2024: The Year of Magical Thinking
In 2024, I took some time at the end of each month to write down what life had felt like. This capturing is what eventually became this piece. I put it out a few days ago but felt I still had more to share about the year — in concrete, more practical terms. It’s why I’m writing this piece.
I have journaled since I was 13. As a child who had once been called “too sensitive” by a classmate, I took to writing my feelings in journals. I still keep these books, sprawled in cursive, leaking emotions about events, people, and things that have marked my life. The journal for 2024 was the first of these books I gave a name. In coloured marker, I titled it: The Year of Magical Thinking.
The idea was simple, stolen from a Joan Didion memoir, long before I read it and felt guilty because her idea of a magical year was very different from mine. I wanted a year that encouraged me to dream, to think big. I wrote down three values to lean on for 2024: creativity, community, and consistency. I wanted it to be that kind of year.
Writing this now, I see all the ways 2024 encouraged me to stretch my faith to heights it had never been. The economy got worse as Tinubu settled into his presidential seat, and the strength of the naira weakened. Electricity tariffs skyrocketed. Fuel prices, too. I had to tighten my belt because I had left a job at the end of 2023 to focus on school. Living a good life seemed pretty unlikely at the beginning of the year, with everything going on.
But I gave 2024 my best. In return, she gave me a clearer vision of who I wanted to be and do.
As I have done in previous years, this review will be divided into the different key areas of my life. The final part dedicated to self, will share major takeaways.
Love
2024 was a wonderful year for love.
My relationships with family and friends blossomed. This year, more acutely than ever, I felt truly thankful for the gift of mankind. I watched the faces of my loved ones light up countless times. Listened to their stories; the good ones, the sad ones, the ones that made my eyes widen with surprise, and the ones that made me laugh till I couldn’t breathe. I asked and gave tons of advice. Had many movie dates in bed that were spent drinking wine and talking about men. Had so many conversations at art galleries, cafes, and dance floors!
Community is a major cornerstone in my life, and I enjoyed what I made of it this year. With a group of friends, a tradition of eating at each other’s houses began. With another, attending church together once a month. I met new, really amazing people and welcomed them into the halls of my life. Forged stronger bonds with older friends as well.
People talk about how friendship fizzles out after school, but I liked how inventive my friends and I became in a bid to see each other, despite our busy schedules. Yes, navigating friendship in adulthood can be difficult — but I have seen it work. I am making it work.
I also discovered the healing properties of friendship this year. How beyond laughter and fun, the right people can mend childhood wounds, some you may not even know you had. Friendship taught me this year to cave in, to allow myself to be loved, and love myself better.
2024 was also the year for loss. Several friends decided to leave the country, taking slivers of my heart with them. A key friendship walked out of my life this year, and while the mechanics of this loss still doesn’t make sense to me, I have made peace with the idea of friends coming in, having tea in the living room of your heart, then saying goodbye (or nothing at all).
It’s a symptom of life.
On romance: 2024 was a year for real lovers. They were everywhere, from the Olympics to Nigerian weddings. I just wasn’t one of them. I did experience little pockets of romance; some I would have lingered in longer if I were a different person. But none of them “clicked” at the end of the day, so I simply enjoyed going out on dates and spending hours with ghost-lovers.
I was fully present through it all. Even in less-than-ideal situations, I steered the boat of my heart as best as I could. I think this is because love does not die on the hill of romantic relationships for me, I am conscious of how abundantly I experience it in my relationship with family and friends. A friend of mine thinks I’m too busy to be in love, but I think many Lagos men are just mad. All in all, ending the year single is the lot of light-skinned babes from the East (according to AJ).
Work
The irony of leaving a job to focus on school when 2024 ended up being a Work Year. Work followed me everywhere I went, and I had a hard time saying no. I think it’s because I like work. If a project seems interesting and I see in it a capacity for personal growth, I am usually willing to give it a try.
And boy — I did try.
This year, I taught content marketing and branding classes, partnering with businesses and communities like SisterlyHQ, SmarketersHub, ConTech, Path4Her, BusinessDay, Brailoo, and several others. Zikoko invited me to share a day in my life, and 3MTT, a government program, invited me to host a webinar. It was a big blessing to teach, and I would like to do more teaching in 2025.
