There are habits that tag along with our person, habits that grow roots in us before we can name them. They are the quiet, constant companions we never asked for, yet they take their place like they were always meant to be there. Some of mine have been with me for so long that I can barely remember the shape of my life without them. They have wrapped themselves around my hours until I could no longer tell where I ended and they began.
Times arrive with a strange slowness — not the gentle slowness of peace, but the heavy, stale kind. The kind that turns stillness into a trap. For three months now, cluttering shadows have walked beside me. They’ve held my hands and my legs, tethering me down, but they’ve left my mind free to wander into corners it does not always wish to go. In that wandering, I’ve met a new self. One who is not entirely unfamiliar, but one who feels different, altered — an identity born from dusting up the attic of my soul and letting reluctant light trickle in.
But light does not erase everything. Some habits are simply relics — unhealthy inheritances passed down not through blood, but through the slow, constant conditioning of life. Family, friends, society — they plant seeds without always knowing, and some of those seeds grow into weeds. I have carried beliefs about my worth, about how fast I must move, about how much I must give, that were never truly mine to carry. These habits, these shadows, are like the stubborn stains on memory — picked up in childhood, strengthened in youth, and only questioned when the body begins to feel their weight.
Cluttering shadows tied me down and clipped my wings before I even knew I had them. They taught me to second-guess my abilities, to doubt my own voice. They convinced me that questioning life was more important than living it, that overthinking was a kind of preparation. I didn’t see then how much they were poisoning me — not in loud, obvious ways, but in the slow seep of unspoken expectations, subtle criticisms, and the quiet ache of being misunderstood by those I loved.
The clutters of my soul scattered my well-being. It felt like searching for a shirt I suddenly remembered I hadn’t seen in months — tearing apart my closet, desperate to find it, only to end up surrounded by a mess I no longer had the energy to clean. This is what living with those shadows felt like. You lose track of what was once yours — your joy, your courage, your clarity — and when you finally notice it’s gone, you are already knee-deep in the mess.
For a long time, I thought it was the world holding me back. But in truth, I was holding myself back, carrying fears planted by the voices around me. Sometimes they came as well-meaning warnings from family: don’t risk too much, don’t dream too big. Sometimes they came as careless comments from friends that sank deeper than they realized. Sometimes they came as society’s relentless reminder that worth is proven in productivity, and not also in presence.
And so I rushed. I rushed through my own growth, treating my life like a checklist instead of a journey. I tried to pile too much onto my table at once, starving my creativity of patience, choking my passion with the tight rope of “professionalism.” I lacked communication — not just with others, but with myself. I never asked my own heart how it was doing.
The world handed me a script, but I read the lines too fast, too anxious to get to the ending. I swallowed my truths before they could find a safe place to land. Even now, as I pour this out, I wonder if I am fully saying what I mean — if these words carry the full weight of my weariness and my hope.
It took a conversation with friends to remind me how much we suppress. How many memories we lock away because we believe they no longer matter, when in truth they shape us every day. The shadows we carry are not always made of what happened to us, but of what was never said, never healed, never forgiven.
A shadow of a broken self lingers behind me — sometimes broken, sometimes whole, but always there. It maps my steps, traces my outline, and refuses to let go entirely. These shadows are stitched together from pain, from words I wish I could unhear, from dreams I never dared to name aloud. They are permanent tattoos no one else can see, but I feel their weight in every breath.
Each day I ask myself why I never told myself to pause, to breathe, to let an idea simply rest without the pressure to chase it immediately. Why I never slowed my hands long enough to feel my own heartbeat. Instead, I lived in haste, in rush, in the constant hum of doing. And all the while, my surroundings — the expectations, the comparisons, the cultural scripts — piled more onto my back.
But here is what I am learning. Shadows do not disappear all at once. They thin. They loosen. They allow light to slip through in unexpected places. And each time I name them, each time I refuse to carry their weight alone, I feel my wings unclip a little more.
Growth is not clean. It is not the tidy before-and-after picture we want it to be. It is closets still half-messy, but with enough space to hang something new. It is remembering that you have the power to take one thing off your table at a time, to decide which voices get to stay and which must be sent away.
I am not free yet. But I am lighter. And maybe that is where it begins.
-Nnenna
Nene's Corner 