If you're new here, welcome. You've arrived just in time to read all three chapters of The Fog, a fiction series following Nimisola Clark.

Nimi is 26, talented, and quietly unravelling. She has a job that costs her more than it pays, an art practice she is slowly losing grip on, and a mind that has started working against her in ways she cannot yet name.

The Fog is a fiction series about what it looks like when everything is fine on paper and nothing quite is. New here? Start with Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

And if you've been here from the start: hello again, sorry to have kept you waiting.

Let's get back to Nimi.

The “Ona Foundation Restructuring Week” started like any other week, except that Marie kept calling Nimi in for impromptu meetings that all seemed to blur into one another. By Wednesday, Nimi had started recording them on her phone, holding it casually on her lap and hoping Marie wouldn’t notice. It was the only way she could keep up.

The tension in the office had been building for weeks before that. Marie’s old school friend had recently been appointed Managing Partner, West Africa at one of the Big Four consulting firms, and Marie had put together a proposal — with Nimi’s help, of course — to bring the firm in for the restructuring, but the new board had declined and instead hired a smaller consulting firm that had only recently opened its Nigerian office in Abuja. Their lead consultant was reportedly someone outside Marie’s social circle who had recently moved to Nigeria. This, combined with increasing tensions between the board and Marie regarding her discretionary budget, made the atmosphere in the office thick with a particular kind of unease that made everyone move a little more carefully.

For Nimi, this translated immediately and practically into the loss of her remote working days until the restructuring was fully in effect. Her 4:30am wake-up, previously sacred time carved out for her art account @nimisartworld, was now spent catching up on last-minute document changes that Marie sent at odd hours. The commissions she had been chipping away at sat untouched. One of them, a birthday art print for an early supporter who had been following her since her first year on Instagram, had been sitting in her drafts folder for two weeks. She had promised it would be ready but by the looks of things and where she was at mentally, Nimi knew it was not going to be ready in time for the birthday.

She sent the cancellation message on Tuesday evening and spent longer than she should have staring at the reply: “Oh okay. No worries.” Three words that managed to say quite a lot. She checked her follower list and realised she had been unfollowed. She was crushed. It was the first time she had ever had to cancel an order. She had kept her commission slots deliberately limited to avoid exactly this kind of disappointment, but her responsibilities at Ona were taking up so much space in her life that she didn’t know what else to do.

Part of the new responsibilities Marie had assigned her under the restructuring was coordinating the organisation-wide health evaluation, a mandatory exercise introduced as part of the new board’s governance requirements. Every staff member was required to complete both a physical and psychological assessment, and Nimi was in charge of the legwork: collating the forms, chasing the stragglers, liaising with the contracted clinic and filing everything with HR by the end of the week. Nothing about chasing people to fill out cumbersome paperwork was remotely enjoyable, and she dreaded the eye rolls that came with every follow-up.

She completed her own assessment forms on a Thursday afternoon, filling them out quickly between two other tasks and not paying particular attention to the psychological questionnaire beyond what was required to submit it. She had a stack of other people’s incomplete forms to chase. She filed hers and moved on.

What she did not follow up on, because there was simply too much happening, was the email that arrived four days later from the clinic’s psychologist. It was courteous and brief, noting that her assessment results had been reviewed and that the lead psychiatrist would like to schedule an optional follow-up consultation at her earliest convenience. Nimi read it, swallowed the invisible lump she felt lodged in her throat and deleted the email. The last thing she needed was anything that would give Marie more reasons to chastise her under the guise of concern.

Share HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM

The collation itself did not go smoothly. Two senior staff members missed the submission deadline despite three reminders. The clinic sent the wrong template for one section. Nimi followed up, resent the correct forms, followed up again and still submitted the collated file to HR two days late. This was the other thing on Marie’s desk the morning she called Nimi into her office.

The RFP (“Request for Proposal”) folder for an important government-funded art programme was open beside it. Marie had collected it that morning and had been out of the office for most of the day. Nimi had spent those hours finalising the airport logistics for the consultant’s arrival and trying not to watch the clock. Her phone buzzed at 3:47pm.

My office. Now.

She saved the draft she was working on, picked up her notebook and her phone and walked down the corridor.

Marie’s office always felt slightly cooler than the rest of the building. Marie herself was sitting at her desk with an almost expressionless face when Nimi came in, holding her notebook to her chest like a shield.

“Neemay, have a seat please, this won’t take long.” She paused. “I understand that the health assessment that they insisted on having for you people was meant to be done and dusted by Thursday. But you apparently completely forgot.”

“Thurs — no, today —” Nimi stumbled over her words. “We — I mean, yes, today is Tuesday, uhm, Marie.”

She couldn’t seem to place the days in order and that wasn’t even her biggest problem right now. Completely forgot? All she had thought about for the past two weeks was this restructuring. She had taken on her own tasks and Marie’s board deliverables simultaneously, and now she was being told she had completely forgotten, by the same person who referred to those deliverables as something they insisted on, and to the staff affected as you people.

“I’m a bit confused, Neemay, because you waffle on about these fancy ideas and now I give you a rare opportunity to work on them, to show how competent you are, and yet you always fall short.”

Nimi took a quick sharp breath and looked away. “I really tried to get everyone to submit on time. I just — I’m sorry.” Then a thought surfaced. “But I did send everything to Saint Dymphna Medical. I didn’t forget.”

“Two days later,” Marie said flatly. She exhaled loudly. “Ughhh, really. You know this special projects role isn’t just about waving a fancy title around. You actually have to work.”

Nimi wasn’t under any impression that the title was fancy. She said nothing.

“If you actually paid attention to your job, there wouldn’t be any time to go nosing around to the board about how I speak to you. Maybe if you did these things well the first time, you would —”

“Marie.” Nimi heard her own voice before she had decided to use it. “I don’t know what you mean about the board. I haven’t spoken to anyone on the board before.”

She had seen the board members on two occasions, both times as they filed into the conference room for meetings with Marie present. She had barely been able to muster the courage to contribute whenever she had a one-on-one with Marie. The idea that she had been going to the board with anything was almost funny.

“Oh,” Marie said, her demeanour shifting slightly. “Well, I — okay, that’s fine.” A brief pause. “It’s such a shame though. One does so much to try to get things running properly and suddenly you’re the villain. These people don’t want to work. No wonder the country is in the state it’s in. We can’t find good workers anywhere.”

Nimi kept quiet. She knew her colleagues put in their best and often went well beyond what was expected of them in service of Ona Foundation’s mission. There had long been whispers among the staff about senior management being paid in foreign currency while everyone else struggled to keep pace with the country’s rising costs, though nobody dared to confirm it openly. She kept quiet about that too.

Marie kept talking. Nimi’s mind began to drift, trying to mentally arrange everything into some kind of order, like pushing pieces around a poorly drawn map. The birthday commission. The guilt of the cancellation. Mr. Ranti and Babs who had asked her to fill their assessment forms for them and to make sure they were certified “healthy and not mad, in Jesus name.” The consultant. When was the consultant arriving? What was today’s date? Wait — she was forgetting something. What was she supposed to have done this morning?

From what she could absentmindedly piece together, Marie’s concern was less about the delay itself and more about what it signalled: that Nimi needed to take greater ownership in her new role, that the board expected a level of operational rigour that reflected well on the whole team. Nimi nodded and took notes and did not mention the three reminders she had sent, or the clinic’s error with the template, because she had learned by now which details Marie absorbed and which ones she didn’t. At the end of the meeting she thanked Marie for the feedback and left.

Walking back to her desk, Nimi turned over the RFP feedback in her mind. Some of it had been fair. There was a document that should have been a more recent version and a section that needed more specifics. But the feedback also felt like a renegotiation. Tolani was Marie’s maternal cousin, a fresh graduate on her NYSC posting, stepping into the assistant role Nimi had vacated. She had started at Ona a while ago with a lot of energy and questions. She CC’d Marie on emails where it wasn’t necessary, asked Nimi things that were more efficiently answered by reading the onboarding document Nimi had prepared, and had the particular quality of someone who was performing helpfulness rather than enacting it. Marie had insisted that Nimi assign her duties on the Art project which she did. From Nimi’s perspective, it wasn’t her fault that Tolani did not deliver. But Nimi knew better than to imply that anyone related to Marie was less than perfect. She had it all on recording anyway. By the time the conversation wound down and Marie was in a noticeably lighter mood, Nimi had summoned enough nerve to ask for a transport and lunch stipend and formal ownership of the art programme going forward. Marie agreed to both.

In the middle of all of this, the fog had started showing up more frequently and in smaller, more insidious ways. Not the long heavy episodes she recognised from university but brief flickers: moments where she would open a tab and immediately forget why, read the same email three times and retain nothing, or find herself standing in the kitchen at work with the kettle already boiled and no memory of having walked there. She lost her work lanyard twice in one week. She arrived at a staff meeting, realised she had left her notebook at her desk, went back for it and returned to find the meeting had moved rooms. Small things. It always started with the small things.

Meanwhile, onboarding the new consultant had become formally her responsibility. The consultancy brief named someone called Bola, and their email correspondence had been polite, efficient and entirely undemanding in a way Nimi had found quietly refreshing given everything else. She had not had the time to look the person up on LinkedIn. The emails had given her a sufficient enough picture: patient, courteous, organised. She had set three alarms for the airport pickup.

