05. The Smell Isn’t On The Listing

This week, someone asked me what it’s like to live in my estate. I gave her my honest review. She listened carefully, then told me she had heard the complete opposite from someone else. She was polite about it, genuinely considering both accounts. Yet, the conversation lingered in my mind, much like certain small things that carry deeper meanings.

Because here is what nobody tells you when you are researching where to live in Lagos.

There is a house just outside my estate. It looks perfectly decent, listed properly and priced reasonably. Yet, it has cycled through tenants repeatedly. People move in, then quietly move out. If you asked the landlord, he probably wouldn’t volunteer the reason. If you looked at the listing, you would find nothing unusual.

The area has a smell. A nearby canal emits an odor that finds you whether you are ready for it or not. Someone has even opened a food business right beside that canal. This serves as a lesson in how differently two people can experience the same environment.

The Reality of House Hunting

This is what house hunting in Nigeria does not prepare you for. If you are serious about where you are going to live, visit during the rainy season. Nobody will tell you that the road floods. It won’t be on the listing. The landlord will not bring it up. The agent will absolutely not mention it. You must stand on that street in July and see for yourself.

The same goes for electricity. No listing will tell you that the area has light three days a week. You have to find someone who lives on that street, ask them directly, and even then, you must ask the right way. People often soften their answers if they think you might not like the truth.

No listing will tell you that the area has light three days a week. You have to find someone who actually lives on that street and ask them directly.

What one person experiences as unbearable, another may genuinely overlook. Neither of them is lying. This is where it gets interesting.

The Nature of Opinions

I have always been someone who holds opinions firmly. You find a position, understand it, and are not easily moved from it. Then life starts sending you evidence.

This week, NASA released what they are calling the clearest images of the planets we have ever seen. Saturn’s rings appear in detail that makes you stare. Jupiter’s storms look exactly as violent as they should. Earth, round and patient, hangs in space. I thought about the people who spent years insisting it was flat. Not stupid people, but individuals who looked at what they could see and drew the most logical conclusion available to them at the time. They spoke with confidence and committed publicly. Then images like these arrived, and the argument simply could not hold anymore. That is the thing about irrefutable evidence; it does not negotiate.

It made me think about what we do when evidence arrives that contradicts something we have already said out loud—loudly and confidently—to others.

Some of us revise quietly and move forward. Some of us dig in.

The Contrarian Spirit

I have a child who will argue against whatever position you take, regardless of the evidence. You say yes, he says no. You say the sky is blue, and he finds a reason to push back. He is young, far too young to have formed a hardened worldview that would explain this. It makes me think it may simply be wiring. Some people arrive in this world contrarian. Some are just built to resist.

Then there are those shaped entirely by their experiences. They absorb the narratives of their households, schools, and cultures, carrying those narratives forward as truth without ever stopping to ask whether they chose any of it.

I have been that person.

Aajo: The Unspoken Expectations

When my child was born, my mother came to stay. She was upset with me in a way I did not understand at first. She felt I did not care for her, that I was neglecting her as a guest in my home. But I was exhausted, newly postpartum, running entirely on empty.

What I did not know, what nobody had ever actually taught me, was aajo.

The Yoruba practice of checking on an elder repeatedly. Stopping what you are doing to ask, "Have you eaten?" even when you already know she has. Sitting with her for a stretch, even when your body begs you not to. It is a kind of structured, intentional attention—a language of respect expressed through presence and repetition. My mother had grown up steeped in it. She expected it the way you expect someone to know how to greet, without instruction or explanation.

But she had never taught me. Not explicitly. It had lived inside her as obvious, the kind of thing you simply know. Except I didn’t know. We had been raised stoically in her house. Greet properly, do well in school, don’t embarrass the family. The emotional choreography of aajo had never been narrated to me.

She threatened to leave. I had to ask her to teach me what she expected.

And she looked at me like I was a stranger.

Two people who love each other, standing in a gap that neither of them knew existed, both equally certain they were right about what should have been obvious.

I think about that moment a lot. Two people who love each other, standing in a gap that neither of them knew existed, both equally certain they were right about what should have been obvious.

The Impact of Unspoken Expectations

That is what unspoken expectations do. They don’t announce themselves. They quietly widen the distance between people who are trying.

I find myself, at this point in my life, turning over beliefs I have held for years and asking honestly, "Where did this come from? Did I choose this? Or was it chosen for me?"

It is a strange thing to sit with. Not painful, exactly. I actually enjoy rearranging furniture. Physically moving things around until the room feels different, lighter, more honest about what it is. Turns out I have been doing the same with my own thinking, just more slowly.

I don’t have clean answers. I don’t think I am supposed to yet.

What I do know is that I am someone who will change her mind when the evidence arrives. That is not weakness. Some of the most interesting moments in my life have come from discovering that what I was certain about needed updating.

Once we know better, we do better. That part I am clear on.

The Unexpected Connections

Some days, it looks like a conversation about an estate that opens into something I wasn’t expecting to think about. Some days, it looks like dictating a blog post because I am too drained to type, yet still needing— for reasons I cannot fully explain—to get the thought out before it dissolves.

The smell isn’t on the listing. For houses or for people.

Some things only reveal themselves to those who actually move in.

In this journey of observation and reflection, I invite you to look closer at the world around you. What truths lie beneath the surface? What expectations shape your experiences? Let us foster a perpetual state of inquiry together.