What Is in Your Hand? Releasing the Stories and Gifts We Carry.

Letting Go: The Power of Opening Your Hands

Some gifts come wrapped. Others come clenched — held so tightly in our own fist that we forget the whole point was to open it. I know that fist. I have had one for most of my adult life. Inside my fists were manuscripts at eighty percent. A blog I have kept since 2011. Journals, sometimes two a year. A pen in every single bag I own — and I own a lot of bags. The gift was never missing. It was simply never let go of.

We tell ourselves we are protecting it, and often we are protecting ourselves too. Some things need to be kept close a long while before they are ready to be handed over, and only God knows the length of that season. But then, a day when the hand is meant to open arrives, and everything around you seems like a set-up for that exact moment. A gift does not begin its work until it leaves the hand.

The question that found me

A long time ago, a door closed on me after a series of interviews for a bank job in Lagos. Devastated, I went home and cried the way you cry when the only version of the future imagined gets taken away. And then a question found me, out of the story of Moses at the scene of the burning bush, and it has never really let go:

“What is in your hand?“

What was in my hand was a pen – I loved writing letters, journals, and scribbling random things. That was the entire inventory. No credentials, no plan, no permission — just writing. So I wrote a letter directly to the MD/CEO of that bank. The door opened, and I got that job.

Then, because where I come from, writing was for dreamers and a proper job was for survival, I took the very thing that had opened the door and put it quietly in a drawer and focused on the career that paid the bills.

We do this. We mistake the tool for the hobby. The thing we reach for at every breaking point is never the side project — it is the operating system underneath our purpose and life. It’s like the air we breathe. It never feels like treasure because it is too close and takes minimal effort.

The vacuum I built on purpose

Here is what nobody tells you about carrying a dream for two decades: it gets warm. It shapes itself to your palm. It becomes so familiar that letting it go feels like an amputation.

But then the season turns. Nothing announces it. You simply wake up one day knowing that the carrying part is finished. I did something that, from the outside, looks like very poor planning. I registered a publishing company and bought roughly 100 ISBNs. A hundred. For books that did not exist yet. Cart, horse, in that order, entirely on purpose — because I knew that if I built an empty shelf with my own hands, something in me would not be able to stand the sight of it.

I created a vacuum so the work would have to come fill it. Call it strategy, call it desperation. I call it grace arriving in the shape of a hundred numbers I would have to answer for.

The release

The release never quite fits into a reel or a graphic. It did not feel like a montage. For me, it felt like a Friday. It felt like padded envelopes stacked on my table, a roll of tape, and my miniature thermal machine printing every address label. Somebody’s name, in my hand, going into a mailbox. That was the manifestation. The first story in Artficially Flavored Layers, Hallowed Codes, references this post office- how uncanny.

*The first batch, going out. No montage. Just tape.*

And it was enough. Because the thing I had been holding was suddenly in someone’s hand, delivered via mail to a friend who took a chance on my storytelling. These books are on someone’s nightstand, being read by a child I will never meet. It did not get smaller when I let it go.

Here is my Aha moment – the release came exactly when I was able to receive it. God plans our days, and He is never behind schedule. Here is how grace works – There is no late. There is only done.

This is the shelf — welcome to it.

Mayen and the Unexpected Gift — a children’s chapter book about a Lagos city girl who does not want to share the one thing that is privately, gloriously hers: her birthday. In the village, she learns about community and empathy. This little girl also taught me about sharing and how apt it is that she started this journey.

It comes with a Bonus Learning Guide inside and two companion books for children who would want to draw and color the village after reading about it: Mayen’s Village Drawing Book and Mayen’s Village Coloring Book.

Artificially Flavored Layers — nine short stories of longing, identity, and becoming. These are the grown people’s stories of varied diaspora experiences – the misdirected text that uncovers an affair, the marriage that tasted like chili-mango gum, the name and identity that get shortened at the border, the ache that finally softens into something a person can carry. If Mayen is the door, then this is the room.

(There are ninety-something ISBNs left.) Join me and subscribe for updates as Dormanes becomes a place where real stories are curated)

And you?

I am not telling you this so you will clap, and I am certainly not telling you to hurry. I am telling you because I know what a full fist feels like, what happens the moment it opens, and how it feels to start letting go.

We came loaded with everything we needed for life. The work is not hoarding. The work is getting empty — on purpose, in service, before our last adieu. — AD

So: what is in your hand? Not what you wish were there. What is actually, already there — the thing so native to you that you have never once counted it as an asset. The letters. The recipes. The ear for numbers. The way people always end up telling you the truth.

And if you are still in the season of carrying, carry it well. God works all of it together — the drawer years too. Nothing you have lived is wasted material. You’ll need perseverance, grit, and the stubborn optimism to push through the inevitable hurdles. Any endeavor is worth the testing.

When the day comes, stay the course, run with what you already have, and watch the doors eventually swing wide open.

Peace to every gift, to every fist, and to every hand. Please feel free to share your own experiences with releasing and owning your journey towards your purpose.

📖 Read, order, or go direct – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever books are sold.

Get Mayen and the Unexpected Gift on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/1969448008
Get Artificially Flavored Layers on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/1969448067
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