As Daniel slouched into a faded couch in his Gbagada apartment, his eyes darted between me and the ceiling like someone searching for the right words to match a tired heart.
“I thought making it would bring peace. Instead, it brought pressure.”, he says.
The power had just returned, so the standing fan whirred lazily beside us. On the wall was a photo of him during his NYSC, standing straight in a green-coloured khaki with a smile too wide to hint at what life would later require of him.
At 29, Daniel is what some would call a Lagos big boy, minus the noise. He works remotely as a product designer for a UK-based fintech startup. He earns in dollars, budgets in naira, and still sends a large chunk of his income home to Delta State.
He is the first in his family to graduate, the first to leave their small town for Lagos, the first to enter tech, and perhaps, the first to realize that becoming successful in Nigeria is not just a destination, it’s a delicate negotiation between black tax duty and self-preservation.
He told me how it all started with a borrowed laptop and church WiFi. In his final year at the University of Benin, while studying Industrial Chemistry, a course he said he “tolerated more than loved”, he would sneak into the church office late at night, not to pray, but to practice. Free YouTube videos, pirated design resources, and any PDF that had “UI/UX” in the title became his gospel.
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His first design gig paid N5,000. He transferred half of it to his mum, not because she asked, but because he wanted her to believe he was on to something. It wasn’t long before “something” became “everything.”
Two years, multiple unpaid jobs, and one depressive episode later, he landed his first international gig. When the first $1,000 paycheck dropped, he cried in silence. Then he sent N250,000 home.
He thought things would get easier after that. They didn’t.
The money opened doors, yes, but it also unlocked expectations. And not the subtle kind. The kind that comes with late-night WhatsApp messages from relatives who “heard you’re now working with white people.”
The kind where your younger brother drops out of school and everyone turns to you, not out of entitlement, but out of trained desperation. So he paid. School fees, medical bills, a leaking roof in the family compound, nursing school for a cousin he barely speaks to, he paid.
And the one time he didn’t, he was reminded. Not directly. But through whispers that somehow found their way back to him. “He has changed.” “He’s doing big boy in Lagos now.” “…after all the prayers we prayed for him.”
“No one ever asks if I am okay. If I am sleeping well. If I can afford the silence that success brings.”
He didn’t say these things like someone complaining. He said them like someone who had rehearsed the lines in his head, over and over again, but never had anyone to hear them out. His tone wasn’t angry. It was quiet. Like someone who had long stopped expecting to be understood.
He recounted one December he chose not to go home for Christmas. It wasn’t because he was too busy. It was because he hadn’t sent the usual “end-of-year package.” And he couldn’t face the looks, the subtle jabs, the silence that would say more than any words could. What they didn’t know was that he had just been laid off two weeks earlier.
He tried therapy once. The therapist asked what success felt like to him.
“Heavy,” he responded. That single word held everything: the joy of providing, the pain of always being the provider, the guilt of wanting space, the fear of appearing selfish, the grief of realising that becoming “the first” often means becoming the one people expect to fix what generations before you couldn’t.
Still, he keeps going. He sends money, but now with more boundaries. He says “No” more often, not out of rebellion, but out of necessity. He’s applying for a Master’s abroad; he’s saving again, slowly finding ways to separate Daniel the person from Daniel the provider. He’s building, still. But this time, not just for his family, but for himself too.
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“You can’t pour from an empty cup,” he said, half-laughing, as if trying to convince himself more than me. “Being the first doesn’t mean I have to be the last. I’m learning to draw the line between helping others and losing myself.”
There was a pause. A long one. I didn’t interrupt. He seemed grateful.
In Nigeria, we celebrate success loudly but grieve silently. We praise the child who made it, who built the house, who brought light into a family’s history, but we rarely ask what it cost. Behind every glow-up is a growing pile of emotional receipts: unspoken traumas, guilt-driven transfers, friendships that faded once you stopped being broke.
Daniel’s story isn’t rare. What’s rare is the courage to talk about it. To say out loud that success can be lonely. That becoming is not always a fairy tale. Sometimes, it’s a slow, silent mourning of the life you thought you’d have, or the people you thought would celebrate you when you finally arrived.
Still, he’s becoming. In the truest sense. Learning to make peace with his past. Learning to unlearn the idea that love must always look like sacrifice. And in doing so, reminding the rest of us that it’s okay to carry your people, but not to the point where you forget yourself on the journey.
In the end, Daniel isn’t just the first to make it. He’s the first to say the silent part out loud. And that, too, is a kind of freedom.
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