My full name is Benjamin-Bede Ezichim Benorie. I was born into a Catholic family in Nigeria, the kind of household where the church calendar organized the week and the saints organized the imagination. I received this inheritance seriously. At an age when other children were deciding what they wanted to be when they grew up, I was deciding how to be holy. This is not as strange as it sounds in the context of West African Catholicism, where the sacred and the ordinary are not cleanly separated. It is, however, a significant amount of pressure to place on a child’s interior life, and I did not handle it without cost.

I entered the seminary. I will not name it here because that is not the story I am telling. I will say that I spent years in formation, learning to pray in Latin, memorizing encyclicals, cultivating what my spiritual directors called an examined life. I was good at the intellectual work. I was less good at the silence, which in the seminary is not simply the absence of noise but a discipline, a way of being with yourself for long enough that the questions you have been avoiding become unavoidable. The questions I had been avoiding were about who I was, separate from the institution, separate from the vocation I had inherited from my family’s expectations. I did not yet have language for those questions. I only knew that something in me was not settling the way it was supposed to.

I left the seminary without the ending I had planned. I carried with me a philosophy degree from Nnamdi Azikiwe University and a set of unanswered questions that did not become less insistent simply because I had changed my address.

What followed was not, by conventional measure, a success story. I encountered addiction during a period when I was looking, without knowing I was looking, for something to quiet the noise of being a person whose life had refused to follow the map he had drawn. Addiction is, in my experience, a solution that works until it doesn’t, and the problem with it as a solution is that by the time it stops working, it has become the primary problem. I will not perform a dramatic account of this period because it was not primarily dramatic. It was primarily tedious and frightening and expensive in ways that had nothing to do with money. It cost me years. It cost me relationships. It cost me a version of myself that I am not certain I miss.

During this period, I also received a medical diagnosis. I will not name the condition because naming it in this context would shift the focus of this account from the experience of living with it to the diagnosis itself, which is a substitution I resist. What I will say is that the diagnosis arrived in a Catholic hospital, delivered by a doctor who was professional and kind, and that it immediately reorganized my understanding of my own future. It did not, as I had feared it might, end my future. But it changed the texture of it in ways I am still learning to describe. It introduced me to a community of people who were navigating similar terrain, and those people changed my life more completely than any spiritual formation had managed to do. There is something clarifying about being in a room with people who have no reason to perform wellness at you. What happens in those rooms is not polished. It is real, which is more valuable.

I founded the CADA Initiative, the Calling All Drug Addicts, in Abuja, Nigeria. I founded it because the resources I had needed during the worst years of my life did not exist in the form I had needed them. I founded it because the peer counselors who had helped me most were the ones who had survived something comparable and were honest about it. I founded it because I believed, and still believe, that lived experience is a form of expertise that formal credentials do not automatically confer and cannot replace.

I am now a clinical researcher. I have a study underway, a 90-day pilot examining wellbeing and loneliness outcomes in people affected by substance use disorder. I have been accepted to the Master of Social Work program at The Catholic University of America, alongside graduate programs in public policy and research methodology. I am also a writer. I have completed two books: a work of historical speculative fiction about Oba Ovonramwen and the Benin Bronzes, and a journal memoir about the years I have been describing in this essay.

I am also, as of this writing, twenty eight years old and still in the process of becoming whoever I am going to be. I say this not as a disclaimer but as a factual statement. The path from seminary to addiction to recovery to research to writing is not a path anyone would design. It is the path my life actually took. I have stopped apologizing for it.

There is a phrase in Igbo, Ife echi wetara, anyi ewelu, which translates roughly as: whatever tomorrow brings, we accept. I encountered it first in the mouth of a character in a novel, and it has stayed with me because it describes, more precisely than any English phrase I know, the disposition that has made it possible for me to continue. Not optimism, which requires believing that things will go well. Not resignation, which requires accepting that they will not. Something more precise: a willingness to receive whatever comes and find, within it, the material for the next version of your life.

That is the story I know how to tell. It is true. Every word of it is true.

My name is Benjamin-Bede Ezichim Benorie, and I am becoming

And there is still so much to become.

Life is a reality to be experienced, not a problem to be solved- Soren Kierkegaard

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