Everybody was new.

Volleyball brought me there before classes started.

The first day of practice, I met her. She was part of a club on campus.

So by the time the fair came around, in a room full of people I didn't know, there was one face I recognized.

Hers.

She recognized me too. She waved me over, and we walked the rest of the fair together.

It wasn't a big thing. But when everybody was new, one person recognizing me felt like enough.

Nobody here knew me. Not entirely, anyway.

But the rest of them did not know the story I had arrived carrying. They did not know which parts of me had been approved and which had been shamed. They did not know who they were supposed to believe I was.

For the first time, I could enter the room before someone else's version of me did.

And I mistook that feeling for freedom.

Not because I wanted to lie about who I had been.

I was tired of arriving somewhere already explained.

There was no history to defend.

No reputation to correct.

No old room waiting to remind me who I had been inside it.

There was only the person standing there.

Me.

Volleyball helped. It gave me a place before I had to introduce the rest of myself. Practices, teammates, a court where my body already knew what to do.

Then my shoulder changed the story. Nearly a year in pain, and then a surgery that only confirmed what I already knew inside my own body. By junior year, the thing that had told me where to go and who to be was gone.

The room where nobody knew me became the room where I no longer knew how to explain myself.

And then I saw her.

Randomly, on campus.

The girl my first boyfriend had cheated on me with.

I hadn't known she was there. Social media confirmed it afterward. She had transferred to my college.

There was history between us, but not the kind I had chosen.

I had been cheated on.

Humiliated.

Lied about.

And somehow, after I finally left him, the story became that he had chosen her over me.

It wasn't true. But I already knew by then that a story didn't have to be true for people to repeat it.

I had come here where nobody knew me.

And suddenly, someone did.

She didn't have to say anything.

The past had found the room.

What did she remember?

What would she say?

Who would people believe I had been?l

Eventually, I got my first job. I went to the website and applied. I had applied to be a cashier. I started as a greeter, moved around apparel, and pretty quickly made my way to the register.

That was it.

No one there had known me before. No one had vouched for me, and no one had warned anyone about me.

It was the first room I had ever entered entirely on my own.

They only knew the girl who walked in and showed them who she was.

But I knew every version of her that came before.

For a long time, I treated that knowing like something to outrun. I thought a clean start meant leaving the girl from the last room far enough behind that no one could reach back and use her to explain me.

She came anyway.

She was in the job.

She was in the new room.

She was the one doing the leaving.

She was not the problem I kept carrying from room to room. She was the person who had survived enough of them to bring me here.

I didn't know then how many years I'd spend trying to recreate that first feeling — walking into a room before anyone else's version of me could.

At my first job, no one knew me from anywhere else.

The room couldn't tell me who I had been.

It could only wait for me to introduce myself.

What I hadn't learned yet was that I didn't have to introduce someone new.

before you go —

who is the version of you that you keep trying to leave behind, and what has she survived to bring you here?

next volume: the first room i didn't try to leave.

— May

The kind you assume comes with you — through braces and boyfriends and everything in between, all the way to wherever you end up next.

I lost her defending her.

And then I lost her anyway.

So I showed up to opening weekend already grieving someone who was supposed to be there.

Everyone was at the fair — tables end to end, everyone talking over everyone, a hundred versions of “what club are you thinking about.” And the thing about a room like that is nobody in it had a version of me yet. Nobody knew what I used to be like, or who I used to be it for. I could’ve stood at the edge of it and let the newness make me small. Some part of me wanted to.

Then I saw her. A teammate — someone I knew from the team, but had never once seen off the court, out of season, just a regular person standing behind a table on a regular day. She was the one who’d always taken me under her wing. And there she was, somewhere I didn’t expect her, doing something i didn’t know she did.

I walked over because it was her.

At the time, it felt like relief. One familiar face in a room where nobody knew my history, nobody knew who I had been, and nobody had decided who I was going to be next.

But I didn’t understand yet that being unknown and knowing yourself are not the same thing.

For a while, I had an answer to who are you.

I was on the team.

That was enough of a shape to hold onto. I didn’t need to invent myself from scratch. I just needed a jersey, a schedule, and somewhere to be at six in the morning.

Then sophomore season came to an end. Off season began.

By then, there had been a year of pain. A year of knowing something was wrong while other people kept deciding it wasn’t. Then the surgery that finally confirmed what my body had been trying to tell everyone.

Volleyball didn’t disappear all at once. First, I lost the ability to play. Then I lost the schedule. The team kept existing around me until eventually, I had to admit that the version of me who had belonged inside it no longer did.

By junior year, volleyball was officially gone.

I was still at the same college, walking through the same buildings, surrounded by many of the same people. But the girl who had entered that room with a jersey, a schedule, and an answer to who are you wasn’t there anymore.

And then the girl my first boyfriend had cheated on me with showed up at the same college.

Just like that, the room wasn’t new anymore.

Someone inside it knew a version of me i had come there believing I could leave behind. She didn’t have to say anything. She only had to exist in the same place, and suddenly the girl I had been before college was standing there too — the one who had been betrayed, compared, and made to wonder what someone else had that she didn’t.

I thought a new room meant the old version of me couldn’t follow.

But sometimes all it takes is one familiar face for her to come rushing back.

That was when i got my first job.

All on my own.

Nobody I knew from college worked there. Everyone i met went to a different college. Until after my senior year, those two rooms never overlapped.

When I walked into work, there was nobody waiting to tell the room who i had been.

I wasn’t the girl whose boyfriend had cheated.

I wasn’t the best friend someone had left.

I wasn’t the athlete who couldn’t play anymore.

I was simply the new girl.

And maybe that should have felt small. An entry-level job, a name tag, another schedule telling me where to be.

Instead, it felt like possibility.

College had been the room where nobody knew me until my history found its way inside.

This job was the first room i entered entirely on my own.

No teammate waiting behind a table. No person from my past arriving with a version of me already in her hands. Nobody from college would work there until after my senior year.

For a while, the room belonged only to the person i was becoming inside it.

I couldn’t see the four years ahead of me. i couldn’t see everything that job would eventually teach me about working, leading, leaving, and beginning again.

I only knew that the room i had entered without a history might have enough space to shape who i became next.

I didn’t know how to keep myself yet.

When one room became too small, i found another. When an old version of me appeared, I went somewhere she hadn’t reached. I kept mistaking movement for freedom because movement was the closest thing to freedom I knew.

But maybe there was something underneath that instinct too.

Maybe some part of me already understood that the version someone else remembered was not the only version I was allowed to be.

I thought freedom was finding a room where nobody knew me.

I didn’t understand yet that every room would shape me.

Or that one day, the work would become learning how to enter a new one without leaving myself behind.

But this room was different.

Nobody had chosen it for me.

Nobody had introduced me before i arrived.

I walked in all on my own.

Same me. Different room.

May

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 16

There are parts of this story I have intentionally left out of Sunday Letters.

Not because they didn't happen. Not because they don't matter. Not because I'm afraid to tell the truth.

Read more

Not the kind where you call your mom and ask what she thinks. Not the kind where you make a pros-and-cons list, ask three friends, sleep on it, and hope the right answer feels more obvious in the morning.

I mean a decision that, no matter how many people love you, no matter how many people are standing beside you, no matter how desperately someone else might wish they could make it for you — they can’t. Because eventually, everyone else has to step back. And you’re the one standing at the fork in the road.

Two paths. Two directions. Two versions of what comes next.

It reminds me of the Game of Life. You move your little plastic car around the board, collecting people and jobs and houses and all the things you’re told make up a life. Then you reach one of those places where the road splits. Choose this direction and one thing happens. Choose the other and something else does.

Except real life doesn’t let you pick up your little plastic car and move backward three spaces when you don’t like where you landed. Sometimes you know, even while you’re standing there, that the direction you choose is going to change everything that comes after it.

I had already stood at one of those intersections. And while the decision was solely mine, I wasn’t standing there completely alone. There was someone outside of the rooms I had known. A therapist. Someone who didn’t need me to be the athlete. Didn’t need me to be the daughter. Didn’t need me to be the student. Someone who had no history with me that needed defending or explaining. Someone whose only job, in that moment, was to sit in a room with me and help me see what I couldn’t see from inside my own life.

Looking back, I think there is something incredibly important about that distinction. They didn’t save me. They didn’t make the decision for me. They couldn’t. What they did was create enough safety for me to realize that I still had a decision to make.

Sometimes that’s what support actually looks like. Not someone grabbing the steering wheel. Not someone choosing the road. Not someone carrying you to the other side.

That there is still a road.

That there is still a you who gets to decide which direction to take.

The details surrounding that intersection belong somewhere else. Some of them may always belong somewhere else. But for this part of the story, there is one thing you need to know.

I chose the road that kept going. I chose another square on the board.

And the next square said: college.

College is strange because we talk about it like it’s a place. Where are you going to college? What college did you choose? When do you leave for college? But college isn’t really one place. It’s hundreds of new rooms arriving at once.

A dorm room. A classroom. A locker room. A coach’s office. A weight room. A court. A campus full of people who don’t know anything about the rooms you came from.

For the first time, you get to walk into a place where almost nobody knows the version of you that existed before you arrived. There is freedom in that. And maybe some danger too. Because when no one knows who you’ve been, you get to decide what parts of yourself you’re going to bring with you.

I brought volleyball. Of course I did.

After everything that happened in the second room, that wasn’t necessarily inevitable.

There had been a point when I didn’t know if I wanted to keep playing. The thing I loved had become tangled up with things that hurt. Belonging had become complicated. Trust had become complicated. Even the version of myself I knew best had become complicated.

But when the road split again, volleyball was still there. And this time, I chose it. I signed with the college. I chose the team. I chose another jersey. I chose another room.

There is something I understand now that I couldn’t have understood then: sometimes choosing something again is different from never leaving it.

The first time, maybe you were simply following the road in front of you. The second time, you know what it can cost. And you choose it anyway.

That choice mattered. Because for the first time in a while, volleyball wasn’t simply something that had happened to me. It was something I was saying yes to.

And if you’ve ever loved a sport — or really, anything that asks you to give your whole body to it — you know there is a particular kind of devotion that doesn’t feel like sacrifice while you’re inside of it.

You just go. You chase the ball. You dive. You get back up. You do it again.

I had thrown my body after more volleyballs than I could ever count. Balls headed out of bounds. Balls everyone else had already decided were gone. Balls you had no business getting to but went after anyway.

You don’t stop in the middle of the point and calculate what it’s going to cost. You see the ball. You go.

That was the athlete I had become. And, if I’m being fair, that was becoming the person I was too.

Go after it. Work harder. Don’t let it drop. Don’t quit on the point. Don’t quit on the room. Don’t quit on yourself.

Until one day, I dove after another ball. And met the bleachers with my shoulder.

At the time, I couldn’t possibly have known the irony of it. Of all the practices. All the conditioning. All the hustle. All the times I had thrown my body toward something because I refused to let it hit the floor — one more attempt to save the ball would eventually help end the career I was trying so hard to keep.

But endings rarely announce themselves when they begin. Sometimes they just feel like pain.

At first, pain is easy to negotiate with. Athletes do it all the time. Something hurts. You ice it. Tape it. Stretch it. Rest when you’re allowed to rest. Play when you’re expected to play.

You learn pretty quickly that there is a difference between being hurt and being injured. Or at least that’s what you’re told. Pain becomes another piece of information you’re supposed to interpret correctly.

Can you play through it? Should you play through it? Is it soreness? Is it weakness? Is it serious? Is it in your head?

And when you’ve spent enough years in competitive sports, pain can become almost ordinary. So I did what athletes do. I kept going.

Except my shoulder kept hurting. And somewhere underneath all of the explanations, I knew. Something was wrong.

Not I don’t like this. Not this is uncomfortable. Wrong.

There is a kind of knowing that happens inside your own body before you have language or evidence for it. You just know.

The problem was that the people around me didn’t know. Or didn’t believe what I knew.

These weren’t random people. They were adults. People I trusted. People whose job, at least from my perspective, was to know more than I did. Medical professionals. People with degrees. People with training. People with words for things I couldn’t name.

