1 - The Condition

Toye Oyelese

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Toye Oyelese—Toye, if you’re not one for formality. I’ve been, well, navigating blind for as long as I remember. And honestly, that’s not even a metaphor… at least, not at first. See, when people find out I was almost clinically blind for the first seven years of my life, they look at me funny. “What do you mean you didn’t know?” I mean exactly that. It’s strange but, as a kid, severe myopia wasn’t something I identified as a problem. I could only make out things if they were basically right in front of my nose, but the blur? That wasn’t ‘blur’—that was just ‘normal’ to me. That was simply what reality looked like.

Toye Oyelese

The funny part is, I managed just fine. At school, at home, I got along. Nobody seemed to notice that my world was a bit fuzzier than theirs. So when they finally figured it out and handed me my first pair of glasses at age seven… my goodness, reality hit me in the face. I remember it—sharp edges, colors suddenly popping out, faces I could recognize without squinting. I nearly winced because everything was so bright, so immediate. It’s a moment burned into my brain.

Toye Oyelese

Now, you’d think that would’ve made me trust my senses a whole lot more. But, if anything, it made me trust them less. If I could be that wrong about something so basic—if a whole world could exist that I had no inkling of—what else was I missing? And what was everybody else missing? Even now, after decades as a doctor, I find myself closing my eyes when I meet someone new. It’s a leftover habit from those early days. Somehow, when I shut out the sight, I can sense people differently. Not better, necessarily, but… more honestly, maybe? Our senses, even when they’re working, aren’t windows—they’re filters. Some things get through, some things don’t.

Toye Oyelese

That was my first real lesson about what I now call “the condition”: we’re all experiencing the world through a fog—consciousness peering through tools that don’t give us the whole picture. It’s humbling. But it also makes me curious: just how much do we really see?

Toye Oyelese

Now, if realizing you can’t fully see the world is one thing, learning you can’t control it is another. For me, that lesson came harshly, just before my tenth birthday. My father died in a car accident. He was only forty-four. It turned everything upside down. At the time, I was a church kid. I believed, I really believed, that good things happen to good people. I’d read those stories where even death is just a pause—Lazarus rising and all that. I watched my father’s funeral, half-convinced he’d just sit up and brush himself off.

Toye Oyelese

Of course, that didn’t happen. But I kept waiting—days, weeks, months—thinking maybe if I wished hard enough, or prayed right, he’d come back. When it sank in that he was gone, gone for good, it wasn’t just grief. Something fundamental inside me, the scaffolding holding the world together, just… gave way.

Toye Oyelese

Of course, adults have their own scripts to cover up how uncertain things are. We tell ourselves—tell our children—stories to keep the fear at bay: the world is fair, good things come to good people, life makes sense if you’re just careful enough. But reality doesn’t play along. I learned that pretty early. Life isn’t fair, and there isn’t always a reason that wraps up nicely. Sometimes, horrible things just happen.

Toye Oyelese

Later, I’d see a pattern in my life that kept repeating. Like, when I moved to Canada—new language, new system, patients and colleagues who looked at me sideways—setbacks ambushing me just as I thought I’d found my footing. I wish I could say I learned to control it all. I didn’t. The world, it turns out, doesn't take requests. My second lesson is this: we’re consciousness navigating a reality we can’t control. The trick isn’t in mastery—it’s more… adapting. Looking for the roses in all the muck, instead of believing roses are the default and dirt is rare.

Toye Oyelese

Things unraveled further after I’d just begun trying to find my footing again. I was eleven. My favorite aunt—she was young, maybe thirty—came down with what looked like a small ear infection. By the end of the weekend, she was gone. Meningitis. Just like that. I’d just seen her, laughing at her son’s birthday party.

Toye Oyelese

As if that wasn’t enough, that same week, I caught my best friend stealing my prized stamps. Selling them, even. I can laugh a little now, but at the time, something in me… broke. Not a dramatic public collapse—if anything, I went invisible. I’d walk around in a haze, struggle to remember my own name, like the wires connecting me to myself were all unplugged.

Toye Oyelese

So I started—well, I started just naming things. “That’s a chair. That’s a wall. That exists.” Over and over, almost like I was patching myself back together one fact at a time. Slowly, the world outside started to have shape again, and inside, I started to come back—bit by bit. I didn’t realize it then, but what I was really doing was reconstructing the self, the ‘I’ that had vanished. Turns out, the self isn’t a given. It’s made, and sometimes—when it shatters—you have to rebuild from scratch.

Toye Oyelese

Years later, in my practice, I’ve seen patients—people I care about—go through similar fogs. Some catastrophe shrinks their world to a single room, a single breath. And slowly, almost stubbornly, they start again. Not because they’re certain, but because moving forward is the only thing left. Survival isn’t about certainty, I’ve learned. It’s about taking the next step, even if you’re not sure the ground will hold.

Toye Oyelese

So, by age eleven, I’d landed on what I call “the condition” we all share: we’re consciousness, moving through a reality we can’t fully perceive, can’t control, can’t fully understand. It isn’t something to fix—it’s just the situation. Most people spend their lives dodging or denying that—that belief that, with enough grit, you’ll see clearly, control everything, make sense of it all. But then something happens. A death; a move across an ocean; a diagnosis. And all you can do is ask: from this exact spot, where do I go from here? Not “why did this happen?”, but, now what? That’s real navigation. That’s what it means to exist, eyes open or closed.

Toye Oyelese

If you’re still with me, thank you. Next time, I’ll talk about the null hypothesis—the foundation for how I navigate, even when I’m not sure what’s ahead. So, take a breath. Survive first, then thrive. Until next time.