Still, she almost missed it.

She had been sitting at her desk at 4pm on a Friday, staring at a budget spreadsheet she had been meaning to update for two hours, when it arrived with a slow, cold clarity: Bola’s flight landed at 5:15pm and the drive from the office to the airport was at minimum forty-five minutes on a good day. A Friday at 4pm in Lagos was not a good day. She grabbed her bag, told Tolani she was heading out and walked very quickly to the car park.

She made it with minutes to spare and stationed herself at the arrivals exit, slightly out of breath, holding a printed card that read ONA FOUNDATION and reminding herself to look like someone who had not just sprinted across a car park.

The arrivals hall was its usual theatre of reunion: drivers holding phones aloft, families craning over barriers, the low hum of trolley wheels on tiled floors. Nimi scanned the faces filtering through the exit, running through her mental image of who she was looking for. She hurriedly pulled out her phone, switching between her work email and LinkedIn for any picture of the person she was meant to be picking up.

What came through the doors instead was an attractive, well-dressed man making his way through the sea of travellers, walking in long, confident strides. Bola was tall, somewhere in his mid-thirties, with the unhurried ease of someone who had just slept through a flight and was in no rush to prove anything to anyone. He spotted the card, smiled and walked over with his hand extended.

“Nimisola? I’m Bola.”

She shook his hand. “Welcome to Lagos.”

She would think about her assumption later and find it faintly embarrassing, which was how she tended to process most things.

Nimi had presumed that she was picking up a woman.

For most gallery and museum enthusiasts, there’s a version of an artist we never get to meet. This is the artist before the acclaim, before the waiting lists, before the art world decides they matter. The Elementals Art Salon, which took place on Friday and Saturday, 12-13th June, was a deliberate attempt to close that gap.

Curated by Paul Ayihawu and Olamide Faloore, Elementals brought together a group of emerging contemporary artists from Lagos’ art scene in a setting that felt genuinely relaxed and human. The idea at the heart of it was simple: what if you could meet an artist early? Not after the distance has set in, but right at the beginning, while things are still forming.

For my vantage point on Saturday, what that looked like in practice was a room full of small-format original works and limited edition prints at prices that actually made sense for younger and first-time collectors. To be able to stand in front of a piece, speak to the artist about it, and walk away with it under your arm. Conversations flowed, people stayed longer than they had planned to, and the art felt like it was for everyone in the room. It was exactly the kind of space that inspired me to chat with two women artists that showed at the exhibition: Rita Odum and Raheemat Shittu.

In Conversation: Rita Odum (@rita.designs_)

Designer, artist, illustrator, and, in her own words, "your favourite art girlie", Rita Odum came to this exhibition with a deeply personal series. The works emerged from a period of uncertainty, not knowing where she was going or why she was where she was.

What inspired this series?

“It was a period in my life when I was just floating, when you don’t know your direction and you don’t know what the future holds. I turned to art to express those feelings. For example, in the first illustration, she’s smiling, but she’s still extremely sad. After a period of introspection, I learned that I need to be comfortable with being lost if I want to move forward. This feeling that I have is okay. I don’t have to have it all figured out by a particular age. The moment I became comfortable with being patient with myself and properly regulating, things started to fall into place. It was also when Paul reached out and said, ‘Yo, I have space for you,’ that I finally sat down with my feelings.”

By the time we spoke, one of Rita’s two works had already sold. When asked what she’d want the buyer to notice:

What should the buyer see that others might miss?

“I hope the buyer recognises that she’s at peace and she’s happy with where she is. She hasn’t fully realised her full potential, but she’s still grateful for what she has. She’s becoming. You can see the transition from the great crash-out (second artwork) to when she becomes calm. She still has this red rose that represents the anxiety, the uncertainty, she still has it with her. She loves that person she used to be. She cannot hate that person. And she’s bringing that person with her, up into her future.”

In Conversation: Raheemat Shittu (@artbyrahh)

Raheemat Shittu arrived at Elementals with something quietly radical: choosing to look back. The works she exhibited are pieces from earlier chapters of her journey as an artist (between 2021 and 2022) and they’ve been brought forward into this moment.

What inspired the series you chose for this exhibition?

“When I started working as an artist, I never really got a chance to show these paintings. I wanted something that paid homage to the journeys I’ve been on. I felt like the stage I’m in right now is still about looking back to look forward.”

Her work rewards careful attention, and she’s very aware of that.

What do you want attendees to notice?

“When I started painting, I was very particular about attention to detail. If you zoom in to the waves, the sunrise, even the lines, I wanted them to be very specific. That is something that shaped my journey as an artist. I was particular about everything, and I carry that through the entire process. I think when people look at my work, they should look at the hours and love and care and attention, everything!”

Elementals is a reminder that access is itself a curatorial act. The salon didn’t just show art: it lowered the drawbridge.

P.S. THE FOG (my fiction story series) is still going strong and you can read chapter 1 and 2 (Chapter 3 drops soon!).

Also in looking ahead, Raheemat has been selected as one of the artists participating in an upcoming exhibition at Didi Museum Lagos, in collaboration with Book Nook and curated by the store’s founder, Uzo Orimalade.

Details and the event poster below:

All works and events highlighted reflect HPC’s ongoing commitment to spotlighting emerging voices in contemporary Nigerian art and culture.

She liked the job. It was stable, and stability in a sector notorious for poor pay and high turnover, in an economy that made employment feel like a privilege, was not nothing. She knew this and reminded herself of it often.

The person who had made it possible was Mrs. Amadi, her mother’s oldest friend, who had been catering the private functions of Lagos’ upper crust for nearly two decades. One of her longest-standing clients was Marie Jean, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Ona Foundation, who came from the kind of family that required very little introduction. Mrs Amadi had recommended her to Marie three years ago at the foundation’s summer brunch which she catered. She had also been catering Marie’s family functions now for almost two decades and was held in high regard by her family. Marie’s mother was a Nigerian socialite from a prominent royal family, known citywide for her annual Christmas parties and charity galas, which Mrs. Amadi’s company, Delightful Bites, catered every year without fail. Marie’s father, a French national, had spent years in Nigeria as a senior diplomat before pivoting to build a shipping company across West Africa. There were rumours of mining operations in the North, though nothing had ever been confirmed, and he was by all accounts a recluse who nobody pressed.

When Marie mentioned that she was looking for an assistant to work with her at the foundation, Mrs Amadi took that opportunity to get her best friend’s daughter employed. That was three years ago.

In the time since, Nimi had come to understand with increasing clarity what it actually meant to work in close proximity to the one percent. Marie’s role at the foundation meant she operated in a world of influence built through institutional access, alumni connections, and an inherited social capital. During major projects and events, these circles extended briefly and conditionally to Nimi. She attended the meetings, sat in the rooms, and carried the folders. She understood she was adjacent to something, not inside it.

As colleagues, they both got along half of the time, the other half was Nimi reminding herself about the job market and how the assistant role enabled her to cover living expenses while saving the occasional income from her art side-gig.

At the time Nimi accepted the assistant job offer she had been making a stipend from an art account she opened on instagram during the pandemic as a way to occupy her time and share her drawings. The art account had started almost by accident. Her friends from the university art club had all graduated, most of them had left the country and for the few left, it was no longer easy to meet up for drawing sessions particularly during the lockdown. With her friends scattered across the world and meeting up with the few who remained proving difficult during that period, Nimi had turned to Instagram partly out of boredom and partly out of a need for something to belong to. She began posting her sketches and slowly, strangers started paying attention. Then they started making requests such as greeting cards, small commissions, prints and these requests led to a nice income stream for her even after the pandemic. The validation she got from it, that someone she had never met would pay for something she made, was a quiet and reliable source of confidence especially on the days when working under Marie wore her down.

Marie Jean was by most outward measures, quite pleasant. At 5’8” with hazel eyes, fair complexion and a slender body, she often drew the attention of any room when she walked in. She was friendly enough on first meeting as most people in her circle were, but Nimi had come to recognise a particular quality in that friendliness over time. It was a smile that never quite reached the eyes, a glance that moved across a person quickly and assessingly as though calculating in a single sweep exactly where they placed in the room’s social order and whether that placement warranted further investment.

Nimi had first encountered this during her job interview. Seated in Marie’s tastefully furnished office, she had answered questions about her coursework and career interests and then just before the meeting closed, Marie asked how soon she could start, adding almost as an aside that if Nimi already had “summer travel plans” she was happy to accommodate a later start date in the contract just incase the plane tickets and hotel bookings were already booked. Nimi, not yet fluent in what was being communicated, replied cheerfully that she was free to start immediately and had a family road trip to Akure over Christmas. Marie replied stiffly “Oh… right,” smiled the smile, glanced briefly at Nimi’s outfit and ended the interview with instructions to resume the following Monday.

It had taken Nimi a while to understand what had happened in that room and even longer to stop feeling mildly foolish about it.

Three years on, they had settled into a functional rhythm. Nimi scheduled Marie’s calendar every Friday, screened her calls and transferred only those from the French embassy, her parents or anyone flagged as VIP, and ensured lunch from Bakendales arrived without incident. It was not glamorous work but it was manageable, and manageable was what Nimi had quietly built her life around.

