In Search of Self?

Here is a Quick Guide to Save Time

This piece came to me after a horrible conversation with a friend. The type of conversation where she calls you entitled and says that you are too intelligent to not know how to play the game. The type of conversation where she says you are not special, but she loves you and she has to go; and she hangs up abruptly.

I left that conversation knowing that our relationship had been changed forever and that despite the explosiveness of that moment, things had improved for the better. According to Robert Greene’s 10th law of power, she had cut off an infection; and according to my understanding of the universe, I had just learnt more about a close friend and now I am free to proceed accordingly.

I didn’t become aware of the saying, ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ until I was an adult, and it was almost the antithesis of my composure for much of my younger life. I had no reason to share my problems, I wasn’t even one to acknowledge them as problems to begin with. I just took what was handed to me and I kept it pushing.

The first time I remember stepping out of fear and demanding for support, directly and loudly, was one school year during my secondary school days. The school fees had been late again and not only that, but our mom had also picked up the fervent Christian bug and she had been away at a mountain in Ogun state, while we struggled with the basics.

I found my uncle on Facebook, the eldest of my dad’s sibling set, and told him we were starving and out of school. And the we here is me, my younger sister, and my younger brother. In a way I had never considered before, I had been playing the role of surrogate parent for my siblings too because their voice was not as strong as mine yet.

That message led to a scolding from both my mother and father, but we were back in school in no time and our mother never left us in such a way again.

The response to that event, and other events like it, would create in me the reluctance to speak my truth and then in the moments where I actually do such a thing, the truth would be so grand and shocking (because the discontents had accumulated and overflowed), that the ability to receive any meaningful resolution would have already passed and now we were dealing with damage control.

A few weeks before this pivotal call, I found myself in a place where I had unintentionally fasted for three-four days straight. Part of the craziness of that time is that I don’t even know which day it officially started, but it ended on the day I received my paycheck because I had been starving in anticipation of it.

I had been working at a Dupont Circle based nonprofit and the day before my fast ended, I found myself in a back and forth with my manager over an email that will forever be marked in my mind as the ‘most relevant throwaway email ever’. The email that proved I needed a lesson on formal communication despite months of formal (and at times too formal) language.

The details are kinda irrelevant, but I had to ask myself, is this who I was starving for?

During the call, Robert Greene came up. Books quoted in this piece will be signified with quotation marks, rather than the typical italics for consistency across all versions of the piece. She said I should read ¨the 48 Laws of Power”, “the Art of Seduction”, and “the 33 Strategies of War” because I needed to learn to play the game. She was frustrated with me, and I understood it, kinda. I was newly 27, newly unemployed, newly embroiled in a situation where ego and pride could be seen as drivers of my behavior. I was practicing what Greene might have considered the 20th rule, don’t commit to anyone, by not favoring a commitment over my ability to truly sustain myself while being equipped to do my job.

At the time we talked, I have to be honest, I had never read the books. I had heard about them, but after my experience with “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”; I was not eager to dive into that world, and I am so glad that was the case, because if I had truly seen the world as a interaction between slaves and masters, I would not be here today, able to exist in this world, only in conflict with my own demons, not seeing myself as slave or master to anybody, but also fully aware that if I am expected to utilize such ideology, I am nicely positioned to have it work in my favor.

When I finally got into it, I realized its appeal. The listicle type of content is so soothing to the mind; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on and so forth. The existence of order is superb, but if the numbers are attached to well-thought-out information, then it becomes an even more powerful tool. It becomes a type of instruction manual or guide.

As with any good piece of writing about the human experience, there are contradictions, and it is obvious that we are expected to know when and where to apply certain rules. For example, law 34 talks about acting like a king to be treated like one and then the first law says don’t outshine your masters, but if you are a king, then you have no master. But those who know, know, I guess.

At the end of the day, I went through it all and concluded that this advice works well when one knows who one is. Narratives that talk about masters versus slaves do not clearly define who is a master or a slave, who is an ally or an enemy. I will always remember Chinua Achebe’s words about the description of savages on the riverbank and the fact that he occupied the eye of the non-savage as he read the book, and his kinfolk occupied the role of savage in the book, meaning that in a sense, he was more closely represented in the antagonist of that story and that the way the author engages with the antagonist is the way the author might have engaged with people like him in real life.

She said to me, if we don’t have trust funds or sponsors, we are slaves to the system and we just have to deal with that. In the, never outshine the master, I am the one being cautioned, but surely masters are expected to feed their slave well so that attempts to outshine, or contradict are reduced, right? I could have walked away from that conversation with many things; with the idea that I was indeed selfish, that I was a burden, that no one cared about my woes and my problems, that I needed to grow up. I could have walked away from that conversation with the deep understanding that there are a million individuals like me in the job market and that my expectation for fair treatment in the workplace was inane. But I could not step away from that conversation with the belief that because a person is not independently wealthy, or tied to the hip of other wealthy individuals, that they deserve the utmost misery in their daily lives.

