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# MY NAME ARRIVED BEFORE I DID
- URL: https://www.comesitwithmemag.co.uk/my-name-arrived-before-i-did/
- Published: 2026-11-08T16:12:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-08T16:12:43.000Z
- Description: Our names, our skin, our accents and the assumptions people attach to them often arrive before we do. A personal reflection on migration, identity, belonging and learning to exist in spaces that may have already decided who you are.
- Author: Oluwakanyinsola Opadele
- Tags: Issue001

An essay about migration, belonging, perception, and the price of being from somewhere else.

 I moved to the UK in May 2024.

 I remember thinking about it as a beginning. 

A new country. 

A new environment. 

A new chapter. 

A new me, perhaps. 

By September, I started college. I walked into that new chapter with the optimism of someone who genuinely believed that starting over meant starting fresh. 

I was wrong. 

It was a new beginning.

 Just not the one I imagined.

 It was a new beginning where I became an outcast.

 A new beginning where my skin could enter a room before my personality did. Where my accent could become a reason to isolate me before anyone had actually listened to what I was saying. Where the way I reasoned, spoke, behaved or understood things could be treated as strange simply because it wasn’t familiar. 

I had crossed an ocean, but somehow I had not escaped the assumptions attached to where I came from.

 And perhaps that is one of the strangest things about leaving home:

 You can leave a country. 

You cannot necessarily leave what people think about it.

 Sometimes, your ancestral background becomes a blockage on a path you haven’t even been allowed to walk yet.

 I remember being told, in one form or another:

 *“I don’t think you can pursue that, given where you come from.”* 

Given where I come from.

 Four words that can sound so harmless when you say them quickly. But there is a particular kind of violence in being reduced to your origin before you have had the opportunity to introduce yourself.

 Before your work.

 Before your intelligence.

 Before your character. 

Before your ambition. 

Before your actual ability. 

Before **you.**

 Your fatherland becomes your ceiling. 

And suddenly, you’re not asking, *“Can I do this?”* 

You’re asking, *“Will they let me?”* 

There is something almost ironic about growing up hearing, 

**“Let your light so shine before men…”** 

and then arriving somewhere where you begin to wonder whether people have already decided what colour your light is allowed to be.

*“…that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”* 

So you try.

 You really do. 

You apply. 

You send the CV. 

You rewrite the CV.

 You change the CV. 

You send another application. 

And another. 

And another. 

Perhaps this one. 

Perhaps that one.

 Perhaps they liked someone else.

 Perhaps I wasn’t experienced enough. 

Perhaps I need a different qualification. 

Perhaps I need to sound different. 

Perhaps I need to look different.

 Perhaps my name is too much.

 Because apparently, sometimes, before anyone meets you, your name has already had its interview.

 Maybe it would be easier if I were Teressa.

 Or John. 

Or Anna. 

Or Marcus.

 Something short. 

Something familiar. 

Something that doesn’t require the person reading it to pause and wonder where it came from.

 Instead, there is **Oluwamagbagbemi**.

 A name so long it could probably qualify as a geographical feature. 

Longer than the longest river in the world, someone might scoff. 

And you laugh. 

Because sometimes laughter is easier than explaining why something that is supposed to represent your identity has started to feel like another obstacle you have to overcome. 

My name is not an inconvenience.

 It is not a warning label.

 It is not a complication. 

It is mine.

 But there are moments when you begin to wonder whether the world would find you easier to accept if you arrived with a name it already knew how to pronounce. 

And that is a peculiar kind of loneliness: 

When something that once made you feel rooted begins to make you feel conspicuous.

 Then comes the funniest part.

 Your friends back home see your pictures.

 They see London. 

They see the trains. 

 They see the clothes

. They see the new life. 

They see the abroad.

 And suddenly: 

**“Omo, boy! You’re living the life ooo!”** 

Then: **“Shey make I paste aza?”** 

Translation: *Should I send you my bank details?* 

Because from a distance, migration looks beautiful. 

Abroad has excellent lighting. 

Nobody posts the 6 a.m. shift

 Nobody posts the cleaning. 

Nobody posts the exhaustion.

 Nobody posts the moment you realise you are spending hours packing somebody else’s shit just so you can afford to keep living in the country you thought would give you more.

 Nobody posts the insults. 

Nobody posts the humiliation of being spoken down to by people who, if circumstances were reversed, might never have been able to stand on the same level as you. 

Nobody posts how often you swallow your pride because pride doesn’t pay bills. 

Nobody posts the moments where you go home and sit quietly because explaining how tired you are would require explaining everything.

 And nobody posts the cold. 

God. 

The cold.

 I came to the UK expecting many things.

 I did not expect my nose to participate in the weather. 

