Every year, I meet a stranger. She has my name, my memories, and my reflection in the mirror. Yet somehow, she is never quite the same person I was before. One of those strangers was thirteen years old. She believed love had to be earned. Not demanded. Not expected. Earned. She thought good grades would earn it. Obedience would earn it. Being polite, agreeable, and easy to manage would earn it. She believed that if she became everything others wanted her to be, she would finally be enough. So she learned to stay quiet. When she disagreed, she swallowed her words. When she wanted something different, she pushed the thought away. Being liked felt safer than being honest. Being accepted felt more important than being understood. For years, she carried an invisible scale. Every achievement added weight to one side. Every mistake added weight to the other. At the end of each day, she measured herself and wondered whether she had done enough to deserve appreciation. The strange thing about chasing approval is that there is never a finish line. No matter how much she achieved, there was always something more to prove. Then life did what life often does. It asked questions she could not answer with obedience. Questions about who she was, what she believed. Questions about whether a person without achievements was somehow worth less than everyone else. For the first time, she stopped searching for answers in other people and started searching for them within herself. The answers did not arrive all at once. They came slowly, through mistakes, through disappointment, through realizing that being loved by everyone is impossible and being understood by everyone is unnecessary. Most importantly, they came through one simple realization: A person's value is not something they earn. It is something they already possess. Today, when I look back at that thirteen-year-old girl, I do not judge her. I understand her. She was trying to find her place in the world using the only map she had. But I am no longer her. I speak when I have something to say. I allow myself to have opinions. I care less about fitting perfectly into other people's expectations and more about remaining true to my own values. The girl who once wanted her future written by the hands of others now wants to hold the pen herself. And perhaps that is why I love meeting strangers. Because every year, another version of me arrives. She questions things I once accepted. She sees possibilities I once ignored. She teaches me something the previous version could not understand. A year from now, I will meet another stranger. I do not know what she will believe. I do not know what fears she will leave behind. I do not know what lessons she will learn. But I hope she remembers what it took us years to discover: We were never meant to earn our right to matter. We always had it.

A sudden global pandemic spirals out of control and then leads to lockdowns across major cities. What does that leave someone with? Nothing but a trail of disruption. For me the situation was a cocktail of activities and opportunities I had never dreamed about either doing or not doing. So here I was, this Nigerian lady of twenty-three trying to figure out my ‘new' life. Starting a relationship was never, ever part of my considerations. So how then did it eventually happen? Educational institutions had gone on break, most businesses and establishments asked to closed down or restrict opening hours and everyone ordered to stay indoors as much as possible to contain the spreading viral disease called COVID-19. But alone at home with little of my life the same as it was before the crisis, my world had transformed into something strange. I was at home doing nothing much except reading my books, catching up with old friends in town through social media and helping around with a little renovation with my siblings. Finding a traditional job that I could engage myself with around my neighborhood and beyond proved futile. It simply was a disaster. No one was hiring anyone new for a job. However, four months into my university break, I found something to do at home that I should say was fascinating: online freelance work. How I got into such a job sometimes makes me wonder but it all started with a friend of mine back from secondary school called Felix. He had sent me a Facebook message asking if I could help him out with some writing gigs. After my initial negative reply which was based on my little experience with creative writing, I agreed to help him. Back in secondary school, Felix was the most captivating of all the boys in my class and I considered him the most brilliant. Once in a while he would top the class but his periodic genius mind wasn't what started our friendship back then. Rather, it was his love for writing and drawing that got my attention. Some probing and demanding on my part made him finally take me as his apprentice. Weeks later, just as I was making some progress with these creative skills, I decided to quit. My love interest in art had gone and in its stead a close friendship had formed between me and Felix. I didn't feel I had it in me to be an artist of any sort or so I thought. Still I occasionally practiced when I needed a break from some stressful things. My first client was a lady, Felix's friend. She requested for a drawing of her boyfriend ahead of his birthday coming up in two weeks. A simple but unique piece of art was my first product in this new world of commerce and it was highly appreciated by many. I did many more interesting gigs after that but the most heartwarming was a love letter I wrote for a girl whose father had survived COVID-19. She cried after reading it stating it was the most love filled message she had read in a long time. Felix had told me about it in the happiest voice and for once in a long while I was moved by that knowledge. Many times I had to refer to the internet for tips on how to go about some projects. And like a mentor that he was, Felix was there to guide me through it all. He shared tips, experience, techniques with me that would help bring better results than the last projects. A year later since I started this new journey I found myself not so enthusiastic about it. It's like I had lost my love and interest for this phase and experience of my life that I felt so withdrawn. True, it was very demanding especially on my creative abilities but I sadly realized I was not in my most unique and comfortable zone. And so like years before, I decided to quit. I sent Felix a message in June, 2021, thanking him for everything: the teaching, support, advice and of course friendship. I told him in the nicest way that I wasn't ready to continue down this road of entrepreneurship, As a second-year nursing student my future career still obsessed me and I did not want to let that go. I did make a request to him that I wanted to be his official business partner in the art industry in future. More of a inactive one I reasoned. Sadly, he did not give a reply when I expected. I was hurt. I imagined he also had the same feeling of disappointment despite the confidence and encouragement he had given me and I still let him down. Some weeks later he responded. “I would gladly have you as my official business partner. Would you please accept my proposal to be my girlfriend?” he wrote back to me. Shock and surprise hit me as I digested the meaning of the message. I had a number of male friends but I had never dated or had a boyfriend before. This really was a first for me. I sent him an affirmative reply teasingly asking if he has had a girlfriend before. He said yes: me, in those days when we were in secondary school. And so that's how my love journey began with a guy called Felix. And till now, we are still going on strong in our relationship.

