If you ask my mother, she will say I was an agreeable child; I didn’t make a fuss or kick up a storm, and I rarely made noise. I knew that being ‘docile’ and ‘agreeable’ was needed from the moment I was born. I was the first child of parents with full-time jobs, and I stayed with a rotation of uncles and cousins who were going to school and didn’t need a child making a mess. Then, my sister was born.

My sister, the loudmouth - the child who took up space and cried if nothing went her way. Our speaker and rebel of the family. The space I barely took up shrank even further. I had to make space for my sister and, later on, my brothers—the plight of the first daughter. 

I took that attitude with me as I grew; even in my most rebellious teenage phases, I kept most of my actions as respectable as possible - holding in my rage and my helplessness, letting it marinate in my head and manifest as the actions of characters in the stories I wrote. As an adult, I still prefer to take up as little space as possible, sticking to the corners of halls. In one-on-one situations, I listen more and replicate the energy most people give me. Except when they’re my friends; my friends know I am a menace.

Older adults and people I look up to kind of intimidate me. I overthink what I say and do and try to make myself as small as possible so that they like me and don’t think that I do not deserve their attention. And then I met Nana. I look up to Nana - she’s a fantastic writer; she knows what she wants and is not afraid to let other people know, too. She hosts my favourite non-criminal podcast, I Like Girls, and was a CNN Africa journalist. 

The first time I informally met Nana was at her wedding during the pandemic. Her husband sent me a Zoom link to the wedding, and I sat in my room, reading through the chat box - my first Zoom wedding. The moment I knew she was someone I would like to emulate was the moment when the officiating cleric was preaching about submissiveness in marriage. Anyone with eyes could see that she was getting irritated with his words, and the chat box echoed that sentiment; the online attendees started taking bets on how long she would last before standing up to take the mic from him.

She didn’t, but that moment stuck with me - the fact that the people who knew her thought she could do that, disrupt her wedding because she heard something she disagreed with. After reading all her articles, I followed her after that, and when she started the podcast, I listened in. When I met her in person, I was starstruck and reverted to how I usually was as a child; I tried to make myself small.

“You say ‘sorry’ a lot. Stop it.” She looked me in the eye and said the words that now repeat in my head. Of course, my default response was “Sorry” before I caught myself. She smiled. At that point, her husband was tired of me; all my communication with him was preceded by a ‘sir’ and ended with a ‘sir’. 

That sentence shifted me, I did say ‘Sorry’ a lot. For multiple reasons; a) - Nigeria is a place filled with angry people, and if you do not start with a ‘Sorry’ you could get whacked; b) - I hated being an inconvenience, and the ‘Sorry’ was to apologise before and after the inconvenience I was sure my presence was. In the course of my growing and healing, and the plenty of therapy I had done (Hi Judith!), I was learning to be more assertive, but I had gone back to my familiar pattern of deferring to people I respected as authority.

“Stop saying sorry.” was more than an admonition; it was a reminder. I am not an inconvenience. My presence shouldn’t be made to be as small as possible. I deserve to take up space and ask questions and, most importantly - make mistakes. 

“Stop saying sorry.” As a woman, as a Nigerian woman, the default is to defer to men, to be humble, to be nice, to be polite, and while I couldn’t really care what men think, I haven’t managed to shake off the part of me that tries to make me as small as possible in situations I do not have as much control over. 

Society doesn’t get to dictate you or your behaviour. You have the freedom to exist in all your forms without apologising for it. “Stop saying sorry.”