I also worked on several projects that were very dear to my heart. In June, we held the third edition of Marketers Therapy, a community I started with a friend last year — bringing Nigerian marketers together to share their work challenges. This time, we went bigger than we ever had, hosting over 150 people and inviting two esteemed guests to speak. We also partnered with WiiCreate, TechCabal, and several marketing communities to make it happen. It was a wonderful event, and I had to pinch myself several times during the day — I couldn’t believe it was real.
Then in August-September, the Lagos Model United Nations was finally held. LMUN took a lot of effort from myself and 90+ members of staff to execute. It was my baby — I held her anxiously against my beating heart for an entire year, raising money, liaising with school authorities, seeking delegates, and praying. The chances of success seemed so bleak at several points during planning period — we were fraught with so many issues. But we did it. The event was a major success, with 200+ delegates attending from 11 universities around the country. I will write about it in detail one day.
Within my 9–5, several projects were executed throughout the year, some of which I led: The Selar Creator Stories Video Series, Selar’s Creator Summit, Selar 100, and more. The work was hard, and required me to give more than I had ever given, but I did it. I also grew in my dexterity as a content marketer, writing articles that ranked, and seeing great results.
I worked with new companies as well. Explored working with a wellness brand for the first time, handling strategy, content, and design. Worked with my first international company as a content marketer, and a media publication company also. These experiences taught me a lot of lessons. Would love to explore more creative projects next year.
I tripled my income this year, earning seven figures in a single month. I really enjoyed this feeling, and would like to experience more growth in coming years. If there was anything I didn’t like about work, it was how monotonous it soon became. I felt like a hamster on a wheel, too busy spinning to dedicate time to learning, upskilling, and rest. There were a 101 things to do all the time, and I was pretty much operating on an empty tank at the end of it all.
2025 is also going to be a work-heavy year. I can feel it in my bones. My uncle says that I am young and this is the time to work — I agree with him. For my health and sanity, I would need to establish better boundaries (no work after work hours) and practice saying “no” more often.
Health
The bad far outnumbered the good, (hate how this is becoming a trend).
The bad: Was sick every other week; pretty sure my HMO providers were sick too — of me. To make matters worse, I had two accidents between June and July on my legs. Wrote about one here. My allergies worsened. This was the year I tried sleep medication for my insomnia for the first time. I was constantly fighting for my life.
The good: I picked up Pilates, and I loved the way my body heaved during a workout, my lungs struggling to keep up, the tension and the release. I also got myself a blender for my birthday. Made many natural juices: ugwu, carrot, cucumber, beetroot, watermelon, ginger.
My body does her best to keep me alive, and so in 2025, I will do my best to ensure she survives.
School
I finished school in August.
Late November, my official results came out. Second class upper division.
Earlier that year, I had spoken on a panel session in school, where I asserted that I would be finishing with this result. Unknown to listeners, I was operating by faith because there were so many variables beyond my control, like my final year project and final semester results.
But I did it. The morning after my accident, I left the hospital for school, to write a test. I remember feeling anxious on the ride, my mind scattered by the pain, struggling to recollect information I had read the night before.
Despite everything that happened, I am so grateful to God for helping me meet this goal. I am grateful to my friends too, who were always so willing to explain things I had missed in class, and share their notes with me.
Here, I mention my mother getting excited, her eyes sparkling because she had underestimated how well I would perform, given how busy of a student I was. Final year was full of work: my 9–5, LMUN preparations, writing my undergraduate project. I barely had time for anything else, but during my final year week, I allowed myself to get fully immersed in the celebrations, dressing up each day, and spending time with friends.
Happy to be leaving UNILAG finally. Ecstatic, even.
Self
The gaping melancholy that accompanied me through my teenage years appears to be slowly eroded, giving way to a sense of endless wonder and a willingness to explore the magnitude of life.
I didn’t lose my joy this year. I caught and sailed it, in all its different forms. Like a doting mother, I paid attention to my life and gave myself many of the things I wanted. I tried new things — beer combinations I liked, video vixenry, wearing eyeliner on the lower waterline, systems thinking, pilates, listening to jazz and afrohouse, silver jewelry, math, table tennis, raves, etc.
