Why This Exists

For a long time, my life looked like it was going well from the outside.

I had good grades, advanced degrees, a corporate career, relationships, and ambition. From the outside, it was hard to think anything was wrong.

But inside, I kept finding myself in situations I did not fully understand. I chose people I knew we would have been better off apart. Sometimes I would enter a room with no real danger, but for some reason, I would feel self-conscious, anxious, and shy in a way I couldn’t explain.

For years, I thought these were just weaknesses, parts of my personality, or maybe just who I am. People often said, " Kisito is a shy boy” or " He is a quiet boy”. And for a long time, I believed them.

I kept thinking I would eventually outgrow that little boy inside me. But I got older, and he was still there. I achieved things I once thought would make me more confident, more secure, more comfortable in myself.

They did not.

Later, I began to understand that some of those reactions were connected to things that had happened long before I even had the words to explain them. Things I had carried for years without really stopping to look at them.

They showed up in how I trusted people, how I handled relationships, how I reacted to conflict, and even in how hard I pushed myself.

It was only when I started recognizing those patterns that parts of my life that had always felt confusing began to make sense.

My name is Kisito Fuh Geh. Growing up, I was called Ton-Ton. These days, most of my friends call me Keezy.

I was born in Weh, a village in the Northwest region of Cameroon. I came into the world as a breech baby, legs first, with my arms stretched out in a T-like position.

The delivery was complicated. The health center where I was born was not equipped to perform a cesarean section, so the nurse had very few options. She had to force me out because she was afraid of what might happen if she did not.

It was not an easy delivery for my mom, and she still reminds me of it whenever she wants to persuade.

You know how African mothers will say, “I carried you for nine months”? Mine has her own version:

“You know you almost killed me when I was giving birth to you.”

To each their mother.

During the delivery, both of my arms were fractured. So I came into the world already injured, before I could understand what pain was or what had happened to me.

The fact that my mother and I made it through that delivery is something I still think about.

And that was only the beginning.

My father was already gone before I arrived. I did not meet him until I was more than five years old, so my grandparents raised me.

At that age, I did not understand what it meant to grow up without my parents around. It was simply the life I knew. It would take me many years to understand what some of those absences had left behind.

My grandparents did not have access to the kind of medical care that could properly treat my arms, so they relied on traditional treatment.

My right arm healed. My left did not, at least not fully.

Because of that, I gradually became comfortable doing almost everything with my right hand while barely using the left. Over time, the left arm became weaker and smaller, and the difference became more noticeable.

As I got older, I became very aware of it.

Whenever I met someone new, part of me was already wondering when they would notice. In a new room, during an introduction, even in ordinary moments, I found myself waiting for the look or the comment.

Children can be cruel without thinking much about the damage they are doing. I was called names I can’t even remember.

After a while, I learned that drawing attention to myself could come with a cost. So I spoke less. I became careful. I tried not to give people a reason to notice me more than they already did.

Being alone often felt easier because there was nobody there to look at me, ask questions, laugh, or say something I would carry home with me.

I remember standing in front of a mirror more than once and wishing I had been born differently.

Not different in some general sense.

I just wanted my left arm to look like my right one.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing it as something that had happened to my body and started seeing it as something that was wrong with me.

I found a way to cope with all of it.

Whenever I made a little money from small jobs, working on someone’s farm or doing whatever work I could find, or whenever my mom or dad sent me money, I would give part of it to my grandmother. She knew how to praise me, and I loved hearing it. For a little while, it made me feel useful. Like I had done something that made me worthy of being noticed for the right reason.

I carried that same feeling into school.

I worked hard until I became first in my class.

The truth is, I hated studying, but doing well gave me something I could point to. Something that said, “There is more to me than what you see first.”

But the feeling never lasted very long. I always needed the next result.

When some of my friends in secondary school said the sciences were too difficult, I chose sciences. Later, in university, when I heard that physics was for the really capable students, I chose physics too. Eventually, I went on to earn a master’s degree in engineering.

I kept pushing myself, one achievement after another.

