Wellness coach and media figure Maje Ayida has dosclosed that he battled depression for an entire year after his highly publicised separation from Nollywood actress Toke Makinwa.
Speaking at a church in the United Kingdom in a video that gained attention on Tuesday, Ayida opened up about the emotional struggles he faced following the end of their marriage.
He admitted the intense public scrutiny left him ashamed and emotionally drained.
“I will be honest about the fact that I went through a divorce, which resulted in me being depressed. It was a very publicised divorce,” he said.
He explained that the public nature of the split took a toll on his mental well-being, prompting him to isolate himself from others.
“That left me feeling very alone. I withdrew from society, and I was really ashamed of my situation. Not just for myself — of course, my self-esteem was affected — but legacy is very important to me. I was ashamed of what I felt I had done to my family’s name. As a result, I went into hiding.”
Ayida described how his personal life affected his professional world. He said he lost the motivation to work, missed opportunities, and struggled to carry out basic daily activities.
“I didn’t want to interact with anyone. I wanted to be alone and stay at home. I stopped going to work. I found it very difficult to work. It was very hard.
I not only lost focus but also motivation. I lost the essence of even getting up in the morning. What am I getting up for? Everyone already feels a certain way about me. So, I started to lose work as a result of it. That was when it really started to get to me.”
He also spoke about how the loss of his professional identity contributed to his decline.
“As a man, your work is your identity, and I started to lose work, business deals, so it became a real problem for me. That was when I made a decision. I had to make a decision for my own survival because I was living in hopelessness. It went on for weeks.”
The emotional spiral lasted a full year, during which Ayida battled insomnia and paranoia.
“I was out of the loop for a whole year. I checked out of life for a year to recoup. I realised that I was in a very dark space. I was in a hole, but I needed to get out of it… I was on the floor. What’s sleep? I didn’t even know what that was. I had insomnia.”
“I was overly suspicious as well, so the few chances that I do get to go out, I had created a scenario in my own mind that everybody is talking about me, people are looking at me. And that would just send me back into my own home.”
Despite everything, Ayida said he eventually chose to fight through the mental battle by taking responsibility and seeking solutions.
“That feeling of hopelessness and the noise that was going on around me even though I was in silence was out of control. I made a choice. I decided that I didn’t want to stay in this space.
“I did research on how to deal with it. The top of the list of the research that I did was accountability. I took the blame on myself. It made me feel worse at first until I began to take practical steps.”
Ayida and Makinwa married in 2014, but the relationship broke down in 2016 amid allegations of infidelity. In 2017, Ayida filed a ₦100 million lawsuit against Makinwa over her memoir On Becoming, which he claimed was damaging to his reputation.
The legal team had requested that specific portions of the book be removed, but Makinwa declined. In 2020, a Lagos High Court ruled in Ayida’s favour, ordering Makinwa and her publishers to pay ₦500,000 in damages to a charity selected by Ayida and stopping any further release of the defamatory content. [Prompt News]
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