I wrote this in my journal years ago, during what I now call my Stuck Pharmacy Syndrome phase, after my elder sister sent me Temilade Salami’s reel on Instagram.

My Story:

In 2019, during my second year in Physiology, I tried switching to Pharmacy.

I had developed an interest in drugs in 2018, my aged parents often asked me to research and explain their prescriptions in Igbo. I thought:

“If I study Pharmacy, I’ll make them proud. I’ll make my siblings proud. I’ll do well.”

I even had a dream: to work in the pharmaceutical industry and eventually own a company named after my mother.

But the switch failed.

So, I dropped out of school and retook JAMB.

People thought I was crazy. Friends told me to return and resit the exams I had missed. But I went offline for 6 months, got private tutors, and studied relentlessly.

I didn’t get Pharmacy. I was offered Botany. I almost lost my mind.

I cried. I felt like a breathing, walking failure. Like I had wasted my family’s money and my time. I turned down the admission because it felt like going from frying pan to fire. I fell into depression. To avoid staying home again, my family suggested I go for Prescience.

This time, my mum said, “Let’s ask for God’s will.”

So we fasted and prayed. And in prayer had agreement:

Whatever course comes after Prescience, I will take it as God’s will—even if it’s not Pharmacy. I badly wanted it to be Pharmacy.

I studied harder. I prayed too. Burned candles. I barely slept. And I got very sick. But I pressed on. Even wrote the exams sick.

I scored over 300 out of 400. I thought, This is it! I’m finally getting Pharmacy.

But I didn’t. I was offered Environmental Health Science. I was like what in the world is that?

The only time I had heard of the course was from two girls in class who said that was their dream course but I never paid attention.

Again, I broke down. I was so disappointed with God. I tried switching again. Tried connections. Nothing worked. The experience wrecked my spiritual life.

Year after year, I tried. Year after year, the answer was still no.

My mum reminded me of our agreement.

I said to her: “But I have a dream. Can’t God just will mine?”

I still went ahead and tried switching to Physiotherapy, it made more sense to me than EHS—with a 4.7 CGPA. Still nothing. In fact, that same year, the faculty banned inter-faculty transfers. I was like, God, why?

Then, after another talk with my mum, I started a new novena—“Come to Me”—alone, before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

And there, during those nine days of praying in that silence, I let go of some things. It was easier but I chose to trust that God cannot mismanage my life.

Why am I sharing this?

During my orientation at the Federal Ministry of Environment, a director asked me:

“Why did you choose Environmental Health Science?”

And I answered:

“I didn’t. But I’ve fallen in love with it.”

I don’t know everything the future holds,

But I’m at peace knowing I’m in His perfect will. My relationship with my degree now is consuming. Sometimes, I feel there is no better degree out there for me. I’m grateful I never got into pharmacy and physiotherapy.

Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between giving up and accepting what comes.

But I’ve learned that consistent ‘no’s’ don’t always mean push harder.

Sometimes, they mean redirection.

It’s not always about what we want.

It’s about what we do with what we have and where we are.

It’s about who we become through the uncertainty. Now, I love to study my courses, I write environmental themed works and they are my favorite of my works.

My eco-flash fiction, Little Bodies, emerged as a winning entry for the Art4Life Campaign for Avoidable Deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and was shared with the Institute of Environmental Futures at the University of Leicester. This story is so dear to me.

Currently, I am working on essays and stories around sustainability, environmental degradation and climate change. I believe technical knowledge needs to be translated into simple literature and I hope to be a bridge between data and people, policy and practice.

I am taking external courses too, reading spectacular environmental writers. All I am saying is that I am in awe of who I am becoming through this degree.

I still have a long way to go,

But I’m open—to learning, growing, giving my best,

And experiencing the fullness of God’s plan.

Yes, yes, I am an Environmental Health Officer in the making 😊

P.S: Temilade Salami is one of the reasons I chose to intern at the Federal Ministry of Environment—turns out she did too!

And my thrilling experience at ministry will require a whole new article to talk about.

