All Steps, All Ordered.

A long rambling to reflect on the past year.

While listening to RAYE’s Joy.

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There’s a version of this essay that has a thesis. Something clean and quotable like this was the year I stopped shrinking or this was the year I chose myself. I almost wrote that version, in fact I did have a draft ready.

But then I looked at the last twelve months and laughed, because the thesis of this last year is messier and goes something like: this was the year I kept saying yes before I knew how.

I’ve been trying to write this for a while but every time I opened the draft, I waited for some tidy resolution to arrive. Maybe like a bow or a paragraph that will sound like I’ve landed somewhere and finally understand what the last year was trying to do. The bow hasn’t come. However, I saw a tweet from someone asking if I’d write something for my birthday, so here we are.

Just you, me and a long rambling about the year that was June 2025 to June 2026.

I was already carrying a lot when the year started, sort of in my own particular brand of chaos. What I did not know, standing in June 2025, was that the year ahead was going to ask me to build things. Not maintain or sustain but to build, from the ground up, with my own hands, on a foundation I was laying at the same time I was standing on it.

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The year opened with my 25th birthday.

I’d planned a soiree and I knew it would be nice because I know how to make things nice. But what I did not expect, what no amount of planning could have prepared me for, was the specific feeling of looking around the rooftop and realising that the people there had chosen to be there. Not out of obligation or proximity, but because they genuinely wanted to be celebrating me.

It was more than I’d dreamed of. I mean that plainly and without performance. There’s a version of yourself that sometimes doesn’t fully believe that people will show up for you even with the way you show up for them. My 25th birthday went to war with that version of me and won.

I won’t linger here too long because joy deserves to stay joy. But I’ll say this as I try to go deeper: there was a whole table of those people laughing, eating, taking photos, making noise the way we do and even singing a special song for me, who I barely speak to today. Some of it was slow drift, most of it was not. While betrayal is too large a word for it, what I know is that the table was full and now it can’t be, and I’ve had to make peace with the fact that some rooms only hold certain people for certain seasons.

Being grateful for the season is not the same as pretending the loss isn’t real. I’m working on that. Maybe I’ll let you know how it goes.

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But the people weren't the only loss or pain I was carrying. Pain was my first real reckoning with my body, and not in the soft, coming-of-age way they describe in books, but in the I am on the floor and I cannot get up and someone please call my mummy way. My body kept score long before I learned to. Some of you know I’ve had crippling menstrual pain since I was eleven or twelve years old and around my 17th year, I got an endometriosis diagnosis.

There is something uniquely exhausting about being a woman in pain. You become your own advocate, researcher, historian and witness. You learn to collect evidence for your own suffering. You learn to prove it, over and over again, to people who have charts and credentials and still somehow need more convincing than you do. You learn to walk into rooms ready to fight for the most basic acknowledgment: that what you are experiencing is real.

Most of you know the nice result of this: Yadah’s Box. Cute and functional period care boxes, educational resources, a whole thing I am genuinely proud of. YB is something real built from something hard and I’ll always be grateful for it. But there’s another result that requires me to cross-reference my calendar with my period chart every single month. The one that means certain decisions have to be made — that some of you know about — that I carry quietly most days.

For a while, things were manageable. Life-altering pain had settled into life-delaying pain, and if you have ever lived with life-altering pain, you know that life-delaying is practically a holiday. I could work around it, sometimes pre-empt it, and many times in 2025 I was able to smile through it because there was a meeting at 10 and nobody needed to know I had endo.

And then 2026 arrived and decided to retire that era.

Twice in four months, I was rushed to the emergency room. Both times, I found new respect and love for my family and friends; the insane amounts spent unplanned, sitting on the edge of the bed with me while I groaned and sobbed quietly, not sleeping through the night because someone needed to check in hourly, cancelling church and outings and meetings so I wouldn’t stay alone, wheww. I’m so grateful for the people who did not wave that pain over my head but stayed, and continue to stay, through it.

A year from June 2025 and I am back on the medical journey in full. And (this is the part where I have to laugh or I will cry) they cannot accurately find where the endometrial tissue is. They. Cannot. Find it. After over twelve years of dealing with this pain. After a CT scan that nearly took my life. Kai. Now, surgery is very likely on the horizon. My body and I are in an ongoing negotiation, and I am at least grateful we are still at the table together.

