On December 29, 2025, Nigeria’s creative community woke up to a message no one wanted to see. Anda Damisa Paul, better known to nearly 100,000 followers as LazyWrita, shared what would become his final Instagram post, a candid farewell that stunned and unsettled people across the country. He spoke of having “lived a full and adventurous life” yet feeling he no longer had the strength to continue, describing himself as “happy, unburdened and free.” You could feel thousands of people pause mid-scroll, suddenly alert to how much can hide beneath charm, brilliance, and perfectly timed humour.
But this isn’t about dissecting a young man’s pain. It’s about what his silence reveals, or rather, what it confirms about the inner lives of Nigerian men. Because if we’re being honest, many people read that post and didn’t just feel sad; they felt a quiet familiarity. The tone. The exhaustion. The softness that appears when someone has carried more than they’ve ever been allowed to say out loud.
We don’t often admit that Nigerian men live in emotional tunnels. They’re raised that way. A boy cries, and someone sometimes lovingly, sometimes impatiently tells him to stop. “You’re a man,” they say, long before he even understands what that sentence requires of him. So he learns early that feelings are something to be folded neatly and kept inside, like a secret wardrobe only opened in the dark.
By adulthood, this private discipline becomes a kind of performance. Men joke about pressure like it’s a personality trait. They use banter the way some people use painkillers. They work tirelessly, not always because they’re ambitious, but because movement distracts from the stillness they don’t want to sit with. And when something breaks, a job, a heart, a dream — they simply tighten the shell. Life goes on. It has to.
The statistics are chilling, not because they’re abstract, but because they confirm what so many people already suspect. WHO data shows that men make up the overwhelming majority of suicide deaths globally, and Nigerian researchers estimate roughly four out of every five recorded suicide cases involve men. It’s not that men feel more pain; they just have fewer socially acceptable ways to name it. Silence isn’t just encouraged; it’s rehearsed.
And silence, like pressure, accumulates.
There’s a particular conversation style men adopt when they’re struggling. You ask if they’re okay, and they say, “We thank God.” You ask if they need help, and they laugh, “No worry, I dey.” It’s polite deflection — a cultural dialect mastered across generations. Whether they are 19 or 49, you hear the same thing: resilience expressed as withdrawal.
But people forget resilience and numbness can look identical from the outside.
I once heard someone say Nigerian men exist inside a constant negotiation — between who they are, who they’re expected to be, and who they fear becoming if they let their guard down. They’re performing strength in a country that demands it in bulk and offers very little cushioning in return. The economy is unstable, expectations are rigid, and the performance of competence is almost a survival skill. When you add emotional isolation to that mix, you realise many men are functioning under conditions no human being should normalise.
And yet, the solutions aren’t grand or complicated. A society doesn’t shift overnight, but intimacy does. It shifts quietly. It begins in the small spaces, the houses where boys are allowed to say “I’m scared” without being corrected; the friendships where men are asked questions they don’t have to dodge; the relationships where vulnerability isn’t weaponised; the workplaces where asking for a mental break isn’t treated like a confession.
It begins with treating men as human beings before treating them as “providers”, “leaders”, or whatever title we think makes them immune to emotional exhaustion.
Support is not a campaign. Its presence. It’s patience. It’s checking in even when someone insists they don’t need checking on. It’s recognising that a man’s silence is rarely an absence of words, it’s often an absence of permission.
Many Nigerian men do not need rescuing; they need room.
Room to speak without wondering how it alters the way people see them.
Room to be afraid without losing respect.
Room to be flawed without feeling like failures.
Room to not be strong all the time.
Perhaps the most sobering part of all this is how ordinary the signs often are. Nothing dramatic. No grand gestures. Just a sentence that sounds slightly too calm. A joke that lands a little too softly. A withdrawal that feels like “space” until you realise it was a quiet exit. We rarely notice these things until hindsight makes them painfully clear.
If LazyWrita’s final message did anything, it was interrupt a national tendency to overlook men’s emotional lives. It placed a mirror gently in front of us, without accusation, and asked whether we’d been paying attention. Whether we truly see the men around us or only the roles they’ve been performing.
And maybe that is where the work begins: not with fear, not with stigma, not with whispered supervision, but with honest seeing. With the kind of presence that makes someone feel safe enough to stay. With a country that learns, slowly and deliberately, to make space for men to be whole.
Rest in peace, LazyWrita. May the conversations your silence sparked become the compassion others desperately need.
