UNSPOKEN (Chapter 12)

Everyone Does It.

May 07, 2026

Catch-up on the Opening Note, Pre-Prologue, Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter Three, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10. and Chapter 11.

She answered the question every day.
The same answer.
Safe. Clean. Correct.
Coach Smart is going to have something to say about that.
………
Narrator’s Nook
One week.
One question. Every morning. Before she opened her phone.
What did I want to say yesterday that I didn’t?
She did it. Every single day. Monday through Thursday. Notes app, 6:00 a.m., before WhatsApp, before email, before anything.
She answered it every day.
It’s Friday again.

Monday

The morning question arrived before my alarm.

I had been awake since 5:30 a.m. Not the 3:00 a.m. panic of pitch week, just the regular early wakefulness of a person whose body had decided that rest was a suggestion rather than a commitment. I lay on my back, ceiling, the Yaba morning beginning outside, and the question was already there waiting.

What did I want to say yesterday that I didn’t?

Yesterday was Sunday. I had spent it at home. I had cooked, read, done laundry, watched one OraeSpeak video that I had paused three times because certain sentences landed in places I wasn’t prepared for. I had not gone out. I had not spoken to anyone except Sewa, briefly, to confirm I was alive.

What had I wanted to say that I didn’t?

I picked up my phone. Notes app.

I wanted to tell Sewa that the panic attack scared me more than the pitch failing. Not because of what it meant for the funding round. Because I didn’t know my body could do that. I didn’t know the wall had a physical address.

I looked at the answer.

Then I deleted it.

I typed instead: I wanted to tell Sewa I was proud of myself for calling OraeSpeak on Friday.

I put my phone down.

I got up.

That was Monday.

Tuesday’s answer: I wanted to tell Mautin thank you properly. Not just the WhatsApp message. Properly.

Wednesday’s answer: I wanted to speak up in the team meeting when Femi misattributed the Shaping Leaders data. I knew it was wrong. I said nothing.

Thursday’s answer: I wanted to tell Adaora she was doing well. I thought it. I didn’t say it.

I read them back on Thursday night.

They were all true.

They were also all safe. All surface. All the things I could afford to acknowledge without opening a door I wasn’t ready to walk through.

I knew this.

I suspected Coach Adaeze Smart would know this too.

The Mautin messages had come on Tuesday and Thursday.

Tuesday, 8:14 p.m.:

How’s the week?

Three words. No pressure in them. No expectation of a particular kind of answer. Just the question, placed in the air like something that didn’t need to be caught immediately.

I had stared at it for a moment.

Manageable, I typed. You?

Same. Reading The Speaker’s Code. Chapter three has an exercise you should try.

Me: I haven’t started it yet.

Mautin: I know. Start with chapter one. Don’t skip.

I put my phone down smiling slightly in a way I was not going to examine.

Thursday, 6:45 p.m.:

Mautin: Session tomorrow. How are you feeling about it?

I thought about it honestly before I answered.

Me: I feel like I am ready for it.

A pause. Then:

Mautin: That means you’re ready for the real homework.

I read that three times.

Then I put my phone down and picked up The Speaker's Code and read chapter one, which I had been avoiding because chapter one was titled The Soil With Cankerworms and the title alone had been sitting in my chest like something I needed a run-up for.

I read it in one sitting.

I did not sleep until 1:00 a.m.

The work week had been quieter than the week of the pitch in the way that weeks were quiet after something large. The large thing had happened, the room had processed it, and now everything was back to the ordinary business of a company going about its work.

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Lady Doreen had called me on Monday morning.

Not to the fifth floor. On the phone, briefly, with the economy of communication that defined her. Ten minutes. She asked about the OraeSpeak call, confirmed I had booked the Friday session, and then said something I wasn’t expecting:

“I want us to have a standing Monday check-in. Thirty minutes. My office.”

I had paused.

“For the pitch preparation?”

“For everything,” she said.

“You are new to this role and you have had a difficult start and I have decided to be more involved in your development than I typically am with new Heads.”

A pause.

“Is that acceptable?”

What she was describing was mentorship. Structured, committed. Lady Doreen Eze investing thirty minutes of a Monday morning in me specifically.

“Yes”, I said. “Thank you.”

“Good. Monday, nine o’clock.”

The call ended.

