You Are Your Narrative
And other things we perform our way around
I have had this thought for the longest time.
It was sort of unstructured. Scattered, even. Living in different corners of my mind the way thoughts do when they are not ready to be written yet. I decided to put it out today.
So before we go anywhere, let me say this upfront: because your fav said so does not make it right. What is wrong is wrong. Full stop.
I already know what you are thinking. “Oya, what exactly is wrong?” “Who set the rules in the first place?” “Everybody is being selective with their obedience anyway, so who are you to talk?” Lmaoo. Valid. We will get there. Sit down.
But first.
You are your narrative.
Not as a compliment. Not as a threat. Just as a fact sitting in the room with you right now, calm and unbothered.
Everything you put out there has your name on it. The things you said. The person you presented. The silence after the pivot you made without announcing it. The contradiction you hoped nobody noticed. All of it is authorship. All of it is yours.
Think about the person who spent two years on Nigerian Twitter posting about discipline, intentionality, and building in silence. Every Sunday, a thread. “Stop explaining yourself to people.” “Your 20s are for building, not enjoyment.” The whole package. Then, somewhere between burnout and a broken talking stage, they switched. Soft life content. Unserious retweets. Captions about healing and letting God.
Nothing wrong with that. Growth is real.
But the audience that followed for the discipline content? They are still holding that script. They did not get a memo.
You let them be. But you have to own the revision. Because you cannot publish a story and then act confused when people read it.
There is a school of thought that says we are all performers. That love is performance. That life itself is one long audition, and everyone is just showing their A game, hoping to be chosen.
In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman called this the dramaturgical model. All social life is a stage. Every interaction is a performance. Every person manages impressions like a rehearsed cast member. Front stage. Backstage. Costume. Script.
You already know this person.
The one who switches to a different accent the moment they enter a formal setting, but is fully Yoruba or Igbo or Hausa at home. The one who posted their japa arrival photos smiling in front of a grey sky as they had arrived in paradise, but is privately eating noodles in a shared apartment and crying on weekends. The one who bought a car on hire purchase just so their Instagram did not tell the truth. The one who agreed to study accounting or law or medicine because their parents said so, and has been giving a very convincing performance of fulfillment in an office they hate ever since.
Goffman was not wrong about what he was describing.
But describing what people do is not the same as declaring what life has to be.
The performance is not human nature. It is what borrowed living looks like from the outside.
Psychologist Dan McAdams spent decades on something he called narrative identity theory. Simply: we are not just the things that happen to us. We are the story we tell about the things that happen to us. The narrative we construct. First for ourselves, in the quiet, before anyone else hears it.
The problem starts when that story is not yours.
When the plot belongs to your parents. Your culture. Your church. Your LinkedIn feed. When you have been living inside someone else’s autobiography so long you have started writing in their voice without noticing.
You see this clearly in Nigeria. The first child who got into a federal university and carried the weight of the entire family’s hope. They get the degree. Get the job. Send money home. Show up to owambe in the right outfits. Say the right things at family gatherings. But there is a quiet hollowness that follows them everywhere because the story they are living was written to impress people who will never fully understand their private life anyway.
The performance is excellent. The life feels borrowed.
Nietzsche called this herd morality. Outsourcing your values to the crowd because your own are too heavy to excavate. He was not being cruel. He was being diagnostic. Most people, he argued, are not living. They are inheriting.
Sartre named it mauvaise foi. Bad faith. Pretending you have no choice so you never have to admit you chose.
The man who stays in a career he hates because his father will not hear it and leaving means the whole family meeting gets called. The woman who stays in a relationship she has outgrown because she is already twenty-eight and people are already asking questions. The one who goes to church every Sunday not because they believe anything but because their mother is watching and wetin people go say is louder than their own conscience. The friend who performs happiness so consistently at every owambe, every hangout, every birthday post, that they have forgotten what it feels like to just be tired in public.
Bad faith is comfortable. It knows all the right songs to sing in church. It shows up to the audition every single day and gives an excellent performance.
Now. That question I promised to come back to.
“Who set the rules in the first place?”
Fair. But here is the honest answer.