Yadah’s Box started because I wanted other people to feel held during something painful. In this last year, it has turned out I still need to be held during it too.

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Some of you know about the infamous breakup of 2024 but you probably don’t know is that at the end of 2025, it came back to collect so much more from me. The specific, quiet devastation of finding out things about people you had trusted and held in high regard is brutal. People I brought close enough to know the real version of your life, not strangers or acquaintances but people I vouched for and brought to the table. People I opened my home to.

In the heat of all of it, very early in December, I passed out alone in The Hague while on a work training. The hurt arrived so completely that my body just left the conversation for a moment. One real way you could have noticed this was I didn’t write anything for over a month; I couldn’t even put it in words at the time it was happening.

I am still not over it. I want to be honest about that because I think we pretend to be over things faster than we actually are, and I’m tired of that performance.

I forgive the same things almost every morning because by evening something reminds me and I’m back at the beginning. Some days it is God, please have mercy. Some days (and the Almighty receives my full, unedited heart) it is God, punish them! I am confident He receives both without confusion 😂.

What I know about betrayal now, from the inside of it is that the ones that really rearrange you don’t come from strangers. They come from inside the house. And the rebuilding after that is slower and quieter and less dramatic than you’d expect. It mostly looks like choosing, every day, to remain open anyway. For me, it looks like choosing to remain myself regardless.

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At the beginning of 2025, I had written in my prayer list that I wanted to travel five times.

By my 25th, I had not been out of the country once. Yeah I’d done Abuja, Edo, and Oyo back-to-back between January and June, but I remember looking at that prayer list and feeling the particular anxiety of a person watching the calendar and asking for a God math.

And then God, who is apparently completely unbothered by my anxiety and my bank account, showed off. By December: Nairobi. The Hague. Milan. Lugano. Twice to The Netherlands and three new countries and stamps I had to count. One year later, we have another six months to go and I’m looking at GOD 👀. Finish what You’ve started with a bang, hm?

I think travel in the last year has just shown me a few things:

1. I cannot die in Ikeja.

2. There’s so much to see and learn and explore.

3. God is truly the creator. One, only and true.

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But between every stamp in that passport, I was still landing back in Lagos being exactly who I am: someone who cannot seem to say no to a good production. Everybody who knows me knows I like planning, coordinating and hosting. I did a wedding in December 2024 which we excellently pulled off, felt the rush, went home and slept for a few hours (before my tyre burst the day after while I was driving to church, remember?) And then the best man and chief bridesmaid from that wedding came to me and asked me to plan theirs in August 2025.

What happened in my body when they said that was not confidence oh! It was terror, followed by me saying yes anyway and then going home to figure out the how.

We delivered two main events and multiple side quests and I’m not being modest when I say excellently, because it was excellent. Dr. T and Mr. D’s wedding was the kind where at the end I felt genuinely proud not just relieved. I had a solid team, solid ideas, the best couple and family and thennnnn the requests kept coming after that. Bruh I was on a flight to Nairobi the day after the wedding and what did I land to? “I have a wedding next month, my friend is getting married in five months…” I said hmmm.

I was still running my SPPG program, where I was on planning and leadership teams; I still had my 9-5 and my numerous 5-9s and volunteer roles, so I had to sit down and ask myself some honest questions because I was doing everything. Events, advocacy, content, community, study, work, church. I love all of it and I’m good at most of it. However, love and competence are not the same as clarity, and I needed clarity. I needed to know what was mine and not just what I could do.

The last year has been a whirlwind of constantly trying to find that clarity. Have I figured it out yet? Lmaooo.

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Let me go back to early August a little, the month I got ordained.

I’ve tried, in the past year, to not talk about it or how I felt in the moment. The months leading to ordination were busy - classes, screening, finishing School of Disciples, and all the in betweens. But in the moment when it was formally done, I cried. I have always said that the divine is unreal until you find yourself in the moment. You’ll know when it happens, and ordination was that for me. I walked out very different from how I walked in, and I knew I wanted to serve more.

And then December came and I felt like I needed out from all things church.

I say this without shame because I think a lot of people who are deeply in it know this feeling: when the structure starts to feel heavier than the presence, when the serving outpaces the receiving, when you’re giving and giving and the place that’s supposed to refuel you starts drawing from you, you’re done. And I was.

