How I Feel
How do you feel about the deaths in Gaza? The war in Ukraine? The Diddy news? Trump vs. Kamala? Elon Musk or Taylor Swift? Beyoncé, Jay Z, and the illuminati? How often should we shower? Are you in love? Have you been in love? Do you have friends? Should you have more than one best friend?
Some of these are questions I’ve asked, others I couldn’t care less about. I ask questions because I’m genuinely curious about you. I want to understand, but I don’t think you deserve or can be trusted to understand me. Honestly, I like controversy. It’s new, it’s spicy, and it’s refreshing in a world that demands conformity. But I’ll never share my controversy with you because I don’t think you trust yourself enough to resist judging me.
Today, however, I am answering the question I never answer: How do I feel? I won’t give you the satisfaction of feedback on this, as these feelings are fleeting—they belong to this moment, not to some permanent truth about me. Engage with my words if you want, but keep your distance from me. Tomorrow, I might feel differently.
How I Feel in This Moment
Right now, I feel like I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve been blessed with so much potential, and every day I push myself to maximize it. Wasting that potential would be a disservice. But I’m tired—tired of people telling me what I can’t do, people who can’t see how little of their own lives they control. “No, you can’t date her, she’s Muslim, and you’re Christian.” “No, you can’t work at Google as a mechanical engineer.” “No, you shouldn’t get your MBA two years after college.” It’s always “No.”
These people, ruled by their own limitations, now want to impose those limits on me. That’s why I don’t tell them my plans. I just do them. If dreaming big makes me delusional, then I want to remain forever delusional. Being at Rice was once a delusion for a Nigerian kid with a high school dropout dad, but here I am. So don’t tell me how to dream.
How I Feel Most of the Time
I’ve come to believe that happiness and peace are relative, fleeting, and found only in the present. But for some reason, we sacrifice the peace of the moment for a future moment we’ll likely sacrifice too. Take note, I’m not talking about pleasure—there’s a difference. Sacrificing peace is like losing the sleep you need to function, while sacrificing pleasure is like putting away your phone before bed even when you crave that last dopamine hit. You can sacrifice your pleasure all you want, but definitely not your peace.
How I Feel About the Future
I feel hopeful, like life is a wave of ups and downs. We’ve been in the “down” for too long—Ebola, COVID, monkeypox, bank collapses, deaths, loss of hope. Surely, a “high” must come soon. I feel like I’m on the verge of building, repairing, and inspiring. Sometimes, I feel like I can heal humanity, and other times, I beg the universe for forgiveness, feeling the need to be healed myself. I’m hopeful for brighter days after the rain, but I also dread the rain that’s sure to follow the sunshine. Life is fleeting and beautiful, but it’s also sad. Any of us could die tomorrow, and the world would keep spinning. I’m not asking to be mourned forever; I just want to be treated as more than an insect while I’m here.
How I Feel About the Past
The past? I feel like I’ve always carried a chip on my shoulder. I never got to be a kid, and now that I recognize its value, I’m not allowed to be one. Another example of where decisions were made for me with repercussions I am now left to bare. I also remember my enemies gathered to plot my downfall, and some days I want them to burn for it, while other days, I want to heal their souls and give us all a purpose greater than revenge.
How I Feel About People
I feel like people have forgotten how to be people. Everyone’s focused on goals and dreams, and once they achieve them, it’s on to the next—like that’s all there is. People forget they exist within a larger network, that they can’t exist without the people around them. Heroes need villains. Billionaires had teachers and communities that sparked their ambitions, but somewhere along the line, they forget to look back. They get so locked into their goals that their superpower of focus becomes their greatest weakness. But I don’t blame them—how are we supposed to find balance when it has no formula?
We expect people to choose love over ambition, but ambition feeds and protects them. Who decides when forgiveness is too much or punishment too little? We judge each other for things we don’t even understand ourselves. We complain about the scarcity that we created, and then someone profits from solving it. You just gotta love people, right, even when we evolved out of love for survival, perhaps?
I can be any one of those types of people described above at any moment, allowing my bubbling identities to unwrap and switch tracks but I am judged for embracing that spectrum instead of being fixed on it. You just gotta love people, right?
How I Feel About Religion
Religion, to me, gives purpose and guidance, but it can also be abusive and controlling. Two things can be true at once. Can’t it? I’m tired of the constant divisions, even if the cause is good. I’m not asking for religion to disappear, but I do want a break from it. Sometimes I wonder if it even matters whether there’s a God, and if you’re so pressed to know, maybe ask yourself why. What truth about yourself are you avoiding? I think we created Gods because we crave stories of purpose.
I get aggravated when people follow blindly, but I also get aggravated when people are too logical, ignoring emotions. Maybe we all need enlightenment, and it’s okay if we never find it, but at least we tried.
How I Feel About Friendships and Relationships
I feel like we should invest in friendships the way we invest in romantic relationships. People are lonely because we’ve been brainwashed into individualism. We lean too heavily on romantic partners because we’ve abandoned our friends and family. Imagine if we distributed all that emotional weight—between yourself, your partner, your friends, your family. Everyone’s load would be lighter.
How I Feel About Family
Family is fine when it’s based on blood ties, but that only lasts so long. If you can’t form friendships with your family members by adulthood, that relationship is a situationship. It takes effort and intentionality, just like any relationship. And if we taught this at the family level, maybe romantic relationships and friendships would be easier to navigate.
How I Feel About Politics
There’s no winning in politics. To be a good political leader, you’d have to let go of yourself entirely for the sake of your constituents, which is too much to ask of anyone. We forget that to lead is to love your community as much as you love yourself, but we elect people who don’t even love themselves. You just gotta love people, right?
How I Feel About Careers and Professional Pursuits
We work, we accumulate, but do we ever ask why, for whom or how much is too much? If the roles were reversed between the rich and poor, would the new poor expect empathy from the new rich? Would the new rich remember to be as empathetic as they once hoped others would be? I appreciate humanity but to be honest is to acknowledge that new situations seem to erase our memories as quickly as dye discolors water.
And that’s how I feel—conflicted, calm, exhausted, hopeful, aggravated, and inspired—often all at once. But tomorrow, I might feel something else entirely. I never really cared to answer the questions society frequently asks, so I answered the ones that matter to me.