And when authority and lived experience disagree, most of us are taught which one we’re supposed to trust.

So I started doing something I had already become very good at. I questioned myself.

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe I’m exaggerating it.

Maybe this is normal.

Maybe I’m not strong enough.

Maybe everybody hurts like this and they’re simply better at handling it.

Maybe I’m making too much of it.

Maybe I need to work harder.

Maybe I need to get stronger.

Maybe I need to stop complaining.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

It’s amazing how quickly somebody else’s doubt can become your inner voice.

I tried to avoid surgery. Physical therapy. Treatment. Cortisone shots. Another attempt. Another possibility. Another reason to believe maybe this would be the thing that fixed it.

I did what I had always done when something stood between me and the thing I wanted. I worked. I tried. I endured. I kept playing. And I kept hurting.

For almost a year, there was this strange negotiation happening between what my body was telling me and what the room around me seemed willing to believe. And I kept choosing the room. Because that’s what I knew how to do.

Room after room, I can see the pattern now. When belonging felt uncertain, I worked harder. When I thought someone doubted me, I tried to become undeniable. When the room asked for proof, I gave it more. More effort. More discipline. More toughness. More of myself.

There was always this belief underneath it: if I can just prove that I belong here, everything will be okay.

Except this time the thing I was trying to prove wasn’t that I deserved a jersey. I was trying to prove that my own pain was real.

Think about that for a second. I was living inside the body that hurt. And somehow, I still needed someone outside of it to confirm that I was allowed to believe what it was telling me.

That’s what doubt can do. Being doubted isn’t always loud. Sometimes nobody says, I don’t believe you. Sometimes it arrives through another explanation. Another treatment. Another instruction to wait. Another reason why what you’re feeling probably isn’t what you think it is.

And eventually you become so accustomed to presenting evidence that you stop asking the more important question: why did I need permission to trust myself in the first place?

I didn’t know to ask that then. I just knew my shoulder hurt. So I kept going.

There is a version of this story where surgery is the victory. Finally. Proof. They opened my shoulder and saw what I had been saying was there.

I was injured. I had been injured. My body hadn’t lied to me. I hadn’t imagined it. I wasn’t weak. I wasn’t dramatic. Something was actually wrong.

And yes, there was relief in that. But vindication is a strange feeling when the thing proving you right is damage. Because I didn’t want to be right. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to play. I wanted somebody to find nothing and tell me there was an easy explanation and an easier fix.

Instead, surgery gave everyone else access to a truth I had been living with for almost a year. And that’s an important distinction.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I’ve thought about that a lot as an adult. How often do we wait for something outside ourselves to validate something we’ve known internally for a long time?

A diagnosis.

A title.

A promotion.

An apology.

A breakup.

A resignation.

Someone finally saying, You were right.

We treat outside confirmation like it creates truth. It doesn’t. Sometimes it simply catches up to it.

I wish I had learned that then. I wish I could tell that version of myself: you don’t need them to cut you open before you’re allowed to believe yourself.

But that’s the privilege of looking backward. She didn’t know yet. She was still learning.

I had spent so much time trying to get someone to believe that something was wrong that I hadn’t fully considered what would happen if they finally did. Because proof didn’t give me volleyball back. It led to another room. Another adult. Another person with authority. A doctor. And another conversation.

Except this one was different. There was no fork in the road. No two paths waiting for me to choose between them. No therapist sitting across from me, creating enough safety for me to hear my own answer. No question of whether I wanted it badly enough.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to play. And for perhaps the first time in this part of my story, wanting it didn’t matter.

The doctor told me I couldn’t continue.

That was it.

Years of practices.

Tournaments.

Tryouts.

Teammates.

Coaches.

Gyms.

Bus rides.

Wins.

Losses.

The first room.

The second room.

The college room.

All of it ended in a sentence I didn’t get to write.

I couldn’t outwork it.

I couldn’t prove myself back onto the court.

I couldn’t be tougher.

I couldn’t practice harder.

I couldn’t make someone reconsider by becoming more valuable.

I couldn’t dive after one more ball and somehow save this point.

I couldn’t choose volleyball one more time.

The decision wasn’t mine.

There is grief in losing something you love. But there is another kind of grief in losing the version of yourself who existed because of it.

Who was I if I wasn’t an athlete? That sounds dramatic until you think about how identity actually gets built.

For years, volleyball hadn’t been something I did after school. It organized my life.

My schedule.

My friendships.

My weekends.

My body.

My goals.

The way adults knew me.

The way other kids knew me.

The way I knew myself.

Athlete wasn’t an activity. It was a room I had lived inside for years. And suddenly, I couldn’t go back in.

That’s what nobody really tells you about rooms.

Sometimes you leave them.

Sometimes they leave you.

Sometimes you outgrow them.

Sometimes you run from them.

Sometimes you choose another one.

And sometimes somebody else closes the door.

The first room taught me belonging. The second room taught me what happens when belonging becomes conditional. College gave me the opportunity to choose the game for myself. And then my body — and eventually a doctor — taught me something I had never been prepared to learn: you can choose something with your whole heart and still lose it.

I think I spent a lot of my early life confusing those two things. If I made the right choice, worked hard enough, behaved correctly, proved enough, surely I could control what happened next.

But life doesn’t work like that.

You can choose the road. You cannot choose everything waiting on it.

Maybe that’s the difference between the two intersections that bookend this chapter of my life. At the first one, I needed someone to help me recognize that the choice was still mine. At the second one, I had to learn what to do when it wasn’t.

Both required trust. Just different kinds.

One asked: will you trust yourself enough to choose the next road?

The other asked: will you trust yourself enough to keep going when the road you chose disappears?

I didn’t know it then, but those two questions would follow me into almost every room that came next.

College.

Work.

Leadership.

Relationships.

Texas.

Rooms where I would once again hand authority to people who seemed more qualified to tell me who I was. Rooms where I would try to become undeniable. Rooms where I would confuse being needed with belonging. Rooms where I would wait for someone else to recognize something I already knew. Rooms where I would stay longer than I should because leaving felt too much like failing.

Different rooms. Same patterns. Same me.

We’re fifteen letters into this now. And when I look backward at the first part of this story, I don’t think Phase One is really about volleyball. It isn’t about childhood. It isn’t even about the individual people who occupied these rooms.

It’s about the making of me.

Before we ever consciously decide who we’re going to become, we’re being shaped.

By rooms.

By people.

By praise.

By rejection.

By the things that earn us belonging.

By the things that threaten to take it away.

By what gets celebrated.

By what gets punished.

By who believes us.

By who doesn’t.

By the moments when someone comes beside us.

And the moments when no one does.

We collect lessons long before we know we’re collecting them. Some become values. Some become armor. Some become survival strategies. Some become beliefs about ourselves that we carry for years without ever stopping to ask where they came from.

That’s why I don’t think unbecoming begins with changing yourself. I think it begins much earlier than that. With noticing. Before you can decide what stays, you have to know what got put there.

Before you can choose who gets access to you, you have to understand the rooms that taught you access had to be earned. Before you can trust your own voice, you have to recognize all the voices that taught you to question it. Before you can keep yourself, you have to meet the versions of you who learned how to survive without knowing that’s what they were doing.

That’s the first audit. Not: what do I need to fix? But: what made me?

So maybe this is where we pause.

Fifteen letters.

A handful of rooms.

One little girl who learned what belonging felt like.

An athlete who learned what it could cost.

A young woman standing at more than one fork in the road, trying to understand which choices were hers.

And underneath all of them, something I couldn’t name yet. A voice that knew.

It knew when a room didn’t feel safe.

It knew when something hurt.

It knew when I needed help.

It knew when I wanted to keep playing.

It knew when I wanted to keep going.

Sometimes I listened. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I couldn’t hear it over everyone else. But it was there.

Maybe that’s the part of this story I understand differently now. For years, I thought I was waiting for someone to save me.

A coach.

An adult.

A doctor.

Eventually, a boss.

Maybe even a room that would finally choose me so completely that I could stop questioning whether I belonged there.

But the person I was waiting for was being built alongside me the entire time. I just hadn’t learned how to recognize her yet.

The first room taught me belonging. The second taught me what it felt like to lose it. This room taught me doubt. But it also left me with something I would need for every room that came after it: the beginning of self-trust.

Because eventually I would learn that being doubted doesn’t make me wrong. Being left doesn’t make me unworthy. A closed door doesn’t erase who I was inside the room. And someone else having authority doesn’t require me to surrender my own.

Most importantly, I would eventually learn something that younger me couldn’t possibly have understood yet.

There will be moments when someone can sit beside you.

There will be moments when someone can help you see the road.

There will be moments when someone can believe you before you remember how to believe yourself.

Those people matter. They matter more than they probably ever know.

But they cannot walk your road for you.

And there will also be moments when the people you trust don’t understand. When they don’t believe you. When the door closes anyway. When there isn’t another person coming through it with the answer.

That’s when you discover the difference between being supported and being saved.

I had been supported.

I had been doubted.

I had been chosen.

I had been left.

I had made decisions.

And I had decisions made for me.

All of it was making me.

But somewhere inside all of that, another lesson was beginning. One that would take years — and many more rooms — for me to understand: the only person who was going to be there for every version of my life was me.

I was going to have to learn how to come for her.

How to believe her.

How to choose her.

How to keep her.

I didn’t know her name yet. I didn’t know there would eventually be a philosophy built around finding her again. I just knew one room had ended. And somehow, despite everything that had happened before it, there was still a next square on the board.

May

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 15u

After gymnastics, we tried other gyms. The equipment was familiar. The routines were familiar. Even some of the girls were familiar. But something had changed. The beams were still four inches wide. Home wasn’t.

I kept waiting for the feeling to come back. It never did.

Eventually, my sister decided she was ready to be done. She had given years to the sport. She was ready for something new. And the decision was made that I would be done too.

I was twelve. The adults around me were making the decisions they believed were best. This isn’t a story about blame. They were doing what they believed was right.

But twelve-year-old me didn’t know how to separate a decision someone else made… from a decision that changed who I believed I was allowed to become.

One day, I was a gymnast. And then I wasn’t. There wasn’t a final routine. No last meet I knew would be my last. No moment where I stood inside the room and decided I was ready to say goodbye. The decision had already been made.

Not in anger. Not in blame. Sometimes a chapter of your life ends before you’re ready to stop reading it.

So I found another room.

Volleyball wasn’t supposed to become home. It just slowly did.

At first, it was another sport. Another gym. Another set of lines on a floor.

Only this room was louder. Messier. Less individual. More people. More noise. More bus rides. More laughter. More opportunities to belong.

Gymnastics had taught me to depend on myself. Volleyball required something different.

Someone passed so someone else could set. Someone set so someone else could swing. Someone covered. Someone called the ball. Someone chased the one everyone else thought was already down. Nothing happened alone.

I liked that. Maybe more than I understood at the time.

Because somewhere between practices and games and bus rides and ordinary afternoons in the gym… the rhythm came back.

School. Practice. Home. Repeat.

I knew that rhythm. I trusted it. Ordinary days started becoming memories again.

And without realizing it… I had stopped looking for the first room. Because I’d found a second one.

My sister was there too. She was a senior. I was a freshman. For one year… we got one more room together.

There were four years between us. Enough for her to have already built a life there before I arrived. Enough for people to compare us. I don’t think either of us asked for that.

I happened to be more naturally athletic. She happened to be older. She had gotten there first. Those differences created conversations neither of us deserved. Some of them weren’t easy.

But I want to tell this part correctly. Because time has a way of letting people carry blame that never belonged to them.

My sister never made me feel like my ability took something away from hers. She never asked me to become smaller. She never treated my success like her loss. She supported me. Always.

She had been my person in the first room. And somehow, when I found the second one… she was there too. If there was one constant between the rooms that were shaping me… it was her.

And she wasn’t the only person I watched. Before the different jersey belonged to me… it belonged to my sister’s best friend. She was the libero.