One afternoon after what should have been a random service in church, I got to Marriott Hotel and wept in the lobby. A few hours later, I sent in all my handover notes and left the church groups. I spent the last few Sundays of 2025 going from one birthday thanksgiving to another ceremonial thing. I wasn’t gonna rush anywhere. In fact, I didn’t want church people around.

God gave me exactly one month to sit with that before He led me somewhere new. A solid local assembly that keeps forcing me to stay. I’m still one leg in and one leg out, if I’m being honest cause I’m still finding my footing butttt I’m in the room, which is more than December-me could say (and I’m preaching sometime soon lmaooo).

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Hm. On the men, briefly, because they each deserve a sentence at most for the past year.

There was Mr. I, who stayed the longest and tried the hardest. There was Politician, who gave me banging amala one random Saturday. There was even Chef at some point, which I can only describe as a fever dream abeg. There were others who came and went in the way people do when you're still learning the shape of what you want.

What’s funny, no, ironic, is that this was the year I planned weddings and attended what felt like every other person’s. I was a bride’s friend, a bridesmaid, a wedding planner, a guest at tables full of people who had found their person. I was so genuinely happy for all of them and I will not lie, I was also watching and wondering. Not from a bad place, mostly. But you notice things when everyone around you seems to be settling into something and you’re still very much... unsettled.

I started the year genuinely wanting to heal and then move forward. By the middle of it, something in me had shifted. The wanting became something more like going with the flow, which sounds peaceful but is actually just a different kind of protection. Less hope, less risk, less disappointment. My father says I’m cynical. My friends say I’m a locked off wall. They’re both right and I know it.

I think I may now be the situationship you don’t pray for. I say that with full awareness and not even a little shame.

Did I ever feel that pull this year? Maybe once. But I was in such a cycle of hurt and healing I sometimes couldn’t tell which one I was actually in.

That was such a good time though. The lessons and the fun I had? “He’s a good man, Savannah.” 😂

Now? I’m happy, genuinely enjoying the space I’m in, and learning to negotiate my own terms. What I’ve learned this year is to let the now be what it is. To enjoy what is actually here without trying to negotiate its future in real time.

Let God deal with the later.

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Six months ago, I realised I wasn’t seeing my friends enough so I started In Company.

What I didn’t anticipate was that it would give back as much as I tried to put in. The friendships that have come out of it are not the networking kind.

They have become the “I’m going to sit with you in this specific uncomfortable thing,” the “I noticed you were quiet, I’m not going to ask, I’m just going to show up” kind. In a year where the ground has moved constantly, my friends have become something solid. Thank you, my loveess. Thank you so much.

Later this month we’re having The Big Birthday Bash at In Company. I’m so excited lmaoo. Who knew in January that June would hold this?

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I have gained ground I couldn’t have predicted. I sat in rooms I used to only imagine. I interviewed at places that once existed in a completely different dimension from where I was, and I was good. I was genuinely, measurably good in those rooms. It hasn’t all landed yet, the things I am working toward are still in motion, but I know something now that I didn’t before: the version of me who walks into those rooms and holds her own is real. She showed up this year and she didn’t embarrass us. And even if the timing hasn’t been right yet, it will be, and I will be ready.

There’s a saying that a moving man will meet his luck. I believe a moving woman will meet her dreams come to life. Somewhere in the motion of June 2025 - June 2026, things happened that I could not have planned or orchestrated because God was in the specific, undeniable details.

The unknown pain days are steps. The interviews are steps. The friendships, the heartbreaks, the ordination, the table that emptied and the rooms I had to leave and the new ones I walked into are all steps going somewhere I cannot fully see yet but have decided to trust.

I don’t always feel this clearly. Most mornings I’m just trying to get through it.

Yet on the mornings when the picture comes into focus, this is what I see: I’m still here. I’m still moving. I’m still, somehow, embarrassingly, wonderfully, open.

Psalm 37:23 says “the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord…”. The past birthday year almost had me, but it didn’t so I’ll keep walking.

This is a late and long birthday post, but you know the whole of June is for me.

So here’s to me, to walking, to trying, to doing, to finding.

Happy 26th, Praise my love. What a year it’ll be ❤️.

P.S Thank you guys for always rocking with me! You have all my love and an Iced Latte,

Yadah xx.