Journey Between Worlds
I’m learning to embrace my duality.
Author’s Note: Below is a snippet of my July newsletter, published exclusively via email to my wonderful subscribers. Subscribe now and get future editions sent directly to your inbox!
As I considered what to say this month after the briefest newsletter ever in May and the one that never went out in June, I started reflecting on why I feel so comfortable leaning into this Uphill idea; this reckoning with the duality of home as an immigrant.
When I look back, I see I’ve always lived between worlds in one way or another. As a child, my playtime was roughly split between my parents’ home and that of their wealthier close colleague who had children my age. We all grew up like siblings but with thin, clear lines demarcating our lifestyles. We watched MNet, MTV Base, and Nickelodeon at their house, and less exciting channels from a regional satellite bouquet at ours. My mom and I meticulously built my wardrobe from China-made and thrift shops at Aleshinloye market in Ibadan, while my almost-siblings built theirs from trips to London high street shops during summer holidays. I swam in the large, kidney-shaped pool at their house, and after drying off and returning home, waded through what it meant to exist in their world and mine at the same time.
Duality also showed up in my academic interests. In my first year of senior secondary school, where Nigerian students typically declared their path as either Art or Science students, I officially chose the latter but still opted into English Literature with the Art students once a week. At graduation, I won prizes for both English and Biology. And a year later, during A-Levels, both my Literature and Economics teachers shared my work with peers as examples of excellence.
At university, my world opened up even further, and this duality continued to shape my journey. I set out feeling embarrassed about ending up at a Nigerian public university after attending top private schools pre-varsity—I thought it was the epitome of a fall from grace—but quickly made friends with people whose life goal was to grace the halls of the university I so despised. Many were first-generation graduates, and when my effervescent, U.S.-educated grandmother came to visit in my cramped four-woman-turned-twelve-woman first-year dorm room, my friends ooh’ed and aah’ed about how ‘elite’ she was. I had never considered it so, and the years that followed were spent becoming attuned to how perceptions of success, status, experience, and even truth vary drastically between environments. When I made it to the United States for graduate school, I found myself branching out of the Public Policy program I had initially signed up for, seeking duality, adding on an MBA, and graduating with two master’s degrees.
In recent years, I have begun coming to terms with my acute ability—even desire—to straddle worlds. Months after letting go of my full-time product management job, ostensibly for full-time creative pursuits, I find my left brain seeking expression, not wanting to be left behind.
I took Choice Points, a class on ‘life and leadership through literature’, almost magical in its timing, at MIT in the spring. Week after week, we analyzed, the decision points of characters in classic works of fiction, drama, and film. From Antigone in The Burial at Thebes to Chiron in Moonlight, to Stevens in The Remains of the Day, to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, among others, we saw how these towering characters failed or succeeded at reconciling their multiple selves, and the consequences that followed. In the final class, the professor summed up our twelve weeks of discussions into these two questions: “Who are my selves?” and “What are my commitments?”, encouraging us with poet Rilke’s age-old advice to “live the questions… try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language”.
As I continue this Uphill journey, I realize that embracing my duality is not just a theme of my past or my present, but a guiding principle for my future. I have slowly begun to cling to it as a vital part of my identity. Maybe embracing duality, even multiplicity, is a source of strength rather than conflict. Maybe the questions are self-evident. Maybe life between worlds is a feature, not a bug.
See you next month!
