Estimated read time: 11 min read
Summary: In 2019, Abraham turned off his WhatsApp read receipts and left them off for six years. This essay looks beneath a setting most people treat as mere preference — at a hard season in Brighton, the death of a peer at 25, and what it quietly cost to be hard to reach. It offers no verdict, only the honest shape of why some people go quiet, and what it takes to become reachable again.
A few months ago, I turned on my WhatsApp read receipts.
They had been off since late 2019. Six years of reading messages when I wanted to, replying when I was ready, and sometimes not replying at all. To anybody looking in, it was a settings toggle. Two lines in a menu I never opened.
It was not a settings toggle.
When It All Arrives at Once
I arrived in Brighton in the autumn of 2019 to start a Master’s at the University of Sussex on a Chevening Scholarship. On paper it read like pure forward momentum: fully funded, international institution, the next chapter of work I had been building since I was a teenager in Lagos with a Nokia and a notebook.
What the paper version left out was everything that travelled with me.
I had come out of a relationship that, in ending, made me look directly at things about myself I had been managing rather than facing. The loss was one thing. What my own choices inside it revealed was another. That kind of ending opens a door you have kept shut for years, and then leaves you standing in it.
Then Brighton did what Brighton does in winter. Sunset by four. Grey that sits on you. I had never lived anywhere that far from the sound of home, and I did not anticipate how much of my sense of self had been held in place simply by being known by the people around me. New academic pressure. A social rhythm I had no fluency in yet. And a social anxiety I had genuinely never met before, moving in quietly with the rest of it.
Nothing broke in one place. It accumulated. Accumulations are harder to explain than events, to other people and to yourself, because there is no clean story to point at. There was only the growing sense that I was carrying more than I had the capacity to hold, and that the honest thing was to put some of it down.
So I turned off the read receipts.
What WhatsApp Asks of You
The distinction matters here, so let me be exact about it.
I did not vanish from public life. I was back on Instagram within a few months, posting again in smaller ways, and that felt manageable. Social media lets you broadcast from a distance. You post, the audience is abstract, you decide what is visible, you ease back in on your own terms.
WhatsApp offers no such distance.
If you are Nigerian, you already know what I mean. WhatsApp is not a platform for us; it is the infrastructure. It is where family sits. Where the church group sits, and the school set group, and the group from a conference in 2017 that nobody has ever left. It is where the person who mentored you at 19 sends a voice note. Where a former colleague asks for a favour (urgent 2k or sometimes rent money). Where your mother sends those weird broadcast messages, and good morning at 5:47 am and can see, precisely, that you read it at 9 and said nothing.
There is no curation available in that. Two blue ticks do not allow for performance. They ask for the actual version of you: present, reachable, able to receive another person.
And you do not always get to choose the channel. My own preference, professionally, has always been email — cleaner, asynchronous, room to think before I answered, a way to give someone my best rather than my fastest. But work in Nigeria does not always run on your preference. Clients came to WhatsApp because WhatsApp is where things happen here, and in many cases you have to adapt. The one channel I would not have chosen for the pressure of immediacy was often the only one on offer.
I was not confident I had that version to offer. I was mid-rebuild, and I did not yet know what I was rebuilding into. Not pretending otherwise was the only honest option I could find.
The Weight That Landed
Somewhere in that season, I heard that Promise Excel had died.
Known online as Maverick Excel, he was a young Nigerian blogger writing about entrepreneurship for young Africans, building a platform from close to nothing, the way many of us who came up online in Nigeria built: conviction, almost no resources, and a stubborn belief that the thing you were making was worth making.
He was 25. I was months away from 25 myself.
I would not claim we were close. But we were in each other’s work for years. In 2016, I wrote a guest post for his blog called “How to Scam Yourself Into Becoming Better at Pursuing Your Dream.” I featured him on mine. We showed up at the same online events. In 2017, he wrote the blurb for my second book, Lead Your Life. In 2018, he sent me the draft of his own book, Be Phenomenal or Be Forgotten, and asked me to write one for him.
That is the particular texture of it. We were part of the earliest generation of young Nigerians building online, before “creator” was a word anyone used, endorsing each other’s work because there was nobody else to do it. You traded blurbs. You gave each other your audience. Nobody was paying anybody.
In 2011, at 16, I had started Seasoned Life Journal on weekly stipends of less than five dollars, teaching myself to code and design because I could not pay anybody to do it. Same species of builder. Same orientation. His name is in the front of my book.
