You have been everything to everyone.
You have said yes when you meant no.
You have shrunk so others could expand.
You have made yourself useful because you weren’t sure being yourself was enough.
You have been waiting — quietly, patiently — to be chosen before you let yourself fully live.
If any of this feels familiar, you are in the right place.
These are not personality traits. They are patterns. And they can be unlearned.
I’m Koya.
I’m a Ghanaian-born, UK-raised Black woman, a writer, and a lifelong journaler.
I write for Black and African women who have lost themselves in everyone else’s life — and I walk with some of them as they begin the journey home to themselves.
I know this woman because I am her.
I grew up between cultures, shaped by family expectations, faith, silence, and survival — and like many Black and African women, I learned early how to endure, even when something inside me was hurting.
I started this space in 2020 because I needed somewhere to place what I didn’t yet have language for — the discomfort, the anger, the confusion, the questions I had learned to carry quietly.
For a long time, writing was how I stayed alive to myself.
Something is different now.
The woman writing this is not the woman who started.
I have done the work — slowly, often imperfectly — of learning how to sit with what I feel without collapsing or self-betrayal. I have stopped waiting to be chosen. I have learned how to come back to myself when I notice I have left.
I am not writing from the other side of the journey.
I am writing from inside it — just moving differently than I used to.
That is what I offer here.
Not arrival. Company on the road.
This is what I want you to know:
You were never the problem.
The exhaustion, the invisibility, the performing — these were things you learned in order to survive. And you can unlearn them.
Every version of you that got through the hard things, the quiet things, the things no one saw — she brought you here.
To choose yourself now is not starting over.
It is honouring every woman you have already been.
If you’re here, you don’t have to figure everything out at once.
You can start where you are.
Read — reflections that help you recognise the patterns you’ve been living.
Reflect — a journal to help you begin finding your way back.
Walk with me — one-to-one mentoring for the woman ready to do this work with support (limited spaces per intake).
Substack → Journal → Mentoring
Reflections and essays live on Substack. You’re welcome there whenever you’re ready.
Koya Nkrumah 