A Year In Motion

A Tribute to 2025

Photo by Vinh Thang on Unsplash

I have been thinking about how to speak of this year without turning it into a victory lap or a confession booth. Neither feels quite right. Especially because of the ways in which it ebbed and flowed. The year did not ask to be conquered, and I am not interested in narrating survival as spectacle. What it did ask of me, insistently, was attention. Attention to work, to fatigue, to my body, and to the slow rearranging of my interior life. This was a big writing year for me, but it was also a big year in the quieter, harder-to-name sense. I began my second year in the PhD and, with it, the early, tentative thinking toward a dissertation. Not the dissertation as document, but as a set of questions that started following me around, interrupting my reading, leaning over my shoulder while I wrote other things or when I am speaking with friends. I can feel the shape of a long argument forming, even if I don’t yet have the language for it. There is something unsettling about this stage of scholarly life, when thought begins to outpace articulation. You know what you are circling, but you cannot yet name it without flattening it, without making it banal or even redundant.

Alongside my academic work, this year I wrote insistently about the African literary ecosystem. About prizes and platforms, circulation and neglect, about what is rewarded and what is left to quietly disappear. These essays were not just critical exercises. They felt like ways of situating myself within a tradition that is at once expansive and precarious. For many of the essays, the thoughts I expressed were not in any way new, but larger formation of sentiments held for years seeking language. At the same time, through the Heartland Journalism Fellowship, I wrote essays about what I have come to think of as the fugitive positionalities of migrants. Small, often unrecorded gestures that make life in transit bearable. A shared meal, a ride offered without explanation, the careful way strangers learn how to pronounce your name. Writing these pieces required a different attentiveness. Less distance, more listening. Less theory, more texture.

Moving between these modes of writing was generative, but it was also exhausting. Somewhere in the middle and towards the end of the year, burnout stopped being an abstract concept and became a bodily fact. I felt it in my resistance to the page, in the way sentences that once came easily now demanded negotiation. I felt it in the quiet dread that accompanied opening my laptop. There is a particular shame attached to being burnout in academic spaces, especially for those of us trained to read endurance as virtue. I tried, for a while, to muscle through it. But it did not work. Eventually, I did something that felt both simple and radical. At first, I surrendered to the exhaustion, and after, I asked for extensions. I explained that I was struggling. And I received grace. This is worth naming, if only because it cuts against so many of the stories we tell ourselves about institutions and authority. The semester did not become easier after that, but it became survivable. I kept working, kept showing up, even when it felt like I was moving through mud. By the end, I was depleted, but I was still standing. That felt like its own kind of knowledge.

What surprised me most this year was not the volume of work I produced, but the emotional work that ran quietly beneath it. I became increasingly aware of how much I use labor, especially intellectual labor, as a way of deflecting from the political realities of my positionality. There is a temptation to call this avoidance, but that would be too neat, too self-accusatory. What it felt like instead was shelter. Reading, writing, teaching, thinking. These were ways of staying upright in a world that seemed intent on making certain lives provisional, contingent, endlessly explainable. The realities I am referring to are not static. They shift with policy, with elections, with the slow hardening of public language. They are the realities of being a migrant, of living inside systems that remind you, subtly and often, that your presence is conditional. I did not always want to look at these conditions directly. There were days when it felt safer to bury myself in archives, in drafts, in deadlines. Work became a way of postponing dread, of turning anxiety into something that could at least be scheduled.

This is not a confession offered lightly. I am wary of the ease with which vulnerability can become currency. But it feels important to say that much of what I wrote this year was written against a backdrop of quiet fear. Fear not always named as such, but felt as tension, as vigilance, as the sense that the ground beneath one’s feet could shift without warning. In that sense, productivity was never just ambition. It was a coping mechanism. This year I lived in fear. I moved forward in fear. And yet my resolve to believe in our capacity to love did not diminish. The fear was not abstract. It announced itself in moments when the future felt suddenly fragile. I had a couple of near-death encounters, a few near misses that recalibrated my sense of time. Once, I was bundled into the back of a police jeep for a mistake I knew nothing about. Another time, I was involved in a car accident that totaled the car I was in. In each of those moments, the thought arrived fully formed. This is it. Everything I have known and built, everything I am striving to build and to know, is about to vanish.