And I learned by watching her. How she read the court. How she moved. How she seemed to know where the ball was going before it got there. How she could change an entire point without being the person who finished it.

I watched. I learned. I practiced.

And eventually… the different jersey became mine.

There was something about knowing exactly what my job was that felt familiar. Keep the ball off the floor. Read the court. Get there. Again. And again. And again.

The position rewarded things gymnastics had already taught me how to give. Discipline. Repetition. Instinct built through work.

There wasn’t time to wonder whether you could reach the ball. You moved. You dove. You trusted your body to answer before your mind had time to ask the question. Then you got back up.

I loved that. And I was good at it. Not in the way we sometimes remember our younger selves as better than we actually were. There was evidence.

All-conference teams. My name on state lists for statistics. Recognition that reached beyond our own gym. We became the first team in school history to make it to regionals.

We won our conference. Then we won it again. And again. Three years in a row. The work kept showing.

Gymnastics had taught me that hard work could change what I was capable of. Volleyball confirmed it.

Work hard. Get better. Get better. Get noticed. Get noticed. Earn your place.

And for a long time… I did.

I don’t think I understood how much safety there was in having a role.

Everyone could look at the court and know exactly why I was there.

I wanted the ball people thought couldn’t be reached. I wanted to be trusted when the point mattered. I wanted my teammates to know that if something was coming my direction… I would be there.

And the more I gave to the room… the more the room gave back. Trust. Recognition. Responsibility. Opportunity. A future.

Volleyball wasn’t just somewhere I belonged anymore. It was becoming part of the answer when someone asked who I was. The work wasn’t just showing anymore.

It was becoming me.

Then came senior year. I was the only senior. The room that had once belonged to my sister before it belonged to me… was suddenly mine to leave.

There was no older girl ahead of me anymore. No next year waiting. Just one last season. One last chance to do what we’d done three years in a row.

We made it back to the conference championship. On our home court. It went five games. And we lost.

After three years of winning it… we lost the year I was the only one who couldn’t come back and try again. Everyone else had another season. I didn’t. I knew something was ending.

But that loss wasn’t what ended the room for me. Something else did.

I made a decision. And that decision had consequences. Real ones.

There are details to that story that I won’t put here. Not because I’m trying to hide them. Because they belong somewhere else.

There are choices in that story. Consequences. Conversations. Relationships that changed. Things I did. Things other people did. Things I understood immediately. And things it would take me years—and eventually therapy—to understand at all.

That story deserves to be told. For the record. But this letter isn’t about every detail of what happened.

It’s about what happened to the girl in the different jersey afterward.

Because suddenly… the evidence I’d spent years collecting didn’t seem to matter. The statistics were still true. The all-conference teams were still true. The championships were still true. The hours were still true. The teammate I’d been was still true. And the decision I’d made was true too.

People I thought knew me… seemed to know only the decision.

Relationships disappeared. People disappeared.

Outside my family… It felt like everyone dropped me.

My family didn’t.

My sister didn’t.

I want to say that clearly. Because this isn’t a story about an eighteen-year-old girl who had no one. I did.

The people who knew me before the different jersey… the people who knew me before the statistics… the people who knew me before the decision… were still there.

My sister had watched me become a gymnast. Watched that room disappear. Watched me find another one. Watched me become good at something new.

And when that version of me cracked…

she didn’t go anywhere.

I kept wondering how years of showing up could be outweighed by one decision. How could all of those things still be true… and somehow no longer feel like enough?

I didn’t have language for that kind of grief. I definitely didn’t have language for shame. I knew accountability. Sports had taught me accountability my entire life.

Miss the pass. Lose the point. Make the mistake. Live with the result. Work on it tomorrow.

But this felt different. Because this time…

And when belonging felt threatened… I reached for the tool that had worked my entire life.

Work harder. Get better. Prove yourself. Earn your place back.

Surely more would fix it.

Work had taken a little girl from cartwheels to competition. Work had made the different jersey mine. Work had put my name on lists. Work had helped take a team somewhere our school had never been before. Work had earned trust. Work had earned recognition. Work had opened a pathway to what came next.

So when everything around me seemed to say I’d lost my place… of course I thought the answer was to earn it again. I didn’t abandon the strategy.

I doubled down on it.

This same year, a couple months later, therapy would finally give me language for what happened in rooms like this one. Not excuses. Language. There’s a difference.

Therapy didn’t go backward and change the decisions I’d made. It didn’t erase consequences. It didn’t make everyone else wrong so I could become right. It gave me tools to walk back through the chapters of my own life and separate things I’d spent years holding as one.

What happened. What I did. What someone else did. What it cost. What I learned.

And somewhere buried beneath all of it… what I decided it meant about me. That’s the question I didn’t know how to ask at eighteen. I only knew how to keep going.

So I did.

The twelve-year-old girl had learned that a room could end because someone else made a decision.

The eighteen-year-old learned that a room could end because of a decision she made herself.

And I did what I knew how to do.

I kept working.

I thought I was learning how to become indispensable.

I didn’t realize I was learning how to confuse earning my place…

with deserving one.

some rooms teach you how to belong.
others teach you what you’ll do to keep belonging.

until then, keep unbecoming who you thought you had to be.

— May

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 14

i didn't know adults could stand in parking lots, talking quietly to one another, while children waited for someone to unlock the door. i learned that later.

At the beginning, there was only gymnastics. Vault. Bars. Beam. Floor.

Before i knew what identity was, i knew those. Before i understood success, i understood repetition.

Before i ever stepped into public school, my world was already small. Kindergarten and first grade happened at home. The same familiar faces. The same routines. The same people, every day.

i didn't know it then, but i think i learned to trust small rooms before i ever learned to trust big ones. And for almost ten years, one of those rooms was a gym.

It became part of the architecture of my childhood. School. Gym. Home. Repeat.

Looking back, it probably looked exhausting. It never felt that way. It felt like home.

The same drive almost every afternoon. The same coaches. The same families. The same girls growing up beside me.

There were long weekends spent driving to gymnastics meets. Hours in the car that somehow felt shorter because everyone was headed to the same place.

i don't remember many of the scores. i remember the rhythm. The packed coolers. The early mornings. Falling asleep on the drive home. Waking up just long enough to carry my bag inside before doing it all again the next weekend.

Every year, our gym held a cartwheelathon to raise money. People pledged money for every cartwheel we could do. i won it more than once.

At the time, i thought i was proud because i'd done the most cartwheels. Looking back, i think i just loved being part of something that believed in one another.

i can still feel the chalk drying my palms. The calluses i was secretly proud of. The leotard straps i'd tug back into place between routines.

i knew my floor routine so completely i could have walked through it in my sleep. Some nights, i probably did.

Looking back, i think it was the first classroom i ever had. It just happened to smell like chalk and sweat instead of dry-erase markers.

Not because i learned reading or math there. Because i learned what it felt like to belong.

Or at least… i thought i did.

Before i learned anything from a coach, i learned from her. My sister.

She was my person long before i knew what that meant. If i was nervous, i looked for her. If i wasn't sure what came next, i watched what she did.

She never tried to teach me. She simply kept becoming someone worth watching.

Before i understood discipline, i watched hers. Before i understood consistency, i watched someone i admired choose the same thing, day after day.

i watched her tie her grips. i watched her come back after bad practices. i watched her try again the next day.

i didn't know i was borrowing definitions. i thought i was simply growing up.

There was something else that happened every time i pulled on my leotard. i can still remember it.

Whatever nerves i had in the car disappeared. Whatever fear i walked in with stayed in the locker room.

i don't know why. i just knew that once i was wearing it… i wasn't scared anymore.

Gymnastics gave me gifts i'll spend the rest of my life carrying.

It taught me discipline. It taught me that hard work changes what you're capable of. That the thousandth repetition feels different than the first. That showing up today makes tomorrow a little easier.

The body doesn't lie. The work showed. There was something deeply comforting about that. For a child, it made the world feel predictable. Safe.

It also taught me loyalty. You showed up. You stayed. You became part of something bigger than yourself.

Discipline. Commitment. Belonging. Success. To me, they weren't different lessons. They were all part of the same one.

Then one day…

The gym closed.

Not because i'd outgrown it. Not because i'd decided it was time to leave.

It was simply…

Gone.

i remember driving there one afternoon. The parking lot was quieter than usual. A few adults stood outside in small circles. None of them looked like they knew exactly what to say. i kept waiting for someone to unlock the door.

For weeks afterward, i still watched the parking lot every time we drove by. Half-believing we'd simply missed a practice.

i had stayed loyal. i had shown up. i had done everything i knew how to do. And still… The room was gone.

We tried other gyms. New buildings. New coaches. New teammates. Some of the girls from my old gym found their way there too.

Everything looked close enough that i thought it would feel the same. It didn't.

The chalk still covered my hands.

I don't think you can rebuild a room simply because another one has the same equipment. Rooms are made from years.

From ordinary afternoons that quietly become your childhood. From people who stop feeling like teammates and start feeling like family. Those things don't move just because you do.

After a while, my sister decided she was done. I don't remember the conversation. I only remember that when she walked away…

Somehow, I did too.

The decision was made for me. It made sense. There wasn't really a reason to keep going.

i don't remember arguing. i don't remember crying. i remember waiting. Waiting to find another place that felt the way the first one had. It never did.

Looking back now, i don't think gymnastics taught me the wrong lessons. Discipline mattered. Hard work mattered. Consistency mattered. Those lessons have carried me through some of the hardest seasons of my life.

i was simply too young to know where those lessons ended… And where my own conclusions quietly began.

If hard work changes what's possible… Maybe it can protect me from loss. If loyalty matters… Maybe the things i love will stay. If i keep showing up… Maybe home will still be there when i return.

i didn't walk away from gymnastics believing i'd learned something about identity.

i walked away believing i'd learned something about life.

i didn't know those were different things.

— May

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters Vol. 13

They hurt because of what we believed was finally about to happen.

Sometimes we don’t lose the opportunity.

We lose the story we had already started telling ourselves about what that opportunity was going to mean.

We grieve the future we quietly built before reality ever had a chance to arrive.

I didn’t know that’s what I was grieving.

I thought I was working toward a promotion.

I wasn’t.

I was working toward proof.

Proof that I had become someone worth choosing. Proof that the years mattered. Proof that the sacrifices added up. Proof that someone else could look at my life and confirm what I had been trying to believe about myself all along.

At the time, I couldn’t have told you that. I would have said I wanted to grow. More responsibility. The next opportunity. To keep building a career.

All of that was true.

It just wasn’t the deepest truth.

Because underneath every one of those reasons was a quieter question.

Will this finally prove that I matter?

The room had given me my first opportunity. It taught me things I will always be grateful for, and it trusted me before I fully trusted myself.

I wasn’t only building a career there.

I was building an identity.

That’s why the disappointment felt so disproportionate.

Someone else was promoted. Someone else was chosen. On paper, an ordinary business decision.

That isn’t the story I lived.

The story I lived was much quieter.

Maybe everything I thought this room believed about me wasn’t true.

For a long time, I told that story as if it were about being overlooked.

I said the promotion didn’t happen. I said someone else was chosen. I said the timing wasn’t right.

Every version focused on what happened. None of them questioned why it had the power to undo me.

Because if I’m honest, I didn’t want the promotion as much as I wanted what I believed it would finally settle. I thought it would quiet something — the part of me that kept wondering if I was enough, the part that still believed worth was something another person could approve.

I imagined walking into work differently. Standing a little taller. Feeling a little safer. Not because my responsibilities had changed.

Because I believed I had.

I don’t think that was ambition.

Ambition builds.

This was bargaining.

Without realizing it, I had made an agreement with the room. If you choose me, I’ll finally choose myself. No one else knew about it. The room certainly didn’t.

It was a contract I wrote alone.

And that’s why losing the promotion felt so much bigger than losing the opportunity. I wasn’t only grieving what didn’t happen. I was grieving the version of myself I believed it was about to introduce me to.

I thought I had lost the evidence.

That’s the dangerous thing about rooms.

They rarely become authority all at once.

They become evidence first.

