’t get me wrong

But if I had to name it correctly,

it wasn’t happiness, It was fulfillment

And then it occurred to me

I don’t actually know when I stopped being happy

Good moments exist

I laugh I smile

But I don’t think I have truly stayed with happiness in a very long time

I have been living the present for the future for so long that I forgot the present was supposed to be lived too

My entire day is simulated

I am always somewhere ahead of myself

Thinking, planning, preparing, solving…

I remember when someone asked Ayobami what my major role in the company was

He said,

“He’s in charge of the headaches. He handles the headaches.”

Looking back, maybe he understood me better than I understood myself.

Even when nothing is wrong, I am looking for the next thing that could be.

Maybe this is how I have learned to live.

Maybe it’s also how I have learned to cope with the poisons I have chosen to sit with.

I don’t know.

I used to think this was simply ambition.

Now I think it’s something else.

I genuinely believe that as long as I have my life, it is a duty.

It was never burden I can attest

Just… a duty.

To give back more than I take.

To leave things better than I found them.

To justify this strange gift of being here.

Maybe that’s why, if I truly love you, my gift is allowing you to dream.

Maybe that’s why fulfillment comes so naturally to me.

Every problem solved feels like I have honoured that duty, if only a little.

Maybe that’s why I could suffer for it for an eternity and still believe it was worth it.

But happiness…

Happiness requires something I am not sure I know how to give or accept.

It asks that I stay, notice, maybe receive.

And I don’t think I have ever been very good at that.

Looking back, I think this is why I have missed important moments in my life and in the lives of people I love.

Not because I didn’t care, I cared.

I was just already living somewhere else.

Always in tomorrow.

Always believing I would make it up later.

Maybe that’s the cost of constantly becoming.

You become so occupied with the person you are trying to become

that you forget to spend time with the person you already are.

I don’t know if I will ever stop chasing.

Truthfully, I don’t think I want to.

But maybe the goal was never to stop chasing.

Maybe it’s simply to remember that today isn’t just the price I pay for tomorrow.

Maybe today is part of the life I have a duty to live too..

Yours in reflection

Laughter..