👀 @docnyio

I hate to talk about my personal stuff online, but 2023 and 2024 were probably the hardest years of my life. If you know me really well, you'd know I'm not the type of person who likes to share my whole life on social media. I've always preferred to just get on with things and focus on work, but I'm trying not to be so robotic these days hahah. To be honest, it took me until last year to properly get through that phase of my life. Everything started when I was at ALU in Rwanda. One random day, I had a sharp pain in the lower right side of my stomach. I thought it would go away, but it didn't. I eventually went to the hospital and found out it was appendicitis. What followed was honestly one of the craziest periods of my life. The appendicitis led to sepsis, a bowel infection, and eventually a blood infection. At some point, I collapsed. There were a lot of complications, and all of this happened while I was in Kigali. I still remember my brother, @therealdeayo, helping me look for a taxi so I could get to the hospital. At the time, I was just focused on getting better. It wasn't until later that the doctors explained how serious things had become and how close I had been to losing my life. I lost so much weight, lost my job, and could barely do anything physical anymore. Then, on top of everything else, I lost one of the closest people in my family. Also kept getting transferred to different hospitals (4 at the time). It just felt like every time something started getting better, something else would happen. After a while, I went back to Lagos and spent about 9 months there. Seeing some of my friends again honestly helped more than they probably know. People like @The_higho, @JohnKayode6, @IamRonald05, @jolaaaa__, @The_Florencee, @therealdeayo, @itzadetunji1 and a few others probably had no idea what was going on in my head at the time, but just being around them made things a bit easier. Most people never knew how much I was struggling. My confidence was completely different from what it is today and from what it was prior to that phase of my life. I found it hard to express myself, hard to be myself around people, and for a long time I just wasn't in a good place mentally. The effects of everything that happened stayed with me for much longer than most people realised. Even after leaving Rwanda, spending time in Lagos, travelling across Africa, Europe, and parts of the Middle East, getting opportunities and working on the biggest projects of my life, speaking at events, getting recognised for my work, and achieving things I had worked towards for years, I was still dealing with a lot internally. A lot of people probably noticed that I wasn't sharing much online during that period. The truth is that I just didn't have the capacity for it. My confidence was gone. I would overthink things constantly and spend a lot of time in my own head. Even when good things happened, I wasn't always able to enjoy them properly because I was still trying to process everything that had happened during those years. I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of people only saw a small part of my life during the past 3 years. It honestly affected me right up until last year. I'm in a much better place now, but looking back, I don't think I've ever really spoken about how much those years changed me. Also, thank you to my friend @Toluwaaa_ for pushing me to make this post. I've gone back and forth on writing something like this for a long time, and you probably know that better than anyone.