We were talking about what else I could have done to avoid ending up without a job and everything she suggested were things I had done this time around or had done in similar situations in the past. She had said a few days before that particular call that I had looked healthier, but then on the call, she had asked why I wasn’t willing to do all that I could to keep the job. I had to think to myself, did she want me to look healthy, or did she not?

After more than ten years of doing all that was expected, after applying all the laws listed in that book intuitively throughout my life. After being compliant to the point that I was elected a prefect by my teachers in both SS2 and SS3, timekeeper and head boy. After being so unsentimental with friends that I would move to whole new countries without telling people. After practicing the art of concealed intentions by living in closets and shadows for the majority of my life, I was tired.

And my exhaustion wasn’t even the, get somebody else to do it, kinda spiel. It was the, I am doing all this, and I am still not receiving the results that make it worth it. Law 27 of Greene’s laws of power ‘Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following’ reveals itself to me in this moment. If this advice is meant to work for only the lucky and happy, as demonstrated by ‘Law 10: Infection: Avoid the unhappy or the unlucky’, then why would I, a person who has been unlucky and unhappy for quite a while, take this to heart. And if I continue to prioritize it in my life even after numerous moments of its inability to change my circumstances, won’t it look like I have been trapped in a belief system with cultish tendencies, namely the insistence that one must continue on in the fold even after it has stopped serving any positive purpose in their life.

A few days before the call with my friend, I stumbled upon Spencer Johnson’s book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” and because I was literally starving, the cheese metaphor was real, who had moved my cheese, where the fuck was it. I like the way Johnson scaled down humans so that they could be compared to mice better. I like that the humans maintained their complexity and that the mice were allowed to react as they would without mini-humans around. I like the way it acknowledges the elements of basic survival, through the actions of the mice; and the elements of navigating social construction, through the actions of the mini-humans.

When it came upon the point in the story where the cheese had completely disappeared and the mice was nowhere to be found; I found myself reflected in Haw, the individual standing at the spot in the maze, asking, why is the cheese gone, starving and indignant that if I think through the issue with enough intensity, I would come upon an answer.

Of course, in a book like “Who Moved My Cheese”, there is a tendency to look at one character and select that as the ideal, but I think even Johnson implied that there is no morality associated with each type of cheese-seeker. That the issue is with the way they approach an end goal they all proclaim to share: coming upon the cheese so they do not die of starvation. If one has concluded that one will come upon the cheese through one’s protest at its absence, then maybe it might work. But the search for the cheese, no matter how futile it might seem, puts us closer to finding the cheese than if we stay in one place and do nothing.

I have always held this innate belief that something is better than nothing, that a step is better than a refusal to move. So instead of waiting to see if my place of work would feed me well, I decided it was time to find my new repository of cheese in this maze that was my life. I needed to step back into the unknown because the known was not budging in any significant way.

Talk of privilege is definitely a very recent phenomenon, and incorporating the existence of system-wide bars to supreme self-actualization in literature about ways to succeed in life is probably counter-intuitive, but I couldn’t help but read the Greene recommendations and think, this is not made for everyone. That it was not made for the folks who have moved through the world with masters that thought policing our self was as important as training us for the world around us. It did not acknowledge its subtle stoic ideals of dignity in perseverance and almost pride in suffering.

It did not touch on the reality that there are people who are already deeply enveloped in the suffering that comes from the fallout of attempts to correct ‘deviant’ behavior and our ability to suffer for an ultimate cause is absent because we are spent before we even enter into the master’s service.

The two people that I talked to about the situation with my job, responded in similar ways. They both were incredibly disappointed that I made the choices I made, and it made me think about what I would need to do next. Because even though I was not necessarily killing myself because of their disappointment, I was dealt with the reality that they were not in my corner at this time, and I could continue on in my search for solutions with a clearer picture of who I could lean on.

The core of their beef was that it didn’t seem like I was ready to deal with the requisite discomfort that comes with the human experience. Don’t talk back, suck it up. If you aren’t already monied, then you can’t move through the world with an ego that can be bruised, especially in the workplace.

Friend 1 said this while on a multi city trip to New York, eating a salad and Friend 2 said this while abroad by the beach sipping wine. I had not bought a bottle of wine in weeks, and I had not traveled in months, it was hard to ignore the place they were talking from.

And they would be the first to tell you that they struggled deeply for many years to come upon that moment we were sharing and that they endured the suffering because they had grand goals that required consistency, perseverance, and strategic thinking.

But one thing that never came up during our conversation was how to proceed when one is trapped in a suffering loop that only leads to more suffering. Anyone that knows my history knows that I have never shied away from hard and honest work, but rather that I have taken on challenges head on, and it has been consistent.

I had been applying Greene’s laws since before I even knew what they were, and I still was being confronted with death like a daily thing. If not my own thoughts, then external factors like hostile neighbors, poverty, sickness. What wasn’t being acknowledged was how the processing of identity expansion experiences affected me. Identity expansion expeirienes being the negotiation between the moving between three different continents before the age of 17, the stress of rejecting cisheteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality, the tension between my artistic disposition and the disposition of a world that sees art as a farce.

