Written piece
Threads we carry
Staveley oluwafunmilola Oluwafunmilola
Nigeria
About this piece
A spoken word poem exploring resilience, identity, and the pressure of becoming. It reflects the lived experience of a young Nigerian navigating expectations, uncertainty, and growth, while finding strength in being unfinished but unbroken.
THREADS WE CARRY
I come from a place where morning does not ask if you are ready. It just arrives loud like a generator waking sleep off tired walls.
Where mothers speak in silence sometimes, not because they have nothing to say, but because words feel too heavy when survival is daily.
And still we carry.
We carry names, expectations, prayers wrapped tight like Ankara on Sunday mornings. We carry “you must succeed” like it was sewn into our skin at birth.
They told me I am a thread, but they did not say thread bends. Thread stretches. Thread survives the pull of hands that do not always understand its strength.
So I learned early how to hold myself together when everything around me feels like loose fabric.
In Nigeria, we know resilience not as a big word, but as waking up again after disappointment, as laughing when life is not funny, as saying I am fine when fine is still under construction.
I am a thread from a home where dreams are both fuel and pressure, where success is prayed for loudly and worked for quietly.
And sometimes I wonder if I pull too hard on becoming, will I tear what holds me together.
But still I move.
Through Lagos traffic dreams and early morning thoughts, through school corridors filled with silent competition, through the weight of becoming somebody before I even fully know who I am.
And maybe that is the truth, that we are all threads in a quilt no one has finished yet.
Some bright like aso-oke at celebration, some soft like lullabies in Yoruba nights, some frayed at the edges but still refusing to fall apart.
So hear me.
I am not just a thread.
I am tension. I am colour. I am movement. I am the story between what was expected of me and what I choose to become.
And if this quilt is never done, then let it carry me as I am, still stitching, still stretching, still becoming.