Maje Ayida, fitness entrepreneur and former spouse of Nollywood star Toke Makinwa, has shared a personal story many never saw coming: he slipped into depression after their widely publicised divorce.
The fallout left him battling criticism and shame so intense he pulled away from the public eye.
Ayida made the disclosure during a testimony at a UK church. The footage has since gone viral, sparking fresh conversations online.
He didn’t hold back, He admitted the emotional breakdown left him unable to function, he stopped going to work, missed out on business opportunities, and mentally checked out for an entire year. His healing began when he embraced personal accountability.
In his words: “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. And that left me feeling very alone. I withdrew from society, 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. I didn’t want to interact with anyone. I wanted to be alone, stay at home. I stopped going to work. I found it very difficult to work. It was very hard.
“I not only lose focus but also motivation. I lose 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.
“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.
“I was out of the look 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 paranoid as well so the few chances that I do get to go out, I have 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.
“That feeling of hopelessness and the noise that was going on around me even though I was in silence was insane. I made a choice. I decided that I didn’t want to stay in this space.
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“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.”
Recall that Ayida and Makinwa were married in 2014, but by 2016, the union collapsed.
A year later, Ayida sued her for N100 million over what he described as defamation in her memoir On Becoming, where she chronicled the marriage and its breakdown.
His legal team had earlier requested she edit out the damaging parts. She didn’t.
In 2020, a Lagos High Court however ruled in his favour, ordering damages of N500,000 from both defendants, to be donated to a charity of Ayida’s choice.
The court also banned any further distribution of the book with the offending content.