I had spent so many years dealing with the clashing of disparate things and seeking a way to exist in the fullness of my many selves, that my ability to actually receive value from growth strategies were dependent on the duration of a healing journey or a rectifying excursion. When I had moved to France to form a new connection with Europe and reclaim my sense of EU kinship, I could only reap the benefits of dogged commitment during the periods when it made sense to be in France.

While I was in school, every difficult moment overcome was a step closer to graduation. And I graduated, walked to receive the cardboard paper in my light blue jeans and my puffy afro. I had been recked with fear because of my lack of proper formality, but I had been so pleased to walk off that stage and know that I had carried myself through the finish line and now I get to live in a world beyond that experience, but with its full suite of lessons, blessings, and scars.

I was now free to continue molting into new selves that would carry the markings of this experience forever. I am pleased to have been given the chance to discover Europe and soon after, it no longer made sense to be stoic in order to stay on the continent. If I wasn’t having an enjoyable experience there, I was, through the randomness of my life, able to seek a better experience elsewhere, so I returned to the US.

Up until recently, my journeys took this shape, attempts to make sense of the theory living in my head and the practical existing in the world. When I told myself that I wanted to exist in African countries that were not Nigeria, I let myself be flown out to Senegal under a shaky arrangement and I was compensated thoroughly for that decision. I had been okay with the possibility of a sub-par or deeply scarring experience if it exposed me to something new, and that lead me around the world and then plopped me in DC.

And as I had explained earlier, the lesson that was DC, also came with the frustration of starvation. I had to step out of the sub-par experience loop, at long last, because I had finally acquired enough lessons and exposure to know that all that I know is enough to live a good life. After asking lifelong questions of what it meant to be African, and European, and American, and queer, and not religious in the way expected in my communities, and so many other things, in DC, it all clicked that I am exactly who I am and that my inability to fit perfectly into the ideal of a certain identity marker was the sign of my lived experience as someone that was never just exposed to one thing and that was perfectly fine. I had the lessons of migration, and colonization, and the flee from conflict, in my name, in my accent, in my approach to the world. But in those same veins, I had the blessing of diaspora – siblings throughout the world, pan-community solidarity, an active spirituality and so much more. There was no longer need to endure another shitty experience to prove that I was resilient and able. I was able and that was not up for debate.

But what was, was my honesty about the cause of my woes. I had been taking the long route to a place I had always wanted to be; right here, writing for an audience beyond me, fully at peace in my skin and fed to abundance in numerous ways. When my friend asked me why I was always in these godawful situations that made me feel like shit, I realized it was because I had been testing different selves to see what worked, to learn of my movement and behavior when I am in different environments, and that because I wasn’t certain of what would soothe the pain in my life, I would approach those situations as a more generic version of myself, the most palatable version, and it would end up in tears because I would realize that suffering in this world and clipping my wings at the same time made me want to jump off a roof.

I am not oblivious to the fact that this piece will change my life in ways I did not imagine, and I cannot pretend that I would have any of the insight I have if I did not go through every single thing I went through. So even as I offer you a guide to save time, realize that I did not actually save the time, I went through it and now it is clear that almost like an explorer that walked through a thick forest by chance, I was tasked with creating a map of my path so that future explorers don’t have to experience the full chaos of the forest.

It is clear to me that this guide is also the sealing of the previous journey I was having, that even I, like new explorers, can use the guide to supplement my muscle memory so that I can discover new things, with even more safety, as I go through the forest again and again, for whatever reason.

For the majority of my life, I have been in search of my self, a self within me that exists the way my younger self might have imagined. A self in me that felt the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most brilliant and blinding. The one that does not do just because, the one that Greene might say, plays the perfect courtier, assumes formlessness, is royal in their own fashion. And now that I have learnt how to bring forth and revel in that self, I am ready to share the tips and tricks with the world.

1.     It all starts with you:

When I was in the church, we were told to be suspicious of what comes naturally to us because it could be inspired by nefarious forces. So, when you tell such a person that they have control of their life and their actions (for the most part), they immediately jump to the exaggeration, but does that mean I can kill people, or steal another man’s wife.

 One thing that has to be made clear is that if our conception of our true self is reaching for violence, then it might be a sign that a circumstance that needs to be changed by radical force might be standing in the way of achieving that self. It is scary to listen to one’s own voice, but humans are not so fallible that they can’t have a sound life without living in constant doubt of their self.

If the self is satiated, the fruits that come from it will represent such an energy. Me heeding to the advice, ‘it starts with you’, looks like writing a guide now. But once, it was a screaming match with my folks. Once it looked like a long and strongly worded email to my boss.

I would be lying if I didn’t mention how choosing one’s self can mean that one is at times a pain in the ass, for one’s self and for others, and that you will just have to deal with the discomfort that comes with that because the discomfort of doing otherwise is just as intense.

And because your subconscious can’t shake the fact that you acted the way you did because of someone else’s opinion or needs, the displeasure that comes with the experience feels like it was taken on because of other people. Other people that would never acknowledge that their expectations of you put you in a position where you were harmed by your own actions.

