Some Days I Wonder

There are days I sit very quietly and ask myself a simple question.

Did I actually do this to myself?

Not in a dramatic way. Just casually. Usually while scrolling, or when the day is moving slower than expected, or when someone sends a voice note in the family group and I realise I have been in Canada for three years and I still cannot explain what a T4 is to my mother.

It starts small. Then the thoughts begin to stretch.

It does not help that everyone back home is eating.

You open Instagram and it is promotion announcements, new cars, new builds, people stepping into roles you recognise, people you worked with, people you trained. One person you sat next to at a workshop in 2019 just posted a photo of their office. Corner office. View. The kind of chair that suggests nobody questions your decisions.

You pause.

Not because you are not happy for them. You are happy for them. You are so happy for them that you like the post and close the app and stare at your ceiling for a while.

And that is when the real thoughts begin.

Because you look at your life here and it feels like you pressed reset on everything. The experience is still there, all of it, but the positioning is different. The progress is slower, more layered, less visible to anyone who is not you. You are essentially doing a speedrun of your twenties again, except you are forty-two and your knees hurt.

Then, in the middle of all this heavy thinking, one thought just walks in like it owns the place.

Maybe this relocation was the handiwork of village people.

I laugh every time it arrives. Because it is genuinely ridiculous. And also because it is, in that moment, the only explanation that makes structural sense. How else do you explain willingly leaving something stable to come and start explaining yourself again from the beginning? In a cold country? Where you need a credit history to rent a flat but you need a flat to build a credit history?

Village people did not just clap for this. They organised. They had a meeting.

The thought passes. It always passes.

And then, just as quickly, I remember why I came.

Not for a title or a corner office with that kind of chair. For something that takes longer to name and longer to build. Long-term stability. Different air for my children to breathe. Opportunities that do not depend on who is currently in whose good books. The kind of things that do not post on Instagram because they are still in progress.

I have started to understand that comparison is a bad accountant. It shows you one line of someone else's spreadsheet and calls it the full picture. What I see on my phone is a moment, a highlight, a carefully chosen angle. What I am living is still unfolding, which means it does not photograph well yet.

Some days I feel certain. Like every slow, unglamorous step is going somewhere real and the patience will be worth it.

Other days I question everything, including the decisions I was once completely sure about, including this paragraph, including my life choices, including whether I should have just stayed and bought land in Lekki when it was still affordable.

But I think that is part of it.

The in-between space. Where things have not fully aligned yet. Where you are still building, still adjusting, still trying to make sense of where you are relative to where you thought you would be by now.

On those days when the thoughts get louder, I let them talk. I laugh a little. I question a little. I remind myself that the village people, if they were involved, clearly underestimated me.

And then I continue.

Because I did not come this far to be defeated by a credit score.