There are moments when you are crying and your eyes are watering, your nose is running, your fingers are freezing, and you’re standing there thinking: *Surely this cannot be the opportunity I prayed for.*

 But you keep going. 

Because what other choice do you have? 

There is a particular irony in coming to a country because you believe it will help you build a better life, only to find yourself fighting the country, its systems, its perceptions, and sometimes its people just to get through the door. 

The country that was supposed to save me sometimes feels like the country standing between me and the success I came here to find.

 And before anyone misunderstands me:

 I am not saying the UK is evil. 

I am not saying everyone here is racist. 

I am not saying every rejection I’ve experienced was because of where I came from. 

I am saying that *I have experienced moments where where I came from seemed to matter more than who I was.* 

And there is a difference.

 Because the danger of speaking about experiences like this is that people immediately want statistics. 

They want evidence. 

They want percentages. 

They want to know whether it happens enough to count.

 But what happens when you’re the person standing inside the percentage? What do you do with an experience that may be invisible on paper but incredibly loud inside your life? 

You remember.

 You notice.

 You begin to recognise patterns.

 You start wondering whether the door was actually closed— or whether it was simply never intended to open for you.

 And then there is Nigeria. 

My country. 

My fatherland. 

The place whose name I carry even when I am nowhere near it.

 We sing:

**“Arise, O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey…”** 

We sing about the labour of our heroes past. 

We sing:

 **“The labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain.”** 

But sometimes I wonder what happens when a country’s name becomes louder than the good its people have done. 

When the reputation of a nation begins walking into rooms before its citizens do. 

When the actions of some become assumptions about many. When the good deeds of the past seem to disappear underneath the bad headlines of the present. 

I did not create that reputation.

 I did not write the history. 

I did not make every mistake.

 I did not choose every government.

 I did not steal the country’s name and stain it. 

Yet sometimes, somehow, I feel expected to answer for it.

 And perhaps that is the part that hurts most.

 Because I am not Nigeria’s mistakes. 

I am not Nigeria’s headlines.

 I am not every story you’ve heard about Nigeria.

 I am a person. 

An individual. 

A girl who crossed an ocean believing she was moving toward possibility.

 And yet sometimes I feel like I have spent my time proving that I am not the stereotype someone else already created. 

Maybe that is what migration doesn’t tell you. 

You think you are moving away from somewhere.

 But sometimes, you discover that you are carrying it with you. 

Your skin comes with you.

 Your accent comes with you. 

Your name comes with you. 

Your history comes with you.

 Your culture comes with you. 

Your country comes with you. 

And, unfortunately, other people’s assumptions about all of those things come too. 

Some things travel first class. 

Your name does. 

Your skin does. 

Your accent does.

 Your history does.

 And sometimes, people’s assumptions about them do too. You can cross an ocean and still have your origin sitting beside you.

 You can change your postcode without changing the way somebody sees you. 

You can learn the trains, learn the slang, learn the weather, learn how to queue properly and pretend you understand wha*t “you alright?”* actually means— 

and still be asked,

**“Where are you really from?”** 

As if the first answer wasn’t real enough.

 As if belonging has an interrogation room. 

As if there is a correct answer.

 As if you can fail the interview. 

Still, I keep going.

 Because somewhere beneath the frustration is hope. 

Not the naive kind. 

Not the everything will magically work out kind.

 A stubborn kind. 

The kind that survives rejection. 

The kind that gets up after crying. 

The kind that keeps applying.

 The kind that keeps learning.

 The kind that still believes there is somewhere in this world where your name will not be treated like a problem to solve. 

Perhaps that is what a new beginning actually is.

 Not becoming someone else. 

Not erasing where you came from. 

Not making yourself smaller so someone else can become comfortable. Maybe a new beginning is simply deciding that you will not allow other people’s assumptions to become your identity. 

I came here believing I was leaving one life behind and beginning another. 

What I have learned is that you don’t really begin again. 

You begin again with everything you are.

 The good. 

The bad. 

The name.

 The accent. 

The history. 

The wounds.

 The dreams. 

The country. 

The contradictions. 

All of it. 

And perhaps the real challenge is not convincing everyone else that you belong. 

Perhaps it is convincing yourself that you were never required to earn the right to exist here in the first place. 

I don’t know what the ending of this story looks like yet

. I don’t know whether I will stay. 

I don’t know whether I will leave.

 I don’t know whether the country I came to will eventually become the country I feel at home in.

 I only know that I came here looking for a future. 

And I am still looking. 

Still applying.

 Still learning. 

Still becoming. 

Still trying to make something out of the opportunity I crossed an ocean for.

 So I have one question left. 

Not for Britain. 

Not for Nigeria. 

Not for the people who judged me. 

For myself.

 For anyone who has ever been made to carry a burden they did not create.

**Will I continue to suffer and bear the consequences of a sin I never committed?**