(It’s my fifth year and I can’t wait to add San. to my name)

During the preparation for my Environmental Health Science Council Qualification exam, simply a pre-professional exam, I was studying Solid Waste Management and I found myself thinking about sustainability and human relationship with the environment.

That is to say, in between memorizing “Sustainability is preserving natural resources and meeting present needs without compromising future generations”  I found my thoughts traveling to the many occasions I had witnessed sustainability spoken of confidently.

We speak about this word so fluently. We ask what more we can do on the planet. What technologies, what policies, what innovations. It is always about innovation. As if the problem is that we have not yet invented our way out of the consequences we invented our way into. 

But I kept pondering on something sitting with that text. A quieter question underneath all the ambition: how disciplined are we, actually, at sustaining anything at all?

I am not only asking about Nigeria, though Nigeria is a good place to start. One of our most visible national problems is not a lack of ideas and hard work but a lack of maintenance culture. We build and abandon. We launch initiatives and neglect them. We inaugurate and then watch things decay with a kind of exhausted acceptance, as if deterioration is the natural end of all things and upkeep is somebody else’s problem.

But I do not want to make this only a Nigerian problem, because it is not. Broadly, as humans, we are not good at sustaining the things we claim to care about most. We neglect our own bodies — ignoring warning signs, being too lazy to exercise, disrupting our sleep, consuming what we know harms us, and then consulting Google at 2am about the damage we have done.

We fail to sustain our closest relationships, letting patience erode, letting repair feel like too much effort. We exhaust the things we love through distraction or carelessness or simply the assumption that they will still be there once we are less busy.

If we cannot sustain what is right in front of us, what is intimate and immediate, what makes us think we can sustain what is distant and collective and planetary?

Our environmental crisis is real and urgent, but I increasingly suspect it is also reflective. The fractures in our relationship with the Earth look very much like the fractures in our relationship with ourselves.

This is the major idea in my recent CNF, The Mementos of Dead Things. In it, I return to my extended family, to the environment we have inhabited, and to the small, lived moments that once felt permanent. The trees: the lime, the cherry, the udala, are not just part of the setting; they are the main characters. Through them, I remember who we were, how we gathered, how we played, how we related to one another without effort. Each tree holds a version of us that no longer exists.

At its simplest, the mementos in the piece are the trees. What unsettles me is the parallel between their decline and ours. As the trees thin out, dry up, or disappear, I begin to see more clearly the erosion within my extended family, the loss of closeness, shared rituals, and simple, sustaining joys. It begins to feel as though the trees absorb and reflect us, and that their deaths are not separate from ours but connected in ways we have not fully acknowledged.

The truth is that knowledge is not the problem. We know about climate change. We know the deforestation rates, the warming trajectories, the biodiversity loss. We know the waste management hierarchy, reduce, reuse, recycle, we can recite it in our sleep. The data is available, it is persuasive, it is overwhelming. And it does not seem to be enough, because knowing a thing and living by it are apparently two very different skills.

Why?

It would be easy to say people do not care. But that does not feel accurate to me. People do care. Students march, scientists publish warnings, writers like Racheal Carson spend their careers making the damage legible, and impossible to ignore. The problem, I think, is not indifference. It is dissonance.

The same dissonance that makes us know sleep matters and still scroll until 1am. That makes us understand the importance of exercise and still postpone it. That makes us aware that fossil fuel dependency is accelerating a crisis and still, individually, collectively, find change very hard to begin.

Reading Silent Spring made this sharper for me. Carson was not only documenting what pesticides were doing to ecosystems; she was exposing a pattern of human arrogance, the certainty that we could intervene endlessly in natural systems without consequence. 

Her warning was ecological, yes, but it was also moral. The crisis she was describing was a failure of restraint. A refusal to live within limits. That refusal did not begin in a boardroom. It began in the individual assumption that more is always better.

There is a version of self-love, the quieter, more disciplined kind, that looks like protecting continuity. Choosing longevity over immediate comfort. Not burning yourself down for short-term relief. When that is missing personally, we chase whatever feels good now. When it is missing collectively, we chase profit and convenience and call it progress. Systems are made of accumulated behaviours, and behaviours come from values, and values form somewhere private and interior.