And somewhere underneath all of it was the same message I had been trying to prove for years:

I am more than this hand.

The strange thing was that doing well did not make being seen any easier.

I could perform well in school and stay near the top of my class, but presentations terrified me.

The night before I had to stand in front of a room, my body would shake. Actually shake.

What confused me most was that I could prepare, know my work, and still feel my body react as if something dangerous was about to happen.

I did not yet understand that achievement had helped me feel valuable, but it had not taken away the fear of being seen.

Somewhere in the middle of all that looking inward, I stopped needing someone to blame.

The pain was real. What happened shaped me in ways I am still untangling. But I began to see that the people who raised me, and the people who were absent, had stories that started long before mine did.

My grandparents gave me what they had. My mother gave from what life had given her. Sometimes what feels like withheld love is simply the edge of what someone knew how to give.

Maybe things would have been different if they had been loved differently. If someone had taught them what nobody taught them. If life had been gentler with them.

I will never know.

What I do know is that blame can travel backward forever. I can blame my parents for what reached me, then blame their parents for what reached them, and keep going until I am angry at people whose names I do not even know.

At some point, somebody has to stop passing it on.

My father is gone now, and I do not want his absence to be the only thing I remember about him.

In the little time I had with him, I saw enough to know he was carrying things of his own. Fighting battles I could not understand then, but understand differently now that I have had to fight some of mine.

His life was not easy. Still, he kept trying.

That matters to me.

I can hold the pain of what I did not receive from him and still hold compassion for the man he was.

Both can be true.

And maybe growing up is partly learning that the people who hurt us were human long before they became our parents.

TLOL grow like a child. It 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. Something that could catch me in the middle of an old thought, an old reaction, an old way of seeing myself, and give me a chance to choose differently.

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 the person whose life looks good from the outside.

The numbers are moving. The dashboard looks good. The KPIs are being hit. The views are climbing. Your body has changed. Your income has grown. People know your name.

And somehow, when everything gets quiet, none of it has answered the question underneath all the achievement:

Am I enough?

Sometimes the reminder you need is simply:

I AM ENOUGH.

It is for the person who has already left the relationship, buried the dream, survived the betrayal, lost the person, or walked away from what hurt them, but still carries the conversation around in their head.

You replay what happened. You imagine what you should have said. You wonder whether understanding it one more time will finally make it stop hurting.

Maybe you do not need another explanation.

Maybe you need permission to feel it fully and stop building a home inside it.

I LET IT HURT, THEN I LET IT GO.

It is for the person living through a season that has lasted so long it has started to feel like a permanent identity.

You are tired of being told to stay strong. Tired of hearing that everything happens for a reason. You do not need someone to pretend the weight is not real.

You need to remember that real does not mean forever.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

It is for the person who has spent too much of their life managing how other people see them.

Explaining yourself to people determined to misunderstand you. Replaying conversations. Trying to control someone else's opinion of you. Making yourself smaller so somebody stays. Working harder for affection that should never have required an audition.

There comes a point when peace begins with allowing people to think, choose, leave, misunderstand, or become exactly who they are going to become.

LET THEM.

It is for the person who keeps arriving at the same pain wearing different clothes.

A different relationship.

A different job.

A different year.

A different promise to yourself.

But somehow, the ending keeps feeling familiar.

At some point, wanting a different life has to become doing something differently.

NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES.

And it is for the person who keeps trying to rearrange everything outside while the same beliefs, fears, wounds, and patterns keep rebuilding the life around them.

Sometimes the first thing that needs your attention is not the world in front of you.

It is the world you are carrying into it.

AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT.

These are not slogans to us.

They are sentences for moments people do not always know how to explain.

Something to wear when you are becoming more aware of what has been running you.

Something another person might read on you at the exact moment they need it too.

That is who TLOL is for.

People still in the middle of becoming.

People learning to recognize the pattern before it chooses for them again.

People trying, slowly and imperfectly, to stop abandoning themselves.

None of us needs another brand telling us who to become.

We just need the right words close enough to remember who we are.