When Did I Stop?

Somewhere between the responsibilities and the deadlines and the becoming-an-adult-who-has-things-to-figure-out, I lost something I didn't notice I was losing.

Not dramatically. Just gradually. The way you stop doing things you love, not because you decided to stop, but because life kept adding things, and the soft, quiet joys were the easiest to put down.

I used to write. Not for anything. Not for anyone. Just because something in me needed to.

Because words were how I made sense of being alive. And then life got serious, and somehow writing started feeling like a luxury I hadn't earned yet.

I used to watch cartoons. Unbothered. Fully in it. Laughing at the same scenes. And then somewhere along the way, I started feeling like that was time I should be using for something more important.

I used to read. Disappear into a book for hours and come back feeling like I'd lived another life. And then the days got full, and the reading pile got tall, and I kept saying, "Soon."

Soon became never. And I didn't even notice.

There's something quietly devastating about realising that in the process of building a life, you slowly edited out the things that made you feel most like yourself. Not the big things. The small, tender, private things. The things that were never for anyone else.

I wonder what else I put down without realising.

I wonder if it's too late to pick it back up.

It isn't. I know it isn't.

But I'm still sitting with the question of when I decided that joy had to be earned.

-Oluwademilade from MANI