Evidence that you’re enough. Evidence that you’re valuable. Evidence that you’ve finally become the person you’ve been trying to become.

And if a room becomes your evidence, its decisions eventually become your verdicts.

Not because the room declared one.

Because you had already decided it held the authority to.

Once I saw it at work, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere else.

The relationship that was supposed to prove I was lovable. The friendship that was supposed to prove I belonged. The invitation that was supposed to prove I mattered. The compliment that was supposed to prove I was seen. The applause that was supposed to prove I had arrived.

Different rooms.

Same question.

Can you tell me who I am?

Maybe that’s why proof never lasts.

Proof was never designed to become identity. It expires the moment the next question arrives.

You get the promotion, and wonder if you can keep it. You find the relationship, and wonder if they’ll stay. You receive the recognition, and wonder if you’ll deserve it again tomorrow.

Proof has an impossible assignment. It has to keep proving itself.

Identity doesn’t. Identity doesn’t wake up every morning trying to earn another verdict.

It remains.

It doesn’t need permission to exist.

Maybe that’s why we feel so tired.

We’ve spent years collecting proof for something that was never on trial.

Every achievement becomes another exhibit. Every compliment becomes another witness. Every rejection becomes new evidence against us.

Then we’re surprised when the answer keeps changing.

Of course it changes. The room changes. The people change. The circumstances change. Everything external is designed to move.

Identity remains.

The hardest part wasn’t realizing I didn’t get the promotion.

The hardest part was realizing how much I had needed it.

Not financially. Not professionally.

Personally.

That was the part I had never questioned. I assumed wanting it meant I was ambitious, and maybe I was. But ambition wasn’t driving the whole story.

Need was.

That’s a very different thing.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between wanting something, and needing it to say something about you.

Those aren’t the same pursuit.

I still want meaningful work. I still hope to build things that matter. I still want to be trusted with responsibility. None of that disappeared.

UN-BEcomME™ isn’t about pretending ambition is dangerous.

It’s about asking a different question.

Am I moving toward this because it reflects who I am? Or because I’m hoping it will finally tell me who I am?

The outside can look identical.

The inside changes everything.

One is purpose.

The other is permission.

I don’t think awareness changes us overnight.

I think awareness changes the questions we carry.

Instead of what do I need to achieve next, I’ve started asking what am I hoping this achievement will prove.

Instead of why did this hurt so much, I’ve started asking what story did I expect this outcome to confirm.

The answers aren’t always comfortable.

But they’re honest.

And honesty has a way of loosening the grip that proof has on us.

So here’s the only practice this week.

When something matters deeply, pause before asking whether you want it.

Ask one question instead.

If this happened exactly the way I hope it will — what would I finally believe about myself?

Don’t change your answer.

Don’t judge it.

Just notice it.

You don’t have to answer the question today. You only have to notice that you’ve been asking it.

Because sometimes the thing we’re chasing isn’t the thing we’re chasing at all.

Sometimes we’re chasing the permission we’ve been waiting to give ourselves.

Maybe that’s what awareness has been trying to give me all along.

Not certainty.

Not confidence.

Not a life where disappointment no longer exists.

Something quieter.

The ability to separate an event from an identity. To let something matter without allowing it to define me. To grieve an opportunity without grieving myself.

I don’t think that’s indifference.

I think that’s freedom.

For years, I thought confidence would arrive after enough proof.

Now I wonder if confidence begins when proof is no longer required.

Not because life stops hurting. Not because disappointment disappears.

But because disappointment no longer gets to introduce itself as identity.

There will always be another room. Another opportunity. Another dream worth pursuing.

I hope there is.

UN-BEcomME™ was never about wanting less. It was never about becoming indifferent to success or pretending recognition doesn’t matter.

It’s about refusing to confuse those things with evidence that you deserve to exist.

The rooms will keep changing. The opportunities will keep changing. The people who choose you, and the people who don’t, will keep changing.

But there has to be something that doesn’t.

Otherwise every new room gets another chance to decide who you are.

And that’s a burden no room was ever designed to carry.

The proof was never waiting at the end of the next opportunity.

It wasn’t hiding inside the promotion. It wasn’t sitting in someone else’s decision. It wasn’t delayed until I accomplished enough to deserve it.

It was there the entire time.

Quietly becoming. Quietly remaining.

I just kept looking everywhere except the one place it had always been.

Me.

Maybe that’s what “I keep me” has meant all along.

Not that I stop wanting.

Not that I stop building.

Not that I stop walking into new rooms.

It means I stop asking them to introduce me to myself.

Because introductions are only necessary when you’ve forgotten who you are.

I haven’t.

Not anymore.

I keep me. Because no room can prove what has always been true.

May

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 12

We walk into these rooms believing they hold opportunity. Sometimes they do. They can introduce us to people we would have never met. They can teach us skills we did not know we were capable of learning. They can give us language for dreams we had not yet learned how to name. A room can change the entire direction of a life.

What it should never hold… is authority.

Somewhere along the way, most of us stop asking whether a room is healthy for us. Instead, we begin asking a different question.

What do I have to become to stay here?

It rarely happens all at once. Most rooms do not ask us to disappear on the first day. They ask for something smaller. A softened opinion. A swallowed question. A boundary moved just far enough that no one else notices. A laugh at something that did not feel funny. A yes we did not mean. A version of the truth made easier for everyone else to hold.

We call it adapting. Being professional. Being understanding. Being loyal. Being easy to work with. And sometimes, that is exactly what it is. But sometimes adaptation becomes abandonment so quietly that we do not recognize the difference.

That is the moment the room quietly receives an authority it was never issued. Not because it demanded one. Because we offered it.

We let applause become proof. We let rejection rewrite us. A single opinion becomes a permanent filter. A single disappointment becomes evidence. We slowly become versions of ourselves designed to survive the room instead of simply living inside it.

And then we carry that version of ourselves forward. We enter the next room already rehearsing. Already anticipating. Already preparing to be misunderstood. Someone in one room questioned our ability, so we begin overexplaining in every room after it. Someone once withdrew their approval, so we begin treating every silence like a warning. One room taught us that belonging could be revoked. Now we walk into every new one trying to earn permission before anyone has even asked us to.

Before long, we are not responding to the room we are standing in. We are still trying to survive the one we already left.

Every room appears to offer an answer. Some rooms tell us we are exceptional. Others convince us we are invisible. Some celebrate us. Some tolerate us. Some make space for our voice. Others teach us to lower it. Some invite us in and make us believe we have finally arrived. Others leave us standing outside, wondering what everyone inside possesses that we do not.

The answer changes depending on the room. That should have been the first clue. If one room can make you feel powerful and another can make you question everything you know about yourself, then perhaps neither room is telling the whole truth. Perhaps they are only reflecting what they can see from where they stand.

A room has a perspective. A culture. A preference. A need. A history that began long before you arrived. It can evaluate your usefulness within its walls. It can decide whether your gifts fit its current plans. It can determine whether it has space for you.

Yet we treat its decisions like verdicts. We take temporary outcomes and turn them into permanent definitions. The promotion did not happen, so perhaps I am not a leader. The relationship ended, so perhaps I am difficult to love. The invitation never came, so perhaps I do not belong. The room changed its mind, so perhaps everything I believed about myself was wrong.

That is how authority moves. Not through one dramatic surrender. Through a series of conclusions we never stop to audit.

Awareness is not the moment everything changes. Awareness is the moment you finally see what has been happening. It is the moment you realize you have been asking the wrong thing for permission.

The room still exists. The opinions still exist. The expectations still exist. The history still exists. But something shifts. You stop confusing influence with authority. Same me. Different room.

That does not mean the room no longer matters. It does not mean you become immune to disappointment. It does not mean rejection stops hurting or that every criticism should be ignored. Some rooms are supposed to challenge us. Some feedback is necessary. Some discomfort is the evidence that we are growing rather than disappearing.

Rooms have influence. They can teach you. Challenge you. Stretch you. Correct you. Call something out of you that you could not yet see in yourself. They can also wound you. Some of the most meaningful rooms in my life changed me. That is not the problem.

Influence becomes dangerous when it quietly replaces authority. Influence says: consider this. Authority says: this is who you are. Influence gives us information. Authority issues the final word. Influence can help us grow. Authority determines what we believe is allowed to remain.

I spent years believing rooms had answers. If I could get into the right one… I would know I had made it. The right company would prove I was capable. The right title would prove I was successful. The right person choosing me would prove I was worth choosing. The right circle welcoming me would prove I belonged.

I confused access with arrival. I confused recognition with identity. I confused being chosen with being worthy. And when a room seemed to confirm the story I wanted to believe about myself, I held tightly to it. Because once a room becomes your evidence, you become afraid of anything that might contradict it.

If I lost the room… I believed I had lost something much bigger than a job, a relationship, a community, or an opportunity. I believed I had lost proof.

Sometimes the room that built you chooses someone else. The room that gave you your first real opportunity. The room that taught you the language, trusted you with responsibility, and allowed you to become someone you had not yet known how to be.

You believe there is loyalty in being built there. You assume the room will recognize what it helped create. And then it makes a decision you never saw coming. Someone else is chosen. Someone else is protected. Someone else is given the opportunity you believed your history had earned.

In that moment, it can feel as though everything the room once confirmed about you has suddenly been taken back. Not simply: I did not get the opportunity. But: maybe I was wrong about who I thought I was.

That is the deeper fracture. The decision hurts. But the identity underneath it begins to crack because the room was holding more than influence. It was holding evidence. And when the evidence changed, so did the story.

What I did not understand then was that rooms do not create identity. They reveal where we have placed it.

The room may have helped develop me. It may have taught me. It may have given me a chance I will always be grateful for. But it did not create the person who used that chance. It did not manufacture the discipline. The curiosity. The resilience. The willingness to learn. The courage to begin before I felt ready. It witnessed those things. It benefited from those things. It may have strengthened them. But they entered the room with me.

The moment I became aware of that… I could not unknow it. The room had not changed. I had. Not because I became stronger overnight. Not because I suddenly stopped caring what people thought. Not because the disappointment no longer mattered.

Awareness does not erase the wound. It changes the meaning we assign to it. I could finally separate what happened from what I had decided it said about me.

Someone’s opinion could be informed. It could be valuable. It could be painful. It could even change the direction of my life. But it was still an opinion. It was not a verdict.

A decision made inside one room could determine what happened to me there. It could not determine who I was everywhere else. That authority had never been issued. I had simply forgotten I was the one signing it over.

And reclaiming it did not require me to pretend the room meant nothing. It meant allowing the room to be what it actually was. A place. A season. A teacher. A witness. A chapter. Perhaps even a loss. But not a judge.

Maybe that is where reclaiming yourself begins. Not by leaving every room. Not by proving yourself to the next one. Not by replacing one external authority with another. But by quietly taking back the authority you never meant to give away. By asking different questions.

That is not arrogance. It is not immunity from accountability. It is self-governance. It is remembering that other people can contribute to your understanding of yourself without owning it. It is allowing rooms to influence the person you are becoming without giving them permission to erase the person who arrived.

The room was never the proof. It was never the destination. It was never the judge. It was simply a room.

The proof was always the person who walked into it.

The person who learned. The person who adapted. The person who survived. The person who began again after the room changed its mind. The person who carried every lesson forward without allowing every verdict to follow.

The Keeper misunderstood her assignment for a long time. She thought she was supposed to protect the room. Keep the peace. Preserve the relationship. Hold the structure together. Make herself useful enough that no one would ask her to leave. She thought safety meant making sure the room survived.

She never stopped protecting. She simply forgot to turn around. She was always supposed to protect me. And for the first time… she finally is.

I keep me. Because rooms change. You remain.

— May

UN-BEcomME

same me. different room.

What I didn't tell you is that this wasn't her first.

Long before I knew what to call her, The Keeper had already been reassigned once before.

The first assignment was simple.

I don't know when she received it.

Maybe there wasn't just one room.

Maybe there were enough of them that, eventually, she learned what was expected.

Read the room.

Adjust.

Become useful.

