I was fighting for my life and rebuilding it at the same time.
Eighty days of rebuilding with intention. That is a massive win. So much can happen when you fully decide to live with purpose and document everything, day in and day out.
Over the past 80 days, I’ve rebuilt, focused, drifted, and rebuilt again by realigning with my purpose through systems.
Those systems were severely tested this week.
We went to protest at the Lagos House of Assembly to demand answers on why our salaries had been withheld without cause for 5 solid months.
The authorities’ response was far from what we anticipated. No concrete promises were made. They claimed they would try their best to intervene and table the matter to the Speaker, who also happens to be our CEO. We collectively agreed that no one would work until we were settled.
The reality of living in Nigeria today is brutal. Inflation in petrol prices has caused a massive spike in transportation costs, which directly affects food prices.
For five months, we had been surviving on loans, and the company didn’t even treat us like human beings. To make matters more complex, the company is owned by lawmakers. This isn’t about sentiments. Withholding a worker’s livelihood violates the right to the dignity of the human person.
I’ve been writing this log long enough to know that I could skip past this and go straight into the systems and the psychology and the lessons. That’s what most rebuilding content does. But I’m not going to do that here, because the rest of this entry doesn’t mean anything if you don’t first understand what it was sitting on top of.
Core Insight
Rebuilding your life without therapy, accountability groups, or clean streaks is possible if you shift your focus entirely from who you don’t want to be to who you’re already becoming. It is an identity-first system that holds when motivation, money, and momentum collapse simultaneously.
“True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.“
The protest happened on Monday. The termination letters arrived on Tuesday.
The full picture of what happened is jarring. For three months, none of the staff received a salary. By the end of the third month, going into the fourth, they started paying a flat 60,000 naira to everyone, including older staff who were previously earning above 90,000 naira, with no explanation for the reduction.
I don’t want to assume, but it felt like they simply refused to pay the rest of us because they either couldn’t afford it or didn’t want to.
The day after our protest, a ghost management team sent out termination letters demanding that all company property be returned immediately and that salaries be paid “according to company policy” upon clearance.
Later in the week, some supervisors who stood with us received their own termination letters. Another supervisor received only half pay because the company needed him to guide a truck to the field.
“If your identity is entirely tied to your output, you will collapse with it. Build a self that does not live or die by a company’s opinion of your worth.”
It is a deeply sad situation. It would have been far better if they had officially let us go at the beginning of the year, so we wouldn’t have had to drain our savings and collect loans just to survive this long. But taking a case against the Speaker of the Lagos House of Assembly feels impossible.
Welcome to Nigeria.
I came home at 5 pm, ate a meal I had no appetite for, and just slept. I told myself out loud that I needed to rest to reset, that I would wake up and consciously pick a new identity, that I would leave tomorrow to worry about itself and focus only on today.
If my identity had been tied to this work, I would have collapsed with it
Work is just work. And I say that not to minimize what happened, but because I had spent 80 days building a self that didn’t live or die by a company’s opinion of my worth.
There is a specific psychological term for the danger I narrowly avoided: role identity fusion.
Behavioral Psychology
Role Identity Fusion
The psychological danger where boundaries between personal self-worth and professional roles blur entirely. Occupational psychology reveals that individuals with high role fusion suffer significantly higher rates of depression post-termination because they aren’t just losing income—they are losing their perceived reason for existing.
This experience may have shaped me, but I refuse to become its prisoner. I may have been hurt by it, and I am certain the people who instigated this are somewhere right now enjoying their miserable lives, but we have done our best. And we must move on.
I woke up and tuned in to chapter three of the book I brought last weekend, Purpose Driven, the topic was — What Drives Your Life? It was exactly what I needed.
Read my Week 11 Recap
What truly drives my life? If it were material things, I would be broken right now. Yes, I have basic needs that must be met, but they are just materials. Being driven by my why is what has carried me this far.
“Willpower is a finite resource. You only have a certain amount of it, and once it’s gone, you’re defenseless.“
When life spirals out of control, you cannot rely on motivation
Motivation is an emotion, and emotions are fleeting. I built my life on systems that keep getting tested, and they are still standing. They aren’t perfect because they still rely on one another, but they are holding me up to this very moment.
