Nobody Prepares You For This
They tell you about the loneliness of leaving.
The first winter abroad when the cold gets into your bones and stays there. Learning to navigate a city that doesn't know your name, that makes you earn your place in small, quiet humiliations. That story exists. People talk about it.
Nobody prepares you for the loneliness of coming back.
For the disorientation of returning to a place that was supposed to already know you and finding that it doesn't. That you don't know it either. The home you carried for years, the one that got you through cold mornings and long days, starts to feel like something you imagined. Or at least something incomplete.
I came back to Lagos thinking I knew it.
I didn't.
What I knew was a sheltered childhood. School, lessons, books. A life that stayed mostly indoors. What I knew were short visits from university, Lagos seen through the window of someone else's car. Brief, contained, not quite mine.
I left in 2015 with an idea of a city.
And then I came back to the real thing.
The first time I went to buy a towel and it cost forty thousand naira, something shifted.
When I left, a towel was barely five thousand. I remember doing the maths in my head, wondering how someone earning fifty thousand a month is supposed to afford that.
Small, almost ridiculous. But it was the moment the idea and the reality separated cleanly. I realized I had been preparing for something that didn’t quite exist.
And slowly, other realisations followed.
The city I had been preparing for had my father in it.
That's the part nobody explains. How grief changes geography. How a place can stay the same and still become something else entirely. Familiar in shape, but not in feeling.
I had never experienced Lagos without my dad. I didn’t know, when I first came back, that I was about to. I thought being here would bring me closer to him somehow. A continuation. Instead, I got the city without the person who made it make sense, and had to learn both at the same time.
Lagos doesn’t care about any of that.
It moves. Loud, fast, expensive, relentless. It will call you on the street, ask you for money, charge you prices that feel unreal. It doesn’t pause for your grief or confusion. It doesn’t soften itself because you’re trying to find your footing.
So you adjust.
Slowly. Badly at first.
Then better.
You get things wrong. You realise how much you assumed you understood. You start to see the difference between feeling confident because things are stable, and actually being steady within yourself.
Here, there’s nowhere to hide. Things echo. People know people. You sit with your mistakes. You feel them properly. And you trust that, eventually, something settles.
What Lagos has given me, underneath all of it, is a kind of self-knowledge I don’t think I would have found any other way. The kind that comes when the things you thought held you up are no longer there, and you have to find out what does.
It has also forced me outward. Out of my own head, out of the version of life where everything was contained and controlled.
Lagos doesn’t let you stay hidden for long. I’ve had to meet people. To be seen. To be misunderstood. To enter rooms without fully knowing who I am in them yet. To build something resembling community from scratch, without the safety net I was used to.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started to recognise myself again.
Not as I was before. As something still forming.
But I think that might be the point of coming back to a place that doesn’t recognise you.
Not to find the version of home you remembered or even to find yourself as you were.
Just to find out who you are when nothing is familiar. When the city is loud and expensive and your father is gone and you are starting completely over in a place that was supposed to already be yours.
To find out, in other words, what you're made of when everything that made you feel safe has been removed.
I'm still finding out.
But I’m here. Still in it. Still learning the city and myself at the same time.
And maybe that’s enough for now.