I sat at my desk and held that for a moment. The CEO of a company that had been named one of the best places to work in Nigeria had just decided, formally, to mentor me. On the worst professional week of my career. Not despite it but because of it.

I thought about what she had said in her office on Friday.

Sometimes failing and being honest are the same thing.

The Monday meeting had lasted thirty-two minutes. She asked me three things: what I was learning, what I was finding hard, what I needed from her specifically. She listened to all three answers without interrupting.

She gave me two pieces of direct feedback — one about my communication with Femi, which she thought was too deferential and needed to be more collegial; one about the Kwame situation, which she framed not as a failure to be recovered from but as a brief she was still working on.

“Kwame has not closed the conversation”, she said. “He has moved it to a different timeline. That is not the same as NO.”

“When will he want to meet again?” I asked.

“When you’re ready.”

She looked at me.

“And you will tell me when that is.”

The implication being: I would know. That I was the one who would determine the timeline. Not Kwame, not Lady Doreen, not the funding round.

Me.

I had left her office on Monday with the feeling of someone who had been handed a responsibility they hadn’t asked for and was finding, against their expectations, that it fit.

The micro-moment happened on Wednesday.

Team meeting. Femi presenting the Q3 client satisfaction data. He cited the Shaping Leaders improvement metrics. The 34% completion rate increase, the 67% satisfaction score and attributed them to the original programme design.

I had rebuilt that programme.

Femi knew this. Everyone in the room knew this. But he had been presenting and the attribution had slipped and now it was in the air, sitting there, and six months ago I would have let it sit. I would have filed it under not worth the energy and pick your battles and email him later and then not emailed him later.

I looked at the table.

I looked at Femi.

“Actually”, I said.

Everyone looked at me.

My chest did the thing. The familiar pull.

I breathed.

“The metrics are from the redesign”, I said.

“The original programme had a sixty-one percent completion rate. The improvement came from the identity-first restructure.”

I paused.

“Just for the record.”

Femi looked at me.

A beat.

“You’re right,” he said. “My bad.”

I made a note. Moved on.

The meeting continued.

Nobody marked the moment except me. I felt it, the small clean feeling of having said the true thing in the room where the true thing needed to be said, without managing it into silence first. It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t a triumph. It was three sentences.

But they were mine. Said out loud. In a room. Without the voice going small.

I pressed my palms flat on the desk briefly.

Then I took them off.

I didn’t need them there as long as I used to.

Sewa had called on Wednesday night.

“Okay so tell me about this morning question thing”, she said, before I had fully said hello. “You mentioned it last week and I’ve been thinking about it and I want details.”

I told her. The card. The question. The instruction to write the answer every morning before opening her phone.

Sewa was quiet for a moment.

Then, “What have you been writing?”

“Bitter truths”, I said.

“Show me.”

“Sewa—”

“Ọrọ. Show me.”

I opened my notes app. I read her Monday through Wednesday.

When I finished she was quiet again. The real quiet.

“These are good”, she said slowly.

“But?”

“But they’re all about other people”, she said.

“Every single one. Something you wanted to say to me, to Mautin, to Femi, to Adaora.”

A pause.

“What did you want to say to yourself?”

I looked at the notes.

She was right. Every answer was outward-facing. Every unsaid thing was a thing I had wanted to direct at someone else. Not one of them turned inward. Not one of them was the thing I had typed on Monday and then deleted before Adaeze could see it.

The panic attack scared me more than the pitch failing. I didn’t know my body could do that. I didn’t know the wall had a physical address.

“I deleted the real ones”, I said.

Silence.

“I know”, Sewa said. “Write it back. Tonight. Before you sleep.”

I looked at my phone.

“Okay,” I said.

“And Ọrọ?”

“Yes?”

“This exercise is not just homework. It’s also—” she paused, looking for the word “—it’s also the thing Coach Smart is going to use to help you grow. Write the real answers.”

I sat with that for a moment.

“You would have been an excellent therapist”, I said.

“Girlll, I know”, Sewa said. “The world’s loss. Now write the real answer and go to sleep.”

I wrote it. The deleted one, restored. And then three more that had been waiting underneath it that I hadn’t known were there until Sewa named the pattern and the pattern fell open.

I read them back.

They were not safe.

They were true.