To ensure I live with intention and not on autopilot, this is what my daily routine looks like:
Morning Routine (3AM – 6AM)
- Pray & study
- Pushups & Brush teeth
- Pushups & Bathe
- Pushups & Skill building
- Start the day
Evening Routine (5PM – 11PM)
- Bathe, refill, and eat
- Social media & writing
- Practice & Social media
- Fresh air, dinner & Journal
- Read & Sleep
Daily Non-Negotiables
- Guided Social Media (post, engage, exit)
- Virtue Tracking (moral/mental wins)
- Rejection Tracking (log 10 per day)
- Dietary Limits (no sodas, excess sugar, or overeating)
By Day 86, my system needed an honest audit
I woke up on Sunday morning to start prepping for this recap, and I sat for more than 25 minutes, not knowing where to start. I haven’t jumped straight to my workspace since I started rebuilding because I always follow a morning routine, and writing isn’t the first thing I do.
I had no option but to pause, run through my full routine, and come back and start my day as I used to.
Sitting with the recap also forced me to acknowledge something I’d been half-aware of all week. The system had drifted in a compounding way that only becomes visible when you actually audit instead of just logging. A mentor must acknowledge his own mistakes.
My System Audit: The Habit Stack Displacement
System Audit Results
1. Dietary Compensation
Consumed excess sugar, energy drinks, and unfamiliar combinations to artificially offset severe physical fatigue.
2. Extreme Sleep Deficit
Rigidly adhering to a 3:00 AM wake-up while unmanaged social media pushed bedtime past midnight forced operations on < 3 hours of rest.
3. Cognitive Depletion
Moving the journaling routine to midnight meant executing it when mental resources were fully drained, resulting in skipped or incoherent logs.
In addition, I seemed to be forgetting the blog’s core purpose. Frequent writing positions me as a writer, yes, but writing is my hobby and my coping mechanism.
My thoughts are so complex that they amaze me when I finally get them on paper, and through this documentation, I continuously understand myself better.
This week was not about learning anything new. It was an audit of myself and my systems, looking at my own growth from an analyst’s perspective to make sure I wasn’t running off course, relying on facts rather than delusion.
Behavioral scientists call what happened to me this week habit stack displacement.
When you add new behaviors without accounting for the finite nature of daily energy, they don’t slot in cleanly. They push existing habits toward the end of the day, where the cognitive resources to execute them well simply don’t exist.
The habits don’t disappear. Their quality degrades slowly, and you don’t notice until you sit down to audit.
The system didn’t fail this week. It bent under the weight of additions I hadn’t properly stress-tested. It’s a different diagnosis that requires a different prescription.
“A framework does not fail simply because you drifted. It bends under the weight of additions you haven’t properly stress-tested.”
From addiction to intention: why I started this rebuild in the first place
I remember vividly why I started. I needed to keep my brain occupied and channel my subconscious toward who I wanted to become, far away from the things that were destroying me.
For years, I was addicted to the most dangerous behavioral patterns: consuming adult content, binging movies, playing games endlessly, and using the internet compulsively. I built my entire life around those vices and completely lost myself.
I had great vision and immense potential, but I lacked purpose to the point where I became suicidal because life felt utterly meaningless. I turned 29 and had nothing to show for it in the ways that mattered to me.
I wasn’t getting any younger, I told myself. And on March 15th — my 29th birthday — I decided to rebuild my life with intention.
But instead of obsessing over streaks of abstinence, I started logging my journal daily. I shifted my entire focus toward the man I wanted to become, removing all visual cues from my subconscious and replacing them with strict disciplines, routines, and principles.
I have done this for 86 days without a support group and without therapy, which is what most people base their entire faith upon.
I have navigated incredibly challenging situations, including fighting for five months of withheld salary and eventually being laid off, while literally fighting for my life and rebuilding it simultaneously.
It has been a grueling mental battle. But since I started this rebuild, I have not woken up a single day with regret, nor gone to sleep feeling like my purpose was unfulfilled.
I might not be exactly where I want to be today, but that doesn’t make any real difference. I have learned to adopt the actions and identity of the person who has already attained what I desire.
“Emotions make us want to become something, but you cannot simply wait to become that person. You have to break apart to grow into them.“
A seed doesn’t wait to become a tree. It has to go down into the dirt, break apart, and fight its way up to the surface. It grows before it can become a shelter, a source, something of true value.
Thank you for joining the Week 12 recap.
Food For Thought
What internal architecture do you have that would still be standing if everything external were removed tomorrow… and is it actually strong enough to build from?
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