I'm from Bayelsa. Nigeria. Izon. If you don't know where that is, picture rivers — wide, dark, endless — and a kid sitting somewhere near them with dirt on his hands and something forming between his fingers that didn't exist five minutes ago. That was me. Always making something. Clay, scraps, whatever was around. I didn't need supplies. I just needed the urge, and that never ran out.
Nobody showed me how. It was already there.
Some people find what they're meant to do. Me — it found me before I was even looking.
Where Science Met Art
Then I got into science. And honestly? It didn't replace anything — it just joined the conversation. I started seeing art and science as the same thing wearing different clothes. Both of them are just you asking questions the world hasn't answered yet. The same hands that used to shape clay started wanting to understand why things work, how they hold together, what breaks when you push too hard.
That's still me. Feeling and logic fighting it out. Beauty trying to make sense of itself.
The Crossing
Getting to the U.S. — that's not a clean story. Early days were rough in ways I'm not going to romanticise. Fear though? Fear wasn't really part of it. When you're in survival mode, fear is a distraction you can't afford. You just go. Head down, hands moving, figure it out as it comes.
I wanted graphic design more than I've wanted most things. That pull toward it was real — not "I think this could be a career" real, more like "this is the thing I'm actually supposed to be doing" real. But life wasn't set up for that yet. It was art or bills. Passion or eating. And I chose eating.
So I got into sales. Turned out I was good at it — not just surviving-good, actually good — because sales is just telling a story until someone believes in it, and I've always known how to make people feel something. I took risks. Made moves. Won some, lost some. Never stopped.
Life makes you earn the things that were always yours. That's just how it works.
The Hole
Then I lost my dad.
I'm not going to dress that up. It hit and I went under — deep, the kind of deep where you're not looking for the surface anymore. Grief is quiet like that. It doesn't warn you. It just changes what the floor feels like.
Music was always something I did — that was never new. But after losing him I wrote something different. A song called STORY. I didn't write it for anyone. I wrote it because the weight had to go somewhere and that was the only place I had. It's probably the most honest thing I've ever made because it wasn't meant for anyone else to hear.
The things you make in the dark for yourself — those are the real ones.
Day One
And now I'm here. Back at the door I left open a long time ago — the one with the drawings on the floor and clay under the fingernails. XCLIPXE is me walking back through it.
No big plan. No pressure. Just me and the work and the love of it, and the kind of excitement that only comes when you genuinely don't know where something is going to go. I'm starting over like I'm new to this — because in a lot of ways, I am. And that's exactly how I want it.
Maybe it becomes something. Maybe it stays mine. Either way — I'm back. And that's enough.
This isn't the day I arrived. This is the day I came back to myself.
Welcome to the beginning.