I put the phone down and picked up the Bible. Not with intention, just the reaching that had been happening more often lately, the hand going to the nightstand in the evening without a plan and I opened it without looking.

Isaiah 43.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.

I read it once.

I read it again.

I did not know yet what I believed fully. I was still working that out, still standing at the edge of the door that had been closed for eighteen months, still in the negotiation between the faith I had inherited and the faith I was beginning, slowly, to actually want.

But I have called you by name landed in my chest in a way that was not nothing.

I put the Bible down.

I went to sleep.

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Friday — 1:45 p.m.

I was in the Shapers bathroom mirror again before I left for Brewed.

Not the same ritual as pitch day. Not the four-minute inventory, not the white shirt and graduation earrings as armour. I was in my regular Friday work-from-home (WFH) clothes because today was a work from home day and I had come to the office anyway and Lady Doreen had seen me at nine o’clock in a grey blazer and dark jeans and had not said anything about it being a WFH day, which meant it was fine.

I looked at my reflection.

“You’ve been playing it safe with the homework”, I told it.

The reflection agreed.

“She’s going to notice.”

The reflection remained in agreement.

“Okay” I said.

I went to Brewed.

Adaeze was already there. Same corner table. Same two glasses of water. Today she had a small Bluetooth speaker on the table, which was new and which I filed immediately as something I was going to ask about.

“Ọrọ.” She looked up. “How was the week?”

“Manageable”, I said. Then I caught the word and the habit inside it.

“Actually — it was more than manageable. Some good things happened.”

She tilted her head slightly. The invitation to continue.

I told her about the team meeting. The three sentences. Femi saying you’re right.

She listened. “How did your body feel when you said it?”

“Like the usual pull. And then — different. Like the pull happened and I went anyway.”

“Good”, she said. Not effusively. Like someone marking correct on a test. “That’s the work.”

The waiter came. I ordered zobo again. Coach Adaeze got water.

“Show me the morning question answers”, she said, when the waiter left.

I opened my notes app.

I handed her my phone.

She read through Monday to Thursday. She read slowly. Not skimming, actually reading, the way she did everything, with full attention. When she finished she looked up.

“These are safe”, she said.

I exhaled.

“I know.”

“Tell me about the one you deleted.”

I looked at her.

“There’s always one”, she said, simply.

“The first drafts. The true one. Before the editing.”

“How do you—”

“Because everyone does it”, she said.

“And because your safe answers are all outward-facing. Every unsaid thing is addressed to someone else. Which means the thing you were not willing to write was the thing addressed to yourself.”

I took a breath.

“I wrote it back”, I said. “After Sewa pointed out the pattern.”

“Can I see it?”

I took the phone back. I scrolled to Thursday night. The restored answer and the three beneath it.

I handed it back.

She read them.

She was quiet for a moment after she finished. Something shifted in her expression — not surprise. Recognition.

“This one”, he said. She turned the phone toward me, pointing at the first line.

The panic attack scared me more than the pitch failing. Not because of what it meant professionally. Because I didn’t know my body could do that. I didn’t know the wall had a physical address.

“Yes”, I said.

“The wall has a physical address”, she repeated quietly. “That’s a significant thing to understand about yourself.”

She put the phone down.

“That’s where we’re going today.”

The Bluetooth speaker, it turned out, was for noise.

Not music. Just ambient sound. Coffee shop background noise, which she played at low volume, and which she explained simply, “Some people find it easier to speak when they’re not in total silence. The ambient sound creates a buffer. We’ll see if it helps you.”

She had thought about this before I arrived. She had prepared the room for me specifically.

I looked at the small speaker on the table and felt something I didn’t have a clean word for. Something that lived in the territory between gratitude and being seen.

“I want you to record yourself”, she said. “One minute. No topic, no structure. Just open your mouth and speak. Anything. Whatever comes.”

I looked at her.

“Here?” I said. “In the café?”

“In the café”, she confirmed. “Nobody is listening. The ambient sound covers it. It’s just your phone and your voice.”

“What do I — what do I talk about?”

“Anything” she said.

“A memory. Something you saw this week. Something you’re thinking about right now. It genuinely doesn’t matter. The content is not the point.”

I looked at my phone.

“Sixty seconds”, she said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I picked up my phone.

I opened the voice memo app.