Don't need too much.

Keep going.

And she did.

For years, she kept me alive inside rooms I didn't yet know I was allowed to leave.

Then, at 24, I packed my car to the brim and moved to Texas.

I had graduated from college. Bought my first car on my own. Worked my way up in a company I had been with for four years.

I had a full-time job.

A mentor who believed in me.

A life that, from the outside, looked like it was moving forward.

But staying felt like going backward.

I grew up in a small town where everyone knew everyone.

And the problem with being known that long is that sometimes people stop meeting the person standing in front of them.

They remember the girl they already decided you were.

No matter how much you change.

No matter how much you grow.

No matter how hard you work to become something more.

I was afraid that if I stayed, I would end up back inside the same kinds of rooms that had taught me to shrink in the first place.

So I left.

Not because I knew exactly what I was looking for.

I just knew I wanted a better life than the one I believed staying could give me.

And the only way I knew how to get one was to create it.

Or at least try.

My mom drove to Texas with me.

Before we got there, we stopped in Nashville.

My second oldest brother was deployed, and my nephew had been born five months earlier, so we spent three days with my sister-in-law while I got as many baby snuggles as I could before continuing toward the life I had decided was waiting for me.

I remember the first overpass in Dallas.

It was higher than anything I was used to driving over.

I was nervous.

But not the kind that makes you turn around.

The kind that means you're moving.

I still feel that way when I drive over it sometimes.

Like some part of the girl who first arrived here is still sitting behind the wheel.

My oldest brother had a townhouse with a spare bedroom and a dresser.

I needed a bed.

My mom stayed for a week helping me get settled.

I started working.

Then she left.

A few days later, my oldest brother deployed.

And there I was.

In Texas.

Alone.

I knew the business.

I knew how to do my job.

I had worked my way up.

But when I walked into that Texas store, nobody knew any of that yet.

New management.

New coworkers.

A new room.

I was quiet.

I watched.

And slowly, people started asking questions.

How involved had I been with corporate?

How closely had I worked with my old manager?

My district manager?

Where had I learned so much about the business?

They didn't know the store I came from had doubled its revenue while I worked there.

They didn't know what I had carried before I walked in.

And for the first time, that was exactly what I needed.

Because nobody in Texas knew who I had been before I entered the room.

There was no history attached to my name.

No old version of me waiting at the door.

No one reminding me of the girl I had been while I was trying to discover the woman I could become.

I thought moving to Texas would mean immediately building the life I had imagined.

The man.

The money.

A community of girlfriends.

Eventually, someone to marry.

The next chapter.

But that isn't what happened.

For the first six or seven months, my life was remarkably ordinary.

And completely mine.

I worked Sunday through Thursday.

Friday and Saturday belonged to me.

I didn't have friends yet.

There were no plans waiting for me.

No one asking where I was going.

No one expecting me to show up.

On Saturdays, I would get up and do whatever needed doing.

Grocery shopping.

Washing my car.

Walking my brother's dogs.

Usually two miles.

Sometimes I would walk through the new neighborhoods being built nearby.

I didn't know it then, but there is something almost too perfect about that now.

Me, walking alone through streets where the houses weren't finished yet.

Watching other people build lives I couldn't see inside of.

While somewhere beneath the ordinary routine of my own, I was doing the same thing.

The kind where nobody is keeping track of your Saturday but you.

The kind where you can spend an entire day alone and slowly discover that being alone does not have to mean something is wrong.

Sometimes I was lonely.

Of course I was.

I grew up in a big family.

My parents raised us to believe our siblings were our best friends.

And they were.

They still are.

But ours had become a family slowly scattering across the world.

Military orders.

Marriages.

Children.

Jobs.

Life.

We haven't all lived under the same roof in years.

I don't think I understood then that building your own life sometimes means learning how to love people you can no longer live beside.

Because leaving a room doesn't mean you stop loving the people in it.

And freedom doesn't erase the pull of home.

A couple of months after I moved, that pull grew stronger.

My sister and the man who would become her husband moved back to my hometown.

My 2nd oldest brother returned from deployment.

There were family gatherings.

Reasons to go back.

People I missed.

I traveled between the life I had left and the life I was trying to build.

And for the first time, I felt the tension of both being true.

I wanted to be there.

And I wanted to be here.

I wasn't mourning the life I had left.

I was missing the people who had lived inside it with me.

There's a difference.

We talk about leaving as though the hardest part is walking out the door.

Sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes the hardest part is discovering that you can love the life you are building and still ache for the people who aren't standing inside it.

That you can be proud of yourself and lonely.

Free and homesick.

Certain and pulled in two directions.

And maybe that's what I didn't understand about building a life.

Every room asks something of you.

Every room gives something back.

And every experience alters the person who eventually leaves it.

Texas gave me freedom.

It gave me anonymity.

It gave me the chance to enter rooms without an old version of myself waiting inside them.

But it asked something of me too.

I had to learn how to miss people without mistaking the ache for a reason to abandon the life I was building.

I had to learn how to be alone without assuming I had been abandoned.

I had to learn that choosing one life would always mean not living another.

And I had to learn that growing into myself did not require me to stop belonging to the people I came from.

I could leave.

I could miss them.

I could go back.

I could love them.

And I could still return to Texas.

I could still stay.

Then a coworker told me about a part-time job at a minor league park.

I already had a full-time job.

But I wanted extra money.

I wanted to meet people.

And I was curious about a world I had never seen.

So I said yes.

I ran the register.

I watched.

I learned.

And I became fascinated by the business happening around me.

But something else happened there too.

People became fascinated by me.

Or more specifically, by my story.

I was the girl from the Midwest who had packed her car and moved to Texas.

Alone.

They wanted to know why.

What it was like.

Where I came from.

And somewhere inside their curiosity, I started to see something I hadn't fully understood before.

What I had done was brave.

I hadn't thought of it that way when I left.

Staying felt like going backward.

So I went forward.

That was it.

At least, I thought it was.

But now, ten years later, I look back at that girl and think she did one of the bravest things I have ever done.

And I'm not entirely sure I could do it again.

Not because I think I'm less brave now.

But because she knew something I'm only now learning how to name.

Sometimes building the life begins before you build anything at all.

Sometimes it begins when you leave the room that already decided who you are.

Sometimes it begins when you enter a room where nobody knows you.

Sometimes it begins in the ordinary.

A Saturday.

A clean car.

A grocery list.

Two dogs.

A two-mile walk through an unfinished neighborhood.

A phone call home.

And then another one to return.

I used to think Texas was where I became someone new.

I don't anymore.

The girl who packed that car was still the girl who drove over that first Dallas overpass.

Still the girl who walked quietly into a new store.

The girl who went to work.

Walked the dogs.

Went to church.

Missed her family.

Went home.

Came back.

Spent nights alone.

Said yes to something new because she was curious.

The rooms changed.

The experiences altered her.

But something traveled.

And I think that may be the part of our stories we forget to look for.

We spend so much time examining what the rooms took from us.

What they required.

Who we became to survive them.

Evidence that we left.

Evidence that we stayed.

Evidence that we loved people enough to miss them without abandoning the life we were building.

Evidence that we could be lonely without being lost.

Evidence that before we knew who we were becoming, we were already becoming her.

I told you last week that The Keeper has a new assignment.

Keep me.

But the more I look back, the more I realize I had been learning from her long before I knew her name.

Ten years ago, I thought I had handed her an empty room.

I can see now that she was the one showing me what to do with it.

She taught me how to be alone.

How to miss people without disappearing.

How to be unknown without feeling unseen.

How freedom could be lonely and still be freedom.

How loving where I came from and choosing somewhere else could both be true.

The Keeper didn't build the life all at once.

First, she cleared the land.

Then she stayed long enough to teach me what was mine.

And then—

She started building.

But that's another room.

And I think it's time I told you about it.

From the room I cleared before I knew I was building anything —

May

UN-BEcomME™  ·  SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 10

Four years ago, a text turned green.

I didn't know yet that my life had just divided itself into a before and an after.

I didn't know there would be a last conversation.

A last unanswered question.

A last version of me who still believed there would always be more time.

I didn't know that four years later, I would still be trying to understand everything that happened after.

Not just losing my dad.

Everything.

Because that's the part no one really tells you about loss.

Sometimes, you don't just lose a person.

You lose the life that existed around them. The relationships that depended on them. The traditions they held together. The version of your family you thought would always exist. The person you were when you still believed some things couldn't happen to you.

And then you adapt.

At least, I did.

Read more

I was wrong.

Finding her changed everything.

Keeping her will change me.

When Volume Eight ended, I thought the search was over.

I thought recognition was the destination. I thought once I finally saw the girl I'd been looking for, the work would somehow become easier.

Instead, recognition asked me a question I wasn't expecting.

Not… Can you see her?

But… Now that you can… what will you do differently?

Because if I'm honest, this isn't the first time I've recognized myself.

I've met pieces of her before. On quiet walks where I forgot to perform. In cities where no one expected anything from me. In moments of laughter that arrived before I had time to edit them. In rooms that were finally big enough to let me breathe.

She was always there.

I just didn't know how to bring her home.

I'd recognize her… Then I'd walk into the next room. The next responsibility. The next expectation.

And somewhere between the doorway and the conversation… I'd quietly leave her outside.

Not because I stopped loving her.

Because I didn't yet understand who was supposed to protect her.

For a long time, I believed The Keeper was the obstacle.

She noticed every shift in the room. She anticipated needs before they were spoken. She carried the invisible work no one else saw. She learned that survival often depended on staying one step ahead of everyone else's disappointment.

For years, I thought she was the reason I disappeared.

Maybe she carrying the wrong assignment.

No one had ever told her that I belonged on the list of people worth protecting.

So she kept the room. She kept the peace. She kept everyone else comfortable.

Until there was almost nothing left of me to keep.

I don't blame her anymore. She was doing exactly what she believed would keep us safe.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something.

Maybe healing isn't asking The Keeper to disappear. Maybe it's giving her someone new to protect.

Maybe… it's me.

I don't think the question guiding my life is, Who am I beneath all of this?

I think I know the answer now.

The question is quieter. More ordinary. More demanding.

In this room. In this conversation. In this season. In this grief. In this success.

Can I walk through this doorway without leaving myself outside?

I don't expect to answer that perfectly. I only know that I want to answer it more often than I used to.

Because finding yourself is a beautiful moment.

So this Sunday, I'm making a different promise. Not to become someone new. Not to never be afraid. Not to never forget.

Just this.

When I walk into the next room… I'll remember who The Keeper has been waiting to protect all along.

This time— I keep me.

Still learning to walk through every doorway without leaving her outside.

— May

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 9

The girl who trusted herself before she learned to ask permission.

The one who laughed without wondering how it sounded.

The one who walked into rooms assuming she belonged there.

Somewhere along the way, I became convinced she disappeared.

I spent years trying to become someone who could find her again.

A better version.

A more successful version.

A more healed version.

A more confident version.

I thought if I kept accomplishing enough, proving enough, fixing enough…

I’d finally meet the girl I’d been missing.

But I’ve been thinking about that differently lately.

Maybe she was never missing.

Maybe I just stopped recognizing her voice.

Because here’s the strange thing about becoming someone who survives:

You get so good at listening to everyone else that your own voice starts sounding unfamiliar.

You learn to read rooms before you read yourself.

You become fluent in expectations.

You can tell who’s disappointed before they say a word.

You know how to adjust your tone, your ambition, your emotions, your dreams—sometimes before anyone even asks.

It feels responsible.

It feels mature.

Sometimes it even looks like success.

But somewhere in all that translation, something subtle happens.

You stop asking yourself what you know.

You start asking what everyone else believes.

For a long time, I thought that voice inside me had disappeared.

The quiet one.

The one that knew when something wasn’t right long before I could explain why.

The one that whispered,

This room doesn’t fit.

Even while I was busy convincing myself it did.

I thought I ignored her for so many years that eventually she just left.

But lately I’ve started noticing something.

When I moved away by myself…

She was there.

When I left rooms that no longer fit…

She was there.