Despite the routine they had established, two new things had changed in the last few months which meant that the perfect routine was getting harder to maintain and Nimi’s perfect balance between her art business (which she woke up as early as 4:30 on weekdays to work on) and the demands of her job at Ona foundation had begun to falter.

The first was the appointment of a new board of directors. The governor’s wife had been added following a memorandum between Ona Foundation and the state government, a partnership that brought new funding and with it a different kind of scrutiny. This change put everyone in the organisation on high alert and Marie, in response, had begun to lean harder on Nimi. Requests came faster and expectations that were not part of her role were now being added. The buffer Nimi had carefully constructed, early mornings reserved for her art and workdays kept within their limits, was being quietly eroded and she could feel it giving way at the edges.

This is the second chapter in The Fog, a fiction series. If you’re just joining, you can catch up on the first chapter here:

But there is something I have wanted to do for a long time, and I have finally decided to stop waiting until I feel ready enough to do it.

The Fog is my first public work of fiction, and I am sharing it here, with you, as it develops. It follows Nimisola(“Nimi”) a young Nigerian woman whose life, on the surface, is beginning to look exactly like what she worked for. Underneath that surface is a more complicated story and through a series of posts, I will let her tell it.

Writing fiction is newer territory for me and I will not pretend otherwise. But HPC has always been a space where I think out loud, take up space, and try things. This feels like another way of asking the questions I care about, just through a different door and I hope you’ll come along for it.

New chapters will be posted here as the story unfolds, I hope you stick around.

Prologue/Chapter 1

“Hi Nimisola, it’s Sewa from Einheit-Institut, just checking in to see how far you’ve gotten with the workshop framework. I’ll need it to approve the first round of funding, you know how we are about documentation here. Anyway, hope you’re settling in nicely. By the way, Theo loooved your ideas; you made quite an impression! Let me know when the framework’s in my inbox. Bye.”

Nimisola replayed the voice message on her phone again, hoping it would jolt her into action and pull her out of the fog she was in. It didn’t. Then she remembered: she had a virtual appointment with Dr. Okenwa. She scrambled to open the Zoom link on her laptop. She was already nine minutes late. What if he was annoyed? What if he said something about it? She couldn’t even make an appointment on time. When would she ever get th —

“Hello, Miss Clark. How are you doing today?”

The older man on her screen had interrupted her thoughts before she could finish them. “I’m…..yes, thank you. So sorry for the delay.”

“I’m glad you could make it. I understand from your email that you’re currently in Ouidah for a conference, is that correct?”

“A retreat, actually. I’m facilitating a session.”

“That’s wonderful! Well done.”

“…Yes.”

Nimisola wished she could stop fidgeting with her sweaty palms, but doctors made her nervous. “You said this would only take thirty minutes?”

“That’s right! It’s just a quick chat really. I was curious about some of your responses in the questionnaire. It took courage to be that open. Can you tell me when you first noticed this? As far back as you can remember.”

Silence.

“Miss Nimisola?”

“Nimi is fine.”

“Nimi.” He softened his tone slightly.

“Anything you share here is completely confidential and won’t be passed to Ona. Please be rest assured that we’re an independent advocacy and support organisation.”

She gave a quick, tight smile at her screen, pursing her lips, her eyes moving around the hotel room. She was trying to mask her nervousness, and she knew she wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it. She found herself wondering how she had gotten here. Not the beautifully decorated hotel room that suddenly felt steamy and uncomfortable, but here: inside this fog of confusion, carrying equal parts determination and paralysis. It was almost like a video glitching, unable to advance to the next frame despite knowing exactly what came next.

It was, she realised, a very familiar feeling.

Nimi’s earliest memories of the fog were from university.

As a sociology undergraduate, she had often struggled to keep up with class notes and had a tendency to drift mid-lecture. While secondary school had provided enough external structure to keep her mostly afloat, her progression into university meant a removal of rigid routines, school bells and teachers who noticed subtle changes. Without any scaffolding in form of support from others, the fog thickened and she found herself waking up to missed classes, reading through photocopied notes borrowed from friends, or rushing to get ready for a lecture that had already been going for thirty minutes. She learnt to develop some workarounds: slipping into class through a side door, getting friends to sign attendance registers on her behalf, watching recorded videos of missed classes. And most of the time, they worked. Sometimes however, they didn’t. A lecturer would announce an impromptu test on a day she had arrived late. A seminar group she was part of would be asked to present on a topic, and she would have no slides, no notes, nothing prepared, just herself standing in front of the class and speaking into the air.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t engaged with the material: she could spend hours on YouTube or down a Wikipedia rabbit hole on a topic, genuinely absorbed. But organising those thoughts into a structured and submittable document was a different kind of task entirely. One that either arrived in a last-minute rush or not at all.

There was however something that she enjoyed doing when the pressure was too much, the fog so intense in her mind that she could barely eat or take a shower:
Nimi loved to draw.

She had fallen into drawing illustrations by accident. It was her first year, and she had been on her way to a Friday afternoon lecture when a text from her friend stopped her: don’t sneak in, someone just got caught and they’re being sent to the dean. She was already inside the building — a newly constructed block shared by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Arts — so she did the next logical thing and made her way to the art library, reasoning that she was unlikely to run into any of her own lecturers there. It was in the general reading section that she stumbled on a small group gathering around two art students who had decided to run a paid illustration class and were offering the first session for free.

What began out of mild curiosity became six weekends(they eventually moved the classes to Sundays) filled with something she hadn’t expected: clarity. Two hours, once a week, of focus and clear skies.

After that, whenever anxiety crept in during sociology lectures, Nimi would take out her pencil and the sketchbook she’d bought specifically for this purpose, and draw. Fogs. Clouds. Spider webs. Tangled cables. Whatever shape the feeling took that day, she put it on the page. And as she drew, there were moments where she would feel the fog lifted and absorbed into the pages of her drawing book. It felt so magical that Nimi wouldn’t even know when class ended until she heard chairs scraping and voices rising around her.

But the lightness never held and the fog always found its way back to her.

As the years passed, what had once arrived occasionally, began to occur cyclically and with more frequency. It stopped feeling like a response to something and started to feel like a constant weather condition she lived inside of.

Share HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM

Bigger.

Bigger means something to me.

In July 2023, I was living in the UK, having moved from the South to the Midlands for a fresh start in a city where I knew no one, but which was cheaper than London. I was applying for jobs, optimistic in the quiet, determined way you are when you have no real alternative.

I felt particularly confident about one application and was invited to interview shortly after. But as I left the building, a sinking feeling settled over me. Something the interviewer said (which might have read as a compliment to someone unfamiliar with the conversational undertones of British professional culture) made it clear that I had not managed the delicate, exhausting performance of making myself small enough while still demonstrating just enough competence to be considered safe.

The more I ruminated on it, the more a certainty of rejection washed over me in the summer heat as I stood at the bus stand trying to fight off the tears welled up in my eyes before the next bus arrived. It was in this frame of mind that I reached for my weekly playlist which was a rotation of songs I curated every week for commutes and walks around the city. Black Is King had been featuring prominently that season.

As the bus arrived, Beyoncé’s voice came through my earphones:

“If you feel insignificant / you better think again / Better wake up because / You’re part of something way bigger…”

By the time she reached “Life is your birthright”, something had shifted. I was okay.

I understood, with a clarity that only comes when you stop fighting a feeling, that the place I had just interviewed at was probably not right for me. The rejection, when it came, would not be a verdict on my worth. It would be a redirection.

The rejection was, in fact, freedom.

Two Roads, One Homecoming

What strikes me now, returning to both works with more matured and empathetic eyes, is how differently each one offered me something I needed and they both formed a complete portrait of what it means to come home to yourself.

Black Is King gave me kinship. Watching it again as a migrant in Britain three years after its release, far from the landscape and the people that made me, it offered what I can only describe as communal power: a reminder that identity is not something you lose when you cross a border. It is something you carry, and more importantly for me at that time, something that carries you. Its Afrofuturist visual language insists on the dignity and mythic grandeur of Africa and the African diaspora at a scale that feels almost corrective: a deliberate refusal of the smallness the world so often assigns us.

Lemonade, released in 2016, offered something different and more interior. On the tenth anniversary of its release (April 23), I was Beyoncé’s exact age when she made it and that fact lands differently than it might have a few years ago. When I first encountered the album, I did not fully understand the extent to which she was opening a window onto Black female interiority, or how much of what I saw there I would later be able to name in myself. Now, revisiting it, I see it for what it is: a blueprint for personal transformation, and a map of the long road back to yourself.

As a curator, programming them together in a double screening forms a kind of diptych: the interior and the exterior, the wound and the inheritance, the self and the lineage. Lemonade asks who broke me and how do I heal? Black Is King asks who made me and what am I carrying forward?

Together, they suggest that both questions are part of the same conversation and that we have always been the ones holding the space for it.

That is what we are gathering to do tomorrow May 16th.

The Viewing: Edition II — A Ritual in Image & Sound

Her Personal Curriculum presents an intimate screening experience: both visual albums, curated, in sequence, with a Nigerian snack board and a signature cocktail designed as part of the experience.

📅 Saturday, May 16th | 3pm (3.5 hours)

📍 Joydragger’s House, Lagos

🎟 click here to get your tickets at ₦12,000 ₦10,000 — all inclusive

Come ready to dance, feel good and celebrate yourself.