When someone like that dies, the grief sits differently than when a public figure dies. This one was close enough to be a mirror.
He did not choose when his voice stopped. And there I was, alive, with a platform I had spent a decade building, choosing to go quiet. Dimming a light that for him had simply been switched off without notice.
It was not guilt. Something restructured, though. A quiet confrontation with the fact that presence is not guaranteed, and that the work we are given carries an urgency anxiety does not always respect.
It did not heal the anxiety. But it woke something up in me that has not gone back to sleep.
The Slow Way Through
Nothing about this arrived as a ceremony.
The weight dispersed the way it had gathered: gradually, without announcement. The Brighton winter gave way. The wound from the relationship closed over. I began to understand what that season had actually been asking of me and, slowly, to answer it.
The social anxiety loosened. The work never actually stopped — the studio, a family, things I am proud of, built quietly through those years. What changed was the showing-up. On Instagram I would surface for a moment and then disappear again. Same on LinkedIn. The public presence returned in flickers rather than a steady signal, and I stopped treating that as something to fix and started treating it as information about who I was becoming.
Because I did not come out of that season as the person who went in, and I have long stopped wanting to. 2019 was not a peak I fell from. It was a door I walked through. The version of me before it was not better; he simply had not yet met the things that would rearrange him. What I have been doing since is reconstruction, on ground the old version of me never stood on.
WhatsApp was always going to be last. Most intimate, most exposed, most insistent about receiving the real you. You cannot offer that until you have grown into the person who can.
A few months ago I picked up my phone and turned the read receipts on.
There was no breakthrough. It simply felt possible in a way it had not before. Something had loosened its grip, and I could feel it clearly without being able to explain it.
What This Is Really About
I have spent years writing and teaching about identity. About the cost of performing a version of yourself that is not integrated. About what happens to a person when the public face and the private reality drift too far apart.
That season was me living inside my own subject matter, which is a humbling place to find yourself when you make your living helping other people sort theirs out.
Earlier this year I wrote about five shame-driven leadership brands, and I called one of them the Ghost: significant capability paired with deliberate invisibility, a person who lets the work speak but will not show up to own it. I wrote that of the five, the Ghost is the hardest to diagnose in yourself, because from the inside it looks entirely like principle. What I did not say in that piece was that I was describing something I recognised. It is easier to name a pattern in the abstract than to admit you have been living inside it with the read receipts off.
The read receipts were never about WhatsApp. They were about my willingness to be found. To let people in before I knew who exactly they were finding. To be visible while still mid-becoming.
Turning them on has not made me a different person. But visibility creates accountability in a way hiding never could. Seeing the messages sitting there, knowing they know I have seen them, means I cannot pretend the pending things are not pending.
Clarity is uncomfortable. It is still closer to integrity than the alternative.
Last month a friend from university, Dozie, told me plainly that I am a hard person to reach. He was not being unkind. It was the same thing that had been sitting in the quieter feedback from clients for years — the work itself praised warmly, called excellent, and then, almost as an aside, a note about how hard I was to get hold of. Great work, hard to reach. The two kept arriving together, and I had never made myself sit still long enough to hear the second half properly.
I cannot point to one relationship and say that is what it cost me. It was not that clean. What changed was the whole weather of it. How my community related to me. How associates followed up, or stopped following up. How family and friends adjusted their expectations of me without ever announcing that they had. And it did not stay on the app. It spilled into how people met me in rooms, in Lagos, in person. You train people in how available you are, and they believe you.
That is the honest truth, as we say here in Nigeria.
I am not writing this to recommend that anyone turn their read receipts on. There are good reasons people turn them off, and most of those reasons have very little to do with the ones I have described. Some people are protecting their attention. Some are protecting their peace. Some simply do not owe the world an itemised account of when they were reachable and when they were not. A setting is allowed to just be a setting.
But sometimes it is not. Sometimes the small toggle is standing in for something larger you have not looked at directly. That was true for me. Whether it is true for anyone else is theirs to sit with.
For now, mine are on. I still do not answer everything. The messages still sometimes pile up. But I can see them, and they can see that I have seen them, and there is a kind of respect in that I had underrated for years — the people on the other end were never just notifications to be managed. They were clients who trusted me with real work, friends who kept reaching, family who kept the door open long after I had made myself hard to find. I am learning what it means to let that be true, and to let them see that I know it.
