No, I do not mean tribes as in cultural divisions.

"so here you are,
too foreign for home,
too foreign for here
never enough for both.
- Ijeoma Umebinyuo"

I find myself having to go back to this poem so often. Living between two worlds, one a desired place to call home, another, an abstract dimension that is supposed to manifest a physical location yet...not quite.
I am not alone in this. That poem is enough to show that too many people feel the same way. More times than probably necessary, i go back to the beginning. The time i became self aware and what led me there and i have to always remember that it was the people. The collage of different people form different cultural spaces and languages that have come together to make me who i am. I am grateful!
I read something somewhere, "your vibe attracts your tribe" and whenever i go out and meet people who like a cosmic abnormality, turn out to be just like me, i revel in that.
It is true what they say, how the energy you give off into the universe always comes back to you. This is true for me as i have seen it visibly applied in my life and i have watched as these realities changed me and my perception of the world.
Initially, i had this idea that for someone to belong to your tribe, they must; be a replication of ourselves but that is not true. There are people who are a part of my tribe whom ideally, based on misconceptions that i was raised on, would not be around me. My tribe is filled with muslims, christians, atheists, hipsters, agnostics, homosexuals etc, naturally, these groups of people would not be within a 100 mile radius of me but alas, life threw me in a chaotic group of interesting individuals who have taught me the true meaning of a connection and a tribe. We found a common union in our differences.
One's tribe does not have to include people whom one grew up with, i have a few friends from middle and high school who are not a part of my tribe but are nonetheless, people i consider as friends.
I always assumed coming back home would be hard, It has been one year eight months and A LOT has happened but i still keep asking myself these: would home be ready for me? would i be ready for home? and the answer for both is always a resounding No. Home will never be ready for me because the idea of home as a physical place does not exist for me and i will never be ready for home's insistent need to mould me into a version of myself that only benefits this physical place that i have confined myself within.
Not a lot of this is making sense, it is not making a lot of sense in my head either but today i was thinking of tribes and family and relationships and all of that are related. Somehow, we always find ourselves thrown from one end of a thin web to another part of the same web but thicker.
A colleague once told me "I am very curious to see the kind of person you would be if you were not Nigerian" and i know deep down, i would still be this version of myself. I laughed and said i am curious too.
I have found that the only way to live through the trials and tribulations of home is to forgive the notion of understanding and accepting difference as i have with my tribe. Misunderstandings make the world go round...right?? I have accepted that it is not my place to change the world or change people's ideas, it took me some very interesting conversations and accidental rendezvous to make me into this version of myself that i unconditionally Love. Maybe everyone's journey is different and i am not the center of any of it.
My best friend and soul sister told me "you are not going to agree with everyone on who you are...different personalities, different experiences, different paths and that is okay". It is not our place to convince people on who we are, it is up to everyone else to see for themselves and decide for themselves if they accept us or not. I am happy with myself and my tribe, i pray everyone else would find their tribes, discover who they are and be happy too.

xoxo