About Me — Sylvia Emokpae
A short and sweet bio.
I have put this off for so long because, honestly, who likes to write about themselves?
So here we go...
Sylvia discovered that while she was trying to be a mother first, and then herself, she had to be herself first so she could be the best mother. The irony in this catch-22 is what motivated her to start writing and doing more for herself while she nurtured and loved her family.
Writing keeps her brain ticking, but it has provoked a lot of thinking in Sylvia about the role she wants to lead as a woman, and as a mother, in this modern world.
She faces daily struggles to keep up with the expectations that the outside world has conditioned her to have of herself and of others while building new goals of her own, outside of the conventional life.
The ideal images she had spent her lifetime envisioning for herself were tossed away and replaced with reality — she doesn’t have the big company job where she’s a boss of a team and carries her laptop around the city. She doesn’t have an assistant to bring her coffee every morning. She doesn’t have the top floor condo she envisioned owning and she doesn’t have a puppy that greets her when she gets home from work.
Nope. She’s got it a hell of a lot better than that.
She fast-tracked through the big city job, dodged the promotions and made career choices with her heart rather than with her mind. She became less concentrated on money and more focused on helping out. She worked with refugees and then gave up her career entirely when she had her son.
Sylvia made her other visions come true, with some surprises along the way.
Now, she’s got the husband, the child, and 2 cats. She’s got her own homemade home office where she can do her writing and study — something she never thought she’d do. She’s got a really good coffee machine and a semi-nice view out of her bedroom window that displays a tiny section of the park just 2 minutes’ walk from her house.
She has got it good, but she doesn’t know it sometimes. Sometimes, self-doubt and fear get to her about whether or not she deserves everything she has. Sometimes, she dwells on what she does not have. But mostly, she swats those feelings away with music, comedy, and by embracing her toddler in a great big hug.
As her husband put it, “she has a lot to say”. And she does — a hell of a lot. It’s just a question of, who wants to listen?
Well, she thought, she surely wasn’t the only one with the thoughts she had, so she had to try putting them out to the world to find others who could relate.
And then something else happened. She discovered that through writing, she is able to face and tackle a lot of her demons that stem back from her childhood and early adult life. She also discovered that a lot of the stuff she has to say is actually interesting, which contradicts her old view of herself —that she is boring and plain. This came as a welcome surprise, so she started picking up those negative comments about herself and letting them go, one by one.
She began to grind and really put out all her emotions to turn them into something positive.
Now, she has gained confidence, and she is stronger. Most importantly, she is happy. She is slowly but surely winning the battle that’s ongoing between Fear and Positivity, by learning to use Fear to her advantage.
Sylvia hopes to finish her first book this year, and write many more articles on Medium as well as branching out to Youtube – eventually. *Gulp*
She also hopes to have more kids to write about, because, my god, is being a parent the BEST thing in the world!
Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love and motherhood. See more work like this.