Dear Reader,
If you’re anything like me, then you know what it’s like to want to look like your life is together. Actually having it together would be great, but the appearance would do just as well. I am ever in pursuit of the unimpeachable version of myself, a perfect presentation that might render me worthy of belonging and acceptance and love. I am ever failing to achieve that goal.
When I sat down to write Leave Your Mess At Home, it was at a time in my life when I felt the least sense of togetherness or belonging I had ever felt before; the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just quit a job, I had no sense of how to put my public health education to adequate use, and my closest friends and family were far away. But looking back, the mercy of that time (if there is any to be found) is that we were all, collectively as human beings, wrestling with similar things. It wasn’t just me; it wasn’t just my failure to be charming or accomplished enough that yielded my sense of unbelonging. Experiencing a bout of alienation, at least from time to time, was inherent to the human condition (albeit, at that time, exacerbated by a pandemic). This understanding gave me the space to get curious; if everyone at some point or another experienced a sense of profound isolation that in itself did not belie their deservedness of community, then what had led me to believe that I had to appear to be perfect in order to be found worthy of love? What circumstances could lead someone to begin to shed these beliefs?
The novel I eventually wrote is about four siblings who are each wrestling with the ways they have learned and failed to learn to love; not just others, themselves too. They are second-generation Nigerians, like myself, who navigate a sometimes-contradictory milieu of social expectations. Their Nigerian parents expect them to climb the American socio-economic ladder, even as the siblings are learning that achieving the American dream is not a color-blind or meritocratic process. They are also learning that the cost of pursuing that dream in order to find acceptance and belonging might actually bring them farther away from the love they each desire. Over the course of the novel’s pages the siblings fight against, excavate, and come to accept their own messiness in a way that has mirrored my own journey.
Writing a novel is such a beautiful, vulnerable, exposing endeavor. This one has also been a way of coming home to myself, of allowing myself to drop the mask of perfection and experience how much more easily belonging finds me without it. I very much hope that you enjoy reading this novel and that it gives you some permission to reclaim the messiness within.
Tolani Akinola
