Why This Exist
The life people saw
There is a version of my life that looked successful from the outside. Good grades. Advanced degrees. A corporate career. Relationships. Ambition. By most external measures, I was doing fine. But for more than thirty years, I was responding to things I could not explain — choosing people I should not have chosen, walking away from things that were genuinely good for me, freezing in rooms where I should have felt safe. It took me a long time to understand that those were not random failures of character. They were answers to questions I had never consciously asked.
Where it began
My name is Kisito Fuh Geh. My childhood alias is Ton-Ton, and my friends call me Keezy. I was born in Weh, a small village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. I came into the world as a breech baby, and because the health center had no equipment for a caesarean section, the nurse had to make a decision: save the mother, or save the child. She chose my mother. She forced me out. Both of my arms fractured in the process. I came into the world already injured, before I had any language for what had happened to me. That I survived at all is something I still think about.
My father was already gone before I arrived. The first time I saw him, I was over five years old, and I did not know who he was. I did not grow up with my parents. I had little to no relationship with either of them until I was past thirteen. My grandparents raised me, and I am deeply grateful to them. They did the best they could with what they had. But a child does not process absence the way an adult eventually learns to. A child does not yet have the language for circumstance or distance or survival decisions. A child only knows that the people who made them are somewhere else, and that knowledge lands somewhere in the body and waits. Without understanding why, I began to suspect it meant something was wrong with me.
The first wound
My grandparents had no access to proper medicine, so they used traditional treatment on my arms. My right arm healed. My left did not, not fully. Over time, the hand grew weaker, smaller, more visible. It became the first thing people noticed. It became the thing I braced for in every new room, every introduction, every moment of being seen by someone for the first time.
Children are not subtle. I had names given to me that I will not repeat here. I learned early that saying the wrong thing could invite insults, so I stopped saying much. I became quiet, careful, small in rooms where I might be noticed. The safest I ever felt was alone, where no one could look at me and find something to say. I remember standing in front of a mirror more than once, very quietly, wishing I had been born differently. Not better in some vague way. Differently in one specific way. Just without that. Somewhere inside that silence, shame settled in and made itself at home.
Trying to Be Enough
I found a way to manage it. When I made money from small jobs, working in someone's farm, doing whatever I could, I gave the money to my grandmother. She knew how to praise me. That praise felt like something I needed to breathe. I worked at school until I was first in class, not because I loved studying, but because achievement was the clearest proof available to me that I was worth something. The praise never lasted long enough. It always needed to be renewed. When my friends in secondary school said sciences were too hard, I chose sciences. When I was told only the truly capable studied physics at university, I enrolled in physics. I went on to earn a master's degree in engineering. Every choice was a disguised argument I was making to no one in particular: I am not what you think I am. I am more than that hand.
I performed well. I stayed near the top. But I dreaded presentations with an intensity that made no sense to me at the time. The night before I had to stand in front of a room, I could feel my body shaking. Not metaphorically. Actually shaking. I did not know what to call it. I only knew that being fully seen felt like danger in a way I could not explain or prepare my way out of.
The pattern underneath
My mother said something once, not with cruelty but almost casually, wondering whether women would love a man with a hand like mine. It was not a long sentence. But something in me did not recover from it quickly. I began pursuing women in a way that had less to do with love than with evidence. The more she was considered desirable by others, the more she became a target. Having many at once became a kind of proof I was collecting against the idea that I was unlovable. I drank heavily. I told myself I just liked the liquor. I chose solitude over company and called myself an introvert. I built a career that looked like success and felt like a prison. I moved through the world performing fine while something underneath ran on its own logic, making decisions I would only understand later.
Then my daughter was born, and for a time, fatherhood pulled me into a present I had been avoiding. She was real in a way that cut through the noise. But that joy did not last long either. That was when I started asking real questions for the first time.
Something cracked open
Someone referenced a book called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz in a TikTok video. Something made me write the title down. I found the book. I started reading. Something cracked open. I cannot describe it precisely, but it was the first time I felt like I was looking at the shape of my own life from outside of it, and actually recognizing what I was seeing. I lost interest in alcohol almost immediately. The compulsive pull toward women faded. The job felt impossible to continue with any honesty. I quit it without fully knowing what came next, only that staying was no longer something I could do. I eventually moved to the United States. For the first time in my life, I chose to try to understand what had been running me rather than keep outrunning it.
