You Are Starving Me" — Why Consistency Is an Act of Service By Oluwatosimi

I almost took it as an insult.

Someone reached out to me unprompted and said: "You are starving me."

My first instinct was to recoil. Had I said something wrong? Had I overstepped? I scanned everything I had recently shared, looking for the offence.

Then the next message arrived.

"Why stop?"

And everything reframed.

I had been sharing. Small clips, personal moments, unpolished thoughts from my real life. The kind of content you almost talk yourself out of posting because it feels too ordinary, too unfinished to matter.

But it was mattering. To someone. In ways I couldn't see from where I was standing.

When I went quiet — even briefly — that person felt it as a real absence. Like a meal being withheld. "You are starving me" wasn't criticism. It wasn't aggression. It was a request. Keep going.

Most of us don't stop sharing because we've run out of things to say. We stop because we assume nobody is paying attention. We stop because we're waiting to feel more ready, more qualified, more certain. We stop because we compare what we have to offer against the loudest voices and decide ours doesn't measure up.

But stopping isn't neutral. Silence has a cost. And that cost is often paid not by us — but by the person on the other side who was quietly depending on what we had to offer.

I stood in a meeting once and said: "The information you are privy to is because someone created a space to share knowledge." Every insight you carry today exists in your possession because someone else chose not to keep it to themselves. A teacher shared it. A mentor modelled it. A writer published it when they weren't sure anyone would read it. Someone chose to be consistent — and that choice eventually reached you.

I have also sat at tables with people carrying extraordinary knowledge. Conversations that could have shifted something for someone, somewhere. And the knowledge stayed in the room. People left. The insights dissolved back into private memory. Not out of wisdom — but out of fear, imposter syndrome, the mistaken belief that someone more qualified would say it better.

Nobody did. And the gap remained.

After "why stop?" I had to look honestly at my own patterns. At the times I went quiet not because I had nothing to say, but because I had talked myself out of saying it.

And I made a decision.

I will not be passive — not as a child, a citizen, a friend, or a voice in spaces where I've been given access and knowledge. Because consistency is not primarily about discipline. It is an act of service. When you show up repeatedly, you are not performing for applause. You are feeding someone who is quietly hungry for exactly what you carry.

The information we hold is not ours to hoard. It was shaped by the people, experiences and communities that formed us. Our job is to steward it and keep it moving.

So let me close with the question that undid me — not "why stop?" but the deeper one underneath it:

Who are you starving by staying silent?