If the inner ethic stays unchanged, if we remain people who cannot sustain our own health, our own small daily commitments, and relationships then even our greenest technologies will not be enough. 

Sustainability as a personal practice looks like finishing what you started. Resting without guilt. Repairing things before they break beyond use. Not abandoning what you love because loving it consistently has become inconvenient.

The question I keep returning to is not what more we can give to the environment. It is: have we learned to sustain what we already hold?

Maybe that is where it starts. Not in the policy room, though the policy room matters, but in the daily practice of not abandoning things. Of finishing the water in the cup before pouring more. Of sleeping when the body asks. Of repair before replacement. 

We have a long way to go environmentally. And I know some of that distance is not only technological. Some of it is internal and personal. Charity, they say, begins at home, so does sustainability.

I eventually added a letter to my younger self after trying and failing for two weeks, in the midst of festive chaos and an unexpected emergency. I drafted versions of that letter in different places: in a church compound while waiting for the next Mass because I was late; before the grotto of the Virgin Mary on a Sunday evening; before the Blessed Sacrament; lying on the hospital floor beside my sick mother; and curled in a corner at home a few minutes before attending a burial.

Interestingly, two friends, also writers, who gave feedback on the final draft told me I still hadn’t achieved what Mofiyin asked for. VC, one of them, sent me a WhatsApp message that read: Why are you scared? You are somehow floating above this essay, Chisom.

The beauty of the Abebi Residency is that I didn’t know how much three days of learning, reading, responding to prompts (Mofiyin stressed me, sha), and conversing could unravel in me. We connected through simple things — touring our rooms, sharing rich meals, helping one another — like when I locked myself out and Sapphire followed me to find a solution, or when Erere offered medicine for my stomach upset. And we connected through harder things too: vulnerable sessions Chinwendu called therapy, the prompts, and moments of laughter and tears.

It is no exaggeration to say I came in contact with admirable boldness listening to Chinwendu tell her stories and read her responses to prompts. From her, I learned that one can own shame and break it. That you don’t have to be unafraid to confront fear — you outgrow fear by confronting it. Sapphire showed me unraveling through short sentences and many cancellations. I saw that it didn’t have to be done perfectly, but gently and steadily. Her bravery wasn’t loud, but expressed with intention and style. Erere was our balance, a calm, friendly presence. In her responses and our conversations, she showed precise interrogations of exteriority and a quiet rebellion through agency. From her, I learned to question things I had accepted as normal.

There is something freeing about watching young women like you name their unnameables, take agency of their fears, and hearing Mofiyin speak life and belief into your craft. She even prayed with me on the last day, quoting 2 Timothy 1:7, my favorite verse. You’ll find it in my journals; I chant it before exams; I once used it as my phone wallpaper for months. Yet there I was, shedding tears, my hands in Mofiyin’s, realizing I had not been living the fulfillment of that verse. It was a beautiful experience to be seen so thoroughly by someone I had known only for a few days. In the days that followed, I felt peace and gratitude, caught in many attempts to pray myself, study myself, and write myself to salvation.

Today, my first time in church since the residency, my unraveling began to form words. At first, they were short sentences and questions. That reminded me of Sapphire, and I knew it was fine. So I scribbled them rough. Cancelled a lot. A few hours later, back home and washing dishes, the words came like floods — too many, overwhelming, crystallizing as shame. Thank God I had experienced Chinwendu. I tried mind-mapping, like Mofiyin taught. And in the stillness of the evening, I leaned on all the exterior factors like the church, the women…and I smiled, knowing that was the Erere effect.

Maybe I could say I have a rough sequel to A Lineage of Mantles. Maybe I could say I finally found names for what I failed to name in that letter to myself before the residency. One thing is sure: with this gift of words He has given me (Sirach 51:22), I will write myself back to salvation.

Thank you, Abebi (and Selar)