People say, “I’m finding myself,” and it sounds like a gap year. Like a woman in linen trousers journaling in Bali with a matcha latte, having just left a corporate job to “do the inner work.”
And maybe that is what it looks like for some people. But that’s not what it looks like for a lot of us. Me included.
For me, finding myself looks like standing in my bathroom at 27, touching my natural hair, hair I shaved off, grew back, and am learning to love more, and realizing I want more.
That’s the thing nobody explains about self-discovery. It’s not adding new things to your life. It’s removing everything that was put there without your permission and seeing what’s left.
Sometimes, what’s left is very quiet. Sometimes the fear stops us.
It Started with Leaving
I don’t think I could have found myself if I’d stayed where I was.
Not because Nigeria is a bad place, it was home, and it always will be. But I was living inside a framework that had been built before I could speak. My family, my religion, my community, they all had a version of Funke that existed before I did. And I spent most of my early life performing here.
When I moved to the UK, I thought I was leaving for a master’s degree. I was. But I was also leaving for space. Space to ask questions that didn’t have room to exist back home. Space to be.
The first time I walked through a city where nobody knew me, nobody knew my family, nobody had any expectations of who I should be, I felt something I can only describe as a kind of terrified relief. Like stepping off a stage you didn’t know you were standing on.
The Hair Thing Is Not Just a Hair Thing
People think the hair journey is about aesthetics. It’s not.
I grew up in an environment where what I did with my body was not entirely my choice. What I wore, how I presented, what was “appropriate”, all of it was filtered through someone else’s approval. When I got my first piercing at 18, it felt revolutionary. Because it was mine.
Since then, I’ve had pink hair, green hair, purple hair. I went completely bald. And now I’m growing my natural hair and falling in love with what comes out of my own head, maybe for the first time properly.
Each version was me figuring out what I looked like when nobody was editing me. And each version taught me something different. The bold colours taught me I wanted to be seen. Going bald taught me I didn’t need anything external to feel like myself. Growing it back is teaching me patience, which — if you know me — is not my strongest quality.
But here’s the uncomfortable part: sometimes I still hesitate. I second-guess whether something is “too much.” And I have to remind myself that the hesitation isn’t mine, it’s inherited. It belongs to a version of me that was trying to be palatable. I’m not trying to be palatable anymore. I’m not agege bread.
Losing a God? and Finding… Something
I grew up religious. Deeply, structurally religious, the kind where it wasn’t just belief, it was identity. It was community. It was the answer to every question before you’d even finished asking it.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’ve got it all figured out now, because I haven’t. What I can tell you is that I no longer believe because I was told to. And that gap — between the faith I was handed and whatever I’m building in its place — is one of the loneliest parts of finding yourself.
Because when you leave a religious structure, you don’t just lose God (or your version of God). You lose a language. You lose a community. You lose the comfort of certainty. And you gain this vast, open, unstructured space that you now have to furnish with your own meaning.
Some days that feels like freedom. Some days it feels like floating.
I’m still finding my way with this one. I don’t have a neat conclusion. I just know that whatever I believe now and how I worship now, it’s mine. And that matters more to me than having all the answers.
My Body Is Not a Project
Finding yourself also means finding your body. And by that I don’t mean a glow-up, I mean actually being in your body without apologising for it.
I’ve spent years absorbing messages about what my body should look like. The beauty standards shift every few years, but the message stays the same: you’re not quite right as you are. Lose weight. Gain weight. Be toned but not too muscular. Be curvy but not too big. Be everything except what you naturally are.
I caught myself recently picturing a smaller version of my body and feeling something dangerously close to longing. And then I had to stop and ask, is that mine? Did I decide that, or did the internet decide it for me?
Finding yourself in your body means learning to tell the difference between what you want and what you’ve been sold. For me, that looks like going to the gym because I want to feel strong, not because I want to shrink. It looks like eating without counting. It looks like wearing whatever I want and not bracing for someone’s opinion.
It’s a daily practice. Some days I’m better at it than others.
What It Looks Like Day to Day
Self-discovery sounds grand. In practice, it’s mostly small and unglamorous.
It’s trying a new recipe and realising you actually love cooking when nobody’s watching. It’s picking up a book after months of not reading and remembering that you used to love this. It’s going for a walk with no destination and noticing that you feel okay — just okay — and that being okay is enough.
It’s choosing to stay in on a Friday because you want to, not because you’re sad. It’s wearing the bold thing without waiting for someone’s approval first. It’s saying no to people who drain you and not writing a three-paragraph apology about it.
It’s also the harder stuff. It’s sitting with questions that don’t have answers yet. It’s letting go of friendships that only worked when you were smaller. It’s crying in your flat on a random Wednesday because something you thought you’d processed came back up, and that’s just what happens when you start looking at yourself honestly.
Finding yourself is not a single moment. It’s not a retreat or a revelation. It’s the slow, daily act of choosing yourself over the version of you that everyone else was comfortable with.
The Cliché Is Real, Though
I know how it sounds. “Finding myself.” It’s the kind of phrase people roll their eyes at. And I get it, it’s been diluted by Instagram captions and self-help books and people who use it to justify quitting their jobs without a plan.
But for me, it’s literal.
I am, genuinely, in the middle of figuring out who I am. Not who I was in Nigeria, not who my family expected, not who the church said I should be, not who the algorithm wants me to perform. Just me.
A 27-year-old woman in Manchester. Childfree by choice. Queer. Nigerian. Finding her religion. In love with fashion and cinema and writing and her own hair. Stressed. Hopeful. Still becoming.
And that’s the thing about finding yourself, you don’t find a finished version. You just get closer and closer to someone who feels honest. Someone who, when she looks in the mirror, doesn’t flinch.
I’m not there every day. But I’m closer than I was last year. And I’ll be closer still next year.
That’s what I mean when I say I’m finding myself. Not that I’m lost. Just that I’m still arriving.
Until next time,
Funke