Part One: The sentence that took my creativity.
I watched a video this week, and it opened something I have been carrying for about forty years.
Jonny Thomson talked with the philosopher Daisy Dixon about an idea called aesthetic injustice. It happens when you deny somebody access to art or beauty. Dixon says it takes three forms. You deny someone their own taste. You deny them beautiful surroundings. Or you deny them the ability to create at all.
Thomson gave an example for that third one. A mother tells her child she cannot sing. Years later, the child is a grown woman in a beer garden; the band is playing Oasis, everybody is singing along, and she sits there with her mouth closed because her mother once told her she had a horrible voice and shouldn’t sing in case somebody hears her.
I sat with that for a long time. Then I realised my story isn’t quite that story, and the difference is the whole point.
Nobody ever told me I could not create.
What happened to me is smaller and, I think, more common.
They measured my hands and sentenced my soul.
I could not draw. I tried sewing, and my dress did not come out like everybody else’s. I tried typing, and I was slow and clumsy. My handwriting was poor. When I wrote my name as a child, the first letter would sit on one line, and the next letter would drop to the line below, and here is the part I need you to hear properly.
I could not see it.
I looked at that page, and I saw my name. I had written my name. In my own honest assessment, I had done the thing. Somebody else had to tell me it was wrong, and I had no way to check before I handed it in or predict the verdict.
I know now what that was. Nobody had the language for it then. A neurodivergent child with poor motor coordination, being assessed on tasks that ran directly against her wiring, with nobody adjusting anything.
But here is what I want to sit with. Everything they measured was my hands. My coordination. My fine motor control. Not one of those tasks measured whether I could think of something nobody else had thought of. Not one of them measured imagination.
They measured my hands. They recorded the verdict against my creativity.
I decided, quietly and completely, that I was not a creative person. Because in my house and my school and my culture, creativity meant drawing, sewing, neat work, and a dress that came out right.
That is not aesthetic injustice by denial. Nobody forbade me anything. It is a verdict delivered in the wrong category. And it is so ordinary that it happens in millions of homes without anybody raising their voice.
The sentence
There was a phrase that travelled with all of it.
Nobody is praising you.
If you grew up Nigerian, you probably felt something in your chest when you read that. If you did not, let me bring you in properly, because I have been asking people all week, and I am not finished asking.
Oyindamola Gloria Muller, who works with me, put it like this. Itdoesn’tt mean peoplearen’tt praising you enough. It is what we say when someone is doing too much or seeking validation. It is like saying nobody is giving you an award. There is no prize for this. Relax, stop overworking yourself trying to impress people, because nobody is keeping score.
My sister Tonye told me it is what a parent says to a child who is misbehaving and will not stop. It’s a way of saying, “Stop acting up.” She has never used it on her own children.
Eme has never heard it in her life.
Three Nigerian women. Three different answers: doesn’t know the phrase at all.
I am still collecting. And honestly, the disagreement is the most interesting thing I have found, because it tells me this is not one national saying with one clean meaning. It is a household thing. A regional thing. A thing that shaped some of us completely and passed others by entirely.
Tonye’sh Tonye’s definition for a second, though, because it explains something I could not explain before. The phrase has a native home, and that home is naughtiness. It is built for a child who is acting up.
So when it landed on my handwriting, and on my dress, and on my sewing, a sentence designed for misbehaviour was being applied to effort.
I was not acting up. I was trying.
But the sentence that arrived carried the grammar of a child being told off. That is why it did not land as correction. It landed as shame.
My method has never been the one that gets applauded
Let me tell you how I work, and how I have always worked.
I attempt. I learn from it afterwards. Then I make another attempt.
That is a real method. It is arguably the only method. Nothing has ever been made without it. But people applaud it only at the very end, once the output is finally correct, and nobody claps for the drafts.
So a child running that method in public does not look like somebody working properly. She looks like somebody failing repeatedly.
And every failed attempt is a fresh opportunity for the sentence.
It is not the correction. It is the delivery.
I want to be very clear here, because it would be easy to read this as me saying nobody should ever bring anybody down to earth.
I am not saying that at all.
My coach Victor tells me the same thing regularly. He will say, DK, you have got carried away; come back, stay on track. And he says it in a way that accounts for how my attention actually works, that I have deficits there, that I need guardrails to stay on the road.
