How Imperfection Heals | KingDavid Ayo-Loto's Story

Sometimes waiting for that moment when you have the perfect story stops you from being able to inspire someone else—because you're thinking, “My story is too small. I don't have something big to tell.” But just being able to say, “I've been here before. I know what this looks like,” can give someone else strength.

So I'm going to tell you my own story, and how what I just told you is something that I have put to work.

Growing up, I used to be this kid that everyone looked at as “too much.” I was asthmatic. I found out recently that I'm neurodivergent, and that explained a lot. Dealing with all of that, it was really hard to explain to other people what was going on in my head. Everyone either said, “It's just being a child,” or “Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.” And I was like, “No, it doesn’t matter—I still feel like this.”

When you deal with all of this—being silenced, people not understanding you—you learn to just accept that this is the way things are, and you just keep moving through life. So I did that up until uni.

Then I had one moment where everything changed.

In 2017, I was preparing for my Law of Evidence exam. I went to read at the medical college building and was heading back home. I got to the hostel, and my roommate was like, “Oh, a phone was stolen.”

“Whose phone was stolen?” “It’s Wale’s phone.” “Who stole Wale’s phone?” “You were the last person in the room before it was taken.”

And in my head, I was like, “What does that have to do with me? Wale’s phone was stolen, how can we find it?”

Next thing I hear, “We’re going to the SCG building.”

Okay, we’re going to report a theft, right? But no—they said, “He stole Wale’s phone.”

“Why do you think he stole Wale’s phone?” “Well, he’s the weird guy in the room.”

As a person who had struggled with self-acceptance and with other people’s perceptions of me, that moment felt crushing. The entire incident lasted for just two weeks, but it took me over a year to fully recover.

I had so many questions in my head: Why me? Why would people look at me and think I stole it?

Eventually I asked them why, and they said, “It’s just because we never really understood you. Because you didn’t really fit into the norm with guys in the room, it was possibly you that took it.”

It made no sense.

I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because every single time I tried to share, it sounded crazy in my head. Like one plus one wasn’t equalling two.

But then I met this group of guys. One had failed so many times in school that he went from being bubbly to very quiet. Another wanted to be a filmmaker but was stuck in tech. Another had been battling depression since first year, and everyone saw him as irresponsible—like he wasn’t taking education seriously.

But we sat down together and just talked about the things we were dealing with. Not necessarily to give each other solutions, but just to say: “I see you, you see me.”

From that, I got strength to pursue the things I’d always wanted.

After school, I quit law eventually. I decided to go into media. I did that for a year, and one day, while working a job that was not paying me enough and squatting with a friend, I ran into an old flame from uni. She was getting married. And I thought, “She’s on to something else, and I’m still here, still trying to figure out my life.”

I spiralled again. I made a video about it, posted it online, feeling like it was the most cringe thing I’d ever made. Strangely, I started seeing comments: “Oh my God, I can relate to this.”

Of course, I was still there—in that place of questioning everything. But it was interesting to see how people connected to this story of my in-between. I wasn’t at the end, I was still in the middle—and it was giving them hope. People said, “For the first time, someone is giving words to the things I’ve been struggling with. Someone is giving language to my pain. Someone is giving an image to my uncertainty.”

I made more videos. And yes, they helped others—but they also healed me. They made me realise the value of everything I’d experienced before. They reminded me of the beauty of my conversations with my friends in uni. Sometimes I draw from those conversations when I make videos, and people still connect with these stories of in-betweens.

What am I trying to say here? Start.

Start that thing you think is not fully formed. Share that story you feel is not grand enough. Why? Because sometimes the fact that it’s not grand is what makes someone else connect to it. It’s what gives someone else strength.

We’re often obsessed with the perfect image. And when you share that perfect image, it makes someone else feel like, “Can I really do that?” But when you tell the story of small progress—like, “Today I was depressed, but I chose to get out of bed anyway”—you give someone else a spark of hope for their next moment.

So yeah, start. You have the power to change someone else’s life with your story.