You’ll Be Just Fine

Notes from the two months I went quiet, and what the clay gave back. A men’s mental health story, told plainly.

For a little over two months, I went silent. No posts. No reels. No new vessels for anyone to see. If you follow my work, you probably noticed the gap and assumed I was busy, or travelling, or buried in studio orders. The truth is simpler and harder than that. I was depressed. Not the casual kind we throw around in conversation, the kind that sits on your chest in the morning and makes the distance between the bed and the door feel like a journey you cannot afford.

I am writing this as a journal entry more than an article. It is June, Men’s Mental Health Month, and I have decided that the most honest thing I can offer right now is the truth about where I have been. I will not go deep into the reasons. Some of that belongs to me, and some of it does not matter as much as people think it does. What matters is that it happened, that it was real, and that I came out the other side still holding my own two hands.

So let me tell you about those hands, and about a vase.

The room got quiet

There is a version of depression that nobody warns you about, and it is the silence. Not sadness exactly. Sadness at least moves. This was stiller than that. The world kept going, my phone kept buzzing, the studio kept needing me, and inside it felt like someone had turned the volume all the way down on my own life.

I want to be plain about something, because plainness is the whole point of this piece. During those weeks I had a lot of thoughts about not being here at all. Suicidal thoughts. I am writing the word out fully because I think we owe each other that honesty, especially men, who are taught to swallow the word before it reaches the air. I had them, more than once, more than I will pretend. And I am still here. Both of those things are true, and they live in the same body that is typing this.

I say this not for sympathy and not for drama. I say it because somewhere a man is reading this with the same quiet sitting on his chest, convinced he is the only one, convinced that the strong, capable, creative person everyone sees online could never be carrying this. I was that person everyone sees online. I was carrying it. You are not as alone as the silence tells you.

What my hands did next

There is a line I keep coming back to, and it ended up as the caption on the post that brought me back. You cannot always choose what breaks your heart. But you can choose what your hands do next.

I did not choose the depression. I did not invite it, schedule it, or earn it. What I could choose, eventually, on a morning that did not feel any better than the ones before it, was to sit at the wheel again. Not because I felt healed. I want to be clear about that. I sat down still broken, still tired, still unsure if any of it was worth it. The clay does not require you to be okay first. That is the mercy of it.

I centred a lump of clay that day with hands that were shaking a little, and I let the wheel do what it does. There is a thing potters know in their bodies that took me years to understand. Clay collapses if you fight it, and it collapses if you ignore it. The only way through is steady, patient pressure, the same pressure that ruins it when you panic and saves it when you stay. I sat there pressing, breathing, letting the form rise, and for the first time in two months the volume of my own life came back up a little.

When the vessel was done, I wrote four words at its base. You’ll Be Just Fine. I was not sure I believed them yet. I wrote them anyway, the way you leave a light on for a version of yourself who has not arrived home.

My medium has always absorbed me. Every artist has one. Mine just happens to take tears without asking questions, then hands them back as something you can hold.

Why I am grateful, and I mean it

This is the part that surprises people, so let me say it carefully. I am grateful that I went through it.

Not grateful for the pain itself. Nobody should romanticise the kind of dark that makes a person wonder if the world would be lighter without them. I would not wish those mornings on anyone. But I am grateful for what the experience returned to me, because I walked into it as one man and I walked out as another, and the difference is something I will spend the rest of my life building on.

I learned that I could survive my own mind. That is not a small thing. For years a quiet fear had followed me, the suspicion that if it ever got bad enough I would not make it. It got bad enough. I made it. The fear has a smaller voice now, because I have proof, and the proof is that I am sitting here writing to you.

I also learned the difference between healing and performing. For a long time I confused the two. I thought recovery meant looking recovered, posting like a man who had it together, smiling on camera. The real thing was quieter and far less photogenic. It looked like getting out of bed on a Tuesday with no audience watching. It looked like making one ugly pot just to remind my hands they still worked. Nobody applauds that. It still counts. It might be the only thing that counts.

And I came out of it largely by my own hand. I had help in pieces, I had moments of being held by people I love, but the daily climb was mine to make, one small decision at a time. I am proud of that in a way I am still learning how to carry without arrogance. A man can be the one who saves himself and still need others. Both of those are strength.

