Sometimes I wonder what I think of myself when no one is watching—when the bravado leaks out of my bones and the room is quiet enough to hear my heart naming its losses. I do not trust the flattering mirror of certainty. My mind is a workshop where faith hammers at doubt and doubt returns each morning with better arguments. I am not the sum of my victories; I am the argument itself—between what is easy and what is right, between appetite and calling, between the praise others offer and the truth I owe myself.
If there is an escape I droll over, it is not an island or a promotion but a moment of unambiguous meaning—five clean seconds in which my actions align with the person I claim to be. I have learned the world gives us very little of that. The rest is negotiation. The rest is apprenticeship to the ordinary: waking before the sun, tending to work that rarely thanks you, loving people whose needs are not symmetrical with yours, carrying a body that grows tired even when the spirit is willing.
Work has taught me a stern tenderness. The ledger does not care about my feelings; the deadline does not bow to my backache. I used to think excellence would deliver me into a talismanic ease, a clearing where effort becomes effortless. Instead, excellence revealed itself as devotion—the kind that sharpens you and also takes its tax. You learn to show up not because you are inspired, but because your word has weight. And there is a secret grace hidden here: when I hold myself to the discipline I promised, I become more than my moods. On days that wring me dry, I remember the patient dignity of labor—the way a well-done task offers evidence that my life is not a rumor.
Love is the counterweight that keeps the machine from splitting apart. It is less fireworks than steady voltage. I used to chase the mirage of a perfect fit, a person who would interpret my silences like scripture. Now I think love is the art of translation—two imperfect languages learning each other by repetition and mercy. In a good love, your edges are not filed off; they are named, held, and slowly taught to soften. In a bad love, your edges are weaponized, and you bleed without even realizing it. I have known both. The good love does not shout. It sets the table, texts when you land, remembers how you like your tea. It stays when you are not impressive.
Family is where loyalty first learned my name. It is also where disappointment speaks in a dialect only you recognize. There are relatives whose embrace warms the bones, and others whose affection is conditional, a kind of polite taxation. The cruelest betrayal is not an enemy’s blade; it is the smile that hides the audit of your worth. I have suffered from such inventories. I have also been rescued by a few good ones—the aunt who pressed a quiet envelope into my palm when the month ran long, the brother who called at 2 a.m. and said nothing for seven minutes because silence was the only medicine I could swallow. The few redeem the many. They remind me that love is not a theory; it is logistics.
I think often about death, not morbidly but faithfully, as a teacher who keeps office hours I cannot skip. Death makes a monk of the proud and a child of the philosopher. When I hold mortality in my mouth like a lozenge, I taste both terror and relief: terror that so much will be left unfinished, relief that the grading ends. If every life is a sentence, death is the period we cannot relocate. Knowing this, I want my days to read like a paragraph that holds together—work with candor, love with courage, and a few clean sentences of gratitude before the page ends.
As for God: I love Him, and I am often confused by His methods. Religion, to me, is a language for the ache—liturgy as choreography for bewildered bodies. I stand with believers who doubt and doubters who pray. I have learned that faith is not certainty; it is fidelity. I do not always understand the Author, but I stay in the story. And when religion becomes an idol to itself—when it polices more than it heals—I walk outside for air, and I remember the God who speaks fluent wind, who measures our hearts by their hospitality to the suffering.
Society instructs with a confident voice. It tells us what success looks like, how grief should schedule itself, which failures are forgivable and which must be erased from the résumé. But society is, at best, a useful rumor. Much of what I learned was less truth than tradition—handed down like ill-fitting clothes. The question, then, is not “What does society think?” but “Which lessons have earned the right to stay?” Some have. Keep them. The rest must be re-stitched or returned.
False friends taught me the arithmetic of proximity: not everyone who stands near you stands with you. There are people who love what you do for them but resent that you can do anything at all. Their affection is a loan with predatory interest. Let them go. The good friends are quieter; they show up with soup and leave before you have to thank them. They remember your mother’s birthday. They let your success enlarge them instead of shrink them. In their presence, envy gasps for air; it cannot live. Those few—guard them. Be one of them.
What do I think of myself? I think I am unfinished on purpose. I am a student of days: some that blister, some that bless. I want a life whose achievements do not outpace its integrity, a love that chooses me on the tedious Wednesdays, a faith that can survive both the hospital room and the wedding dance. I want to be the kind of person who returns the grocery cart, who answers messages even when there is nothing to gain, who tells the truth without using it as a weapon.
When the days tire me out, I hold a small ritual: I name three things that did not fail me—the taste of water, the hand I held, the work I didn’t want to do but did anyway. I forgive the rest. I ask for strength to choose the better thing tomorrow, and wisdom to know that “better” sometimes means gentler, slower, kinder. If I am lucky, I sleep. If I am blessed, I wake again to the same ordinary world and try, with all the ruin and all the hope in me, to meet it honestly.
In the end, the escape I dream of is not escape at all. It is arrival—into a self that can stand before God and the people I love and say, without embroidery: I tried. I failed. I tried again. I kept faith with what was given. And though I was not always brave, I did not run.
Kofi Amankwaa-Benneh Jr.