Healing has been the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than any degree, any job, any performance. I have cried during this period more than in every other period of my life combined. Not because I was broken, but because I was finally thawing. I was beginning to feel what I had spent decades numbing with performance,the gym, alcohol, sex, ambition, and isolation. Pain does not disappear when you suppress it. It finds another door. I am not fully free. I do not know if that is even the destination. But I can now see the patterns when they arrive. I can catch myself mid-motion and recognize what is actually happening. That is not resolution, but it is genuinely different from before.
Blame Has No Final Destination
Somewhere in the middle of all that looking inward, I stopped needing someone to blame. Not because the pain was not real, or because what happened did not shape me in ways I am still untangling. But because I began to understand that the people who raised me, and the people who were absent, were also shaped by things that happened before I arrived. My grandparents gave me what they had. My mother gave from what life had given her. Sometimes what looks like withheld love is really the limit of what someone had left to give. If they had known differently, if life had been gentler with them, maybe things would have looked different for me too. I cannot know that. What I do know is that blame has no final destination. If I hold my parents responsible for what they passed on, I can just as easily hold their parents responsible for what was passed on to them, and the accusation keeps traveling backward through generations that never had the chance to answer for it.
My father is gone now. And I do not want his absence to be the only way I remember him. The time I had with him, I saw enough to know he was a man carrying his own weight, fighting his own battles, in ways I did not fully understand until I began fighting mine. He did not have an easy life, and he did not stop trying, even at the end. That still means something to me. That is the version of him I choose to hold. Not because I am pretending the distance between us did not hurt, but because I am old enough now to know that a person can be more than the hardest parts of their story.
The Life We All Hide
Most of us are living two lives. There is the one people can see, and there is the one we carry underneath it. We make decisions we cannot fully account for. We succeed at things that do not heal us. We love people in ways shaped by losses we never properly mourned. We chase proof and call it ambition. We avoid pain and call it strength. We stay silent and call it peace. We repeat what is familiar because familiar can feel safer than healthy, even when familiar keeps hurting us. And we do most of this without realizing it, because it began long before we were old enough to question it.
My hand has not changed. It is still smaller, still weaker, still visible. What is changing is my relationship to it. I am learning to look at it with something closer to compassion than shame. That shift is quiet and slow and genuinely unfinished. But it is real. Maybe that is what healing looks like for most of us — not becoming someone entirely new, but returning to the parts of ourselves we abandoned in order to survive. I may not reach something I can call complete. But I know I am not where I was, and I will keep doing the work.
The Lattice of Light
I believe there is something in us that the weight of life cannot destroy. Something that was there before the shame settled in, before silence became a habit, before survival taught us to leave parts of ourselves behind. I think of it as a lattice, something still holding underneath. And the light is what remains when we begin moving the things that have been covering it.
That is where the name came from: The Lattice of Light (TLOL).
The work of bringing light to the world is not ours to complete. But refusing our part in it does not make us free.This Is TLOL
TLOL did not begin as a fashion brand. It began as a need. As I was learning to come back to myself, I needed reminders around me. Things that could quietly pull me back when the old patterns started speaking again. Through the music, the comments, and the messages from people I had never met, I realized I was not the only one who needed that.
TLOL is for people who know what it feels like to carry a life underneath the one everyone else can see. For people who have been performing fine for so long they forgot they were allowed to feel. For people still in the middle of it, still learning to recognize the pattern before it runs through them again. For people choosing, slowly and honestly, to stop abandoning themselves.
If any part of this story caught on something in you,
then you already know why this exists.
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Wear what you carry inside
Garments for the ones becoming quietly stronger.
The Story Was Bigger Than Me
As that understanding deepened, I started writing songs. Not for an audience. For myself. As a way of releasing what I had never known how to say. I posted some of them on YouTube, more as a form of journaling than performance. Then people started commenting. Strangers from places I had never been were writing things that matched what I had only understood as my private experience. Person after person, some version of the same thing: this is exactly how I feel, I did not know anyone else felt this way. I sat with those comments for a long time. The story I had believed was specific to me, to that village, to that birth, to that hand, was landing somewhere in people who shared none of those details. That was the moment I understood something I had not been looking for: the story I thought was only mine was not mine alone.