Putting Feelings Into Words

Some writers tell stories. Others seem to find the words for feelings you had not yet figured out how to name.

Hannah Salami Oyiza belongs somewhere in the latter category.

A writer with a growing audience around her work, Hannah has built a connection with readers through the kind of stories that feel familiar almost immediately. Her writing often reaches into the places people think about, laugh about, romanticise, worry about or quietly experience but may not always know how to articulate for themselves.

It is perhaps why authenticity sits so naturally at the centre of how she sees herself.

If she had to introduce herself without a résumé or a job title, Hannah would call herself “a smart one.” She is also, by her own admission, an overthinker. She loves love—the idea of it, the feeling of it, the possibility of it. She cries easily, sometimes at the smallest inconvenience, and doesn’t seem particularly interested in presenting a tougher version of herself simply because it might be easier for other people to understand.

She is sensitive. She is smart. She is, quite deliberately, herself.

That same honesty has become part of what makes her writing connect.

Hannah is building a community where people can feel safe and seen without having to perform a version of themselves that feels more acceptable. She knows her personality will not appeal to everyone. There is a side of her that some people might consider vulgar, but she doesn’t seem interested in editing herself into someone more palatable.

“I’m not performing for anyone,” she says.

That decision to be herself rather than carefully construct who she thinks people want her to be is also shaping what she creates. She knows that there are people who have found something useful, comforting or simply relatable in her stories, and that knowledge has made continuing feel less like an option and more like a responsibility.

For Hannah, writing is not detached from who she is. It is one of the places where she gets to explore herself in real time.

She is currently learning what it means to simply be herself and pay attention to what makes her happy.

It sounds simple. It isn’t always.

Life has already challenged some of the assumptions she once carried with certainty. There was a time when she believed that giving someone one hundred percent would naturally result in receiving the same in return. She believed certain things could never happen to her and certain mistakes were ones she would never make.

Then life happened. There were heartbreaks. There were mistakes. There were experiences she still isn’t ready to tell in full.

And somewhere along the way, the belief that “it can never happen to me” stopped feeling like protection.

Instead, Hannah began to understand that life does not necessarily follow the rules we create for ourselves.

One of the lessons that stayed with her came from a simple but difficult realisation: nobody owes her anything.

She learned that if she wants something, she has to work for it. That even the people closest to her cannot always be expected to give her everything she needs. It is an uncomfortable lesson, but it has changed how she moves through the world.

Her writing has also taught her something about herself.

When she released her book and watched people connect with what she had written, the experience became personal in a different way. Something that had come from her own experience had found its way into the lives of other people.

That exchange between writer and reader seems to be at the heart of what she is building.

For Hannah, success today has little to do with the conventional markers she might once have attached to it. It is much more intimate now.

Success is showing up for herself.

It is recognising that she can be tired and still choose to show up for the community she has built. It is allowing herself to have bad days and failures without turning those moments into a definition of who she is.

Perhaps that is another reason her writing feels personal to the people who read it. She isn’t writing from a place of having everything figured out. She is writing while figuring things out herself.

And there is humour in that process too.

Hannah knows what her readers associate with her. She is unapologetically a “lover girl,” someone who talks openly about men and love and has a particular fondness for fantasising about older men. Her audience has noticed, of course, and she has no interest in correcting the assumption. Instead, she has allowed that part of her personality to become part of the world she creates.

People know what they might be getting when they open one of her stories.

That familiarity matters. It gives her writing an identity before the first sentence has even been read.

But beneath the jokes, the romance and the playful self-awareness is a woman who is learning to be more protective of where she places her energy.

She is learning not to overthink everything. Not to give so much of herself to people who aren’t worth it. And, perhaps most importantly, to pour back into herself with the same generosity she has always extended to others.

Her sister has been an important part of that journey. Hannah describes her as her biggest motivation and someone she has looked up to for a long time, a person who has helped keep her on track through different seasons of her life. Her family and friends remain part of what she is most protective of now, alongside the community she has built.

They remind her of where she comes from. And in a life that increasingly exists in public through words, readers and an audience, those roots matter.

So does peace. Hannah is chasing it “like mad.”

She is becoming a version of herself that feels more peaceful. She is letting go of fears and the things she has carried for too long. And somewhere inside that process is a hope that is both simple and deeply personal: to experience the kind of love that doesn’t leave her questioning her worth.

It is perhaps fitting that faith remains another constant. The sentence she has carried since childhood—“With God I can do all things”—continues to be something she tells herself every day. It is not a new discovery for her. It has followed her from childhood into the woman she is now becoming.

There is something quietly revealing about the combination of all these things: the writer who can make jokes about love and older men, the woman who cries easily, the overthinker trying to become more peaceful, the daughter and sister who values her people deeply, and the person who continues to write because she knows her words have found their way into other people’s lives.

Perhaps that is the real thing Hannah is building.

Not simply an audience.

A place where someone can read a sentence and think, “I’ve felt this too.”

A place where being complicated, sensitive, romantic, uncertain, hopeful or imperfect does not require an explanation.

And maybe that is what makes her work resonate. She doesn’t seem to be writing from the other side of life, where everything has finally made sense. She is writing from inside it. Her advice to another woman reflects that same understanding. You are not alone.

There will be difficult days. There will be moments when everything feels overwhelming enough to make you want to lose your mind. But she wants you to keep your head up, keep moving towards what you want and resist the temptation to give up.

Because, in Hannah’s words:

“Na who give up fuck up.”

For someone whose gift is finding words for what other people struggle to say, perhaps there is no better place to leave her story than there: still becoming, still learning, still writing—and still finding the words.