I scored high enough in JAMB to apply for medicine. My parents have been planning this since I was in JSS2. My father tells people I am going to be a doctor. My mother has already started imagining grandchildren delivered by her physician son.
I do not want to study medicine. I want to study fine art. I have wanted this quietly for years and I have said it once, carefully, and watched my father's face do something I never want to see again.
I know the argument they will make: art won't feed you. In Nigeria. In this economy. In a family where we had nothing and built something through practical choices. They are not wrong about the economics. I understand the fear behind their preference.
But I am 18 years old and I am being asked to choose the next 40 years of my life based on someone else's fear.
I don't know how to have this conversation with them. I don't know how to be honest without breaking something that took my family years to build. But I also don't know how to spend six years studying something that feels like it belongs to a version of me that doesn't exist.
Has anyone navigated this? How?