Some things do not need a rulebook to be wrong. You feel it. The discomfort you suppress when you do it. The justifications arrive a little too quickly. The way you avoid certain mirrors after certain decisions. That is not guilt being dramatic. That is your own internal standard trying to speak before you reach for someone else’s silence to cover it with.
Everybody is being selective with their obedience. True. But selectivity is not proof that nothing is wrong. It is proof that people are more comfortable performing righteousness than practising it.
Wrong dressed in nuance is still wrong.
A man who uses his trauma to justify hurting people is still hurting people. Stealing with a smile and calling it “finding your way in a hard economy” is still stealing. A toxic dynamic does not become complicated just because both people have wounds. Some lines do not move, no matter how beautifully you argue against them.
The “two truths can coexist” conversation is necessary. But it has limits. And knowing where those limits are, holding that line calmly while everyone around you is dissolving theirs, that is not rigidity.
That is a person who knows themselves.
Which brings me to the real thing underneath all of this.
Knowing what is wrong is only half of the work. The other half is building something so internally yours that it cannot be argued away.
Not a rigid moral checklist. Not rules you carry around to judge people with. Something deeper. Personal standards and convictions so excavated, so deliberately chosen, so completely yours that when the world tries to talk you out of them, it finds nothing to grip.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow, the man who gave us the hierarchy of needs, spent years studying what he called self-actualised people. What struck him most was not their success. It was how uncolonisable they were. The pressure to conform, to shrink, to become whatever the room needed, slid off them differently. Not because they were arrogant. Not because they did not care about people. But because they had done the work of knowing themselves so thoroughly that outside noise simply had less real estate to occupy.
You know someone like this.
The one who turned down a big man opportunity that everyone else would have jumped on, just because it conflicted with something they knew about themselves, and they could not be pressured into it. The one whose relationship does not look like the standard Lagos relationship template and they are genuinely unbothered because they built it on what they actually needed, not what Instagram said love should look like. The one who sat in a room full of people agreeing on something, said quietly that they did not agree, and did not spend the rest of the night anxious about it.
That is not stubbornness. That is conviction with roots.
You cannot borrow roots. You cannot copy and paste someone else’s convictions into your life and expect them to hold when things get hard. Borrowed convictions are decorative. They look good until pressure is applied. Then they crack. And suddenly you are doing things you said you would never do. Justifying things you once called out. Performing a version of yourself you do not even recognise.
Your own convictions, the ones you arrived at through actual living, actual questioning, actual failure, actual sitting with the discomfort of not having easy answers, those do not crack the same way.
They do not dissolve when the crowd moves. They do not disappear because a pastor said otherwise, or because your mates are all doing it, or because someone charming told you that you were being too rigid.
They bend. They evolve. But they hold.
The goal is not to be immovable. The goal is to be uncolonisable.
Live life fully as a being. No more, no less.
Not because Goffman said you are performing. Not because Nietzsche said the herd is wrong. Not because this piece told you to. Not because someone you admire did it first and made it look clean.
Because you want to.
Because when you strip away the borrowed ideology, the inherited standards, the convictions that were handed to you before you were old enough to interrogate them, what is left is just you. Alive. Choosing. Present in your own life for the first time.
Research in self-determination theory by psychologists Deci and Ryan found consistently across cultures and decades: autonomy is not a luxury. It is a psychological need. People who live from internally derived values, not external pressure, not performance, report deeper well-being, more honest relationships, and a significantly reduced need to be chosen by anyone.
Because they stopped auditioning.
The most threatening thing in a world running on auditions is someone who is not performing.
In Nigeria, we have a name for them. Proud. Too known. She does not regard. He thinks he is better than everyone. They do not know how things work here.
What they actually are is free.
And that is the thing about a person who has done the excavation, who has built their own standards and chosen their own convictions and is living from the inside out.
You cannot shake them with noise. You cannot move them with crowd pressure. You cannot rewrite them without their permission.
They are not performing.
They are just living.
And in a room full of auditions, that is the most radical thing a person can do.
You are your narrative.
Own every word of it.
What narrative have you been living that was never actually yours?
My Substack recommendations: hosannaiah Onyinye Raychel Adesola Fọlá BADA Najeebah Mubarak Exactly Where You Need To Be Sopuruchi