It was Funmi Odutola‘s birthday in December, so she packed her bags and headed for a solo trip to Thailand. She had moved to the UK for university over a decade ago, long before Nigerians started moving to the country in droves fleeing the effects of bad-faith public policy. So her experience as a Nigerian immigrant in the UK is very different from what it is now. She works in tech. Some times days she read books. She was comfortable and now she needed to heal.
By the beach in Khao Lak, she picked up her phone and recorded a video of herself, at the time just for her consumption. “No amount of self-work that you’ve done for yourself can be lifted and transferred to another person,” she said to the camera, giggling. It felt silly. She felt silly.
Then in May this year, she read Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves about the work that women have done to travail, and she thought of the video. She posted it on Instagram where she goes by Chubby_Oddly with the caption, “Note to self,” and a new era of her life as a social media content creator offering titbits on how to fight manipulators, recognise trauma, clock abusers began.
In the weeks that followed her followers grew from a few thousand to over 53K. She spoke about accountability, the toxicity of being the bigger person, protecting your space, having trust issues. The comment sections, filled with, “I needed this.” “Thank you for saying this.” “The accuracy.” “We love you in Kenya.” “When are you coming to South Africa?”
“There was no plan. This is not a business idea. No part of my consciousness foresaw how much people would resonate with what I was saying or that a community would be built around it. It’s not even just my interaction with people, it’s their interaction with themselves,” she said.
The way she put it, there was a shift happening at the core of her life. After years of trying to be a fashion influencer, she had begun to prioritise self-discovery, self-care, self-compassion, and a better understanding of the self to improve her quality of life.
“I was going from a space of being a content creator around certain themes, whereas, now, I don’t see myself as a content creator. The content is a by-product of the journey. I knew the way I wanted to show up on social media had to change. I was shedding a lot of conditioning, programming, and I am asking myself ‘Who am I?’” she said.
“Often people will say to me, ‘Just be the bigger person and let it go.’ I strongly disagreed with it. People use language like ‘Be the bigger person,’ to try and position a problematic dynamic as something that you should tolerate, and your tolerance is somehow noble, good behaviour. It’s a very superficial way of stroking your ego so they can placate you into a situation that is more beneficial for them.”
Her videos come from her digital diaries, a reflection on a personal experience, deep introspection on her childhood, a conversation that she had. She then uses the tools of the era, ring light and a nude face beat to produce sleek and slick Reels. In another era, she could have used, “I woke up like this,” as the caption and not be challenged. All of this she does while she holding her full-time job. How does she make it work?
“I don’t have any formula on how I balance it other than being disciplined with the time and energy I invest in these things. I know what my career goals are and my self-discovery goals. And I also know that there are certain things I need to do in order to balance my well-being,” she said.
In all of this, the community she has built, the videos, and the validation she gets from followers who repost them, what she has realised is a major failure in society in the skills that are offered and the ones that are not offered.
“Culturally we are taught a lot of things through academic channels. They taught me Almighty Formula. I can’t tell you that I’ve used it since I left secondary school. What they do not teach is how to look after your emotional well-being, identify abuse, emotional and verbal, identify manipulation and the consequences of manipulation,” she said.
“Part of what drives me is to share whatever I discover with as many people as possible so they can use it to improve their lives and share with others so that one day it’s as ubiquitous as mathematics.”
But taking up this mantle has not been without backlash. Critics have accused her of promoting narcissism. She has shrugged it off as trolling. “You’re playing in this field and you’re equipping people to deal with manipulation. Manipulators are not going to be happy with you.”
She has also had to deal with content jacking. One of her followers who speaks Spanish drew her attention to a famous influencer who used her exact words in a video in Spanish.
“There’s nothing wrong with taking what someone has said and building upon it in creative ways. If you’re going to share what someone has said then you give them credit. But this person didn’t do any of that. They just took my words and said it in a different language. I had to have a serious conversation with myself that this is the space you’re playing in and these types of things happen,” she said.
Now, she wants to do more than offer her insights from doing “the work” in short Reels. She is not sure what the next phase of Chubby_Oddly is, but podcasts, blogs, and even individual one-on-one sessions are on the table.
“For those who have the appetite for more, I have registered that and I’ll be providing that. But it can only be things that do not come at the cost of the authenticity, of the work,” she said. “There’re possibilities.”
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