Seven years of writing. Three days of being seen.

Seven years ago, she was a teenager with a diary, a facebook account, and far too many thoughts for one head.

She questioned everything.

People, Life, Money.

Why adults did the things they did, why some things felt unfair and why people behaved the way they did.

Sometimes, she wrote them down in her diary.

She opened a Facebook account and post a random meme. On better days, it was a long paragraph nobody asked for.

She simply had to write because keeping all those thoughts in her head was becoming too much.

Nobody called her a writer

She wasn't trying to become one either

She was just a girl trying to make sense of the world through words.

Years passed.

The diary became fewer.

Facebook became LinkedIn.

The random thoughts became stories.

The stories became opinions.

And somewhere along the line, she discovered that she enjoyed making people stop and think.

She could take an ordinary experience and turn it around until someone reading it would pause and say, "Wait... I've never looked at it that way before."

Money, Confidence, Society, People, Life.

Nigeria and all its wahala.

She had a lot to say....oh she has a loud mouth😂

Plenty of “But why do we we do this?

Plenty of two cents.

She just needed somewhere to spend them.

Then someone told her about Two Cents.

She joined. She simply entered another room with all the thoughts she'd been carrying for years.

And then she saw the Olodo uprising competition.

She read the prompt, had a perspective and she wrote.

She simply said her two cents.

And submitted.

Then came the announcement.

“Congratulations, you are one of the winners of the Olodo Prize.”

Wait.

Winner?

😭😭😭

She had barely spent three days in the room.

Three.

Days.

And someone had already looked at her words and said:

“We see you.”

Now there's a flyer.

Her face is on it.

Her name is there.

WINNER.

Spotlight.

Recognition.

A prize.

But there is something else that hits differently.

Being seen.

Because there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with creating for years without knowing whether anybody is listening.

You write, you post, you express yourself.

You pour pieces of your mind onto a screen and send them into the world.

Sometimes people clap, scroll or silence.

And if you're not careful, you start turning that silence into a verdict about yourself.

"Maybe I'm not good enough."

"Maybe nobody cares."

"Maybe I should stop."

But perhaps we get it wrong sometimes.

Don't confuse being unseen with being untalented.

You're simply building it in a room that hasn't learned how to recognise it yet.

And that's why rooms matter.

The right room gives your talent somewhere to breathe. It gives your work somewhere to travel.

It puts your thoughts in front of people who might actually understand them.

And sometimes, one little opportunity can make you look back at everything you've been doing and realise:

“Oh. So I wasn't wasting my time after all.”

Maybe those diary pages were practice, those Facebook posts were practice, every paragraph nobody cared about was an investment.

Not necessarily an investment of money.

An investment in skill.

Because before something can make you money, it often has to make you good at it.

And perhaps that's one thing we don't talk about enough.

We are always asking:

"How do I monetise this?"

But sometimes, the first question should be:

“What am I building?”

She had been building.

For years.

And now, something was beginning to come back to her.

Recognition, reward, proof, spotlight.

And for once, she is allowing herself to smile at the girl who started all those years ago.

She didn't know it then...

But she was already becoming the woman who would write her way into rooms she hadn't even discovered yet.

And this?

This is only one room.

Because this week, Princess Chronicles is entering another one.

The podcast.

Different guests, conversations, stories.

Other insights from Princess Chronicles

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