Same information. Costs me nothing. I come back whole.
Because something real is being pointed at, when I am deep in work, I do genuinely lose the edges. I get absorbed, and I stop checking, and blind spots close in. That is a state where you can be sabotaged or where you can sabotage yourself. Somebody saying, “Come up for air,” is doing you a service.
But that is not what the sentence says.
The sentence does not say, “Come up for air.” It says nobody is praising you. One comments on your state. The other is a ruling on your worth.
So the child does not he, ” Check yourself. She hears it, and it doesn’t register anywhere. And she draws the only conclusion available to her.
Do not go in that deep. Being absorbed is what got you caught.
That is the whole mechanism. That is how a comment produces avoidance instead of effort. It never taught me to do it better. It taught me not to go in. And you cannot make anything from the shallow end, because getting lost in it is the making.
And notice who it actually hits. If you thought you were nothing, you do not need bringing down. That sentence only bites the person who briefly, quietly, thought she might have made something. It aims at pride, and it lands on emergence.
If you think a gentle version is safe, look at the left-handed children
I keep thinking about how we handled left-handed children.
In Nigeria, the left hand is still discouraged in plenty of communities. Some children were struck. Some had the hand tied to a chair or bound to the body. Some got the softer treatment instead: the reasoning, the rewards, the moral argument, the disappointed look.
The research is detailed. Soft methods do the same damage as hard ones. Gentle or punitive, the outcome is the same. The child suppresses something natural, internalises shame, carries lower confidence, and struggles for years in ways nobody connects back to the source.
So no, softness of tone does not rescue the instruction.
A sentence delivered with love, with a laugh, in front of family, at a child who has just made something, still converts her.
And there is a line from the research on praise that I cannot let go of. Praise out of season, or tactlessly bestowed, can freeze the heart as much as blame.
Freeze.
London
I was in London, an adult, running my own practice, years into building something.
I did something. I do not even remember what. And a woman looked at me and said it. Nobody is praising you. Your own is too much.
And I froze.
Not annoyed. Not offended. Frozen. All the way back to the child with her name across two lines, in one second, standing there in my adult body.
That is when I understood the sentence had never been removed. It had just been sitting there all that time, and she had pressed it.
And if you succeed, there is another one waiting
Here is the part that finished the argument for me.
Fail, and you get nobody is praising you.
Succeed, and you get you just got lucky. Or na luck. Or see this one. Or the classic, delivered as a question that is not a question: why you dey like this? doesn’t mean the behaviour was wrong. It means, “What is wrong with you?” It puts the fault in your nature rather than your action, which is the same move as the sentence.
So no result counts. Fail, and it is proof. Succeed, and it was not yours.
A brake stops motion. This is not a brake. This is a system with no exit condition.
Dead inside, but moving
I want to say what this produces, because I meet her constantly.
She is compliant. She functions. She shows up, does the work, gets the results, smiles in the photograph. And there is a part of her that does not question authority, ever, because questioning was the thing that got corrected. She carries that shape into every relationship afterwards.
Dead inside, but moving.
Her parents will tell you she is fine. My child can never do that. My child is confident. They see the compliance, and they read it as character, and they cannot see that what they are looking at is a mask that went on so early it does not come off.
And when she is hurting, you will not be able to see it. That is not an accident. That is the skill she was taught.
I see this in the women I am privileged to mentor. They come from these homes. Some of them have been to church for counselling and were told to open up, be vulnerable, share. By people who did not understand that trust is granular. I might trust you with one part of my life and not another, because of what I have already survived. Demanding total disclosure from somebody whose disclosure was once punished is the same instruction wearing a kinder face.
I know a whole conversation is happening about this. Every day on TikTok, African parents this, Nigerian parents that. People going no contact. It is the same in Asian households, the same in immigrant families everywhere, where sacrifice turns into expectation and expectation turns into a child who performs.
I am not writing that article.
I am not here to call anybody toxic, and I am not telling anybody to cut off their mother. My mother was doing what she understood as love and what her culture understood as raising a child properly. There was real information inside that sentence.
I am asking a different question, and I think it is the one underneath all of that noise.
What did the sentence do to the child’s ability to make things?
That is Part One. That is the wound.
Part Two is what I have learned about the way back. Read Part Two here.
