Managing your Mental Health During a Pandemic

‘I’m scared’ said Piglet ‘A story will help’ said Pooh ‘How?’ ‘Oh. Don’t you know? Stories make your heart grow’ Life is so weird, so funny, so fleeting. Here today, gone tomorrow. For once in my life, in my journey to become a better version of myself, I created a vision board for the year, […]

Mental Health Issues Apply to the Average Nigerian

We need to have more conversations around mental illness. It’s 3.11am in the morning and my phone is blowing up, I curse under my breath and pick up. It’s my friend Clarine and she’s breathing heavily and crying intermittently. The sleep clears from my eyes and I’m struggling to decode what she’s saying. She says; […]

Coping with Loss During the Holidays

I remember like it was yesterday. I awoke to a startling call that my brother had not returned home from the previous night. We waited to hear from him only to learn that he passed away in the middle of the night. He died on the eve of Thanksgiving. I couldn’t believe it because we […]

No Man is an Island

Mental health issues are a huge concern in Africa, and as a Nigerian, it is safe to say we do ourselves a huge disservice in allowing ourselves to be blinded to it. The more we open up to discourse about what is really happening to people, instead of leaning solely on religion to take care […]

Because I love, I grieve

People experience loss daily. The grief felt as a result of loss is hard to deal with – let alone discuss and process. And, as a Nigerian-American, my experience has been that we often don’t talk about our emotions and many times veer away from topics that lend themselves to discussions about mental health. Unfortunately, […]

Bound No More

A number of aspects of Nigerian culture have maintained themselves as taboo throughout generations. Any iteration of mental crisis, like the suggestion that a loved one may be battling an unhealthy psychological state is often unacknowledged or stigmatized, and therefore not talked about in the ways that point towards healing. In engaging this topic we […]