It is better to take L’s that you know you can own with your full chest so that when the L’s roll in, and they will, most likely, you can know that there is no mastermind to blame; and you also get to learn ways to have your self, your true self, not make those blunders again.

When we move through the world, with its inevitable entropy, as the construction we think other people will prefer, we open ourselves up to learn lessons that are geared for that construction and those lessons, as well detailed as they are, won’t make the path to the self we are seeking easier, it will just mean that you become more adept at responding to the needs of others with your life. And even that adeptness doesn’t mean that if you lost your life in the process of serving others, that you won’t be replaced the day after, or that your memory won’t inevitably fade in the minds of those that even loved you the best.

You save time on the search of self is you internalize the truth that doing is living. Life doesn’t happen outside of our daily actions. If we actually eat an apple every day, then we are a person that eats an apple every day. If the self that is out of reach for an individual is the self that eats an apple every day and the person isn’t trying to eat an apple every day; either by going grocery shopping, setting a schedule, saving up money, eating the actual apple, then that out of reach self will never actualize. Things are actualized in the doing, always. It is the final cement, the difference between imagination and reality and the line between daydreaming and living.

So, learn to listen to you and proceed from there, the self you seek is a more majestic you and you cannot put in your 10,000 hours of practice into being you, if you are hiding away in your safety skin. Embrace the texture and remember that life is ultimately a one-time thing, anything done under the sun is final and you will realize your most ideal self if you simply embrace it.

2.     The self exists in community:

This is the part that took me the longest to learn and hence, has been the most freeing to accept. Many, if not all, cultures expect a type of closeness with one’s true self. Greene’s third law is conceal your intentions. Sometimes the problem is that the self we are seeking is a self that is persecuted in society, either socially, legally, or both.

Greene might say, guard your reputation, so it is preferable to maintain one’s safety skin, than be painted by the disparaging brush of social or legal condemnation.

It is my assumption that if one is on an actual search of self, things are dire enough to require change. In my life, that direness has looked like actual hunger. It has looked like gender dysphoria, like weight fluctuations, the repeated acquisition of unpleasant experiences and so much more.

If I was truly committed to my safety skin over my survival and thriving in this world, then in a way, I might have been deserving of the misery that came with it.

Because we can’t actually do two things at once, we can’t pretend to be someone else and be who we are at the same time. We are what we do and if we are not doing the things, we believe are innate to this iteration of our soul and body in the world, then we are not being who we believe we should be.

In a post-modern world where the socially constructed nature of our reality is glaringly obvious, the self that I believe the seeker reading this aches for is not an abstraction of itself, it needs to be honored as it is, so that it can guide you to the places and the experiences where that self that you were shy to reveal exists amongst those that do not believe the core of your self is lacking. They might hate how the search for self left you with nasty scars and persisting illnesses that make life with you harder than a walk in the park, but at least there would be an understanding that you need help being a better you, not that you are a you that is fundamentally wrong.

Audience member: Okay, you have said, life is in the doing, what if I do my true self behind closed doors, would I not be in honor of the self I am seeking?

Me: The answer is that you would be in honor of the version of yourself that exists, supposedly, as two people, one at home and one in public. You are you in both scenarios, but if the you that you believe exists in the home is that you that torments you for recognition and full acceptance, then that you will not be satiated if it is relegated to private practice and regard.

And this is not to say that we won’t have the bits of ourselves that are just for ourselves and those that are close to us. I am saying that even when we have a solid and secure private self, we also can, and should probably have, a public self that we can tolerate because all the actions and consequences of that public self affect the ability of the private self to maintain its internal peace.

Because humans are social beings and the social in social beings means community, and community means other people, and other people means other eyes on you, the self you are seeking will have to exist in the world in the perspective of other people, starting with your immediate neighbors and moving outward.

Because this is a guide to save time, it is better to be as straight to the point, so I can’t go on and on about the numerous ways this phrase can be interpreted, but going back to what was outlined earlier, ‘doing is living’, if you know that it is inevitable for you to interact with other humans, and you will have to do so for the rest of your life until you die, it would track that if you are your true self in interaction with the other humans you need to interact with, you will be in honor of your true self in most scenarios and moments of your life, hence realizing that goal of finding that long-desired-for self.

3.     The self can and will have inadequacies; and an ability to seek for and receive (accept) help is an essential part of self-discovery:

The image that comes to mind right now is that of a body pulled out of the rubble of a collapsed building. The self we are seeking are selves that were probably battered to create the self that we seek from and hence, even when we find the self that we seek, we will have to recognize that we are dealing with a fragile being. We must realize that authentic to us does not mean universally right. In fact, authentic to us might be stigmatized. Authentic to us might be violent to the world, but that would also be a sign of where tangible aid can be offered to bring forth a you that thrives in the world better.

People will say maturity is knowing how to conceal your emotions, knowing how to manage your expectations and knowing how to be content with what you have; but what they might not tell you that while some people do conceal their emotions very well, they aren’t typically doing so because they are responding in ways that feel innate or inevitable to them.

