By Adeleke Adekunle | Mental Health in Transit
Some mornings, the sky feels heavy, like it’s carrying everybody’s problems at once.
Lagos wakes up loud: danfos honking, people arguing about ₦100 change, deadlines running ahead of you. And yet, inside all that chaos, you find yourself searching for calm that never seems to come.
I used to think peace was something life handed out to the lucky few, people with quiet schedules, stable electricity, or constant Wi-Fi. But I’ve learned that sometimes, peace is not found. It is made.
That’s how I found Opalite.
The Art of Making What Doesn’t Exist
Opalite isn’t a natural gemstone. It is glass melted, shaped, and polished until it shines like something born from the earth. People call it fake opal, but the more I think about it, the more I realise it’s not fake, it’s forged. It’s beauty built by effort.
And maybe that’s what we’ve been doing all along. Nigerians, Lagosians, survivors of one kind of madness or another, making our own glow from whatever the day gives us.
Because peace doesn’t always come naturally. You create it in pieces.
When the World Feels Like an Emergency
The theme for this year’s World Mental Health Day is Mental Health in Humanitarian Emergencies. It sounds global, yes, but it applies on the ground level too. Tell me, what’s more of an emergency than waking up to twenty-five missed calls from work, traffic stretching from Ojuelegba to your soul, and “insufficient balance” staring back at you from your bank app?
Every day here feels like a small crisis.
But somehow, we still laugh.
We still send memes.
We still share food from one plate.
We still show up for each other, even when we’re running on fumes.
That, to me, is resilience. That is how we keep from losing our minds in a city that sometimes feels like it’s running on our sanity.
The Lagos Kind of Light
If resilience had a sound, it would be a woman singing in traffic.
If it had a scent, it would be suya smoke from the seller setting up in the rain.
If it had a face, it would be tired but smiling, like yours, like mine, like ours.
We are people who build joy in small doses. We share jokes inside noise. We hold laughter like medicine.
We turn our pain into poetry, our stress into rhythm, our tears into something that shimmers faintly when light hits.
That’s Opalite.
That’s us, imperfect, man-made, glowing anyway.
Making Your Own Peace
Making your own happiness doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It means finding small, honest moments that remind you you’re still alive.
Some days, peace is in prayer.
Some days, it’s in gist, music, or soft silence.
Some days, it’s just saying, I’ll try again tomorrow.
We don’t have to wait for perfect skies.
The plan is simple. Make your own Opalite.
Melt what broke you. Polish what’s left. Let it shine, even if it’s fragile.
Now the Sky Is Opalite
I used to look up and see nothing but grey, deadlines, worries, fatigue. But these days, even when the sky is cloudy, I remind myself: it doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.
Now, the sky is Opalite. Not clear, not calm, but crafted.
A sky made by people who keep going.
A sky that reflects every scar, every laugh, every survival story.
Because we were never handed light. We made our own sunshine, our opalite.
And somehow, it’s still shining.
#WorldMentalHealthDay #MentalHealthInTransit #NowTheSkyIsOpalite
Mental Health In Transit 