I think journalling saved my life.

But first I had to overcome the fear of someone else finding and reading it.

This was such a crippling thought, that a presumption had calcified in my mind:

I wasn’t a “ diary/journal person”.

Surely not.

Not after my parents found a preteen diary I had at twelve years old for all of two weeks before its great reveal (or did I have the diary for a month? event details post-lashings are often foggy).

Not after a French therapist suggested I write and keep a journal as a way of processing complicated thoughts about my father’s death during a particularly fragile week where breathing seemed like a labour too much to ask of my mind, and my body could not hold space for life.

And certainly not after I had gotten spiritually exhausted from harsh winters, rainy days, not-so-minuscule microagressions, or being asked where I was from for what seemed like the millionth time, and why my English was “so good” for an African…..

But I did in-fact start journalling that January and kept writing everyday since. I would write about how many smiles I had encountered for the day and the joys of a warm smile.

I would write about tough times but also my dreams for the future. This journal became my therapist of sorts, a self-directed intervention technique for when I had big feelings and needed to process them, my map into my tangled world of hurt, joy and a little girl inside waiting to be released through those sheets of paper on a notebook I bought at half-price from a Christmas sale.

Act II: Documenting Women

Through my personal writings and reflections I decided last year, to post more on TikTok.

I made these long-form videos about media I was consuming, using them as tools to discuss timely issues or to simply make observations about my life.

Then a follower messaged me and advised that I create a Substack as my content favoured textual long-form content and I could flesh out my ideas.

As it turns out, my videos often got bookmarked due to the density of information and video length. I took the advice and went to work.

While that writing process was aided by a lot of factors from a technical standpoint (years of academic writing and copywriting for brands), it became apparent that my journal writing had been a spiritual release needed to usher in this process and provide clarity to my mission.

So a few days into March this year, I decided to create a social content project themed, “28 Days of Nigerian Women”. It was a series of posts about pioneering Nigerian women across sectors and history. Each post had an on-screen text written as a quote (fictionalised) from the woman being highlighted, detailing her accomplishments in conversational language. I had not felt so alive, so invigorated and so angry all at once: we as women had contributed so much to all sectors of Nigerian life and yet sidelined into domestic, politically neutral or completely inaccurate narratives in a country where the current generation of Nigerian women seemingly needed a limitless supply of courage and self-trust just to survive.

Writing in my journal was textual testimony to my resilience and storied evidence that any worries about my future was best alchemised into loving myself and experiencing life in the present. It was also a way to find patterns in the past connecting ancestral memory as a West-African woman, Nigerian woman, Yoruba woman.

The more I wrote, the more I awakened a creative bravery and soon writing felt like a homecoming: I have been worthy from the first moment I took my first breath.

I can do this (whatever “this” was). I was home.

Act III: Curation as the practice of witnessing

My experience with the curious curating workshop started before the first session. I saw an instagram post from the Didi Museum’s page about a series of Curator workshops that would be facilitated by an American curator named Robin Ruskin currently based in Ghana. It seemed like an interested proposition, this two weeks where we would converge from multiple disciplines and I proceeded to fill the form. I was shortlisted for the interview where I spoke about my writings and general thoughts on art and community, the rest is history.

What I started with no expectations, morphed into one of the best two weeks of my adult life. I was able to see how curation is an act of care: care for people, care for communities, care for ancestral technologies. There are many ways I have been transformed by this experience and will need to decompress from the emotional heaviness that I’ve carried throughout this period of transformation. For now however, we have created from our experiences, a group exhibition showing our reflections from the workshop and various works-in-process by artists, writers and curators (like myself) that participated in this event. Friends, family members and industry stakeholders were invited to our forest of possibilities which we grew and nurtured over these two weeks.

“A zine (/ziːn/ ⓘ ZEEN; short for MAGAzine or FANzine) is a magazine that is a "noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter".” - Wikipedia

From allegorical frameworks explaining the curatorial practice, to a session on family heirlooms where I spoke about my father (for the first time in years, publicly at that), to car rides with a group of amazing women artists, writers, curators, to the idea of curating in a multimodal format which birthed a zine, we experienced (in a spiritual and psychological sense) a deep, intentional presence to our own experiences, emotions, and truths as creators.

Through the zine - an ode to girlhood, womanhood and community - we honoured our humanity by letting the workshop experience live in the pages of our creative output and shape our being.

What a sacred thing to witness.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to watch something properly.

Most of what I’ve been exploring through HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM has lived digitally through writing and my quiet reflection. But there’s a limit to what can be experienced individually.

Some things shift when they’re shared.

So I’m hosting the first edition of something I’m calling THE VIEWING.

A small, intentional gathering centred around film, maybe books, perhaps a podcast episode we can’t stop talking about.

A shared presence.

Of noticing.

Of seeing differently.

For this first session, we’ll be watching a curated preview of BLK NWS: Terms & Conditions by Khalil Joseph. It’s a nonlinear, experimental film celebrating the creativity of the Black Diaspora and Africa that moves through archival footage, music, and fragmented narrative. Adapted from his renowned video art installation, the film mirrors the sonic textures of a record album and is divided into 21 “tracks“. This free screening of the film will take place in April and show the first 7 - 10 “tracks” of the film.

Considering Khalil’s career, the unique storytelling style of the film isn’t surprising.

He directed iconic videos for artists like Kendrick Lamar (”m.A.A.d.”), FKA twigs (”Video Girl”), and Beyoncé (”Sorry,” “Love Drought,” “All Night” from Lemonade), for which he received Emmy and Grammy nominations.

I have had this film on my watchlist as part of my 2026 media board and I welcome the opportunity to watch this with you.

This isn’t a large event. It’s a private screening in Lagos with 10 spots available.

—

📍 Surulere, Lagos

🗓 Friday, 10th April

🕒 6:30PM

🎟 Free, click here (RSVP required)

Bring snacks, drinks, and whatever openness you’re willing to arrive with.

—

If you’ve been reading, following, or thinking along similar lines, this is an invitation.

Share HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM

Get more from Tems A. Dayo in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

REGISTER FOR BLKNWS - A PREVIEW

My TikTok and Instagram get the first glimpse: behind the scenes, in-process thoughts, and the fragments that don’t always make it into the essays.

If you’d like to follow along more closely, let’s connect there.

Here is a list of all my posts this month (from the latest):

Her response to this was not to perform wholeness she did not have, instead she went to therapy, figuring things out incrementally. She was honest with herself about what her body needed to relearn, and she found ways to do that relearning on her own terms. There is a radical honesty in how she discusses this that is both unusual and important: she refuses to allow the damage to be invisible, but she also refuses to be defined by it. She has a husband who sees her fully and has not required her to pretend. She has children. She has, by her own account, turned lemon into lemonade, using the metaphor as a precise description of what it means to insist on a life that is yours despite everything that was done to it.

She is also clear that healing is not the same as being fixed. Izzy was diagnosed with PTSD and still carries what Italy did to her. But she has made something out of this heavy burden, and she has done it without waiting for an apology from anyone.

“Protect a Girl Child”: Institutional Accountability and What Justice Actually Looks Like

Seven years after arriving in the UK, Izzy wrote three letters: one to the UK government, one to NAPTIP (Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons), and one to the Oba’s palace in Benin. The UK responded within two weeks, informing her that the government spent five million pounds annually to support anti-trafficking efforts in Nigeria. Nigeria however, did not respond. Izzy has not forgotten this.

Her position on NAPTIP is not hostile so much as precise: according to her, they are not doing their job and they know it. The load is too large, the resources too small, the structural incentives too misaligned. What Izzy wants from NAPTIP is not a press release. She wants them to sponsor her book which she describes as a full-length account of her experience, and proposes that her book should be distributed to every girl child in Nigeria. She believes, and has said confidently, that this proposed book would do more to create awareness and protect girls than anything NAPTIP is currently doing. As it would be coming from a trafficking survivor, someone that has “been there”, she may be right.

When people respond to her videos by blaming her mother for what happened to her, Izzy points out something so obvious it should not need saying: she has a father. He is alive. He is, in fact, living with her in the UK and yet no one is making videos blaming him. This is the gendered logic of accountability in action prevalent in Nigerian online discourse. By our society’s logic, when something goes wrong (particularly with a child), the nearest woman is held responsible. Her mother, who has since died, has been posthumously tried in TikTok comment sections for the actions of traffickers. Her father has not been mentioned. This, Izzy sarcastically declares, tells you everything you need to know about what Nigerians mean when they call men the protectors and providers of their families.

On a larger scale, the accountability she is asking for is not symbolic. She is asking the Nigerian government to do its job. She is asking adults in Nigerian communities across Europe who see young migrant girls in obvious distress to intervene: to call the police, to speak up, to stop being convenient witnesses. She is asking people to stop performing outrage in comment sections and start asking what it would take to actually stop this. Italy, she says, is just the tip of the iceberg.

She has been talking about her experience for seven years on social media. This recent series of TikTok videos that brought her to wider attention is an act of extraordinary patience with a world that has been slow to listen. Izzy Ogbeide survived something that was designed to consume her, and she came out the other side not diminished but clarified. She knows what she wants to say. She knows why it matters. And she has, in her own words, absolutely no time left for the people who never protected her telling her how she is allowed to speak about it now.