I sat for a moment with my thumb over the record button and the café around me doing its Friday afternoon things — the couple two tables over having a conversation about something, the barista making a noise with the coffee machine, the ambient sound from Coach Adaeze’s speaker filling the space between us.

I pressed record.

And then I did the thing I had been doing for seventeen years. I managed. I opened my mouth and what came out was the email voice, the professional voice, the voice that had been trained for exactly this situation, the voice that was correct and present and entirely defended:

“My name is Ọrọ Adekunle. I am the Head of Learning Strategy at Shapers Ltd. This week I had a team meeting where I corrected a misattribution of data and—”

I stopped.

I looked at Adaeze.

She was watching me. Not the surgical look, not the warm-curious look. Something more specific. The look of someone watching a person do the exact thing they had predicted they would do.

“Try again”, she said quietly.

I looked at the phone. The recording was still running.

“Just — speak”, she said. “Not a presentation. Not a professional summary. Just you. Talking. Like you talk to Sewa.”

I thought about how I talked to Sewa.

I thought about Wednesday night. Sewa saying show me. Me reading the answers. The deleted one being named.

I looked at the phone.

I breathed.

And something, not a decision, something below a decision, something that had been sitting behind the managed voice for a very long time and had apparently decided that this Friday afternoon in a café in Oniru with ambient sound playing and a woman across the table who had called it correctly before I even sat down. Something opened.

“I’ve been scared this week”, I said.

And it was not the managed voice. It was the other one. The voice that arrived in my flat when nobody was watching, the voice that had read Isaiah 43 out loud the previous night without noticing it was doing it.

“Not about the pitch or the funding or whether Kwame comes back. I’ve been scared because Thursday in the boardroom was the first time my body stopped listening to me. And I’ve spent — I’ve spent a long time being very precise about what my body does and when and how and the idea that it could just. How does it decide something, without me, in front of people? That scared me more than failing. Because failing I know how to manage. I’ve been managing things my whole life. But this was the one that my management system couldn’t reach.”

I stopped.

The recording was still running.

The café was still there. The couple two tables over. The barista. The ambient sound from the speaker. All of it continuing, indifferent, requiring nothing.

“Keep going”, Coach Smart said softly.

“I think—” I started.

“I think I built the management system a long time ago and I built it well and it has kept me safe for years and I am genuinely grateful for it. But I also think it has kept me from things. Rooms. People. Myself.” I paused.

“I don’t know how to dismantle it without losing the safety. I don’t know what I am without it. And that is the thing I have been not saying. Not to Sewa, not in the morning question, not here until just now.”

I pressed stop.

Sixty-three seconds.

I put the phone on the table.

Adaeze looked at me.

“Play it back,” she said.

I looked at the phone.

“Now?” I said.

“Now.”

I picked it up. I pressed play.

My own voice came out of the phone and into the Friday afternoon air of Brewed café in Oniru Lagos and I heard it. The first thirty seconds, the managed version, the email voice doing what the email voice did. And then the moment it shifted. And then what came after the shift.

I listened to myself say: I’ve been scared this week.

I listened to myself say: I don’t know what I am without it.

I put the phone down.

The back of my eyes were doing something I was refusing to authorise. Not refusing from management. Refusing because I was genuinely surprised. I was surprised by my own voice. Not by the words, which I had known were true even before I said them. By the quality of the voice itself. The way it sounded. The warmth of it. The certainty. The voice that arrived when I stopped performing and simply spoke.

“That”, Adaeze said, “is your voice.”

I looked at her.

“Not the first thirty seconds”, she said.

“The second thirty. The one that comes when you stop trying to present yourself and just are yourself.”

She held my gaze.

“That is the voice that was in that boardroom. Trying to get out. And the management system was the thing standing in the way.”

I pressed my lips together.

“It’s a good voice”, she said.

Simply. Like a fact.

“It’s the kind of voice that makes rooms go still.”

I looked at my phone on the table.

At the recording. Sixty-three seconds. The two halves of it.

“I’ve heard it twice,” I said quietly. “In professional settings. Both times I didn’t plan for it to come out.”

“Because planning is part of the management system,” she said. “The voice doesn’t need planning. It needs permission.”

Permission.

Every time. That word.

“How do I give it permission?” I asked.

Adaeze picked up her water. “By doing what you just did,” she said.