When I started writing words that scared me…

She was there.

When I built something that didn’t make sense on paper but somehow felt true in my bones…

She was there.

Every decision that eventually became one of the best decisions of my life wasn’t made because I suddenly found myself.

It was made because, for just a moment, I trusted the version of me I’d been drowning out.

Not perfectly.

Just enough.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about The Keeper.

She deserves compassion.

She learned how to survive in rooms where survival mattered.

She paid attention.

She adapted.

She carried conclusions that once kept me safe.

She believed if she could just become enough, no one would ever have the power to decide my worth again.

And for a while…

That worked.

Until it didn’t.

Because eventually you realize something survival never teaches you.

Lately I’ve noticed something changing.

Not because life suddenly became easier.

Actually, quite the opposite.

There are still unanswered questions.

Rooms that feel uncertain.

People I thought would always be there who aren’t anymore.

Plans that haven’t unfolded the way I expected.

The old version of me would’ve treated uncertainty like evidence.

Evidence that I wasn’t enough.

Evidence that I needed to work harder.

Prove more.

Become someone else.

Instead…

I’ve caught myself asking a different question.

I’ve realized something I don’t think I understood before.

The girl I’ve been looking for isn’t waiting somewhere in my future.

She isn’t hiding behind another promotion.

Another relationship.

Another achievement.

Another perfectly healed version of myself.

She has been quietly walking beside me this entire time.

Every time my stomach tightened before my mind caught up.

Every time I knew a room was too small before I had words for it.

Every time I chose integrity over approval.

Every time I left.

Every time I stayed true to something I couldn’t yet explain.

She wasn’t absent.

She was patient.

Waiting for me to trust her again.

Maybe that’s what healing actually is.

Not becoming someone new.

Not finally earning your place.

Not reaching some future version of yourself that’s worthy enough to arrive.

Maybe healing is recognizing that the truest parts of you never agreed with the conclusions you learned to carry.

Maybe they’ve simply been waiting for you to listen.

I don’t think I’ve found the girl I’ve been looking for.

I think I’ve stopped overlooking her.

And maybe that’s the beginning.

Not of becoming.

But of remembering.

From someone still learning to stop talking over herself —

May 🖤

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters · Vol. 08

I knew how to read a room.

How to meet the standard.

How to arrive prepared, perform well, and make it look like none of it cost me anything.

From the outside, it looked like growth.

New roles.

New credentials.

New versions of myself built for new environments.

And by most measures—

it was working.

But there was something I couldn’t reconcile.

The more successful I became, the further I felt from myself.

Not lost exactly.

Like somewhere in the process of becoming who I needed to be, I had slowly edited out the parts that didn’t fit the rooms I was trying to survive.

I didn’t notice it happening.

That’s the thing about adaptation.

It doesn’t ask permission.

It just quietly becomes the answer to a question you never realized you were answering.

Until one day you look up and realize you’ve been performing a version of yourself for so long that you can’t tell what belongs to you anymore.

What changed wasn’t a single moment.

It was a question I couldn’t stop asking:

What if the distance I felt from myself wasn’t failure?

What if the rooms were just too small?

And then another question:

Who did I become to survive them?

UN-BEcomME™ exists because I needed somewhere to ask that honestly.

Not to reject who I became.

Not to shame the versions of me that protected me.

Some of them carried me.

Some of them helped me belong.

None of them were failures.

But survival isn’t the same thing as selfhood.

And eventually—

I wanted to know what remained when performance was no longer required.

This isn’t a publication about self-improvement.

It isn’t about becoming your best self.

It’s about remembering.

Sunday Letters holds the reflections.

For the Record holds the transactions beneath the summary—the ledger beneath the narrative.

UN-BEcomME™ holds the space for the return.

You do not have to become someone new.

You can start with remembering.

Because that’s where UN-BEcomME™ began.

— Sarah

UN-BEcomME™

Not becoming someone new.

Remembering who you were before performance.

For a long time, I thought growth meant adding.

More achievement.

More discipline.

More proof.

More versions of myself that could survive different rooms.

Some of those versions built my life.

Some protected me.

Some helped me belong.

None of them were failures.

But eventually I started asking a different question:

What remains when performance is no longer required?

UN-BEcomME™ exists inside that question.

Every week, Sunday Letters returns to the places that shaped us and asks what still belongs.

Not to erase who we became.

To understand her.

To thank her.

And to decide what comes forward.

Some reflections become letters.
Some become records.

Some ask for evidence.

For the Record exists for the things that don’t reconcile cleanly—the transactions beneath the summary, the ledger beneath the narrative, the parts that asked for more space.

This is not self-improvement.

It is not reinvention.

It is a practice of return.

You do not need to catch up before you belong here.

Start wherever you are.

And eventually, there was someone standing inside one of them.

Someone whose world looked nothing like mine.

He grew up caught in the center of chaos he didn’t choose. It swirled around him for years. He was never the cause, but he was always in the middle of it.

People around him became bitter about their choices. Let situations define their expectations.

But somewhere in all that, he learned something most people never do: how to love without performing it.

For years, I believed love was something you earned.

By performing. By proving. By becoming easier to keep around.

The Keeper knew how to do that. She’d spent her whole life reading rooms and adjusting herself to fit inside them. Calibrating. Disappearing. Making herself small enough that nobody would leave.

And then I met someone who wasn’t asking me to become anything.

Not softer. Not smaller. Not less ambitious. Not more maternal. Not more agreeable.

He wasn’t evaluating whether I fit into his life. He was building a life and inviting me to stand inside it exactly as I was.

I didn’t understand how disorienting that would be.

Because when you’ve spent years calibrating yourself to fit the room, unconditional respect feels almost suspicious.

I kept waiting for the requirement. The catch. The version of me he’d eventually ask for.

It never came.

For the first time in my life, I was allowed to choose.

Not perform the choice. Not calibrate what choice would be acceptable. Actually choose.

He saw my too-muchness. My ambition. The intensity that everyone else wanted smaller. And he didn’t tolerate it — he made room for it. He made room for someone like me.

I’d spent my whole life believing that wanting myself meant I had to apologize for it.

He showed me I didn’t.

The Keeper got quiet for a while.

May started to show.

I came into his life with one boundary I wouldn’t move: I would not perform motherhood. I had my own education, my own career, my own life I was building. I made that clear from the beginning.

He respected it without trying to negotiate it.

That was new.

That distinction mattered more than I understood at the time.

Because there are ways we become responsible without ever being asked.

There are roles we inherit quietly.

Roles that teach us love is anticipation. Staying. Becoming easier to keep around.

I knew that language well.

So when someone respected a boundary instead of negotiating it, I didn’t experience freedom first.

I experienced confusion. Then grief. Then relief.

My mother was my constant growing up. She protected me. She shielded me from chaos. I watched her do that.

And then I watched him do it too — for his three sons, every single day. He became both. Mother and father. The steady thing in a house that had no ground. He absorbed everything and chose happiness anyway. Never once letting them see him break. Never once making them responsible for his sacrifice.

I never required validation. But I do require respect.

And he gave it to me. Every single day for nine years. Even when everything was loudest. Even when loving me meant showing up differently than anyone expected.

He gave me something I hadn’t known I was missing: the clarity that you are enough, exactly as you are, without performing a single thing.

I came looking for a bigger room.

What I found was a man who’d been building one all along.

Not a bigger room because it had more space.

A bigger room because nobody inside it was asking me to become someone else in order to stay.

I didn’t realize it then, but I wasn’t just learning how to be loved.

I was grieving.

Grieving every place I’d learned to earn it.

Every room that taught me belonging could be negotiated.

Every version of myself that thought being chosen meant becoming smaller first.

Realizing that didn’t make those rooms evil.

It just made this one different.

Some of those places deserve more space than this letter can hold.

I spent four years being loved before my foundation cracked.

And I realized I had only been watching the surface of it.

But that’s another story.

That’s For the Record.

Still learning what it means to be chosen exactly as I am —

May

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters Vol. 7

But if you want to keep reading,
I’ll meet you next Sunday.

I wanted him to know me.

Not the version of me that was manageable. Not the version that placed second at nationals, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business, moved across the country, built a career & while doing that got her MBA. Not the version that performed well enough to earn a text message saying he was proud.

The real version. The one with too much confidence in her own understanding. The one who felt deeply and thought fiercely and never quite learned how to make herself smaller for anyone.

Whether he couldn’t meet me, didn’t know how to, or simply never learned the language I was speaking — I don’t know.

I only know what it felt like to keep reaching.

The record continues below.

Not because the answer is there.

Just because the rest of the account does.

Read more

They tell you about the courage it takes. The leap. The reinvention. The way a new city can feel like a clean page, like possibility before it becomes complicated.

What they don't tell you is what you bring with you.

I left because I needed a room where nobody knew the old story. Where the verdict hadn't already been written before I walked in. Where I could just be — whoever I was becoming — without the weight of every room that had shaped me pressing down on every new introduction.

The decision wasn't clean. Nothing that real ever is. The life I had known was shifting around me in ways I hadn't planned for — relationships ending, people I loved moving toward their own lives, the particular loneliness of watching the people closest to you grow in directions that don't include you the way they used to. The judgment. The rooms that had already decided who I was. The version of myself I had been performing for people who still saw the girl I used to be rather than the woman I was trying to become.

So I left. Alone. By choice.

And for one week, I wasn't alone at all.

Then the person who had been my anchor in that new place was gone — deployed — and I was standing in a city where nobody knew my name. My history. My too-muchness. Any of the rooms that had built me or broken me or both.

I remember the specific quality of that silence. Not peaceful. Like the first night in a house with no furniture. Too much room for everything I'd been outrunning.

Here is what I did with that silence: I filled it.

Because that is what The Keeper does. She doesn't sit with discomfort — she builds around it. She makes herself useful. She fills the schedule, finds the community, switches careers when something doesn't align, takes on new challenges in new industries, networks in rooms that feel foreign until she learns their language.

And she did all of that. Remarkably well.

New city. New career. New rooms. A different industry, a different culture, a different way of showing up professionally. She adapted to all of it. She met people. She built a life. She made Texas feel like something that could eventually be called home.

What she couldn't do — what she was never designed to do — was let May lead.

Because every new room still came with the same question running underneath it: How much of me is this room actually able to hold?

And The Keeper — loyal, efficient, exhausted — would walk in first. Decide what version of me this room could hold. And I'd follow her lead. Every time. Because I already knew what happened when I didn't.

Most of the time, she chose manageable.

Because manageable people don't get abandoned. At least that's what she believed. Not consciously. Not in words. But somewhere along the way she had become convinced that intensity had consequences.

Need less. Care less. Reveal less. Become easier to hold.

Because every time someone left, The Keeper didn't ask whether they were meant to stay. She asked whether May was simply too much to stay for.

The hardest part of this to name is that it looked like thriving.

From the outside — and sometimes even from the inside — the first years in Texas looked like a woman building something real. New industry. New community. The Keeper built something genuinely real.

But underneath the building — the same fear that had always been there was still running the decisions. The same question The Keeper had been carrying since the first room handed her a verdict she hadn't earned.

Will they accept all of me? Or just the version I've made manageable enough to belong?

She didn't know yet that the answer wasn't going to come from finding the right room.

It was going to come from May deciding that the rooms that couldn't hold her were simply too small.

I watched a woman survive in a male-dominated industry by making herself smaller. By extracting everything from the work without letting the work require anything real from her. She'd been in it longer than me. She'd learned the language of survival.

I chose differently.

I put in my notice. I didn't explain it in a way that would make it comfortable for anyone else to understand. I took a month off. And when I came back, I moved to a bigger company — one that was predominantly male, built on concrete and electrical wire and the kind of work my father had known before it all fell through.

I had a degree he never got. Knowledge I'd earned. And I walked into accounting and finance in a world that had never made space for women like me — and I trusted that what I knew was enough.

They were the first room that actually used what I brought. Not just the performance of competence. The real thing. They built me from the ground up instead of extracting what I'd already done for myself.

