Anselm Ezemson | Updates

EMPOWER YOUR FUTURE

Anselm Ezemson — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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Half-Circles Hold More Truth Than Wholes

Anselm Ezemson — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was five years old the day my mother came to see us.

The evening sun must have been setting like a defiant chief on the western side of Niellé, leaving behind a stubborn reminder of its heat. The brown earth still baked beneath our feet, and the air carried the mingled smells of dried fish, spices, and palm oil drifting from the nearby stalls. Somewhere close, I was playing with other children beside the only photo studio, Master’s Photo Studio, just opposite the market. The sound of our laughter mixed with the calls of traders packing up for the day.

Then she appeared.

A woman in a clean wrapper , or so I imagine now , though her face must have betrayed the weariness of travel. Her eyes carried both hope and hunger, and exhaustion seemed to hang on her shoulders. She must have sighted me and come forward, the dust rising with each step as if the earth itself wanted to announce her arrival. Her hands, I now imagine, trembled slightly as she reached toward me.

She bent down until her face was level with mine. I must have caught the smell of the road on her wrapper — a mixture of sweat, dust, and distance. Her voice came low, soft, almost pleading.

“Do you know who I am?”

I stared at her, my small chest tightening as the world grew silent around me. Even the pestles pounding millet in a mortar nearby seemed to pause mid-beat. My eyes searched her face for recognition, for something familiar. But there was nothing. Only a stranger standing in the dust before me, her eyes wet with waiting.

“No,” I said. Mma is mother.

Her smile collapsed. Tears gathered quickly, spilling down her cheeks like sudden rain in dry season. Her lips trembled as she whispered, almost broken,

“I am your mother.”

I was confused. I remember her head shaking. Perhaps it was her dignity stripped in the presence of onlookers whose eyes pierced us with silence. Shame, pain, and confusion mingled in the dust.

Without hesitation, I ran away from her.

I was only a child then. Now I feel the weight of a truth I could not carry. Looking back, I understand. Something broke in her that day—a crack too deep for either of us to mend. By the time my own understanding ripened, death had already closed the door.

That memory has never left me. It taught me that life rarely hands us full circles. More often, we live in half-circles—unfinished, incomplete, aching for closure that never comes.

But half-circles carry their own wisdom:

Wholeness is an illusion. The perfect circle of belonging may never come.
Edges shape us. Our fractures become the very ground where resilience grows.
Belonging begins inside. No tribe, family, or culture can complete us.

If you wait for the whole circle, you may wait until your beard or hair turn grey. But if you lean into the half-circles, you may find they hold more truth, more humanity, and sometimes more beauty than the wholes we chase.

Because sometimes, it is the broken edges where the light gets in.

So I ask you: What half-circles in your own story have shaped you more than the wholes you thought you needed?

— Anselm Ezemson

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What My Grandmother Taught Me About Strength

Anselm Ezemson — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I think about strength, my mind doesn’t go first to soldiers or leaders or people who conquered nations.

It goes to my grandmother. I would have died as a todler, exept for her.

She was not tall. She did not command a room with her voice. In fact, she often spoke so softly you had to lean in to catch her words. But there was something unshakable in the way she carried herself. A steadiness, like the earth itself.

I remember watching her rise before dawn, her hands already at work long before the sun crept over the horizon. She worked, not because anyone praised her for it, but because that is what love required. When life brought hardship, and it often did, she met it with a quiet resilience that made me believe storms could be weathered, not just endured.

Once, during a particularly hard season, I asked her how she kept going without ever seeming to break. She looked at me, eyes deep with years of both joy and pain, and said:

“Child, strength is not about not falling. It’s about standing up each time with your heart still open.”

That has stayed with me all my life.

In a world that often confuses strength with hardness, my grandmother taught me that true strength is tender. It’s not about closing yourself off, but about refusing to let bitterness win.

Whenever I face moments of doubt, I find myself asking: Am I being strong like the world defines it—or strong like my grandmother showed me?

And maybe that is the lesson we could all use:

Strength is not just power. Strength is love that endures.

Until next time,

Anselm

PS: I am working on my next book and would love to hear from you. Who in your life taught you the deepest lesson about strength? Hit reply and share your story—I may feature some reflections (with your permission) in a future letter.

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The Day That Changed Everything

Anselm Ezemson — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Every story has a beginning, but not every beginning tells the whole story

I remember 1985 and 1987 as if it were yesterday.

The air was heavy, thick with the kind of silence that warns you something is about to break. One moment I was just a boy, playing with other children with nothing but laughter in my chest. The next, I stood frozen, watching a scene of rage between my mothers unfold that would mark me for life, as I would be latter shipped and dumped in Nigeria.

I did not prepare for these. There are some kind of moment you cannot prepare for.

There are no rehearsals for sudden loss, no script for the moment innocence slips quietly out of your hands. What I saw, and felt, on that day and its sequel planted a seed of awareness that life is fragile, unpredictable, and yet strangely held together by something greater than us.

Looking back now, I see that day not only as an ending, but also as a beginning. A beginning of faith. Of resilience. Of a hunger to make meaning out of memory.

We all have a “day that changed everything.” Sometimes it arrives like thunder, other times like a whisper that only makes sense years later. Mine taught me that while we don’t always get to choose our storms, we do get to choose how we rise after them.

Today, I invite you to pause and reflect:

What was your day that changed everything? What did it take from you, and what did it give back in return?

Because hidden inside that one day is often the story we are meant to carry forward.

Until next time,

Anselm

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Cultural pride often hides deep-seated pain

Anselm Ezemson — Sat, 9 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2003, after what I still regard as an act of quiet discrimination during an interview in Cardiff, South Wales, I made a decision that would follow me for years: I tried to remove every trace of the English element from my name when applying for jobs. If the sound of my heritage unsettled someone, so be it. I refused to smooth my accent into a palatable British tune.

In rooms where cultures collided, my words moved with ease , I was a proud envoy of where I came from. But pride is a curious thing. Behind my confident replies and easy laughter, another scene would be playing a quieter memory, laced with the sting of being seen but not accepted due to immigration rules.

Later, when immigration challenges turned me into an “illegal” in the UK, I slipped, almost without noticing, into a deeper form of Black consciousness. At first, it felt like empowerment, but over time, I saw how my focus narrowed, my world tightening into a smaller circle of belonging. My pride had started to grow walls.

That experience never left me. It taught me that belonging is a fragile thing , and that cultural pride can sometimes be less about celebration and more about survival, a mental one.

Throughout my years in the UK, my smile was never false , but it was armour.

The truth is, cultural pride can be like a bright cloth wrapped around old scars. We wear it loudly, in our songs, our food, our expression , but beneath it, we wrestle with fractures and unfinished reconciliations.

Real pride does not deny the hurt. It holds both the wound and the wonder in the same hand, refusing to let either define us alone. Only then can our culture stop being a battle we defend, and start becoming a home we can rest in.

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