“By letting the recording run past the managed version. By staying in the room when the body wants to leave. By writing the true answer instead of the safe one.”

She set the glass down.

“Permission is not a one-time decision. It’s a daily practice. You give it in small rooms before you give it in big ones.” She looked at me. “That’s what we’re building.”

I sat with that.

The ambient sound continued. The café continued. Outside the window, the Oniru Friday afternoon light was doing the golden thing it did between four and five, the trees on the road holding it.

“Your task this week”, Adaeze said, “is the recording. Every day. Two minutes. Same instruction. No topic, no structure, just speak. And this time—” she looked at me directly “—don’t stop when it gets uncomfortable. That’s exactly when to keep going.”

I nodded.

“And the morning question continues”, she said.

“But this week the answer has one rule: it cannot be about another person. What did you want to say, to yourself. Not to Femi, not to Sewa, not to Mautin.”

She paused.

“To yourself.”

I exhaled.

“Okay,” I said.

“One more thing,” she said.

She reached into her bag and placed a book on the table.

Naked and Unashamed — Seide Agosu.

I looked at it.

“Not now”, she said. “When you’re ready. You’ll know when.”

She picked up her bag.

“See you next Friday, Ọrọ.”

She paid. She left.

I sat at the table for a longer moment this time. Not because I was processing, though I was, but because Brewed on a Friday afternoon was doing something good and I had nowhere to be and I was learning, slowly, that having nowhere to be was not a problem to solve but a space to inhabit.

I picked up the book.

Naked and Unashamed.

I read the back cover.

I put it in my bag.

I opened my voice memo app.

I pressed record.

“It is 4:47 p.m. on a Friday,” I said.

“I am sitting in a café in Oniru and I just heard my own voice play back to me and I did not recognise it at first and then I did and I don’t fully know what to do with that yet.”

I kept going.

Ninety-one seconds.

All second half.

I called Sewa from the ride home.

“How was it?” she said.

“She made me record myself.”

“And?”

“And I played it back.”

A pause. “And?”

“My voice”, I said. “Sewa. My actual voice. Coming out of a phone speaker in a café.”

Silence on the line.

“Tell me”, Sewa said, softly.

“It’s—” I stopped. Started again. “It’s the voice you always talk about. The one from JSS2. The Literature class. I heard it. Sixty-three seconds. The first thirty were me managing. The last thirty were—” I stopped again.

“Were you,? Sewa said.

“Were me,” I confirmed.

Sewa was quiet for a long moment.

Then, very quietly, she said,

“Girlll, I have been waiting for you to hear that since we were fifteen years old.”

I looked out of the window. The Lagos evening. My building coming into view. The junction where Mallam Isah’s danfo departed at 7:00 a.m. every morning, which I had not been on in two weeks.

“I know,” I said.

“Ọrọ.”

“Yes.”

“You are going to be okay”, she said. “I don’t mean eventually. I mean that the direction is right. You are going in the right direction.”

I received that.

Fully. Without the machinery.

“Thank you,” I said.

We talked until I got home. Easy, warm, about nothing much. A film she had watched, a restaurant in Abuja she was obsessed with, a detail about her work that had been frustrating her that she needed to say out loud. Ordinary things. The texture of two lives lived in two cities, connected across three hundred kilometres by fourteen years and a phone call.

When I got home I made tea. I ate. I sat on the couch.

I picked up The Speaker's Code— I was in chapter three now, the chapter Mautin had mentioned and I read for twenty minutes.

Then I opened my notes app.

What did I want to say to myself today that I didn’t?

I thought about it honestly. Not the first answer. The true one.

That I am proud of the sixty-three seconds. The were not perfect but they were real. And real is the thing I have been avoiding since forever.

I read it back.

I did not delete it.

I put my phone down.

I reached for the Bible. The reaching that was becoming a habit I hadn’t decided to form, just found myself in, the way you found yourself taking a route you hadn’t planned because your feet remembered the way.

I opened it.

Psalm 139.

You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

I read the whole psalm.

When I finished I sat with the last verse.

Search me, God, and know my heart and I thought about sixty-three seconds in a café and a management system I had built at age seven and a voice that had been waiting behind it this whole time.

I said, quietly, to the room:

“Okay. I’m listening.”

I didn’t know if anyone heard it.

But I meant it.

And meaning it was enough.

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