Join me with me while I tell you how moving to America changed me.

So I moved to America from Nigeria about a decade ago now and at the time I thought that I would just be you know changing countries but what I did not realize is that moving here would completely change my personality and honestly sometimes I wonder who I would have been if I had not moved. Honestly there are three main things that I would say changed after I moved to the US. So the first thing is that it made me significantly more aware of my race which probably is unsurprising to anyone but for me moving from you know Nigeria and Qatar at age 15 I hadn't had race be a central part of my identity for all of my life. It wasn't really something that I thought about it wasn't really something that impacted me or that even made me anxious. Then I moved to suburban Michigan and that really fundamentally changed everything and suddenly you know my race is a huge part of how people see me how they respond to me. I have never felt so ugly or hated in my entire life and I was on a run one day and I had stopped outside of someone's sidewalk and they called the cops on me and the cops came. I was in a hoodie I remember I was 16 I was frightened and I just did not realize and no one really prepared me for how negative of an impact my race would have on me especially in Michigan. Now I feel like I'm more guarded I am less confident in my abilities. I am hyper aware of the fact that people perceive me as black and I'm also hyper aware of the kind of like stereotypes or expectations that they have for me now. When I was in boarding school I would have a lot of really weird interactions where people would touch my hair or where they would comment on how well spoken I was or just things about me that they found so surprising and I often felt like an animal in a zoo. It was a horrible experience. It made me withdraw a lot internally and just like looking back it's all because I just didn't quite understand that race was so important and so central to how people treated you in America. That I became very hyper aware of everyone else's internal and mental states partially because of the race stuff but also partially in you know palm colored America there is a lot of internal emotional repression. You are not allowed to say what you think what you feel what you truly want. Expressing yourself is this Olympic game and you become this pretzel trying to twist yourself into ways that are honestly unnatural in my personal opinion. Conversely Nigerians are very direct. We say exactly what we feel what we want. If I don't like you you'll know it and we're respectful about it but we are very direct and so that takes a lot of the guessing work out of it and it's honestly very mentally taxing to never really feel clarity with the people that you are in community with or around constantly. And over time I started to notice I said less and less of what I meant and just started keeping my thoughts to myself. The last thing America changed for me was my relationship with achievement. I used to be a very chill kid. I never really you know spent much time doing activities outside of school. I pursued my own interests but once I moved to the US I felt like everyone was in this constant race to achieve or get their like a five on their AP or get that next internship or whatever. There was never really a pause there was never really this idea of being a kid or even finding joy in your day-to-day and slowly slowly slowly I started to squeeze all the joy out of my daily activities as well. And I will say that mindset helped me accomplish a lot of things that I'm very grateful for but it also left me with this kind of anxiety that I still carry with me where if I'm not constantly achieving something I feel like I'm falling behind. America has honestly changed me in a lot of ways that are besides this. The race stuff being the biggest and there's a whole lot that I could unpack there but I am overall grateful that I am here. I don't think I would be the person that I am today without a lot of these experiences. I do think a lot of people especially black people African people don't quite understand the level of soul wearingness that comes with being black in America.