When people talk about balanced diet or say, “my child doesn’t like this food,” I just smile quietly. Because honestly, some of us did not grow up knowing what that even meant.

I remember how average families, not even rich people would talk about giving their children rice today, yam tomorrow, beans next, so the food doesn’t repeat. Their kids could even reject food and say ‘Mummy I don’t want this, I want spaghetti’.

But on my own side, I had to fight and hustle just to eat. There was no mummy’s kitchen waiting, no meal plan, no fridge, nothing. I worked for every bite. I paid for every meal I ate.

From the age of 12, I had already become my own provider. I worked for my food. I paid for what I ate. I hustled for survival. By the time I was 13, I was carrying 25 liters  of water on my head to sell, By 15 to 16, I was carrying two 25-litre kegs, one in each hand sometimes 5 to 10 rounds a day, depending on customers.

And who were these customers? Most times, they were Igbo guys running small restaurants in the slums. They’d pay us sometimes with money or food, eba, sometimes rice, but mostly eba. That was how we ate. That was our payment.

Then there was the crate hustle, carrying 24 bottles of minerals or beer on your head. Empty bottles one way, filled ones back. We’d walk 3 to 5km doing that. If one crate slipped and broke, that was your loss. You’d pay for it, even with injuries.

At some point, I got into gambling, every child there was into gambling anyways, not because I was greedy, but because I was desperate. Then came the time I was showing adult movies at night for people in the community. But even in all that chaos, one thing I never did, I never joined any criminal activity.

Almost everyone around me was deep in it, but I was scared. Scared of jail, scared of losing my life.  I can still remember some very close friends of mine that died in police detention when we were in secondary school.

We’d work all day, come home late, and still eat crumbs. When I say crumbs, I mean real crumbs, stale bread, leftover eba, whatever we could find. I can tell you boldly today that I once ate bread from January to December, nonstop, for two to three years. That’s not exaggeration, but a fact because I needed to survive.

So when people talk about balanced diet, nutrition, or food choices, I smile because those were foreign words to me as a child. I didn’t know what don’t repeat food meant. We were just trying to see the next day.

Now, I want you to look back and think deeply.  Imagine a boy who started feeding himself at age 12, hustling, fighting, begging, negotiating survival and fast-forward that boy into adulthood. He becomes a man.

He gets married. He becomes a father. He loves his family, but he has never been loved properly himself.
You see, trauma doesn’t vanish when you grow. It just transforms.
That kind of upbringing you had leaves mental scars that people rarely talk about.

As I was growing up into adulthood,  I was very hyper-independent because all my life i had to survive alone; I struggled to accept help. I always though love equals weakness. I carried everything on my shoulder, even when i was drowning. I was emotionally disconnected because i grew up suppressing pain to survive. I found it hard to express my emotions. I may appear calm or cold and most of the times loud, but I was burning up inside.

I had control issues because because I grew up without safety. So it made me crave control of money, and people because chaos reminds me of my past. I did not know how to rest. I feel guilty when I’m not hustling. I believed if i stop working, everything will fall apart.

Now, let’s look at how this would’ve affect my wife and children if I wasn’t healed.

My wife would’ve suffered emotionally not because I won’t love her, but because I didn’t know how to show love without pressure. I may become impatient, quick to withdraw, or even emotionally unavailable. She will cry for affection while I will be trying to survive mentally and this would not be because I am wicked, but because I am wounded. Still, she does not deserve that.

My children might carry that trauma unknowingly. When they ask for something simple like toys, food, or anything ordinarily, my response would’ve been…

When I was your age, I was already working”. Not because i wants to hurt them, but because my inner child never healed. And do they deserve that capital NO.

That’s why we see a lot of men acting on pain-based behavior today. They call it being street-smart, but the truth is, many of them are not smart, they are wounded boys who grew into traumatized men. They confuse survival for wisdom and trauma for strength. If I didn’t heal, if I didn’t learn, if I didn’t let knowledge and faith rebuild me, my wife would have been the victim of my pain, and my children would have inherited my trauma.

This is why I always tell young men today; HEAL before you go into any relationship or start making any humans: fix the boy inside you. Because if you don’t, you will raise your children in the same emotional prison you escaped from.

You will tell them, “When I was your age, I suffered,” instead of telling them, I suffered so you don’t have to. Dear brothers, healing is not weakness. It’s wisdom. It’s saying, I will not allow my pain to raise my family.

You can survive the streets and still become emotionally whole. You can be strong and still be gentle. You can be healed and still be humble. Because strength without healing only creates new victims. But strength after healing creates a new generation.

I am not who the slum said I would be. I am who God and healing allowed me to become

Jimoh Noah Onaolapo

Lagos, Nigeria