The goal isn’t to exist without obligation or consequences, but to internalize the fact that you can have genuine - you - responses to things in your life and not have it feel like the tension between a desired action and a performed action.

It is possible to have a job where, if one isn’t outright excited about it, then one is enthusiastic enough about it to persevere through the less-than-ideal bits.

The existence of slavery or forced labor also reveals that it is possible to also work and not even have a say in the matter, so the act of believing that the former is possible is an active process.

People have asked me, what if in the search of self, everyone chooses to be something different; and my response was that that would reveal a flaw in the present system. If the removal of one hindrance to true self expression results in the massive change of the behavior of crowds and crowds of people, then are we sure we weren’t dealing with an oppressive system.

The preachers of self optimization do not often speak of oppression, but they might mention a master, a human construct that does not exist without its ability to oppress to sustain their position as master.

When I started responding to things in the world from a genuine place, it became easier to pinpoint pain points.

There’s a young man on TikTok that one day came online and said, Hi, I’m Oliver and I can’t read. When we resist the fullness of our self, the parts that hunt us and the parts that thrill us; we leave ourselves open to never receiving true solutions that help us exist as the best self we imagined.

Oliver will still have to learn how to read, and that journey will be his completely, but an army of support makes it so that what was originally a laborious process that scared him becomes a process he anticipates eagerly because he gets to interact with humans that honor and value his true self. But they also benefit from their relationship with him. He gets to be a light in their life, they all get to experience a moment of community building and enjoy the world together.

Because the self can’t exist in isolation, even Robert Greene concurs, it can’t heal in isolation. You will need to expose your wounds (of course, this could just mean to a health care provider), but it will need to be regarded by your self and other individuals for it to receive the feedback and informed guesses that can expedite the healing process, and because this is a guide to save time, expedited processes are a win-win.

4.      Your self will disappoint certain people and you will just need to live with it for as long as they decide to be disappointed with who you are:

People will say, your response to a person’s actions says more about you than the other person, but then they would also say, we need to control the way people perceive us and we need to protect our reputation.

So, is the backlash over my nude photo caused by people that can’t get over their lack of courage to post a nude themselves or is it an image tarnishing action that is a genuine societal faux pas?

The answer is not clear, so it is better to not dwell on it. Some people preface their disappointment as a sign of the wrongness of our ways, but we then find that their disappointment revealed the wrongness in their eyes and that because, to all our best interests, they are not God, wrongness in their eyes is just an unfortunate reality, not an irrevocable condemnation.

I guess it goes without saying that even if one acknowledges that one is not a perfect being, that you do not have to believe that your presence on this planet is not a net positive, even if it feels delusional at first.

If you need help, imagine if you were to pass away tragically, and those that were disappointed with you had to negotiate with the fact, even if it is just in the moment they learn of the news, that what they held against you might have been exaggerated or overblown in the grand scheme of things.

Let me clarify that disappointment is not the same thing as grounds for estrangement. If realizing the self that we believe we are causes others to squeeze their face in a frown in response in our direction, we can take it as their genuine response in that moment. Maybe down the line, they might see what you see, and that disappointment will alleviate. But if a person responds with constant intention to reshape your self every time you reveal it, you are operating within territory that permits you to never consider them when making decisions for your best interests.

The self you seek does not exist in the spaces that abhor its presence, and the fact is, the reason you are still searching for self is because the space you exist in does not give room to that self you desire. You will need to claim it and when you claim it, you cause movement. And when you cause movement, you become the perfect receptacle for attention, and when you are in the public eye, you are subject to the responses of other people, whether you like it or not.

But understand that it is impossible to live as one’s true self and not butt heads with the people that knew you as the not so true self. The spiritual babes would say that the old self needs to die, but I just think that when we find ourselves disappointing the people around us in the realization of the self we seek the hardest, we are telling and showing them who exactly they are dealing with when they think or say they are dealing with us, and they are saying they preferred to deal with the other version of us, they are allowed their opinion.

Now it has to be said, sometimes the disappointment we receive from others is justified because our actions have had outsized impacts outside of our own personal lives. And this is stated as a reason the ignorance of the disappointment of others is dangerous or anti-social, and I would say, humans are social beings by default and that the existence of disappointed observers must mean that the human at the center of the disappointment is living in a community.

Chances are that if the actions that spurred the disappointment was a murder, for example, that there would be cultural or legal responses to that action that attempt to properly recognize the impact of the murder on the lives of the victims and those around in the community.

The succumbing to the disappointment of others, does not mean one has made any restitutions; and just because a person doesn’t heed to the disappointment of others, doesn’t mean that they won’t receive the full consequences of their actions. Cause and effect is a constant force. It is better to focus on actionable items than spend too much time trying to win a person over to your way of approaching things.

5.     Logic is a dog whistle:

If logic actually worked the way we expected it to work, it would be logical that the world is perfect. That there is no conflict, no hunger, no pain; just good vibes and we give thanks.

