06/04/2026
𝑰 𝑭𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒅 𝑴𝒚 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒍𝒇𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝑭𝒐𝒓 𝒀𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒔 – 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝑰 𝑮𝒐𝒕 𝑭𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒂𝒘 𝑾𝒉𝒐 𝑺𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝑾𝒂𝒔
The first time a client sent me ₦482,400 for words I had written from my table in Surulere, I sat down. Two years earlier, I had stood in a flat in Yaba, jobless and alone, staring at a missing pot and wondering whether my worth had walked out with my payslip.
The money came on a rainy Friday evening. I had sent the final draft of a website project and was pretending not to panic. When my phone screen lit up, my hands trembled. I read the message three times before it felt real. It was not only the amount. It was proof. I looked around my flat and saw the things I had bought bit by bit with money from writing: the second-hand sofa, the curtains, the kettle on the stove, and the shelf of books. None of it was luxurious. Every bit of it mattered because it was mine.
Then I remembered another room and another silence. I remembered Chioma's suitcase scraping across the tiles in Yaba. I remembered her lifting plates from the cupboard as if she had paid for them. I remembered the key she left on the table without meeting my eyes. On Tuesday morning, I was a man with an office job.
By Thursday night, I was unemployed, abandoned, and too ashamed to tell anyone the woman I loved no longer thought I was worth staying for. Back then, I thought losing her had finished me. Later, I understood the truth. The job loss exposed my fear. Chioma's departure exposed her heart. And that payment in Surulere proved I had never been empty. I had been measuring my value in the wrong currency.
My name is Joseph Ayodeji and before everything collapsed, my life looked steady enough from the outside. For two years, I lived with my girlfriend, Chioma Okeke, in a one-bedroom flat in Yaba. It was small, with cream walls, a narrow balcony, and a tap that always needed a hard twist before it stopped dripping. Still, I loved that place because I paid for it myself.
I worked for a private firm on Lagos Island, preparing reports, drafting letters, and refining documents nobody else seemed able to write clearly. My salary was not large, but it was steady, and I wore that steadiness like armour. In my family, being a dependable man mattered. I had grown up hearing that a man proves himself by providing, so every bill I paid made me feel secure, needed, and adult. Chioma never contributed anything regularly.
Whenever I raised it gently, she would smile and say, "I go contribute later." Later never came. I told myself love was not an audit. I told myself that support came in different forms. Deep down, I knew I was avoiding the harder truth. I was afraid that if I pushed too hard, I would discover Chioma liked my effort more than she loved me. She enjoyed the comfort my salary created. We bought takeaway on good weekends.
I sent her fare when she asked for it. Her phone never lacked data. Sometimes she joked, "I no fit stay with man wey no get anything." I cannot stay with a man who has nothing. I always laughed with her, but those words stayed behind after the joke ended. They made me work harder, spend more, and ignore my own unease. Long before Chioma, people had always said I had a gift for writing.
At work, colleagues often brought me their applications to polish. Friends asked me to rewrite their CVs. I never saw it as a career. I believed my real security lay in my payslip. That belief broke first. I ignored that warning until it became my reality. The morning I lost my job felt ordinary until it did not. I boarded a danfo from Yaba before sunrise, half asleep, thinking about an unfinished report and whether I had enough money for lunch in town.
At around ten, my supervisor, Mr Adeyemi, called me into his office. I assumed he wanted changes to a document. Instead, he closed the door and told me the company was cutting staff. They had removed my position with immediate effect. He said other words after that, but I barely heard them. There was talk of restructuring, pressure, appreciation, and final dues. I nodded, took the envelope Mr Adeyemi handed me, and thanked him. Even now, I hate that I thanked him.
I walked out into Lagos Island carrying a paper envelope that had just split my life into before and after. Outside, the city looked offensively normal. Buses roared. Hawkers shouted. Office workers hurried past with coffee and purpose. I stood there near Broad Street feeling as though someone had erased me from the world. I went straight home. On that danfo ride back to Yaba, I kept telling myself one thing. Chioma would comfort me.
I had carried our life for two years. Surely, at my lowest moment, she would at least stand beside me emotionally. When I told her, she did not come near me. She folded her arms and asked, "So wetin we go do now? You want make I dey sponsor your life?" The question stunned me because she had never financed anything in that house. I said I would start applying for jobs immediately. I reminded her I had some terminal dues coming. I said we would manage for a while.
She clicked her tongue and looked away. That night, she barely spoke. I sat at the table updating my CV as she scrolled through her phone, as though my unemployment were something I had done to her. We slept in the same bed, back to back in silence. The next two days felt like a slow, deliberate humiliation.
I left early each morning, carrying printed CVs to offices, shops, and reception desks around town. Some people promised to call. Some gave me the kind of sympathetic smile that feels worse than rejection. By evening, I came home tired, dusty, and still trying to sound hopeful. I kept saying, maybe tomorrow.
In 48 Hours Chioma had no patience for hope. She complained about her depleted internet bundle. She asked whether I expected the landlord to wait forever. Once, while I was filling in an application, she muttered that she had not signed up to suffer because someone else had failed to plan. Another time, she asked whether I had hidden savings I was refusing to use, as if my fear itself were suspicious.