For me, Women’s History Month 2026 has been a sober one.

I have been sitting with the particular weight of being a Nigerian woman at a time when the failures of Nigeria towards its women, towards its girls, feel less like aberrations and more like policy. These failures do not begin at the national level. They begin in the family home, in the silence of a father who is never blamed, in the education a girl child is the first to be pulled out of when money gets tight, in the dreams of living “abroad”, away from home, that is dangled in front of young women as opportunity and is sometimes something else entirely, mirroring or amplifying terrors young women try to get away from back in Nigeria. They accumulate through communities that shame survivors and protect perpetrators, through religious institutions that preach female submission and male authority, through a government agency created specifically to address trafficking that cannot be moved to respond to a letter from one of its own citizens. The failure is systemic and it is intimate at the same time, living both in big structures and in the small, everyday decisions of ordinary people who look away.

I know something about the immigrant life in Europe. Not Izzy’s life, but enough of the texture of it to recognise what she is describing: the way the diaspora can close around you like a second country with its own rules, the transactional nature of belonging, the exhausting gendered performance of being fine. What I did not have, and what I want to name plainly, is what Izzy had to survive before she got to any of that. She arrived in Europe as a child and was immediately consumed by a system built on the disposability of young Black women. That she emerged from it with this much clarity, this much insistence on her own story, this much love for herself and for the girls who came after her, is no small feat.

To conservative, misogynistic, sexist, androcentric Nigerians, Izzy Ogbeide is polarising. She is too loud, too explicit, too unrepentant, too unwilling to be quiet about the things we are all supposed to be quiet about. To me, she is perfect. She is the fullest possible expression of what it looks like when a Nigerian woman who was given every reason to disappear decides, instead, to stay visible.

This essay is my small act of bearing witness to her. And to all the women like her whose tenacity holds up more of this country than the country has ever held up for them.

Read Part 1 of this two-part series here:

In the video, “Izzy” (as she is fondly called), rejected any sympathy from her viewers for her experience and charged them to focus on young girls currently being trafficked all over the world, citing a recent example of someone trafficking young girls to Kuwait. She mentioned her healing journey and instead directed her audience to help young girls around them, chastising the Nigerian community for a culture of bullying young girls and even stigmatising them after sexual assault. In a predictable fashion, her comment section was divided: some praising her for her bravery, others chastising her for not having any privacy and accusing her of “enjoying” her trafficking experience. But as I would come to learn about Izzy, she is truly a courageous woman who has not allowed her life to be defined by others and instead has shown up for herself with authenticity, love and sometimes, a bit of dark humour. While I have experienced the immigrant life in Europe, my story differs from Izzy’s in many aspects. I do however strongly identify with her perspective and experience on inter-gender relationships within the European diaspora, the cyclic nature of workplace abuse abroad, and the complicity of immigration policies in making Black immigrants susceptible to exploitation within their communities.

I hope that by shining a light on Izzy’s story through this essay, you the reader, are able to find courage to push past difficult circumstances, to seek justice, and to find your voice unapologetically.

“They Like to Carry Children”: How It Happened

Izzy was seventeen years old and had barely travelled outside her home state when someone she trusted gave her a set of instructions and a ticket. She was a teenager from Benin City, and like many girls recruited into trafficking networks through Nigeria’s south-south corridor, she was young enough to seem manageable and old enough to be moved across borders without arousing immediate suspicion. She flew from Nigeria to France, where a connection was waiting, and was then rerouted on a second ticket to Italy. The instructions were simple: walk straight off the plane and wait to hear your name. Follow whoever calls it. She did exactly that.

What happened next would consume seven years of her life.

This is not an unusual story; and that is precisely what makes it so devastating. Izzy has noted, matter-of-factly, that sex traffickers prefer young girls. Some of the girls she knew in Italy had their ages falsified to make them easier to move. The entire operation ran on logistics and compliance strictly mapping out flights, connections, handlers, instructions delivered in stern, threatening voices to children who had no framework for understanding what they had been delivered into. The violence was not always spectacular. Sometimes it was the slow grind of having no choice: being told to block your period and go to work regardless of the pain, having a “madam’s relative” stationed at your workplace to monitor and report back everything you did, seeking help from Nigerian men and being told that the only alternative to sex work was drug trafficking - a path that if caught by the authorities would mean prison. Taking a ritualistic “blood oath” back home and being threatened with harm to yourself and your loved ones back home. The trap was total.

Her words about the physical reality of that period are some of the most arresting in the entire series. She describes various forms of reproductive abuse including having to stuff cotton balls into her uterus to block her menstrual flow and being forced to drink dangerous substances including copious amounts of alcohol to abort pregnancies. With no duty of care and a constant looming threat of physical and/or sexual assault, the girls were disposable to these traffickers.

The Men Who Watched and Said Nothing

One of the things Izzy returns to repeatedly, and with a specific, focused anger, is the role of Nigerian and African men as bystanders who profited from proximity to the women they claimed to love or desire, while offering nothing in return. She is not speaking broadly or theoretically. She is speaking from a very particular experience of what community looked like to a young Nigerian woman navigating sex work in Italy.

There were the men who stayed home with the babies while their partners went out to work, then spent the money and supplemented it with contempt, simultaneously holding religious standards over their women. They shamed these women as sex workers while using their financial resources to take care of their families back home. There were the men who travelled across Europe and built businesses, bought land, funded various construction projects back in Benin - all of it, she says bluntly, built on “ashawo money”. The wealth was laundered through respectability but in the eyes of the community led by these men, the women who generated it were not. Anecdotally, she recalls being stranded at an airport, trying to exchange pounds, and it was two Senegalese men who helped her. Not a single Nigerian man.

In contrast (not in a subservient or glorifying way), she makes an important distinction about white male clients here. Within the transactional world she was forced to inhabit, Izzy recalled that the men who treated her and women like her with the most basic human decency were often not from her community. The men from her community knew exactly what she was doing, sometimes created the conditions that kept her doing it, and still felt entitled to judge her for it. This, she says, is what she means when she calls them “disgusting”. The hypocrisy is not incidental, it is structural. It is what it looks like when patriarchy extracts labour from women while denying them the dignity of naming that labour honestly.

She is also careful to extend this critique to the broader social ecosystem around trafficking. The women who recruit and manage other women (the “madams”) are not exempt. Izzy describes knowing a woman who had been in Kuwait for barely a year before she began trafficking girls from her home state. The pipeline does not only run through men. It runs through anyone with proximity to power and a willingness to use other people’s vulnerability as a resource.

The Body After: Trauma, Healing, and Relearning Pleasure

Izzy arrived in the United Kingdom at twenty-three, having spent seven years in Italy. She claimed and was successful granted asylum. Recalling her asylum interview, she insists that she did not cry, making this choice deliberately as she did not want the people who had trafficked her to win. She wanted it on the record in her own voice, not filtered through the conventions of victimhood. She has since said that she was never in any doubt about how her application and testimony would be received, because according to her, “You don’t have to have a good memory when you’re telling the truth”.

But this was the start of a completely different challenge for Izzy..........

(PT. 2 of this two part essay will be published soon)

Update (PT. 2):

A few weeks ago, I shared an excerpt from a work-in-progress essay on Lagos and the idea of “third spaces.” Many of you read it, shared it, and sent thoughtful messages about your own experiences of the city.

I’m happy to share that the full essay has now found a home with Unruly Magazine.

The piece is, in many ways, a love letter to Lagos and my complicated relationship with the city. But it is also an attempt to document a cultural shift happening in real time. Across Ikoyi, Victoria Island, and Lekki, a new ecosystem of curated social spaces is emerging: part gallery, part café, part community hub. The essay traces how we got here: from early social spaces like Stranger Lagos, Wèré House, A White Space, to the present moment shaped by the city’s increasing cultural capital, its relationship with the Nigerian diaspora, post-pandemic behavioural shifts, and a new generation of adults trying to rebuild forms of gathering that feel meaningful.

Like most of my writing, the essay sits somewhere between cultural observation, memory work, and media analysis. I was interested in how culture forms quietly around us: how cities teach us who belongs, where we gather, and what it costs to participate.

Thank you to the team at Unruly for giving the essay a home and for the thoughtful editorial care.

If you read the excerpt here earlier, you can now read the full essay online at Unruly.

And if it resonates, feel free to share it with someone who has tried to make a life (or a community) in Lagos.

This month brought me a gift.

I saw with my eyes and felt in my heart, life dancing with me.

Pace over speed, excellence over validation, routines over deadlines.

I enter into a season of self-trust,

I release myself from the confines of fear and into the limitless world of abundant possibilities.

Failure cannot find me.

What is failure really? Only discovery and synchronicities.

Am I not the universe dancing through time?

I embrace movement,

I embrace the rising tide of prosperity which lifts my community and whose waves bring me ease.

I embrace ease.

I embrace flow.

I embrace myself.

As we ushered in the Lunar New Year (the year of the Fire Horse) I made the decision not to make a vision board; something that previously had become an annual tradition.

The vision is already clear.

I know what kind of woman I am becoming. I know the texture of her life. I know the rooms she occupies. The conversations she entertains. The standards she refuses to lower.

I did NOT need a collage to remind me; what I need is a world that either validates that vision or sharpens it.

So instead of a vision board, I built a media board.

I want to be clear about this, a media board is not a watchlist.