I invested in the things that mattered to me — my happiness, my intellect, and my relationships. I sang a lot at the top of my lungs. Watched plenty movies, too. When I realised that I was scared of math, I took Algebra lessons on Khan Academy. I enjoyed going out alone and taking walks. I told my mother often how beautiful she was and how lucky I was to have her, and spent quality time on phone calls with my father.
I struggled, too — mostly with my career. Feeling I wasn’t good enough for the opportunities that came my way. Feeling I didn’t have enough to offer. I recognize now how these feelings are very limiting, and would remain so if I don’t get comfortable with the knowledge that I don’t have to be good enough for good things to come my way. I am allowed luck, grace, and mercy. I don’t have to earn everything that is given to me.
This year I held onto the phrase: a different life is possible, and made it a prayer whenever I felt pressured by the demands of life. Like a handfan on a hot day, it was soothing, restoring back the air that would get sucked away from me. This prayer gathered more meaning when I went home to the village in December for my grandmother’s burial, and observed how different my life became in the three weeks I spent there. All of a sudden, I found myself sleeping for fourteen hours a day when previously I could only get five. The days passed slowly, lugubriously, and were spent playing table tennis and gisting with my cousins. I could breathe easy. The pressure on my neck disappeared. I felt really good.
I think this experience pulled my head out of the tunnel vision it had been in and made me see the other lives I could live if I created the right space and gave them enough time to take shape. It has made think about how to make a life that is comfortable to live in. A life for the Treasure who is active and works all day, and the Treasure that sleeps for half a day, and only wakes up slowly, the sound of children’s laughter rousing her back to life.
There were other takeaways from 2024.
- That you have full agency over your life: Nothing happens without your permission. The places you want to go to, the people you want to meet, the person you want to be, can be willed into existence if you believe and act like it. You don’t have to wait for anybody’s instruction, advice, recommendation, suggestion or vision. Trust yourself more, and move.
- Document, document, document: Documenting is my life’s practice, but I have always approached it as a teacher, sharing my thoughts and telling my stories. This year I discovered how documenting can also be a form of self-advocacy — in your career, when you need to show proof. I also saw its preservative nature at home in the village, listening to the oldest family member share stories about our tied history. Briefly, I thought about how I didn’t want those stories to die with her.
- Curiosity is a form of love: When you love someone, you pay attention to the details of their life, and you ask them questions. In this newsletter, I wrote: “when we express curiosity by sitting with them [our loved ones] and asking questions about their lives, we signal an openness that is traded in with even more questions, back and forth, and this way, we are able to knit closer bonds with the people that we’ve chosen to love.”
- The magic has to be created: Everything you see and love was made by God and man. If you want beauty, and magic, laughter and fun, you have to cultivate it for yourself, and for others. Learn to make yourself happy, noone else is obligated to do this work for you.
- The work you do for others is yours to keep: When working for other people (companies, brands, bosses), there’s often a tendency to feel like you’re simply slaving away, especially when the work is tedious. However, when you realise that you have as much stake in your work as they do, and that the results you get are yours to celebrate or defend, it fosters a sense of ownership. So cultivate an owner’s mindset. Treat the work entrusted in your care as if it were yours.
- You get farther with help: Asking for help can be very humbling, especially if you derive pride in cosplaying strength. This year, I learned how to let go of needless shame and ask for help when I needed it. It made the world of a difference.
- Optimize for doing less: My father uses the example of trying to turn a ceiling fan with your hand. Sure, it’s hard work, but you could simply flip the switch and let the fan do its job, freeing up your time for other tasks. Similarly, instead of juggling 3–4 jobs, could you focus on securing one well-paying job? What steps can you take to make that a reality?
The future — 2025.
For 2025, I am not going to delude myself into thinking that life will be easy. It probably wouldn’t. The things I want require grasping at the edge of a ladder with more effort — choice fruit at the top of a tree. But I will live it, and live it well, and God will be with me, so I will not fail.
Thank you for reading.
