Review of “This or That”, by John Owen E. Adimike

This or That? is a quietly luminous piece of creative non-fiction that dramatizes the inner evolution of a young woman whose dream of becoming a medical doctor collides with the brute realities of life, loss, and national circumstance. What begins as a simple autobiographical reflection unfolds into a layered meditation on purpose, disappointment, and self-reinvention in the Nigerian educational landscape. The power of the piece doesn’t reside in stylistic flamboyance but in its deeply human honesty, its structural coherence, and its delicate emotional rhythm. At the heart of the narrative lies a young girl’s ardent childhood dream, to wear the white coat of a medical doctor. This desire, initially inspired by the example of her brother Goddy and reinforced by the idealism of books like Ben Carson’s Gifted Hands , becomes a symbol of her self-worth and familial continuity. In this first act of the essay, the author⁩ constructs the reader’s emotional investment through clarity and innocence. The rhythm of her sentences echoes the momentum of youthful certainty; the reader senses how deeply she has internalized the logic of achievement: good grades, medical school, success, marriage. Life, in her early imagination, was linear; a clean equation of effort and outcome.

Then comes the rupture— the confrontation with the stubborn opacity of reality. Her brother’s death, the University’s refusal to offer her Medicine, and the repeated failures of her plans signal a slow unraveling of the narrative she once trusted. The persona captures this transition with disarming simplicity. There are no melodramatic flourishes, no philosophical abstractions. Instead, her words ache with understatement: “I was left feeling like an overripe banana that had been crushed by a truck.” This image, at once humorous and tragic, reveals her capacity for self-awareness even in pain. The simile is unpolished in the best sense: raw, local, and intimate: evoking the everyday vocabulary of frustration in Nigerian youth culture.

The essay’s structure is chronological, yet beneath the linear narrative lies a rich emotional architecture. Each stage (aspiration, disappointment, resignation, reinvention) marks a chapter in her formation. Blessing’s greatest strength as a writer is her tonal discipline: she never succumbs to bitterness. Even as she documents the exhaustion of chasing a system that refuses to yield, she maintains a patient, reflective gaze. The reader follows her through the practical calculations of survival: waiting years for admission, weighing JAMB scores, negotiating ASUU strikes, and senses how the larger dysfunctions of a society can infiltrate and reshape the most personal of dreams. Her education, in the truest sense, becomes not medical but existential. The later sections of the essay reveal a maturing consciousness. Having abandoned the dream of Medicine, the narrator wrestles with her next steps: postgraduate study or entrepreneurship, stability or experimentation. The internal questioning, “But what was I to do with my life?”, signals a kind of awakening, as opposed to the prima facie despondency. It is here that the essay transforms from a lament into a narrative of self-definition. Blessing’s turn toward writing, editing, and tailoring might seem at first like a resignation, but it becomes instead a reclamation of agency. By framing her new path as a deliberate choice rather than a consolation, she demonstrates that fulfillment often emerges through detours. 

I think that this piece, “This or That?” is marked by clarity and unpretentious candor. Blessing’s prose flows with conversational ease, and her tone is distinctly Nigerian: it is grounded, rhythmic, and unpretentious. The narrative voice carries the warmth of oral storytelling, the kind one might hear in a reflective evening conversation among friends. Her diction bridges intellect and intimacy, preserving the authenticity of her cultural idiom without sacrificing coherence. The minor stylistic blemishes (a few redundancies and syntactic slips) do little to diminish the essay’s power. In fact, the occasional roughness adds texture; it reminds the reader that this is not a polished confession filtered through literary vanity but an honest, breathing testimony. On a thematic level, I think the piece operates on several levels. Superficially, it is about vocational frustration, the common Nigerian tale of dreams deferred by institutional inefficiency. But more deeply, it interrogates the myth of a singular life path. Blessing challenges the cultural fixation on linear success, the belief that worth must follow a predictable script of academic excellence, professional prestige, and societal approval. In choosing a nontraditional path, she exposes a subtler truth: that the meaning of life often resides not in achieving childhood dreams but in rediscovering new ones through resilience and openness. Her concluding reflection that “I still get to do work that I enjoy and even save a few lives from poorly edited documents and wardrobe malfunctions”, encapsulates her newfound philosophy. The humor is deliberate, the irony tender; the metaphor of “saving lives” bridges her abandoned medical dream and her current creative reality, closing the circle of purpose with poetic symmetry.

On a general note, I would say that the piece succeeds because it is both particular and universal. Its specificity (the mention of JAMB, NYSC, ASUU, and departmental transfers) roots it in the Nigerian experience, yet its emotional resonance transcends geography. Anyone who has watched a cherished dream evolve or dissolve will recognize themselves in Blessing’s narrative. What distinguishes her voice is her refusal to romanticize struggle or to idealize success. Her conclusion does not offer triumphal closure but calm acceptance which is a kind of maturity that is born from endurance. One would say that the piece is therefore, a moving testament to the human capacity for adaptation and self-renewal… a story of one woman’s confrontation with destiny’s detours, told with grace, humor, and understated wisdom.