And somewhere in that season — in the choosing of a bigger room, the month off I didn't apologize for, the apartment I got on my own for the first time — May started to lead.

Not loudly. Not all at once. But she stopped waiting for The Keeper's assessment before walking through the door.

I've spent a lot of time in this series talking about rooms. The ones that held me. The ones that made me small. The ones I left, the ones I lost, the ones I built myself.

What I haven't said yet — what Vol. 6 requires me to say — is this:

The Keeper isn't just a response to bad rooms. She's a response to the fear of what happens in good ones.

Because good rooms are dangerous too. Good rooms ask you to be fully present. To show up without the calibration. To let yourself be known rather than just seen. And for someone who has spent years learning that full presence carries a cost — that being too much, too loyal, too intense eventually sends people toward the exit — a good room isn't always safety.

Sometimes it's the most terrifying thing in the world.

Because if you show up fully in a good room and they still leave — you don't have the protection of telling yourself the room was wrong. You just have the rawness of having been exactly yourself and still not being enough.

That's what The Keeper was protecting against. Not just bad rooms. The risk of good ones.

I've been more afraid of good rooms than bad ones my whole life. And I couldn't have told you that until right now.

Vol. 6 isn't the resolution. It's the recognition.

The recognition that The Keeper did what she came to do. She kept me safe. She built real things in real rooms with real stakes. I don't carry shame about that.

But I also know this now: she was never protecting me from danger. She was protecting me from rooms that were too small to hold all of me. And for a long time, I let her — because I didn't know yet that the rooms could get bigger.

They can.

They did.

The apartment I got on my own. The job I left without performing an explanation. The industry I walked into carrying my father's knowledge and my own degree and the refusal to make myself manageable just to survive it.

New state. Same me. Different room.

That's when The Keeper's job started finishing. Not because the threat was gone. Because May finally had rooms that could actually hold her.

And once you know what it feels like to be held — you stop letting anyone convince you that shrinking is safety.

Still learning which parts are hers and which parts were always mine —

May

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters Vol. 6

NEXT WEEK

There is one thing I haven't told you yet.

What happens after you finally find a bigger room.

What happens when someone walks into it.

Not someone who understands your story. Not someone who came from the same world.

Someone who couldn't have been more different from me if we had tried.

Vol. 7 begins there.

It isn’t always loud. It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like sleeping through things you used to care about. Avoiding the conversations you know you need to have. Going through the motions of a life that used to feel like yours and noticing — quietly, in the back of your mind — that you don’t recognize yourself in it anymore.

That was me. Not all at once. Gradually, and then completely.

I grew up as the fourth of five children. In a family where expectation wasn’t optional — it was the foundation. My parents instilled that in us young, and looking back now I am forever grateful for it. That expectation is part of what kept me from going under completely when everything else started falling apart.

But growing up the fourth sibling in a small community where everyone knew everyone meant something else too: by the time I walked into any room, people already had a story about who I was. Our family was known — for the athletics, for the involvement, for showing up. And that reputation, good and complicated, walked into every room before I did.

Most of the rooms in that school were fair. But there was one that wasn’t. A teacher who was new to the school — but not new to the complicated social geography of a small community where everyone’s history with everyone else runs deeper than it appears on the surface. For three years — freshman through junior year — no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I showed up, the grade never changed. “a “C”every time.” As if the verdict had been written before I ever walked in.

The moment my mom pulled me out of that class and put me in an online course through the university, I got an A.

Same me. Different room.

That was one room. But the rooms were everywhere. The social dynamics of a small town where everyone already knows everyone. The cliques. The rumors that spread — things that were never true, told by people who never came to me directly. The particular weight of being handed a narrative you didn’t write and watching it become the story people believed about you.

I was the fourth sibling. I was the loud one. The too-much one. The one who was supposed to fit a mold that had already been cast. And when I didn’t — when things got rocky, when the rooms closed, when the people who were supposed to be in my corner weren’t — the spiral got quieter and deeper.

At some point I stopped fighting it. I stopped going to school. I stopped wanting to face the day. I let the weight of everyone else’s story about me become the only story I could hear.

That’s the part nobody posts about. The part that doesn’t have a clean caption.

Here’s what I want to say to anyone reading this who is in that place right now — or who has been, or who loves someone who is:

The spiral isn’t evidence of weakness. It’s evidence of how long you’ve been carrying something too heavy without the right kind of help. And the silence around it — the not talking about it, the performing fine, the sleeping through what you can’t face — that silence doesn’t protect you. It just makes the spiral quieter. Which makes it harder to find.

Men go through this too. They just have different permission structures around admitting it. Different rooms with different unspoken rules about what’s allowed to be said out loud. And so the spiral goes unnamed. The weight goes unshared. And people spend years wondering why they don’t feel like themselves without ever having the language to say: I think I’ve been in rooms that made me small, and I don’t know how to find my way out.

There was an adult who saw me before I could see myself. Who didn't look away when everything felt like too much — and when others had. Who understood that years of loyalty and history shouldn't be erased by a person's hardest season. That person told my mom. My mom didn't wait for me to be ready — she made the call. And that's the thing about the people who truly love you: they don't always wait for permission to save you from yourself.

I walked into that first therapy session carrying everything I’d been managing for years. The version of myself I’d been presenting to every room. The calibrated, handled, here’s-what-you’re-allowed-to-see version.

I didn’t have a name for her then.

I do now.

The Keeper.

The woman I built very carefully. The one who learned how to survive rooms that had already decided who I was before I arrived. The one who learned how to carry expectations, disappointment, judgment, and silence without letting anyone see how heavy they had become.

She wasn’t a failure. She was a feat of engineering.

And she was exhausted.

That’s the thing about a room where judgment isn’t part of the contract — it doesn’t just see you. It sees what you’ve been carrying. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have to pretend the weight wasn’t there.

That’s a different kind of room.

Not because therapists are magic. But because judgment isn’t part of the contract. She didn’t know my family. She didn’t know the community. She didn’t have a story about who I was supposed to be. She just had me — whatever I brought into that room — and the professional obligation to hold it without weaponizing it.

The first session was scary. Uncomfortable in the way that things are uncomfortable when they’re real. But what I’ve learned — from that room and from every uncomfortable room since, including this brand — is that the scary uncomfortableness is exactly where you need to be. The fear isn’t a warning. It’s a signal that something true is happening.

She spoke life back into me. Not by fixing anything. Not by telling me what to do. But by saying the thing I hadn’t heard in so long I’d forgotten it was possible:

It’s okay not to be okay.

That permission changed everything. Because suddenly I didn’t have to manage how much pain I showed. Didn’t have to be the villain in everyone else’s story while quietly drowning in my own.

I could just — be in a room where the truth was safe.

I’ve felt that permission three times in my life. Once in that therapy room. Once after college when I found my way back again. And once — the most recent, the most deliberate — when UN-BEcomME™ became real.

Because that’s what this space is. A room where the truth is safe. Where being seen doesn’t cost you anything. Where the spiral you’ve been hiding doesn’t make you a villain — it makes you human.

The expectation my parents built into me didn’t break under the weight of those years. It bent. It got quiet. But it never disappeared.

Therapy didn’t teach me something new.

It helped me find my way back to someone I’d always known.

I call her May.

She existed before the protection. Before I learned how to survive.

She was never gone. She was just waiting for The Keeper to realize she didn’t have to stand watch forever.

If you’re in the spiral right now — this is me telling you.

It’s okay not to be okay. And it’s okay to let someone see that.

Same me. Different room.

Sometimes the thing that changes your life isn’t becoming someone new. It’s finally being seen as who you’ve been all along.

And so, for the first time in a long time, I let the silence sit with me. Not to solve anything. But to notice what I no longer have to outrun. And maybe — just maybe — that quiet is the first step toward remembering who you were before you had to survive.

Sit with that. When the time is right, I’ll meet you in the next room.

From someone who has been in the spiral and found her way back —

May

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters Vol. 5

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Not physical ones — though some of them were. I'm talking about the rooms that shape you before you know you're being shaped. The ones where you learn, without anyone saying it directly, exactly how much of yourself you're allowed to bring inside.

Every person has them. The rooms that held them. And the rooms that made them small.

This letter is about learning to tell the difference.

The first room that held me completely was one I'd been in since I was young. A place where the part of me that had always been called too much — too intense, too driven, too competitive — wasn't just tolerated. It was required. I gave everything to it. And it gave me something I didn't know I needed: proof that a room like that could exist at all.

And then one day — without warning, without a choice — that room was gone. Not because I left. Because it closed. The kind of closing that happens when something bigger than you makes a decision and you just have to absorb it. I was dropped off expecting one thing and found something else entirely.

When you find a room that holds all of you — you don't forget it. Even when it closes.

I found a second room. And it gave me everything the first one had — the intensity had a home again, the competitiveness had a purpose, the too-muchness was currency. I lived and breathed it. It became my identity. The place where I knew exactly who I was and nobody asked me to be less of it.

That room closed too. Not cleanly. Not without complexity. I made a decision I own — one I've carried the weight of for a long time. But the closing wasn't just about my decision. There were adults in that room who had the power to respond with fairness and chose instead to make it personal. Who used their authority to settle something that had nothing to do with me. And I paid a price far larger than the one I'd earned.

Both things are true. I've learned to hold them that way.

Here's what nobody tells you about growing up as an athlete — about building your entire identity around being the best, around perfectionism, around showing up and outworking everyone in the room:

It prepares you for almost everything. And nothing.

The mindset that makes you excellent in a gym or on a court — the drive, the discipline, the refusal to accept anything less than your best — is a gift in the rooms that reward it. But walk that same mindset into a boardroom, a classroom, a new job, a new city, a new life — and suddenly the traits that made you exceptional start getting labeled differently. Too aggressive. Too intense. Too much.

The rooms changed. But nobody told you the rules had changed with them.

So you did what you'd always done — you adapted. You pushed harder. You found a way to fit. And when the intensity that had always been your greatest asset became the thing you had to manage, hide, and apologize for — you looked for a way to make yourself work in the new room. Not question whether the room was right for you.

That's when the adjusting started. The calibrating. The slow, quiet work of becoming a version of yourself that could exist in rooms that weren't built for all of you.

We grew up in a time when the rooms weren't just physical anymore.

The internet arrived and suddenly the social dynamics that used to live in hallways and gymnasiums had a platform. A ranking system. A public record. You could log on and see, in real time, exactly where you stood. Who had chosen you. Who hadn't. What people were saying when they thought you weren't watching — except now you were always watching, because the watching never stopped.

That era handed us something that felt like connection but was actually something else entirely: a mirror that only showed you what other people thought. And when you're young and still figuring out who you are, looking into that mirror for too long teaches you to see yourself through everyone else's eyes instead of your own.

And then came the boards. The pins. The carefully curated images of the life you were supposed to want — the home, the wardrobe, the career, the aesthetic of a woman who had it all figured out. It all looked so attainable. So close. Just work hard enough, want it badly enough, become the right version of yourself — and all of it could be yours.

Nobody told us that what we were pinning wasn't just aspirational. It was a blueprint for a life that most of us would spend years chasing without ever fully arriving. Not because we weren't capable. But because nobody had thought to tell us that the gap between the board and the reality was by design — not a failure on our part.

Nobody knew how dangerous it could be for a young person's sense of self to spend years measuring their real life against a curated version of someone else's. We didn't have the language for it. We didn't have the research. We just had the feeling — quiet, persistent, impossible to name — that no matter how hard we tried, we were somehow always falling short of the version of ourselves we were supposed to be.

The rooms were everywhere. And they all taught variations of the same lesson.

Some rooms ranked you publicly and called it community. Some rooms handed you an image of adulthood and called it inspiration. Some rooms had expectations so unspoken you didn't realize you were violating them until you already had. And some rooms had people in positions of authority who forgot — or chose to forget — that their job was to protect the people in their care, not use them to settle something personal.

Not every room was bad. Some had people in them who genuinely saw you — who looked at the too-muchness and recognized it as a gift, not a problem. Who held the full version of you carefully and said yes to things the other rooms said no to. Those people exist. I had them. And I am convinced that knowing what those rooms felt like is what kept me from fully believing the other ones.