Looking at the mirror, I see myself with a sense of peace today. Devoid of any makeup or accessory, late at night, my reflection smiles back at me. Sometimes it is a smile of joy and victory, sometimes of heart-wrenching sadness. But these is always an odd sort of comfort, like the feeling of slipping into your favorite pair of worn out pajamas. Or the feeling of coming back home after a long, tiring day. This solace was earned, not gifted. I was born as a confident and happy child. Never really caring about my looks, I do not remember ever worrying about how people saw me. My teenage years were not so carefree, however. They were tainted by remarks about how my ugly self did not deserve any company, let alone sympathy. I looked at the mirror then too, but with feelings of contempt and despair. My confidence hit rock-bottom. I did things to myself I am not proud of. I have always had long hair, now I hid my face behind it. Walking through the school corridors, I hung my head low. I had few friends; people distanced themselves from me as if I carried an infectious disease. It can take years of contemplation to make a change happen, but in hindsight you can always find a turning point that acted as the catalyst. My turning point came in the form of a random woman in a random convenience store. She kept stealing glances at me, making me extremely conscious of my appearance. Just when I could no longer bear the scrutiny and was about to bolt, she walked over to me and said in broken English, “You're very pretty.” I stared at her, dumbfounded. What was this strange woman saying? My face was bare; my hair, which I consider my best physical feature, was tied in a bun. She looked over me once again, then said in a decisive tone, “Yes, very beautiful.” She waited a few seconds for me to make a reaction, during which I barely managed to gather my wits and mumbled a faint thank you. Then she left, leaving me extremely confused among aisles of snacks and scattered thoughts. I believe in miracles, I am forced to believe in them since that incident. Now whether the miracle came to me or I made it happen was another question. I have reasons to think that the whole thing was a figment of my imagination. My brain could have simply conjured this up to pull myself out of the pathetic state I was in. I do not remember a thing about the woman; her face, her clothes, her voice, nothing. Just the words. If you are thinking I suddenly discovered my hidden beauty, got a wardrobe upgrade and showed the world what a catch I was, then I apologize for being the cause of disappointment, but no such thing happened. I did not feel particularly beautiful after that encounter, but it did eventually bring clarity to my thoughts. For one, there was no great change in my appearance that could have suddenly sparked such hatred among my peers. Sure, my body was changing thanks to puberty, but my face was essentially the same as it was before I was bullied. Thinking hard, I traced back to the inception of my suffering: a certain comment from a mean classmate who was always jealous of me for some unfathomable reason. Historically speaking, being the subject of envy has never worked out in my favor. At that time, the consequences of a single snide remark were two whole years of self-hate and being treated like an outcast. It took me months to come to terms with the fact that the harassment had nothing to do with the way I looked. More than a year later, I finally learned to fight back and recovered my lost self-confidence. I did nothing to change my appearance. This experience has greatly shaped the way I feel about beauty as an adult. In my 22 years of existence I have been fortunate enough to live in three different countries and meet countless beautiful people, as well as a few ugly ones. Before you jump the gun, let me clarify that beauty, or the lack of it, does not simply refer to the so-called golden ratio or the symmetry of a person's face. At least not in my dictionary. To me, the most beautiful person in the world would be empathetic. Confident, yet not arrogant. Bold, yet not disrespectful. Physically, well, there is no single way to be beautiful. There is no denying the fact that the first thing you see in a person is his/her face. It is out there for the world to see, and it is convenient to judge thanks to the many beauty standards society has imposed upon us. The problem arises when we take the easy way and try to figure out a person's character based on his/her looks. Stop. Because this is where you should stop. Not only are you putting unfair expectations on that person, but you are also making a fool out of yourself. I now listen to the people worthy of my love and admiration to evaluate my beauty. Most importantly, I listen to myself. Do I think I am beautiful? Physically, I consider myself just normal, and I love it. But truly? I am on my way there, though I still have a long way to go.