She's 27, starting out the final chapter of her twenties, and has spent this last stretch of it learning to actually take herself seriously. By day, she's an engineer. On the side, she runs Aik Studios, her floral business, and is currently obsessed with Bird of Paradise and Spanish moss.

She also keeps a running Substack, where she writes reflections on her journey so far. Her early twenties were built on the expectations to graduate, get a job, maybe move back to Nigeria and start a farm, but had a reckoning in 2020 that reshaped how she saw the country she'd once idealized.

We talk about tuning out the noise of everyone else's "locked in" 5am routines and 900k houses, a tight-knit group of friends in her small UK town and a season of heartbreak that pushed her deeper into a spirituality she'd already been building for years, through therapy, shadow work, and eventually a clearer, calmer version of the faith she grew up with.

Tritima's path started with writing, and she pursued it through journalism at her university paper even while working toward a finance degree. That writing instinct found its way into her career anyway, through copywriting and social media management. She's since co-founded Crowdr, a crowdfunding platform helping Nigerians raise money for everything from medical bills to tuition, all while working full-time in strategy and operations.

We talk about the shift from chasing passion in her early twenties to being well-compensated for her expertise now, the burnout that came from running a nine-to-five, a startup, and a full personal life all at once, the hard decision to rehome her dog when something had to give, and how her approach to friendship and romantic relationships has changed as she's learned the difference between hallway friends and couch friends. 

Find Tritima on Instagram at @tritimaa, and check out her Substack here,  where she writes about identity, culture, and taste.

Azzah describes her 27-year-old self as grounded, someone who's finally learned to take things slowly. She studied philosophy, politics, and economics with dreams of Oxford, built a stable career as a financial advisor in Canada, and did everything right by the metrics she'd set for herself. Then her work permit expired, and she had to leave the country she'd spent almost a decade building a life in. Rather than let that loss define her, she turned it into something else entirely: Buka Buku, a book cafe in Jakarta built from her own personal library, seven hundred books deep, that she'd been collecting since childhood.

We talk about the fear of sharing something that precious with strangers, the friendships that carried her through every major transition in her adult life, how her relationship to romantic love shifted once she stopped optimizing for achievement, and the leap of faith it took to open a business she wasn't even sure she'd get to keep.

Find Azzah and Buka Buku cafe on Instagram at @azfarras and @bukabuku.kafe

Jayla describes herself as a multifaceted, STEM-focused creative, and that barely covers it. She left South Carolina for Maine at 18, spent years preparing for medical school, and then walked away from an acceptance letter when she realized it was not her calling. Now she's building a life in Atlanta that looks nothing like the one she planned. She's a content creator, a commercial model, an AI professional, and a student, all at once, all on her own terms.

We talk about starting her twenties somewhere she never planned to be, building community from scratch in a new city, how her view of romantic love has sharpened without losing its optimism, and the faith that's carried her through the hardest parts of the better part of a decade.

Find Jayla online as @gullahbeauty on Instagram and TikTok.