People will ask you for logic when you speak of and manifest your true or truer selves and what they won’t tell you is that the logic of certain actions is understood after the fact. If a gun goes off in a space, people might dive for the ground, instinctively. They aren’t thinking about a logical response to the sound of the gunshot, they are simply responding. And often times, the ability of our body to tap into the right instinctive response is commendable.

As demonstrated with the last point, just because the rebuttal, ‘that isn’t logical’ doesn’t hold too much water doesn’t mean that people won’t be punished for operating in illogical ways, it just means it will happen in the universe and not in the confines of the worries of human beings.

I accepted the lessons of logic well, throughout my life, and then when I eventually became an adult, entering into my late twenties, I learnt how people would use your adherence to logic as a reason to ridicule you and a couple breaths later, they might insist that your ideas are too fantastical.

When I ask why a company can hire an employee they can’t afford to pay, I am told that that’s because its the game, but when I leave after five months because of inadequate pay and a tenuous experience, I am told that I was not acting in logical ways.

There are several overlapping logic systems operating in a space at the same time. The people that see marriage as the coming together of two people that will have children together within the confines of their marriage, without the reproductive gametes and/or organs of people not represented in their marriage, will think that it is illogical for two men to get married and those that see marriage as the legal recognition of committed companionship would not blink an eye when two men get married.

The self you seek deserves to discover if it is truly illogical or if it has just not found the people that understand its logic.

6.     You are you when you are still, denounce aimless ‘productive’ hours:

I grew up with the saying, idleness is the devil’s workshop, but a person in a workshop is not idle. The moral connotations of our actions don’t matter more than our actions themselves.

People will say, eight hours of sleep is fine, a nap here and there won’t completely ruin you, but I do not believe that our ideal selves thrive with such arbitrary and demanding expectations.

In the moments where I felt no need to move in any particular direction, my commitment to standing still saved me from falling into the consequences of actions undertaken for other people’s benefit.

The reality is that the definition of productive varies with the definer. A person might believe that there is no benefit learning to fly a plane and the reason they would think that is because probably they never intend to fly in a plane in their life and they prefer to spend their time farming instead.

You can’t honor the self you are seeking and still run around the world on errands meant to prove that you aren’t lazy or devilish. You might as well accept that narrative so that when you do engage in productive activities, you are doing so in ways where the benefit reaped are obvious.

The way I see it is people don’t need to be forced to do the things they want to do. They might need urging, encouragement; but using the force of guilt tripping to try and cajole people to do certain things does not automatically mean the actions serve their best interest.

Even if a neutral third party agrees that the cajoling has its value, the refusal of counsel could be a call for even more specialized help or declaration of deviancy, both responses are well within the prerogative of the individual in question. 

7.     Take yourself seriously:

A feature of the search of self is an unsureness of if people will respond positively to what we reveal to them. We might describe things as phases, as passing moments, as hobbies and we might be shocked that people around treat these same things without care.

On a rock revolving and rotating in space through no effort of any one of us, everything we do is inconsequential. One of my favorite songs, ‘Nothing Even Matters’ by Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo, explains this perfectly.

Too often people will insist that the self you are seeking is not important and if that belief is internalized, the self you are seeking becomes unimportant.

Our value is not assigned by other humans, but if we don’t lead with our narrative, with our awareness that this is serious business, no one will have a reason see the seriousness on our behalf.

This is a lesson I also learnt recently. I was involved with a project that made me roll my eyes every third business day because I thought they thought too highly of themselves and their impact, but who was I to insist that because I personally didn’t think I should be spending my time working on that project, that it shouldn’t exist. Was it their fault that I did not take the things that I wouldn’t roll my eyes at seriously?

I had to sit down and watch and learn the art of transforming things that could be seen as unserious, into something that people will regard with formality and cautiousness and the trick was simply believing it was serious. Again, it is important to remember than when you get into the arguments with folks that want to mention world hunger and fascism as reasons to not think too highly of yourself or your goals, remind them that you are not mandated to align your idea of serious with another person’s idea of serious and if there are so deeply concerned about world hunger and fascism, they should lead the way in the fight against them.

I, like everyone, hate the proliferation of ideologies that elevate the individual self over the collective self, but we also live in a world where people could legally advertise placebo effect drugs and get away with it if they can convince enough people that they are not being fraudulent. The community is the collection of humans, but it doesn’t mean it is always right. You are allowed, and I might add, expected to internalize the things you find important or take seriously because it means that your response to it would be more well thought out and impactful.

8.     You are unique, but not special:

There are more than 8 billion people on this planet, but no two individual is the same. There are more than 8 billion people on this planet and if one person disappears, another person will be present, with similar stats, to take the spot that the previous person held.

We are the final copies of a unique manifestation of pretty common materials and tropes. We will never be the last human to exist, and the first is a mystery we have not yet been destined to truly understand.