It is a curated, thematic selection of films and television I intend to consume across the year. It is deliberate. It is modular. It evolves as new projects are announced. What initially started as a question on my tiktok about how to consume media with intention, morphed into a notebook list of films and television projects I felt inspired by or curious about, arranged into themes that are important to me, structured in a spreadsheet and translated into a visual board.

In doing this, I created my cultural syllabus. Because media is not neutral; every film teaches you something about the world around you. Films teach you about ambition, love, womanhood, the dynamics of power and so on. What you watch can teach you about what is rewarded and what is punished, whose voice is lifted and whose is silenced.

Media also opens your eyes to new worlds, allowing you to travel far beyond what your material circumstances can allow and sometimes, sometimes giving you a better contextualisation of the interior lives of others than you would have by sheer in-person witnessing. As a twelve year old girl watching Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné, I was able to understand sexism and interfaith romance in contemporary Senegalese life. Through the relatability of Tunde Kelani’s Saworoide, I witnessed the use of allegory as a plot device and a tool of dissent, gaining a better understanding of how the vestiges of Nigeria’s colonial terror have been filtered through corruption and authoritarianism. And watching the 1982 film E.T., taught my young self about otherness, American surveillance state and government overreach (even though at that time, I was unable to fully conceptualise what I was watching).

And so it would seem that if I am serious about HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM - about designing my intellectual and emotional life with intention - my engagement with media cannot be accidental.

For years, my consumption was reactive. I watched trending films, absorbed entire seasons of shows without asking what they were feeding me, subjected my screen time to whatever clips were auto-played by the algorithms on social media platforms, and I am still shown these videos though to a lesser extent.

The Fire Horse, in the zodiac, is said to be intense, independent, unruly.

I do not know how much I believe in astrological determinism, but I understand symbolism. And this year, I wanted a symbol of refusal. Refusal to drift. Refusal to let the loudest story win.

So this time, I began with themes instead of titles.

I asked myself: who am I becoming, and what stories support that becoming?

Power and sovereignty. Feminist rage. Female anti-heroes. Political thrillers. African futurism. Community. Girlhood and memory.

Then I listed everything: upcoming releases, old films I had postponed, television shows I had “been meaning to watch”, announced projects that sparked something in me.

During this time (and in a familiar fashion to the framework of my multimedia feminist curriculum), I considered the possibility of accompanying media that would further contextualise my selection. After all, a similar approach was used to select accompanying resources in my multimedia feminist/womanist curriculum where books, films and research articles were selected not in isolation but in conversation with one another.

I began to wonder: what would it mean for my entertainment to also exist in conversation?

What would it mean for a political thriller to sit beside a long-form essay on state violence? For a film about motherhood to be accompanied by a memoir that sheds lights on reproductive labour? For a series about wealth and power to be watched alongside economic history or cultural critique?

So I aggregated. While aggregating titles, I also began to eliminate. I began to refine my selection through themes asking myself: “who am I becoming and what stories support that becoming?” What survived became structured in a Google Sheets document sorted by themes, film/series titles, recommended media pairing, film or book suggestions from HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM community members and a vote button (“Recommend 👍🏾”, “ehhh....depends 🤷🏾‍♀️”, “Nah 😒”).

That spreadsheet became “textual architecture” which I then translated into a visual guidebook on Canva. It showed me the atmosphere I was inviting into my year and that is what this is about.

The media we consume builds the emotional climate of our lives. If my media input is filled with anti-blackness, sexism, dysfunction, and spectacle — there is no surprise if that becomes the background frequency of my thinking.

But if I’m building a life rooted in feminist world-building, media literacy, creative sovereignty, and critical thinking….. then my inputs must reflect that.

In a few steps, I will show you how to curate your media inputs the same way you curate your ambitions, relationships and life.

Step 1: Start With Themes, Not Titles

Before listing any film or TV show, ask: What world am I building internally and externally? Who am I becoming this year?

For examples, your themes might look like:

• Girlhood & memory

• Political thrillers

• African futurism

• Female anti-heroes

• Feminist rage

• Cultural reclamation

• Sport

Themes first. Titles second. Themes prevent you from drifting. You can also later introduce new themes if certain commonalities appear here which have not been represented in the themes earlier stated.

Step 2: Brain Dump Everything

Now list:

• Upcoming 2026 releases

• Films you’ve postponed

• Shows you’ve “been meaning to watch”

• Announced projects that interest you

Step 3: Sort, Rank, Eliminate

This is where it becomes a curriculum. In my Media Board spreadsheet, I created columns for:

• Viewing Month

• Theme

• Title

• Format (Film / Series / Documentary)

• Post-viewing score

• Recommended/Similar/Alternative media

• Member Suggestions

Step 4: Make It Modular

A media board is not static. I add newly announced/released films that I was unaware of when I initially created the board. I also reserve the right to remove films or tv shows that I am no longer interested in viewing (from what I’ve heard about season 2, I think Hijack might be on the chopping block). When new films or shows are announced, I evaluate them against my themes.

If they fit? They’re added. If not? They’re admired from afar.

This keeps the board alive but not chaotic.

It’s also important to remember that this is a guide not set in stone, we all have busy lives with responsibilities and people calling for our attention. You do not have to watch every planned media but this board invites you to a more intentional engagement with your time and attention.

Step 5: Create a Visual Board (optional)

After finalising the spreadsheet, I created a visual board using Canva both for social sharing and to help my neurodiverse brain visual conceptualise the themes I was running with.

Seeing the covers together revealed tone, imbalance, repetition. It showed me the atmosphere I was inviting into my year. If this final aspect would be useful to you, feel free to implement; if not, the spreadsheet is completely fine.

Media Is a World-Building Tool, Build Yours

The stories we let into our days and evenings eventually settle into our interior life. They shape our metaphors, fears, ambitions and our sense of what is possible.

If HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM is about engaging with media and culture intellectually, emotionally and politically then media cannot be treated as filler between “real” pursuits.

Media has always been a teacher, and in 2026, I am choosing the syllabus.

Picture this: it’s a Sunday afternoon in Lagos and you’re driving across the bridge to Ikoyi for a gathering of “creative minds” - artists, designers, founders, lifestyle entrepreneurs. The ticket wasn’t cheap, but you told yourself it would be worth it. You arrive and it is exactly as advertised with minimalist furniture, thoughtful lighting and a curated playlist humming softly in the background. People are laughing, networking, exchanging Instagram handles. For a brief moment, it feels like you’ve stepped into a version of Lagos that mirrors your desires, a community that comes together with intentionality. And yet, beneath the aesthetic ease, you can’t help but wonder: in a country where community has historically been informal, improvised, and class-bound, what exactly are we building when we call these places “third spaces”?

But first, we must ask ourselves: what exactly is a “third space”? The term was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place to describe social environments outside the home (the “first place”) and the workplace (the “second place”) that support psychological wellbeing and reduce isolation. These are spaces where conversation flows easily, hierarchy softens, and belonging is not something you earn but something you inhabit.

Examples of third spaces include cafés, bars, libraries, barber shops, community centres and, in many societies, religious institutions. By this definition, Lagos has always had spaces to commune. Churches and mosques anchor neighbourhood life. Buka joints and beer parlours spill into the streets. Weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals double as reunions. Community, in Nigeria, has rarely required a formal label.

And yet, these spaces do not exist without limitations. Religious spaces, while powerful, are often structured around shared belief systems and moral codes. Hospitality spaces may be vibrant but are not always designed for sustained, intentional dialogue across difference. Many informal gathering spots remain gendered, classed, or age-bound, making access requirements incompatible with the social needs or values of most Nigerian adults aged under 40.

What we are witnessing now feels distinct. The new crop of third spaces emerging in Lagos are often deliberately irreligious, aesthetically curated, and positioned as neutral ground for “creatives,” “founders,” and “community.” They promise inclusivity without doctrine or gendered hierarchies. They are consciously secular and often aspirational, making them spaces where diverse interests converge under the soft glow of intentional design.

But the question lingers: are these spaces truly neutral ground, or are they simply new forms of gatekeeping dressed in minimalist furniture and Instagrammable lighting? The answer to this question lies in both the changing tides and codified norms of the city itself - the migration patterns of its diaspora, the purchasing power of its middle class, the exhaustion of its young professionals, and the social hunger of its Gen-Z adults. We must look at the Island–Mainland divide. We must look at the aesthetics, the pricing, the programming, and the quiet rules of entry.

Only then can we ask the harder question: are Lagos’ emerging third spaces truly expanding access to community or are they refining it?

From defunct spaces like Stranger Lagos to newer entrants such as Gather House, The Joydragger’s House, 16by16, and Suudu Lagos, the city’s landscape of gathering has shifted in visible and subtle ways.

Each space tells a story of generational aspiration, class, sustainability, and the markers of belonging.

UPDATE:

Get more from Tems A. Dayo in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

My TikTok and Instagram get first dibs/BTS on my work (let’s connect there).

Join my new subscriber chat

Today I’m announcing a brand new addition to my Substack publication: HER PERSONAL CURRICULUM subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
Member suggestions/recommendation for my spreadsheets will be shared through this substack subscriber chat.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

This is what came to mind before listening to both their interviews: first Jill’s interview with Angie Martinez on her IRL podcast, then Traciee’s interview on Emma Grede’s podcast (as written below).