What lingered after those moments was not drama but clarity. A sharpened awareness of how thin the membrane is between continuity and rupture. How much of what we call a life depends on the ordinary fact of being allowed to continue. Returning to work after these incidents felt strange, almost audacious. And yet, it was also grounding. Writing became a way of re-entering time, of insisting that thought and care could still be practiced even when certainty had been shaken. Thinking about this emotional state kept returning me to memory, specifically to the Nigeria of the 1990s. I was a child then, old enough to sense that something was wrong, too young to understand its full architecture. What I remember most clearly is not any single event, but an atmosphere. The shaking of heads when adults spoke in low voices. The gnashing of teeth at the radio. The way silence stretched. There were riots, military dictators, an ambient fear that seemed to seep into everyday life. Even if you did not know the names of those in power, you felt their presence in the air.

Living now, elsewhere, under different but related pressures, I recognize that feeling. The sense of waiting without knowing for what. The instinct to keep your head down, to do your work well, to endure. Back then, reprieve eventually arrived for many Nigerians, not all at once, not evenly, but enough to be felt. It did not erase what had been endured, but it loosened the grip of fear. Remembering that history has become, for me, a way of imagining survival beyond the present moment. What the 1990s taught many of us, even as children, was how to live inside extended uncertainty. Silence was not merely the absence of speech; it was a strategy. People learned when not to talk, what not to name, how to communicate through gesture and implication. Fear reorganized daily life, but it did so unevenly, creeping into ordinary routines rather than announcing itself outright. School continued. Markets opened. Jokes were told, even if laughter sometimes felt brittle. Life went on, not because things were well, but because stopping was not an option.

I think often about how formative that kind of endurance can be. How it trains the body and mind to normalize instability, to mistake vigilance for composure. In retrospect, I can see how those early lessons linger. How they resurface now, in the way I respond to contemporary political pressures with an almost reflexive discipline. Keep working. Keep reading. Stay useful. Do not draw unnecessary attention. These are not instructions anyone has given me explicitly, but they feel deeply learned. And yet, the end of that decade also offered a counter-lesson. Reprieve, when it came, was not cinematic. There were no grand reversals, no clean endings. What arrived instead was a gradual loosening. A sense that the future, while still uncertain, was no longer entirely foreclosed. People spoke more freely. Laughter softened. The air itself seemed to change. Looking back, I realize how much hope can reside in such small shifts, how relief often announces itself quietly. Holding that memory alongside the present has helped me resist despair, even as the world seems determined to rehearse its worst instincts. It reminds me that political climates, no matter how entrenched they appear, are not eternal. That fear, too, has a shelf life, even if it feels endless while you are inside it. This is not optimism in the naive sense. It is historical awareness, hard-earned and unsentimental.

If this year taught me anything, it is that endurance is rarely a solitary achievement, even when it feels that way from the inside. The work I was able to do was scaffolded by others, by mentors who offered flexibility, by editors who read with care, by friends who checked in without demanding performance. We lean on one another quietly, sometimes without names for what we are offering. This recognition has reshaped how I think about gratitude. I am grateful, yes, for the opportunity to continue my education, for the time and space to write, for the stubborn curiosity that keeps pulling me back to the page. But I am also grateful for the infrastructures, formal and informal, that made persistence possible. The extension granted. The conversation that steadied me. The shared understanding that productivity cannot always come at the cost of the self.

Looking ahead, I do not imagine the coming year will be gentler. The classes will be demanding. The dissertation will begin to ask for clearer commitments. The political conditions that produce fear and vigilance show no signs of resolving themselves neatly. But I find myself less interested in bracing for impact than in staying in relation. In learning how to endure without hardening, how to remain porous to others even as the world rewards withdrawal. If there is a lesson I carry from both the Nigeria of my childhood and the present moment, it is that reprieve is often prepared for long before it arrives, assembled through ordinary acts of persistence and mutual recognition. So I end this year not with certainty, but with commitment. A commitment to the work, yes, but also to the people and histories that give that work its stakes. I remain grateful for the ability to keep moving forward and learning forward, even when the direction of the world feels misaligned with those pursuits. Notwithstanding the obvious difficulties, both present and forthcoming, I stay with the in-between. And I do so knowing that I am not alone.

Please read my newest installments on Olongo Africa, Isele Magazine and The Common Reader.

Till the next year.