A word to the men, the makers, the founders

There is a specific weight that comes with being a man in this part of the world, and a heavier one when you are also the creative, the artist, the entrepreneur, the one building something from nothing while everyone watches to see if you will make it.

We are taught to be the vessel that carries everyone else and never asks to be carried. We are praised for being strong, dependable, unbothered, and we learn early that our value is tied to how much we can hold without spilling. So we hold. We hold the studio rent, the family expectations, the unpaid invoices, the dream that we promised people we would pull off. We hold the grief too, quietly, in the same hands we are supposed to keep steady for everyone else.

As a creative the pressure has its own flavour. Your work is your soul made visible, so when you are empty there is nothing to make, and when you do not make, the income stops, and when the income stops the shame arrives, and the shame deepens the emptiness. It is a wheel that spins the wrong way. As an entrepreneur you are expected to project confidence at all times, because doubt is bad for business, so you perform certainty in public while privately falling apart. I know this loop intimately. I lived inside it for two months.

Here is what I want my fellow men to hear. The strength they praise in you is real, but it was never meant to be a wall you hide behind until it crushes you. Asking for help is not the moment your strength fails. It is the moment your strength gets honest. The bravest thing I did in those two months was not surviving in silence. It was eventually letting a few people see that I was not fine.

What making things actually does

I am a potter, so my hands found clay. Yours might find something else entirely, and that is exactly the point I want to land.

When you make something with your hands, the spinning in your head slows down. Anyone who has lost themselves in cooking a real meal, in tending a garden, in fixing an engine, in writing badly in a notebook at 2am, knows this feeling without needing the science. There is a kind of repetitive, focused, physical work that pulls you out of the loop in your mind and roots you back into your body, into this moment, into the simple problem of the thing in front of you. The clay does not care about your future. It only asks what you are doing right now, and that question, asked gently and repeatedly, is its own form of medicine.

And then there is the object. At the end of it, you have made something. On a day when you could not convince yourself you were worth anything, there it sits, proof that you were still capable of bringing something into the world that did not exist before. The pot does not erase the heartbreak that made it. It simply exists, and it holds things, and it stands there as evidence that you built something in the dark.

Clay as care. Clay as truth. I did not invent those words as marketing. I learned them on the floor of my own low season, when the only honest thing I could do was put my hands in the dirt and let the truth take a shape I could finally look at.

The advice I would give, if you let me

If you take nothing else from this, take these.

Do not waste your pain. I know how that sounds, so let me be precise about what I mean. I am not telling you to be productive about your suffering or to turn every wound into content. I am saying that pain with nowhere to go tends to harden inside you, and pain that you put your hands to tends to transform. Teach it a skill. Let it build something your future self will quietly thank you for. The grief becomes material. The material becomes a vessel. The vessel holds what you could not.

Find your wheel. It does not have to be a literal one. Find the thing your hands reach for when your heart is breaking, the cooking, the running, the drawing, the gardening, the rearranging of a room at midnight, and go there even when you do not feel like it, especially when you do not feel like it. You do not need to feel ready. You only need to begin. Dirty hands have a way of clearing the mind that no amount of thinking ever will.

Tell one person. Just one. The silence will tell you that nobody wants to hear it, that you will burden them, that men do not do this. The silence is lying to keep you in the room with it. Break it with one true sentence to one safe person, and watch how much lighter the next sentence becomes.

And believe the four words, even before they are true. You’ll be just fine. Write them somewhere if you have to. Leave the light on for the version of yourself who is still on his way home.

I returned

 

My signature series is called Spirit Vessels: They Who Return, built on the old idea of the ones who leave and come back, who are mourned and then walk through the door again. I did not plan the irony of disappearing for two months and then returning to the wheel, but I have stopped believing in accidents like that. I left. I came back. I am one of the ones who return, and so, I promise you, are you.

If you are in the quiet right now, I am not going to pretend a single article can lift it. It cannot. But I can tell you, from the inside of the same dark you might be standing in, that the volume does come back up. That you can survive your own mind. That your hands remember how to build even when your heart has forgotten why. And that on the other side there is a version of you who is grateful, not for the pain, but for the proof that you were stronger than it.

May you find something that can hold your pain until you no longer have to.

I’ll be here. At the wheel. Dirty hands, clear mind.

With you, Idris (Clay of Lagos)