Dwelling on the you’re not special part of this tip does not mean you get to move through the world with no belief in yourself. Instead, it is a reminder, that to other people, your value isn’t inherent. They can choose to see how your manifestation of humanness makes you an amazing individual to co-exist with, but they could also see you as a person performing a function that can be done by anyone or anything with similar competencies to you.

This, I guess, is about not overestimating your value in another person’s life. If you don’t ride and die for yourself and let those around you be the supporting role to your main character, as you are the supporting to their main character, you will frustrate yourself with the question of why haven’t I been picked.

You don’t need to be picked. If you are not special enough to deserve unearned good favor, then you are not special enough to be picked above others to endure unnecessary suffering.

To save time on the search for self, we accept the fact that even when we acknowledge that we are one of many, we never let that delude us that the specificity of our reality has no meaning. Let people replace you in the places where your absence doesn’t destroy the self you prioritize and be clear on how you differ from the rest of the world in the spaces that you want to hold closely to you.

9.     Speculation or obsession over how another person came upon their true self has no added value:

Let’s keep it brief, immigrants [comparing your journey to other people’s journey] is jarring.

Like all the points in this guide, a book could probably be written about this point alone, but the tea is simply, we don’t know anyone’s full story but our own.

I was reading the memoir of a writer I admire and they talked about contemplating suicide; I concurred that I had once felt the same thing. Then they talked about how they had a friend they could call for estate planning services and I realized that even in the shared experience of suicidality, our ability to prepare was different. The most I knew about estate planning was that I could pick up will templates from Office Depot.

Because we are now so aware of how systemic injustices persist over time, we can stand at a podium and say boldly that certain parts of a person’s history made their ability to achieve what they’ve achieved easier.

Their mom was a politician, their dad an actor. They went to private school in Wales, and they have an Ivy League undergraduate education. We don’t know if they had an uncle they lived with that used to beat them like a common criminal. We don’t know if they are in debt. We only know what has been revealed and if an obsession over the life of others isn’t a core component of your true self (maybe you are a journalist or biographer), then you have no business spending too much time speculating about how other people received certain things that you might be seeking.

This does not mean that we can’t recognize systemic issues, it just means that you are called to be honest with your intentions. If you are a civil rights attorney that wants to challenge the state to give more to the citizenry, then the rumination on the system-wide unfairness of things has value; but if you are lamenting the unfairness as a way to encourage other people to help you rid yourself of that feeling of unfairness, then you might wait forever.

When I moved to America, I realized how people would use the word bodies as a stylish way of saying human. Black bodies, queer bodies, disfigured bodies.

The language of body is great for acknowledging how flesh seems to corrupt what we believe to be our most perfect self, the language of body can make us forget that each body on this planet is the product of a history that flows behind them to the beginning of time.

The way I think about it is through faces. When I was sat squarely in the uncertainty about who I was on this earth, my face intrigued me because it reminded me of my father and my siblings, but as similar as our features were, we could not be more different.

Let’s be real for a minute, I felt unsure about appearing femme while bearing a face that carried so many memories of macho masculinity. I would whisper to myself, I share this face and that this is basically the way biology works. All the faces I have seen in my life and all the faces I will still see from this moment on, will be faces that existed, with slight modifications, for years and years before I saw the face I saw.

I look at my friends, now past the child, teenage and early twenties period, and I see their parents in them more clearly. And of course, it goes without saying that there are individuals that are adopted that don’t have that luxury of say, ‘I look like my parents’, or even some donor conceived people. This isn’t a point about familial resemblance, it is a point about the histories we carry in our body before we even start to go into the spiels of our upbringing, our cities and countries of origin and so much more. If you are reading this and saying, I do not look like my parents, that in itself is a history that your body is carrying.

The point is that despite there being 8 billion people on this planet, and even though these people can be reduced to bodies, it is not in our best interest to pretend that we can know, without them telling us, what happened behind the scenes to make their life the way it was. And even if they tell us, we can never know what they are leaving out or overexaggerating. If you aren’t a judge in the court of law, catching people in a lie is not a goal that deserves too much of your attention.

You need to move through the world aware that it is not a meritocracy and have peace with that. And if accepting that fact is hard, then it could be a sign that you have found a cause that your spirit is keen on working on.

Even as I write this guide, I can be honest and say that I’m a million percent sure that this is an essential component of my journey in life; but I could never insist that it is yours. This is also part of avoiding speculation. It is easy to believe that just because a certain action is perfectly appropriate for us that it must be the same with others, and as sweet of a thought that is, all we can do is give suggestions, tell our stories and let it be. Things will shape up as they are supposed to.

10.  Fear is not your friend, and neither is karma:

My first tattoo was a Nina Simone quote, freedom is no fear. Now, several years down the line, I would say freedom is a frame of mind that does not respond well to fear, but that fear itself is the product of our successful socialization into a rugged world. Fear reminds us of the potential dangers that lay ahead of us.

Fear isn’t a friend. It doesn’t want to see you advance, it wants to see you safe. And if safety is your main concern, you might not leave the 10 mile radius of the life you were introduced to (this isn’t a drag or a compliment, it is what it is).

