a letter, from somewhere.
“I want my life to be completely adventurous, passionate, and weird.”
— Anthony Bourdain
I’ve always been a curious person. About people, mostly. Where they’re from, what they believe, the things they love, and how they came to be who they are. I love asking questions, learning things I know absolutely nothing about, and finding myself in conversations with people whose experiences are entirely different from mine.
I was born in Nigeria, call Texas home, and currently attend university in Nashville. I’ve always loved writing. As a child, it came naturally to me, and somewhere between growing up, university, and figuring out what I want to do with my life, I found myself giving more of my time to academics and intellectual pursuits. I love challenging myself, reading, learning, and finding out just how much I don’t know. I don’t think that part of me is going anywhere.
But I’ve always loved art just as much.
Music, literature, photography, dance, film, fashion. I’ve spent years consuming all of it, sometimes a little obsessively. I made a Letterboxd account because apparently watching a film wasn’t enough; I needed somewhere to have an opinion about it. I became an A24 member despite knowing the membership was practically useless to me. My high school ex-boyfriend introduced me to Ken Carson, and somehow that eventually led me to Lucy Bedroque. College brought house music into my life, courtesy of the cool, albeit questionable, men of Greek Row. And somewhere between those introductions and finding myself in Berghain and Sisyphos, I discovered hardgroove techno.
It’s funny how these things happen. How someone’s favorite artist becomes yours, how a night out changes what you listen to, or how a conversation sends you down a rabbit hole you might never have found on your own.
I’ve come to realize that so much of what I love didn’t originate with me. It was introduced to me by someone else.
I am, in many ways, a collection of the people who have loved me, and the people who haven’t loved me quite so much. Friends, family, strangers, people I’ve dated, people I’ve known for years, and people I’ve only spent a few hours with. They’ve all left something with me. A song, a book, an opinion, a new perspective, or even a better understanding of what I don’t like. I’m grateful for all of it, even the experiences I wouldn’t necessarily repeat.
And more than anyone, I have my parents to thank for my curiosity. They raised me to think for myself, question my assumptions, challenge my beliefs, and remain open to people and cultures different from my own. They never made me afraid of asking a stupid question, which is probably why I still ask so many. They gave me the confidence to enter unfamiliar spaces with curiosity rather than fear. I don’t think I would see the world the way I do without them.
For a long time, I was content appreciating what other people created. I loved discovering art, talking about it, and letting it influence how I understood the world. But eventually I wanted to make something of my own.
That’s where Almost Somewhere comes in.
It’s the most personal form of self-expression I’ve undertaken. Somewhere to bring together my love for people, history, music, art, food, writing, and all the things I haven’t discovered yet. I want to photograph people and places, write about experiences that stay with me, and occasionally document things that mean absolutely nothing beyond the fact that I enjoyed them.
Not everything needs to be profound. Sometimes a good dinner is just a good dinner. Sometimes I take a photograph because I like the way the light falls on someone’s face. Sometimes I love a song simply because it reminds me of the person who played it for me.
I also know that everything here is subjective. These are my experiences, filtered through my memory, emotions, and understanding of the world. Someone else could have been standing right beside me and walked away with an entirely different story. I want to leave room for that.
I don’t know what this will become in five or ten years. I hope it changes as I do. I hope I keep meeting people who introduce me to things I never knew I’d love, finding myself in places I hadn’t imagined visiting, and occasionally having my entire perspective changed over something as simple as a conversation.
More than anything, I hope I never become so certain of who I am that I stop allowing other people and experiences to change me.
And to the version of myself who comes back to read this years from now, I hope you still ask stupid questions. I hope your music taste has gotten even stranger. I hope you’ve made things you’re proud of, loved people well, and allowed yourself to be surprised.
I hope you recognize yourself in some of these pages, and find a few versions of yourself you’d almost forgotten.