There is a version of you that existed before the roles took over.
Before you became someone’s wife and someone’s mother. Before the expectations settled on your shoulders.
That version of you had dreams. Preferences. A quiet knowing about what made her feel alive.
And then, somewhere between showing up for everyone else and keeping it all together, she quietly disappeared.
I know this feeling too well because I lived it too.
What Is Ikigai?
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being” — that deep, quiet place where what you love, what you are gifted at, what the world needs, and what can sustain you all come together.
The authors travelled to Okinawa, home to some of the world’s oldest, most joyful people, to understand how they lived so fully for so long.
And what they found wasn’t complicated.
These people woke up with purpose. They moved their bodies. They stayed close to the community. They did small, meaningful things with great care. They weren’t chasing happiness; they were simply living in a way that was aligned with who they were.
Reading that, something stirred in me.
As African women, we were not raised to ask ourselves that question: What is my reason for being? We were raised to serve the needs of others. To be the backbone. The one who holds it together. Our purpose was always defined in relation to someone else — their child, their mother, their support system.
Nobody told us that we were allowed to have a purpose that was simply, entirely our own.
What This Book Taught Me About Returning to Myself:Â
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1. Your purpose is not found; it’s grown back.
You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly know your ikigai. You find your way back to it slowly, through curiosity, through trying things and paying attention to what makes you feel like yourself again. For many of us, the work is not discovery — it is recovery. Peeling back the layers of who we were told to be until we find the woman underneath.
2. Community should encourage you, not just consume you.
And here is something else the book quietly reminded me — you cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot find yourself in spaces that keep asking you to disappear.
The people of Okinawa live in deep community, but it is a community that gives as much as it takes. As African women, we were built for community. But many of us are living in a community that only takes our time, our energy, and our identity. This book reminds us that belonging should not cost you yourself. The right community makes you more you, not less.
This Book Is For You If…
You are tired of performing.Â
You catch yourself wondering, quietly, if there is more to life than this, not because you are ungrateful, but because something in you knows you were made for more than just surviving.
If any of that is you, this book will feel like a hand on your shoulder.
It won’t fix everything. But it will ask you the questions you have been too busy to ask yourself. And sometimes, the right question at the right time is exactly what starts the journey back.
I know how full your days are. But this is one thing worth making time for, not for anyone else, just for you.
Before You Go
I want to ask you something I don’t think anyone asks you enough.
What do you love?
What lights you up?
What were you doing the last time you forgot to check your phone?
You don’t have to have the answer right now. But I want you to sit with the questions.
Because the woman you are searching for is not gone. She is just waiting for you to make a little room for her again.
Drop a comment below. Tell me, when was the last time you did something just for you?
With love,
Cheta Otiji