These are my reflections.

Diana, the good steward

Something that strikes me immediately about Tracee Ellis Ross is how warmly and gracefully she receives compliments. There’s this sense of self-assurance radiating from her, this way of being that feels like she’s always been exactly who she is, no apologies, no performance. I have spoken on social media about how there are recurring themes in our lives that show up in the dreams and desires we have for our lives; watching this interview drove home this point. Of course, for some people this recurring theme of self-assurance was cultivated from childhood and for Tracee, she seems to agree.

“People say you grow up in your mom’s shadow, I feel that I grew up in her embrace.”Because yes, her mother is Diana Ross, legendary music icon and ultimate superstar it-girl. Safe to say, Tracee had an unconventional childhood compared to most people. To watch your mom break barriers and exercise agency while being celebrated for her glamorous beauty, to witness that kind of power up close, that’s a particular kind of inheritance. Not just access or privilege, but a lived example of what’s possible when a Black woman refuses to shrink.

Tracee talks about seeing strong and beautiful women in media growing up (she mentions Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, the Charlie’s Angels) and upon reflection as an adult, she realised that she became these women(also, doesn’t she look like she could absolutely be an ass-kicking spy with healthy, luscious hair?). The media we consume tells the stories of who we are, who we might become. It shapes the architecture of our dreams before we even know we’re dreaming them.

Know thyself

“When will you understand that anything you need in life, you must build for yourself?” - Eileen to Hedda, Hedda (2025)

To know others, you must know yourself and boy does Tracee know herself! In fact, this entire interview was a masterclass in self-knowledge, self-love, self-acceptance and how to translate this to a fulfilling career. She talks about the importance of building a life around being yourself and how that’s actually more beneficial than focusing solely on what you want. Because what you want can shift, can be influenced by outside noise. But who you are? That’s the compass.

A book that’s had a profound effect on Tracee’s journey is When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, which taught her self-acceptance, mindfulness, and how the way through difficult situations can sometimes be presence and radical acceptance. This part of the interview brought to mind Jill Scott’s interview, where Jill mentions a similar insight through watching her grandmother’s grief journey. Both women arriving at the same wisdom: that feelings are meant to move through you, not calcify inside you.

For all the recent arguments against nepo babies within the arts - and listen, there are valid critiques considering both the devaluing of arts education in the United States and rising living costs - Tracee insists that her victories both emotional and material, did not always come easy and makes a compelling statement about her journey of self-acceptance: “It’s not because of the abundance that I come from that I’ve had the space to do that, I have carved it out. The visioning time, the dreaming time, meditation where I’m looking at things.”

She talks about the importance of not bypassing negative feelings instead working through them. She makes space for them and still sticks to the goals she’s planned out. Her inner strength seems to come from calling to her higher self, letting that part of herself show up on set as an actor and in public appearances as a celebrity.

Something really profound (which I was initially skeptical about but ended up completely fascinating me) was her saying that she uses “May I” instead of “I am” affirmations. It honours whatever state she’s currently in while also honouring where she wants to go. For instance: “May I lean into the part of me that is deeply grateful for this event that I’m going to, for this opportunity, for what it is celebrating, and may I let the soft parts of me stay as soft as they are, as I walk into this from a place of gratitude.”

It’s gentle. It’s not forcing herself into a performance of confidence she doesn’t feel. It’s inviting the version of herself she wants to embody, rather than demanding it show up.

The pattern of dreams (always refine, but never fold)

“Dream big - but know that you’re the one who’s going to do the work.”

One may be fooled into thinking that Tracee’s embodiment of mindfulness, reflection and affirmation combined with her star power must translate into a limitless reservoir of confidence when it comes to trying new things particularly with her now successful hair and beauty brand, PATTERN beauty, but she insists that she couldn’t predict how wildly successful the brand would turn out to be. However one can see how her knowledge of self, her specificity regarding her audience and refusing to internalise rejection (her first business plan was created eleven years before launch after countless “nos”) - all of which are traits she has honed in her personal life - weaved a thread that led her to entrepreneurial success.

She also reflected (there’s that word again) on her rejections, to determine whether it was a case of speaking to the wrong person, feedback that could be used to refine her messaging for the next person or improving the brand’s offerings. Her focus on clarity rather than trying to control the outcome were instrumental to her success.

And here’s the thing that keeps showing up in both Jill’s interview and Tracee’s: these are women who have built entire careers, entire lives, on refusing to fold. On refusing to make themselves smaller, quieter, more palatable. On insisting that their “centre”(that sense of self, that knowing) remains intact even when the world is trying to reshape them into something more digestible.

Subscribe now

On rising in love

Tracee’s singleness has been a subject of discussion in some interviews (who can forget that cringy moment with Kevin Hart) but while she doesn’t completely shy away from this line of questioning its quite clear that her personal growth journey has also included contentment and self-love outside of romantic partnership. She says that this inspired her to create and star in a solo travel show on streaming platform Roku. To not just imagine freedom, joy and self discovery as a woman but to embody it physically through travel.

Discernment through reflection(!) and self-knowledge seems to be a daily practice in Tracee’s life. In this interview, she calls women to apply this same rigour to dating by writing a “facts” and “fantasy” list on a sheet of paper: on one side, you write the observable facts about the person; on the other side, you write your ideal “fantasy” of a partner to give you clarity about the relationship. She also mentions the importance of observing your feelings after dates by asking yourself: “Do I feel safe? Do I feel seen? Do I feel sexy?”

As someone with a psychology degree and currently working on a journal that facilitates mindfulness for career alignment and life-change, I was thrilled to hear this because what she’s describing seems to be a brilliant use-case of the “WHAT” skill in Dialectical Behavioural Therapy; observing without judgment, describing the facts, participating fully in the present moment.

I deeply relate to Tracee’s frustrations with modern dating and find that so much of her advice would be perfect not just for women but for anyone of any gender or sexuality. Her perspective is refreshing and is one that calls us to take ownership of our lives to facilitate outcomes that are aligned to our authentic selves.

A happy conclusion

When asked by Emma what message she would like people to remember if her life was a movie, Tracee says: “May you be comfortable in your skin, find what makes your heart sing, discover your purpose and be of service.”

And I think that’s it, isn’t it? The through-line connecting both these conversations with Jill and Tracee. Both women navigating the world as successful, accomplished, Black women in industries that have historically punished people like them for taking up too much space. Both women who’ve been labeled, scrutinised, pathologised for not conforming to the script of what a woman’s life should look like by a certain age.

But they’re unpunishable. Not because they’re perfect or because they’ve transcended hurt or because they don’t still navigate systems designed to diminish them. But because they’ve done the work of knowing themselves so deeply that external validation or the lack of it, can’t destabilise them.

Tracee reminds us that the work is internal before it is external. That you have to vision, dream, meditate, reflect. That you have to carve out the space for becoming, even when the world isn’t naturally making room for you. That comfort in your own skin isn’t something that happens to you; it’s something you cultivate, fiercely and intentionally, every single day.

May we all be so unpunishable. May we all refuse to fold.

This is part of a two-part series on “unpunishable women”, i.e. women leading “agentic” (self-directed), empowered and resourced lives. It was inspired by interviews recently given by Jill Scott and Tracee Ellis Ross.

READ PART 1 HERE:

This is what came to mind before listening to both their interviews: first Jill’s interview with Angie Martinez on her IRL podcast (as written below), then Traciee’s interview on Emma Grede’s podcast.

These are my reflections.

Motherhood, Wisdom and the Architecture of Age

“You work hard in your 20s,

you work smart in your 30s,

you work how you want to in your 40s,

you work when you want to in your 50s,

you work if you want to in your 60s.”

This “work philosophy” from Jill Scott is something that’s been living rent-free in my head because at 53, she’s speaking from a place I haven’t reached yet, but desperately want to believe in: that there’s a trajectory beyond hustle, beyond proving, beyond the exhausting performance of always being “on.”

She talks about her mentor pouring into her life and how that now fuels her to pour into her mentees. And listen, as someone currently dipping my toes into mentorship with a recent appointment at an organisation for African women in AI, it was honestly refreshing to hear someone of her calibre navigate that space. Because mentorship isn’t always intuitive, and we don’t talk enough about what it means to hold space for another woman’s becoming while you’re still very much in the middle of your own.

This idea of stewarding wisdom - not just through words but through your actual lived actions - to pass on to the women and girls in your orbit, that’s the thing. She watched her grandmother grieve her grandfather and then release that grief to move on. That observation shaped her entire relationship with emotional pain. It taught her that feelings are meant to move through you, not cement themselves in your bones.

And when she speaks about appreciating her age, the wisdom that now gives her art depth, I feel something shift. Because we’re not really taught to want to be older as women, are we? We’re taught to cling, to preserve, to mourn each passing year. But Jill is offering a different perspective where age is accumulation and refinement, not erosion.

She also seems to have found the perfect balance between parenting and work as she speaks about her son with this particular kind of respect that catches you off guard. The kind of reverence that suggests she sees him as a full person, not an extension of herself or a prop in her narrative.

On the Creative Process: Befriending the Creator

“I have allowed myself to be friends with the creator.”

Angie Martinez is a seasoned music journalist, and she was able to pull Jill into conversations about her historic, iconic performances. Hearing Jill share the backstories of some of her pivotal on-stage moments did something to me.

