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How to Get Ahead Creatively in Your Adult Life

Hold the thought …

Osundolire Oladapo Ifelanwa
9 min readSep 29, 2023

I am in my 30s, and my teenage years were the most colorful phase of my life. I had a guitar I never fully learned to play; I could plunk out weary chords on a piano; I was in architecture school, and could stay awake for 72 straight hours watching my hands bring my imagination to life on tracing paper. I wrote stories and poems in the middle of all of that and drew portraits of girls I had a crush on, so they’d like me even more. Whatever I wanted to do, I did. Life seemed to always be at my beck and call. My life was borderless, airy, and colorful.

Age never announced its arrival as one imagines it would. You just wake up, or more aptly put, you come to the consciousness, that you miss yourself; that you are no longer doing the things that once brought color into your life. Your days feel dreary, and Life weighs down upon you. You feel lost.

This time in my life happened when I started raising a family, working a full-time job, and doing everything I could to get by. In fairness to Life (who has been kind to me all along) I didn’t have it hard even in this phase. I was still an architect — something I always wanted to be, and my daily job still offered the opportunity to do the things that gave my life depth and meaning. Yet, something was missing.

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Osundolire Oladapo Ifelanwa
Osundolire Oladapo Ifelanwa

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