My name is Mus Derrick. That's the official version. The trimmed version—Mus—is the one I hand to strangers so they don't twist the full thing into something that sounds like a broken radio. It doesn't sparkle. It doesn't vibrate with fame. But it carries a piece of my history, my grandmother's breath, the older generations who held onto names like anchors. So even if the world never trends it, I wear it like skin.
Most days I talk about my struggles as if I'm the only contestant in some private war. But the thing about life is that nobody escapes unscarred. Everyone walks around carrying something heavy: an expectation they can't meet, a memory that won't fade, a secret that won't sit quietly. Ask a friend what life is, really ask them, and watch the reaction.
They'll blink like you've asked them to explain lightning. They'll rub their head or change the subject. People love to give vague definitions—life is life, life is living. Living what? A comedy? A tragedy? A mixtape with random tracks of joy and disaster?
No one lives a single genre. Even the happiest person you meet is probably walking around with hidden bruises. People post their shiny lives online because sadness doesn't get likes. You've seen it the wide smiles, the tropical trips, the soft-filtered morning coffees. Meanwhile, in real life, they're arguing with their partner or crying in the bathroom. The internet is a stage; everyone acts like they rehearsed the role.
I used to envy those people. I'd scroll through their photos while staring at my old Itel P36, the kind of phone that tries its best even though the world keeps telling it that "its best" isn't enough.
While someone is shouting "My dad bought me an iPhone 17!" felt like a punch to the chest.
But eventually I realised the real performance wasn't their phone, it was their happiness. Short-lived, curated, ten-second joy bursts like a YouTube short .
The kind that ends as fast as the reel they posted.
Real happiness tastes different. It's slow, earned, sometimes ugly. It comes from long nights and repeated failures. It stretches.
I didn't go to high-school parties or prom. I was the boy who stayed home because he didn't have the right clothes, because he didn't know how to dance, because his life wasn't shaped for glitter. Movies tell you that school dances are life-changing. Reality says they're just sweaty rooms full of people pretending to enjoy themselves. I didn't mind missing it all. My world was smaller but quieter. You'll understand me more as you keep putting pieces together.
I wasn't running from happiness. I was protecting myself. Joy can be dangerous when you're not used to holding it.
But writing was the joy I could trust. Back in school, when teachers scribbled equations on the board, I scribbled stories behind my books. Mathematics felt like a foreign language spoken by aliens; writing felt like the only place where the chaos in my head transformed into something useful. Writing was mine. Nobody could take it or laugh at it. It was the one thing I didn't feel inferior doing.
As I grew older, I started to understand something strange about happiness: too much of it, taken too quickly, harms you. Like speeding a Ferrari on an empty road. You feel invincible until you don't. Joy has that same trick. It sweeps you into a high, then drops you the moment you stop paying attention.
Take drinking as an example .Two bottles warm the soul. Four bottles set the soul on fire and make the body stupid. The drink itself isn't the enemy; the loss of control is. That's how most temptations work—not evil in themselves, but dangerous in excess. The boundary between fun and destruction is thin like a badly drawn line.
I avoided many teenage adventures not because I disliked fun, but because fear shaped me. My childhood had no safety nets. My parents were teenagers who let emotions sprint faster than consequences. I grew up with their mistakes echoing like warnings.
My grandmother stepped in, held me steady and reminded me that life doesn't always give you second chances. And when you grow up watching adults ruin themselves, you walk carefully, even around joy.
My uncle—brilliant in the wrong ways, disastrous in others taught me what a bottle can do to a person's life. His addiction didn't announce itself dramatically. It grew quietly, like a vine wrapping around a tree until the tree can't breathe. Fear of ending up like him became a compass I didn't ask for.
I can control my happy moments. My sadness? That's a wild animal. If I poured every sad memory into these pages all at once, the weight would crush me. I've cried in silence more times than I can count. Some nights sadness walks in uninvited and leaves me wrestling with thoughts I never asked for. You can't choose when pain arrives. You can only choose whether you stand up afterward.
People love to say we control our destiny. I think that's half-true. Some chapters are written by our hands; others are carved by forces we don't understand—timing, birth, luck, accidents, randomness, human cruelty. The universe doesn't owe anyone clarity.
Still, even when life feels like a locked room, joy finds a crack. Small joys: a friend who texts without needing anything, a story taking shape, a memory that warms instead of stings. They're not enough to erase the sadness, but they shift its weight.
I used to hate the phrase "patience pays." It sounded like advice given by people who inherited comfort. But I've lived long enough to see those who started with nothing climb into something—slowly, painfully, unexpectedly. Not many do. Success is always a minority. That's the secret nobody wants to admit: life is fundamentally unfair. If fairness were real, we'd all be living the same script.
If everyone were rich, the economy would collapse. If everyone were leaders, nobody would follow. If everyone were happy at once, who would recognise happiness as happiness? The world needs imbalance to function, and that's disturbing if you think about it too long.
Still, I try. I keep pushing myself out of the shell built by childhood and circumstance. I've achieved a few things—not trophies, not fame—but enough to prove that progress doesn't need to be loud to be real. Even small achievements slice a bit of sadness out of the way. Sometimes that's all progress is: removing heaviness, piece by piece.
Sadness never disappears. Life takes people away, bodies fail, plans collapse, hearts get broken. But joy doesn't disappear either. They exist like twins who refuse to live separately. Every moment of happiness you experience sits beside a shadow; every moment of sadness contains a seed that might bloom into something better later.
People desire wealth because wealth solves practical problems. But I've noticed something: it also creates distance. Some rich people become spectators of pain rather than participants. They decide who deserves compassion and who deserves mockery. But the ones who climbed from the ground up are different. They carry their old suffering in their eyes which humbles them.
Suffering connects people. When someone loses a parent or faces heartbreak or struggles through poverty, even strangers feel a tug in their chest. That's because pain strips away the illusions we wear. Pain is the one universal language that doesn't need translation.
To anyone still climbing from the bottom: remember that not every painful moment is a punishment. Some are consequences, yes. Some are accidents. Some are simply the price of being alive. But every experience adds something to your understanding.
Even the mistakes you regret most are teachers hiding in regrets' clothing.
Life isn't something to solve. The greatest philosophers died confused. Life is something to experience—through heartbreak, joy, fear, desire, boredom, hope, and everything in between. It's something to wrestle and negotiate with. Something to breathe through, even when the air is thin.
Life is living. Life is learning. Life is chaotic, beautiful, and completely unpredictable. And you, reader, are moving through it with your own collection of bruises and small victories, just like me.
We're still in the middle of it. The story hasn't finished shaping us yet. And maybe that's the quiet miracle of being alive: you never know which moment will change the rest of your life.