Now, you will encounter the moments where you will need to answer to yourself or others of whether it was fearlessness or foolishness. I would probably advise that you plead the fifth.

The blessing to be able to look at past events and wonder if it was right or wrong is a blessing gifted to us by doing. And once it has been done, all the lessons that can be pulled from it can only be used for future scenarios.

Ignoring fear my lead you to do things where you become the precedent, but that can have either negative or positive consequences on your life and the fact that you are fearless will still not free you from those consequences, so you have to be certain that you are ready to receive what actually occurs, not what you imagined would occur.

11.  You will need to advocate for yourself:

Once in a while, someone will say, no one is coming to save you and it would introduce a pessimistic air to the environment. Is it possible to be helped by others? Definitely and an earlier point explicitly states that we should be okay with seeking and receiving help.

But there is no human that will be saved like a damsel in distress. If we receive help in this world, chances are it will come through someone with concealed or revealed self-interest.

Even in the stories where damsels are saved by prince charmings, we never know what happens down the line. We learn of the rescue mission, the first few days after its completion and that’s it. What happens a month down the line, a year?

I have often made the exhaustion with fighting for myself known, but who will fight for me in my absence? If I say that to make sure no human goes hungry is a goal I have for myself, I must also be able to say that that means that I have a commitment to make sure I do not go hungry because I am a human too.

If I say my goal is for black people to experience joy that sustains and grows even in the face of the atrocities of race-based disenfranchisement, I need to seek and learn to come upon that joy in myself before I can really make due on the promise to be of service to other black folk.

It is easy to use helping other people as a distraction from our own problems, but the ability to help anyone effectively is predicated on our access to information and resources. When we solve problems in our life, we are provided with information and resources that can be used to help others, and possibly even the added bonus of a greater bandwidth because a stressor has been dealt with in our life.

I spent so much of my early professional life working on nonprofit and social causes. I can say that great work is done at times in these institutions, but I can also say that these institutions are helping themselves exist by helping other people. The simple truth is if philanthropy was as effective as we expect it to be, there would be no need for philanthropy to begin with.

You are the only one that has the answers, even if that answer includes stumbling upon the right helper. It needs to be clear that even in the moments where we are eating from the palm of another human, saying that we have found a hero, we are still choosing to eat. We could have refused it. Action taken by us is ours to claim and we will always have a hand in our perseverance in this world. So claim it whole heartedly, you are your first and most relentless advocate. The self that you seek needs you to fight for it.

12.  You have to keep on going:

I’ve written about death before, check out my debut collection of stories and essays to read more about it, and one thing that I am glad my conscious transcribed during my writing process was this idea - if suicide means that nothing in this world is reason enough not to continue living on in it; then nothing in this world is reason enough to be driven from it.

Death at one’s hand is an incredibly complex subject, and I will suggest that professional help is sought when it comes to this issue. I will also add that when faced with the moment where one (death) or the other (not death) become the only two options, and death is truly clutching at your chest; risking death for life is almost your best option. Because if you are truly at that fatal crossroads, then choosing to live is also a risk and we are driven to death because we believe that living on would possibly be the death of us. So risk that death in life because it will still come, regardless and then the goal of death would have been achieved, with or without our input.

After the conversation referenced at the beginning of this piece, I felt flayed alive. To be read so accurately, I was shocked. I did not like not being blameless. I did not like conflict with friends, and I wanted to roll up and die. This was the end, this was it, I am over. And I went to sleep, woke up and chose myself again.

Even when I am supposedly reckless, I am still deserving of a world that doesn’t feel like a perpetual field of thorns. I had to learn how to be dealt very precise blows and still remind myself that even though the blow could be reason for me to say I am a lost cause, it could also be reason to choose life more than ever. I’m already wounded and injured, I don’t need to die to be hurt. I can continue on in this journey, hopefully seeking and finding ways to prevent the repetition of moments where my mortality felt too real and present.

I named this point, you have to keep on going, and the fact is, you technically don’t. The stories we hear of people that pass by their own hands confirm this. You don’t have to do anything; but if you don’t continue on, the possibility of encountering that self you are seeking will diminish.

If you are saying that the search for self is not worth living, that it is better to leave than continue on in the world as a flaw, keep in mind that you would not have that concept of you as a flaw if you didn’t have other people’s voices in your head. Even when our body is producing cancer cells or attacking its own cells, it believes it is functioning as it should.

Keep in mind that the worry of being seen as flawed doesn’t end when death occurs, it just means we aren’t there to witness it. That of course isn’t a bad outcome, but witnessing it is never as bad as we make it. And at least with life there are takesies-backsies. If doing is the final cement; death is the world obliterating nuclear bomb, be careful with it.

If you enjoyed this piece, please check out my debut novel, “Shedding the Archive, For New Beginnings”. You can learn more about me at linkr.ee/vonwuaduegbo. You can find me at[@]vonwuaduegbo on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and other platforms. Cashapp - $vonwua, PayPal - @vasilisonwuaduegbo, Venmo - @Vasilis-Onwuaduegbo; support your local artist.

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