Hybrid
What If Who I Hoped To Be Was Always Me
An extended argument over whether becoming better is discovery or invention — and why the difference matters more than either answer.
This is not a self-help book, and it is not quite a memoir. It moves between essay and narrative to ask one question from every angle available: when you finally become who you hoped to be, did you find that person, or did you build them out of whoever was left over?
The essays draw on a specific life — Asaba, a father's silences, the particular arithmetic of ambition in a country that rewards leaving more than staying — but the question underneath isn't regional. It's the one anyone asks at 3 a.m. after a version of themselves finally arrives and doesn't feel like arrival.
There's no formula here, no five-step framework for self-actualization. What there is: a set of honest attempts to sit inside the gap between the person you performed into being and the person you actually are — and the suspicion that the gap might be the most truthful thing about you.
From the opening essay, "Inventory"
My father kept a ledger for everything except the things that cost him the most. I found it after he died — decades of fuel prices, school fees, the exact naira value of every goat sold at every Christmas since 1994. Nowhere in it was the year he stopped speaking to his brother, or why.
I used to think this was a failure of documentation. Now I think it was the most honest thing he ever recorded: some costs you pay and never itemize, because writing them down would mean admitting there was a choice at all.
I am my father's son in this specific way. I have a ledger too — for output, for progress, for the version of myself I am allegedly becoming. It is very well kept. It does not mention the people the becoming cost.