On the second evening, I came back and found her packing. Clothes covered the bed. Shoes stood near the suitcase. Then I saw Chioma was also taking plates, mugs, and one of the pots I had bought in Mushin. I asked whether she was serious. She zipped the suitcase and said, "I did not come here to struggle." No tears. No apology. No shame. She placed the key on the table and walked out.
When the door shut, the flat felt stripped of more than furniture. I sat under the weak bulb until midnight, trying to understand how I had lost my job on Tuesday morning and my relationship by Thursday evening. That week taught me how quickly some forms of love expire. After Chioma left, life became hard with embarrassing speed. In the first month, I paid rent late and lied that a bank delay had held me up.
By the second month, I had sold my old smartphone and bought a cheaper one with a cracked corner. Then the television went off. After that, I removed the bed frame and dragged the mattress to the floor. Each sale looked small in public and huge in private.
I applied for every job I could find. I tried office jobs in town, warehouse positions along Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, reception roles, retail counter work, and delivery jobs. Some days, I trekked from Ojodu to town because I could no longer afford the fare.
I cut meals down to tea and puff-puff in the morning, then eba and beans at a buka if the day went well. Rock bottom came on a Tuesday evening when the electricity tokens ran out, and I had to borrow money from my cousin Tunde merely to keep the lights on.
I stood in the dark flat with my phone torch on, ashamed and exhausted, and realised I had spent months waiting for rescue from outside myself. That night, I asked a different question. Not who would hire me, but what I still had that nobody could strip from me. The answer came immediately. I could write.
Then I helped a woman in our building draft a business profile for her okrika stall. After that, I wrote captions for a cosmetics seller in Oshodi and polished a personal statement for a college applicant in Akoka. I texted former colleagues, posted my services online, and accepted every small assignment I could get. The money was modest at first. But it was money earned from a skill that belonged to me.
That changed my posture before it changed my bank balance. What I had dismissed for years as just a natural gift became my livelihood, slowly at first, then steadily. I had called writing my side ability when, all along, it was the strongest thing left in my hands and mind. It was still mine. Once the first small jobs came in, more work followed through referrals. A job seeker whose CV I rewrote told his cousin. That cousin sent a friend who needed help with a scholarship application.
A trader whose captions I had written asked whether I could also create product descriptions for her online page. Then, a small business owner in Victoria Island asked me to rewrite his website because someone had liked my wording on another project. I said yes to almost everything, then worked late into the night teaching myself how to deliver better work. I read about copywriting and structure. I studied websites.
I learned how to invoice properly, how to ask clearer questions, and how to edit without flattening the life out of a sentence. I also learned that discipline matters as much as talent. Writing was not only an inspiration. It was deadlines, revision, consistency, and the humility to improve. The income did not become steady in one dramatic leap. Some weeks still frightened me. I chased late payments, counted coins, and wondered whether I was building something real or only surviving creatively. However, the pattern changed for the better.
One client became three. Three became seven. I started covering my basic expenses through repeat work. Then my rent, then my savings goals. Within a year, I was earning more reliably from writing than I had earned in my old office job. The first thing I did was open a proper savings account and build an emergency fund. I never wanted fear to corner me like that again. The second thing I did was move out of Yaba. I found a brighter flat in Surulere. It was still modest, but every curtain, cup, chair, and spoon inside it came from work no one else could claim.
The biggest change was not financial. Writing gave me back my confidence. I stopped seeing myself as a man whom people abandoned. I started seeing myself as the man who had rebuilt his life from the one skill still standing after everything else fell apart.
She wanted to know whether I was doing well now. I did not respond. I did not need apologies, explanations, or a curious attempt to re-enter my life. My boundary had become simple. Anyone who only values me in comfort does not get access to me in hardship. That was the only answer I owed. Looking back, I no longer think losing my job ruined my life. It revealed it. It revealed how much of my identity I had tied to a salary, a title, and the illusion that being the provider automatically made me secure.
It revealed how easily I had mistaken dependence for partnership. Most painfully, it revealed that I had been waiting for employers and lovers to tell me what I was worth, even though I had carried a valuable skill for years. I used to think writing was too natural to count. Because it came easily, I assumed it was ordinary. I respected the office more than the ability.
I respected the payslip more than the craft. It took unemployment, shame, hunger, and heartbreak to force me into a clearer truth. A gift does not become less powerful because it feels familiar in your own hands. I also learned that support without boundaries can turn into self-erasure. Loving someone should not require you to ignore every sign that they only enjoy you when life is easy. Real partnership does not disappear the moment money does.
The wrong person will make you feel small at your weakest point. The right response is not always revenge. Sometimes it is rebuilding so honestly that their absence stops mattering. Sometimes dignity grows quietly, in the choices you make after the worst moment has already happened.
The lesson I carry now is simple. Never build your whole identity on something another person or institution can remove overnight. Build it also on what lives in your mind, your hands, your discipline, and your character. Build it on the part of you that can still create, adapt, and stand up when comfort disappears.
If everything external disappeared tomorrow, what part of you would still know how to begin again?
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