Allow Me to Be Me —

Personal essay from Israel Akindele

There is a particular arrogance in believing you have the final say over how another soul should walk through this world, and a particular tragedy in how many of us hand that authority over without ever being asked to.

So let me say it plainly, the way it deserves to be said.

Allow me to be me. The faulted one. The one with dancing flaws, flaws that don't sit still long enough to be hidden, flaws that move when I move, visible in daylight, unashamed of their own reflection. I am not asking permission to be flawed. I am informing you that I already am, and I have stopped apologizing for it.

Neither of us was built without cracks. You wear yours quietly, tucked behind composure and good lighting. I wear mine louder, perhaps too loudly for your comfort, but a crack hidden well is still a crack. Perfection was never actually on the table for either of us. It was only ever a performance, and I am simply the one who stopped performing first.

I remember the exact room I stopped performing in. The conversation where someone who loved me, genuinely, sincerely, sat me down to explain who I was supposed to become, the tone I should soften, the ambition I should trim, the parts of my voice that made people uncomfortable and should therefore be quietened for everyone's peace, including my own. I said nothing that day. I went home and sat with it, and somewhere in that silence I realized the discomfort wasn't actually mine to fix. It was theirs to outgrow.

Allow me to make mistakes, because mistakes are not a deviation from being human, they are the proof of it. The version of me you'd prefer, smooth, predictable, error-free, isn't a person at all. It's a portrait. And portraits don't breathe, don't grow, don't learn. I would rather be a person who occasionally gets it wrong than a portrait that is admired for never trying.

Allow me to be myself and to say it in my own register, my own rhythm, my own voice, because I have one, and it was never meant to be edited into yours. Your comfort with how I speak, how I move, how I choose to exist, was never the metric I signed up to be measured by. You are entitled to your opinion. You are not entitled to mistake it for my obligation.

So lest you forget, that box you've built, the one with the dimensions of who I'm "supposed" to be, the height you expect, the silence you expect, the agreeableness you expect, that box was built from your opinion. Not from my truth. And an opinion, however confidently delivered, however many people nod along to it, is still just a perspective standing outside a window, describing a room it has never actually entered.

I no longer argue with people describing rooms they've never stepped into. I simply leave the window open, so the description and the reality can sit side by side, and time can decide which one was ever telling the truth.

So here I stand, unboxed. Fair in places, faulty in others, occasionally both in the very same breath. I am the room, not the description. And a room being lived in has never once needed the window's permission to exist.

Isaac Aju’s Poet Of The Month in June, 2026, Israel Akindele is a Nigerian poet, memoirist, essayist and food entrepreneur.