I was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, where I spent most of my life. While I had friends and family in my life, my routine was mostly just work. I worked a 9-to-5 in the operations team at a mortgage bank in Marina while also building the content creation journey I started on the side in 2020, during the early days of COVID, to see what else I could create for myself.
I genuinely loved my main job, but I lived on the mainland and hated the Lagos Island traffic. It was exhausting, and as much as Lagos was home, I never got used to the daily stress. Eventually, I realised I needed a change.
I was young and wanted more from life. I have always believed that no goal is unattainable if I am willing to work for it. So, when the idea of studying in the UK crossed my mind, I refused to ignore it. I confided in a friend, even though I did not even have a passport at the time. She was the one who told me the first step was to apply for a Nigerian passport and gather all my documents before applying to universities in London.
Once I had a clear plan, I told my parents about it too. The support I received from my family and friends turned studying abroad from something I simply imagined into something I was determined to achieve. From the moment I started the process, I knew I had to see it through. By the age of 26, I had applied to study Business with International Management at a university in London, and once everything was in motion, turning back was never an option.
I really could not have done any of it alone. At one point during the process, I needed about 1.1 million naira to keep things moving toward my move. I called three friends and had the full amount before 6 pm that same day because they were confident I would pay it back. My mother prayed over the whole process constantly, because she was scared that I was giving up something stable to chase something uncertain. Honestly, I understood her fear. I was leaving a job I loved and a country I knew for one where I had no family at all.
By the night before I travelled, that fear had settled into me too, sitting alongside the excitement in equal measure. I did not know what to expect when I landed in London, but I have never been afraid to take bold steps.
My friend, Anu, also made my transition much easier. Before I even left Nigeria, she had helped me look into houses and jobs, and the minute I landed, she helped me settle in properly.
School started almost immediately, so I did not get much time to fully take in my new reality before I had to start living it. As a student, I was allowed to work twenty hours a week, and my week fell into a structured rhythm: school on Mondays and Tuesdays, work on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and weekends spent on schoolwork or exploring London with friends I had made through school and church.
That rhythm made the days manageable, but it did not make every day smooth-sailing. To date, one particular evening still stands out to me. It was winter, everywhere was dark by 6 pm, and it was cold. I was rushing to catch my train when I slipped on the wet ground and missed it anyway. After that happened, I walked into a nearby restaurant, got food, and sat there staring into a blank space, quietly rethinking every decision that had brought me to that point. However, I did not let myself dwell on it for too long because I knew it was just a phase and that it would pass.
Around this time, I began to lean further into content creation. My page still had a mostly Nigerian audience, and I wanted to grow a UK following, too, so I started sharing what a day in my life as an international student looked like, along with outfit ideas and lifestyle content. My audience slowly began to shift and grow alongside me.
In 2024, I had a baby girl, and that year became the most beautiful and most challenging of my life. Things did not work out with her father, so not long after she was born, I found myself raising her alone, in a country with no family nearby. I had to figure out, almost entirely on my own, how to earn a living and care for both of us with very little support. Some months I paid rent and other bills and was left with less than fifty pounds, hoping a brand deal would come through before the month ran out.
My friends lent me money whenever things got hard, and my church helped more than once, too. Through it all, I kept posting fashion, lifestyle, and motherhood content, but I never mentioned what was actually happening behind the scenes. The thing about social media is that it makes everyone’s lives look so perfect, and since I did not want to be judged for struggling as a single mother, I carried my pain alone. My daughter and I always looked our best in public, and no one watching knew how much I was holding together on my own.
Eventually, I became honest with myself enough to know that I needed real help, the kind only my mother could give. Childcare in the UK is expensive, and I could not focus on work without someone to care for my daughter, so I saved up and began the process of bringing her over. That process stretched me in every sense. I was still postpartum, living on maternity allowance that was not much to begin with, and now had to pull from it to cover the cost of her visa. Because of this, I made sure the Home Office understood exactly what I was dealing with, that I was a new mother and a single parent who genuinely needed her mother’s support, and they granted the visa.
By the time she arrived, I was more exhausted than I had ever been, worn down by sleepless newborn nights, a caesarean recovery, and the weight of doing everything alone. Her arrival changed everything. She took on the cooking and cleaning, helped care for my daughter, and, for the first time in months, gave me the chance to rest properly. Slowly, I started to feel like myself again, not just as a mother, but as a person.
Life had just begun to steady when, in July 2025, something happened that changed everything. I am not comfortable sharing what, but it was a serious incident that pulled me into a cycle of police stations, court appearances, and lawyers. It was traumatic enough that I made a decision: I was never going to carry that kind of weight in silence again. So I shared a piece of my story publicly for the first time.
It reached far more people than I expected. My page grew from around 3,000 followers to 25,000 in just three months, but the growth itself was not what surprised me most. It was the flood of messages that followed, hundreds of women writing to say they had lived through something similar. My experience was not unique. It had never been.
I began responding to those women personally, encouraging them, praying with some, and reassuring others that things would get better. I did not take it lightly that so many trusted me with their stories. I believed that everything I went through happened so I could be in a position to meet these women. My content shifted too, away from just mother-daughter moments and more toward the real issues affecting women navigating life in the UK.
As my community grew, I hit the lowest point of my life, and that was searching for a stable home. My daughter and I moved through three different cities and stayed with three different families before we finally found a flat of our own. The day we settled in, I finally felt like I could breathe for the first time in a while.
It was then that I started rebuilding in earnest, returning to the things I loved and opening myself up further to the community that had formed around me. That visibility eventually turned into a career of its own, and I have now worked with more than fifty brands, both in the UK and Nigerian brands with a presence in London.
Honestly, if I could sit with my past self, I would tell her that everything would be fine, that the pain she was carrying was nothing compared to the joy waiting on the other side, and that the pain itself was simply part of the journey. My life is not perfect, but it is beautiful, and everything I went through shaped me into someone more resilient than I used to be.
To every woman, especially every single mother, quietly carrying something heavy right now, I want you to know that what you are going through is not peculiar to you.
So many women are living the same reality in silence, and there is no shame in that. On the other side of the breaking is often the best season of your life. Do not let the judgment of people who never walked your path convince you otherwise. I saw the beauty in mine. You will see it in yours too.
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