Because as a Nigerian woman entering her mid 30s with such a long way to go, and yet a robust and diverse work history, I’m always looking at the next project, the next career move. I’m so focused on what’s ahead that I’m not nearly appreciative enough of how far I’ve already come.

When Jill says, “I have allowed myself to be friends with the creator,” the way I interpret it is that she’s talking about her relationship with the creative process itself. And the way she describes it (God-like in a metaphoric sense) it’s almost sensual. She’s charming and beautiful as she talks about her romantic desires, and then she segues seamlessly into her creative process, like they’re cousin experiences.

The same longing, the same surrender, the same aliveness required.

Romantic Partnerships and the Messy Territory of Desire

“We are not in tiny boxes, we are a whole spectrum of things.”

Jill describes herself as a “dominant submissive” and while that part of the interview has been clipped, shared online to a polarising response (understandably so considering the increased attacks on women’s rights all over the world particularly in the United States where she resides), I hold empathy and consideration for Jill while acknowledging that this perspective being shared may seem badly timed to female audiences online. Because I think what Jill is actually seeking (as an accomplished black woman who has had to make so many decisions, who has walked so many paths on her own) is some “soft landing” emotionally and perhaps financially. Not subjugation. Not the erasure of self.

I don’t think “submission” is quite the right descriptor for what she’s describing, but rather a mutually respectful relationship with a man who genuinely loves and considers her. When you actually listen to her full list of requirements for an ideal partner, they mirror the desires that so many cis-heterosexual women have: to be in relationships not poisoned by sexism and misogyny, to be seen fully, to be met with effort and intention.

She also talks, quite humorously, about her sexual desires, in particular, wanting to be with a man with some stamina(which, okay Ms Scott! LOL). She shares how she experienced a sexual awakening through watching Vanessa Del Rio, the 70s and 80s adult film star, and being struck by Vanessa’s complete confidence in the bedroom.

I find myself constantly reflecting on the importance of women having genuinely agentic lives, and such a massive part of that is owning your body and the experiences you have in the world with your own body, without compromise of safety or pleasure. Not performing sexuality for the male gaze. Not contorting yourself into what you think desire should look like. But actually knowing what you want and pursuing it with the full force of your personhood.

All Good Things…..

Angie: “What is one thing you’re no longer apologising for?“

Jill: “Myself.“

As a woman with not just wit, talent and intellect, but also curiosity, Jill also talks about the books that have shaped her view on women’s power and self-determination. She cites Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, pulling out symbols and mythology of feminine power and discussing how they’ve been systematically demonised or debased by patriarchy in our modern world.

She talks about ancestral wisdom that women hold, and how these oppressive systems work overtime to subjugate us from tapping into our ancestral wisdom and feminine intuition. Because a woman who knows herself, who trusts her inner knowing, who understands she comes from a long line of women who survived impossible things: that woman is frankly dangerous to systems built on our compliance.

And maybe that’s what we’re meant to take from the Jill Scott interview. Not a blueprint, but permission. Permission to be contradictory, to want softness and power simultaneously, to refuse the tiny boxes we’re supposed to neatly fold ourselves into. Permission to be 53 and still figuring it out, still desiring, still becoming.

I think Jill has gotten through her own spiritual evolution (a hero’s journey, her personal mythology perhaps……) that has not only led to a soulful life but made her an imperfect or “Wabi Sabi” feminine sage.

Confidence, compassion, pleasure, authenticity – these are the many facets of Jill Scott and I’m excited to see what’s next.

This is part of a two-part series on “unpunishable women”, that is women leading “agentic” (self-directed), empowered and resourced lives.

It was inspired by interviews recently given by Jill Scott and Tracee Ellis Ross.

READ PART 2 HERE:

I grew up watching Nigerian films the way many of us did: on scratched VCDs, satellite TV, and later streaming platforms. Nollywood was entertainment, but it was also instruction. It taught us what kind of women were acceptable, what ambition costs, and the price women pay for stepping outside prescribed roles.

Long before I had the language for patriarchy, I learned its rules through film. Whether it was power, money or independence, women who were depicted as “wanting too much” were rarely allowed peace. Their stories almost always ended in punishment, framed as consequence or “character development.”

Film is never neutral. Nollywood as a cultural force both in Nigeria and the African diaspora, wields soft power: it shapes values, polices behaviour, and quietly disciplines women through narrative repetition. While it often reflects social realities, it frequently stops short of interrogating the structures that produce women’s suffering. Instead, it reinforces them.

Across decades of storytelling, I have noticed two recurring tropes dominate the portrayal of career women: the “Margaret Thatcher” woman and the “Bad Wife.” Together, they form a narrative system that warns women against ambition and redirects them back toward domestication.

The “Margaret Thatcher” Woman

In Nigerian pop culture, calling a woman “Margaret Thatcher” is rarely neutral. The phrase is borrowed from the former British Prime Minister’s global reputation as the “Iron Lady,” but in Nigerian usage it has taken on a more gendered, dismissive meaning. It’s often used to describe women who are seen as too tough, too controlling, too ambitious: women who “fail” to perform softness alongside authority.

Nollywood has embraced this shorthand in its depiction of career women. In films and tv series, powerful women are introduced as emotionally distant, morally ambiguous, or socially deficient. Their authority is framed as excess.

They are successful, but never at ease. Respected, but never loved.

Traits praised in men (decisiveness, ambition, emotional restraint) are “pathologised” in these women. The narrative insists that something is missing.

By 2026, even films marketed as “modern” repeat this logic. In movies like A Sunday Affair (2023) and Love In Every Word (2025), professional women are framed as incomplete until romance enters the picture. Their emotional arc resolves not through self-actualisation or community, but through heterosexual coupling.

For instance, in the Netflix film “A Sunday Affair”, Uche and Toyin are two accomplished and mature women yet their friendship is tested when they both fall in love with and compete for the love of a married man. And while Love In Every Word (2025) was a viral hit last year, I couldn’t help but notice how Chioma (played by Nigerian actress BamBam) is “softened” and “humanised” only when she “submits” emotionally to Obiora.

The message is unmistakable: romance is the cure for female ambition.

Without male validation, they are portrayed as cold, bitter, or lonely. This trope does more than discourage women from leadership. It suggests that female authority itself is unnatural, something that must be neutralised or domesticated.

The “Bad Wife”

If the “Margaret Thatcher” woman is punished for ambition, the Bad Wife is punished for attempting balance.

This trope appears repeatedly in Nollywood domestic dramas. In films like Mr and Mrs (2012) and Trapped In Her World (2025), working wife and mothers are depicted as emotionally absent, distracted, or selfish. Their careers are framed as threats to family stability. For instance in the subplot of Mr and Mrs, Linda (played by Thelma Okoduwa-Ojiji) is a working wife whose high flying career provides for her household and her seemingly idyllic life comes to a halt when she finds out that her husband is having an affair with their domestic staff, Kate. The story frames Linda’s focus on her career as the cause of this infidelity.

When marriages collapse, blame is rarely shared. Husbands’ infidelity is often justified as a reaction to neglect. The woman’s work schedule becomes the silent villain.

What’s particularly insidious is how apology is demanded. These women are often forced to grovel - not for wrongdoing, but for having professional lives. Their redemption arc requires sacrifice: fewer hours at work, abandonment of ambition, or total recommitment to domestic labour.

And yet, the contradiction remains. Stay-at-home mothers are not left out of Nollywood’s narrative punishment as they are also frequently portrayed as lazy, dependent, or unfulfilled, ensuring women lose no matter what choice they make.

Career-focused men, by contrast, are praised as responsible providers. Their absence is noble. Women’s absence is neglect.

Even when working women are shown managing households through planning, delegating, organising, the films still label them negligent.

Domestic labour is invisible, while guilt and shame is constantly reinforced.

Domestication as Subjugation

These tropes are not accidental. They function as tools of social control.

By confining women to the home, Nollywood narratives limit freedom of movement, drain women’s time and energy, and discourage autonomy.

Even as Nollywood expands globally and improves technically, the gender politics remain stubbornly familiar. The aesthetics are modern; the ideology is not.

Women may work but never at the cost of male comfort.

Gendering Behaviour and creating a mental panopticon

Beyond the gendered depiction of roles, Nollywood polices behaviour.

Confidence, assertiveness, and directness are coded as masculine. Women in leadership are expected to be endlessly pleasant, emotionally available, and agreeable. Resistance is framed as disobedience. Assertiveness becomes arrogance.

Over time, these portrayals shape women’s self-perception. They encourage internalised oppression, learned helplessness, and self-policing. Women begin to shrink their desires before the world is able to.

Why This Matters

Nollywood doesn’t just tell stories, it shapes our world as Nigerians.

When films repeatedly punish women for ambition, they normalise female self-denial. They tell women to stay small, stay grateful, stay quiet.

But cinema can also be a site of resistance. To critique Nollywood is not to reject it: it is to demand better from a cultural force that shapes millions of lives.

This essay is part of my ongoing 8-week personal curriculum for Nigerian feminists and womanists, where I critically engage with books, films, research articles, and popular culture.

If you’d like access to the full curriculum spreadsheet, you can sign up via this link.

It’s a self-directed resource designed to be explored at your own pace.

Because our stories matter.

And so does how they’re told.