The Audacity to Keep Going | Solace Ojotule

Before Solace learnt resilience from rejection, she had already learnt it from water.

Growing up, running water wasn't something she could simply assume would be there.

As a child, she remembers joining the queue for water in her neighbourhood and waiting as it came out in trickles.

You waited.

And waited.

Because there wasn't really another option.

So, when I asked Solace how she kept going years later, through rejection after rejection in the UK, with her visa expiry getting closer and the possibility of having to return home becoming increasingly real, she took me back there.

To waiting for water.

She told me that you don't grow up in that kind of environment without learning patience. Without learning resilience.

And suddenly, the woman sitting in front of me made a little more sense.

Solace Ojotule Okeyi came to the UK from Nigeria through a Mastercard Foundation Scholarship to study at the University of Edinburgh.

But a scholarship was not the end of the story.

There were applications. Rejections. Immigration uncertainty. Eventually, there was even the relief of securing a sponsored communications job, only for circumstances around that role to change and that security to disappear again.

And still, she kept going.

She would later describe rewriting her CV again and again, researching sponsorship rules herself and continuing to apply for communications, campaigns, PR and social media roles despite repeatedly being told that communications wasn't the sensible route for somebody who needed sponsorship.

Because sometimes, as Solace put it in our conversation, when life pushes you to the wall, you've got to do what you've got to do.

That was what drew me to her story in the first place.

Before Gems of Liverpool had a website, a directory or even all the language I now use to explain what I am building, I sent Solace a message telling her that I had been inspired by her tenacity and resilience, even in the face of no.

I wanted to know what makes someone continue when stopping would be completely understandable.

Our conversation moved through scholarship, immigration, work, rejection and Liverpool. But underneath all of it was something much simpler:

What has life taught you that you didn't realise you were learning at the time?

For Solace, perhaps some of the patience she needed as an adult had been forming years earlier, standing in a queue and waiting for water to trickle.

And eventually, some of the doors opened.

Today, she works in communications at Liverpool City Council. Her journey has taken her from wondering whether there was even space for her in UK communications to contributing to work that has received national campaign recognition.

There is something beautifully circular about that.

The person who had to keep convincing employers that she deserved an opportunity eventually found herself doing meaningful communications work in the city she had chosen to build a life in.

And that is why Solace became Gem 001.

Not because hers is a neat story where everything worked out easily in the end.

Quite the opposite.

She reminded me that sometimes what looks like resilience in adulthood was being built quietly years before anybody had a name for it.

In a childhood.

In a neighbourhood.

In a queue.

Waiting for water.

Sometimes the things that felt like limitations were teaching us how to survive the rooms we hadn't entered yet.

That is a story worth preserving.

Keep following it. Every entry opens onto the next.