When you've experienced what it feels like to belong somewhere completely — when you've lived in a room that held all of you and asked for nothing in return — you carry that knowledge even when you can't access it. Even when every other room is telling you to make yourself smaller. Some part of you knows: that's not the truth about me. I've been somewhere that showed me otherwise.

At some point the rooms that were making me small stopped working. Not because they changed — they didn't. But because I did.

It wasn't dramatic. It didn't announce itself. It was more like exhaustion. The kind that comes not from what the day asked of me but from the constant work of managing myself within it. Of calibrating, adjusting, showing just enough and holding the rest back. Of being the version that fit the room instead of the version that was actually there.

And then something shifted. The best way I can describe it is this: your gut and your intuition will no longer allow you to keep going the way you've been going. You feel it before you understand it. A frequency shift. An energy that pulls at you. Your body starts to reject what you've been feeding it. And the inner voice — the one that has always known the truth about you, the one you've been managing and quieting and talking yourself out of for years — gets loud. So loud it becomes unbearable. So loud you can't not listen anymore.

And one day you look in the mirror and you don't recognize the person looking back. Not because something terrible happened. But because you've been so busy being the version that fit the rooms that you lost track of who was actually underneath her.

That moment — as disorienting as it is — is the beginning of everything.

Here's what I know now that I didn't know then:

The rooms that make you small are not the final word on who you are. They are not evidence of your limitations. They are evidence of their own.

A room that requires you to be less — less intense, less present, less yourself — is a room built too small. That's an architectural problem. Not a you problem.

And the most radical thing you can do — the thing that takes more courage than almost anything else — is to stop trying to fit into rooms that were never built for you. And start building one that was.

I'm building my own room now. The kind where you don't have to manage a single thing to belong here.

If you've ever stood outside a room wondering if you were too much to be let in — this one was built for you. Come in. You'll always have a place here.

From a room I built myself —

May

UN-BEcomME™ · Sunday Letters Vol. 4

Not out of deception. Out of survival.

You learned early that your depth made people uncomfortable. That your loyalty, your intensity, your way of feeling everything at full volume was somehow a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be honored.

So you managed it for them.

You calibrated. You softened edges that were never meant to be soft. You showed just enough to keep people close but held the rest back — tucked away in the part of you that knew, even then, that not everyone deserved full access.

And when the calibrating wasn’t enough — when your depth still spilled over the edges of what people could hold — they handed you a label.

Too much.

I want to talk about what those two words actually do to a person.

Because it isn’t just a passing comment. It doesn’t land and dissolve. It burrows. It finds the softest, most honest part of you — the part that was only ever trying to connect, to be real, to love without pretending — and it plants a question there that takes years to uproot.

What if they’re right?

And once that question takes root, everything shifts. You start editing yourself before you even open your mouth. You scan the room before you decide how much to feel out loud. You become so fluent in making others comfortable with your presence that you forget — slowly, quietly, devastatingly — what it felt like to simply be your presence without apology.

You start to see your depth as a defect. Your loyalty as naivety. Your intensity as instability.

And the cruelest part of all of it? Somewhere underneath all of that conditioning — underneath every layer of yourself you carefully constructed to manage other people’s comfort — there was a part of you that never fully believed it. A quiet, stubborn, unshakeable gut feeling that whispered:

This isn’t the truth about me.

That voice is the one worth listening to. It always was.

Here’s the part nobody talks about — the version of yourself you built so quietly, so efficiently, that you eventually stopped noticing she wasn’t really you.

She didn’t arrive as a dramatic moment of self-protection. She built herself one small adaptation at a time — until the adaptations became so familiar they stopped feeling like adaptations at all.

They just felt like you.

For some people it starts at home. For others it starts in classrooms or friendships or the first time someone they loved made them feel like their realness was an inconvenience.

And so the first adaptation formed — almost imperceptibly.

Visibility is risky.

Not a thought. A conclusion. Written into the nervous system through repetition long before I had the language to question it. The message wasn’t don’t be good. It was subtler and far more damaging than that.

Be careful how good you let yourself be seen to be.

The thing about this version of yourself is that she doesn’t demand you shrink entirely. She’s far more sophisticated than that.

She teaches you to manage your visibility. To read the room and calibrate your output accordingly. To sense — almost instinctively — how much of your capability, your depth, your realness the environment can tolerate before it turns on you.

And then she rewards you for that calibration with something that feels like safety. Which is why she’s so difficult to let go of.

Because she worked. That’s the thing nobody tells you — the version of yourself you built to survive was genuinely effective at the time. She protected something real. She kept you in rooms you needed to stay in. She helped you navigate seasons that would have cost you more if you’d moved through them fully unguarded.

She got up every single time the world tried to sit you down. She moved through seasons of darkness that would have broken someone less resourceful. She learned every room’s language and spoke it fluently — not because she was fake, but because she was capable. Remarkably, quietly, stubbornly capable.

She deserves to be honored before she’s released.

The problem was never that she existed. The problem is holding onto her long after the season that required her has passed.

Because she was never designed for thriving. She was designed for endurance. And when you’ve relied on her long enough — when she’s been reinforced by years of lived experience — releasing her doesn’t just feel uncomfortable.

It feels like a threat.

Because part of you doesn’t know the difference between a wall you built for protection and a wall that is now keeping you from the life you actually want. It just knows the wall has been there a long time. And anything that challenges it — any invitation to be more seen, more real, more unfiltered — gets flagged as danger before it ever gets evaluated as opportunity.

That’s not weakness. That’s what years of protecting yourself quietly does to a person.

Someone once told me — with full sincerity, “the best advice you’ll ever get is don’t suck.”

I laughed at the time. I carried it forever. Not because it was cruel — it wasn’t. But because something in me took that two-word instruction and ran it through every room I walked into after that. Don’t suck became a standard. The standard became a bar. The bar kept moving. And somewhere in the years between the advice and everything that followed, I stopped trying to do well and started trying to be flawless. In everything. In work, in friendship, in how I showed up, in how I was perceived, in how much space I allowed myself to take up.

Perfectionism isn’t the love of doing good work. It’s the fear of what happens if you don’t. And that fear — dressed up as a standard, rewarded by results — is one of the quietest and most suffocating things you can build around yourself.

It wasn’t until the crack opened that I understood: don’t suck was never the problem. The problem was what I thought had to be built around it.

And then the internet arrived. And that version of yourself found an architecture perfectly designed to house her.

Because what you had already mastered in real life — calibrate, adjust, show just enough — the internet didn’t just accommodate. It rewarded.

Suddenly she had metrics. Feedback loops. An algorithm that amplified the most palatable version of you and quietly buried the rest. An entire ecosystem built on the premise that visibility is currency — but only the right kind of visibility. Curated. Optimized. Safe enough to be consumed without discomfort.

It mirrored back exactly what she had spent years teaching you. This is how you stay relevant. This is how you keep people comfortable enough to stay. This is how you make yourself digestible enough that it doesn’t cost you anything.

Here is what makes this particularly insidious for people who have always felt things deeply, for old souls, for people who were never built for surface level anything — that version of you doesn’t just shape how you show up. Over time she begins to reshape what you believe about yourself. She accumulates enough history — enough evidence that the adjusting, the calibrating, the managing works — that she starts to feel indistinguishable from identity.

You stop asking is this really me? You just assume the answer is yes.

Until something cracks the assumption open. A loss. A betrayal. A season of life that demands more truth than the version of you that’s been managing everything knows how to give.

That crack — as disorienting as it is — is the beginning of everything.

There were seasons in my life that tried their hardest to silence that quiet inner voice.

Seasons where the people I had chosen — and chosen deliberately, with the full weight of my loyalty — revealed themselves to be incompatible with the frequency I was carrying. Not always loudly. Not always dramatically. But completely.

One came in the years when identity is still forming — when the stakes of belonging feel existential and the cost of telling the truth about what you see is paid in the currency of friendship. I paid it. I said what I saw. And I lost someone I had genuinely loved for it.

Another came later — in a chapter when I had done enough building to have something worth envying. And I learned, slowly and then all at once, that not everyone who celebrates you in the beginning can sustain that celebration when your growth begins to outpace their comfort.

Both seasons left marks. Both also left clarity.

Because revisiting them now — from this side of the unbecoming — what strikes me most is not the betrayal itself. It’s how each one sent me deeper into that protected, calibrated version of myself rather than out of her. How loss, layered on top of loss, confirmed the oldest adaptation:

Visibility is risky. Depth is dangerous. Be careful how much you let yourself be seen.

That confirmation was wrong. But it was understandable. And understanding it — without shame, without self-blame — is part of what the unbecoming actually requires.

Looking back now — and this required the unbecoming to see clearly — every season of loss was a redirection. Every person who couldn’t hold what I was offering, every room that turned on how much of myself I brought to it, every friendship that broke under the weight of my loyalty — all of it was pointing somewhere. Toward recollectME. Toward the nightstand drawer. Toward this letter. Toward the version of myself that was always going to end up here, writing the truth she’d been carrying for years.

Because no essay about the cost of being seen is complete without honoring the ones who made it safe.

There is a small, quiet handful of people who have known me across versions of myself I’m not sure I’d recognize anymore. People who showed up in the low moments without requiring me to have it together on a timeline. Who watched my life move and stayed anyway. Not loudly. Not with fanfare. Just — consistently, completely there.

I did not find them all at once. I recognized them over time.

That is what chosen family feels like. Not proximity. Not history alone. But the specific, rare experience of being known at your most unfiltered — and stayed with anyway.

They are proof that the right rooms exist. And the clearest evidence I have that the people who made me feel like too much were simply never the right witnesses.

Some people need what you carry — your warmth, your wisdom, your capacity to hold space for the full complexity of being human — but were never equipped to offer it back. And when you love the way I love, that imbalance doesn’t just sting. It shakes something foundational. Because the loyalty was never casual. It never has been.

I have always gravitated toward people older than me. Not because I was trying to seem sophisticated. But because I was searching for depth before I had the language to name what I was looking for — and I found it in unexpected places. In older friendships. In mentors. In a partner a decade older than me — not because of what that age gap represented on paper, but because of what it felt like to finally be in a room where depth wasn’t something to apologize for. Where I didn’t have to calibrate. Where my intensity wasn’t a problem to manage — it was just part of me.

That wasn’t a coincidence. That was frequency recognition.

Old souls don’t always find their people on a conventional timeline or in expected places. Because what they’re searching for was never proximity or convenience. It was always resonance.

Looking back now — and this required the unbecoming to see clearly — every season of loss was a redirection.

Every person who couldn’t hold what I was offering was simply incompatible with the frequency I was becoming. Their departure wasn’t evidence that I was too much. It was evidence that the room was too small.

The unbecoming isn’t about leaving yourself behind.

It’s about coming home to the version of yourself that existed before the adjusting, the calibrating, the managing of everyone else’s comfort moved in and stayed too long. Before the version of you that adapted got so familiar you forgot she was an adaptation. Before the internet handed you metrics for how well you were doing it and you mistook the validation for truth.

It’s about looking at the woman who carried you through the darkest seasons — honoring everything she endured, everything she built, everything she protected — and gently telling her:

You did what you came to do. I’ve got it from here.

Before too much attached itself to something that was only ever — exactly enough.

What I know now — and couldn’t have named then — is that the too-muchness was never the problem. Early on, there were people who held it as something worth nurturing. Where being a lot was met with patience and encouragement instead of correction. That thread continued into my formative years — the people I kept going back to long after, the ones who became anchors during the hardest seasons not because they fixed anything, but because they had already seen the real version of me and never flinched.

Those people gave me the earliest evidence that the right rooms exist. That the too-muchness, in the right hands, isn’t a burden. It’s a gift.

UN-BEcomME™ exists because I needed a name for this journey before I had the language to describe it. And now that I have the language — I know I’m not the only one who has been quietly exhausted from maintaining a version of themselves that was never really them.

— If you have ever felt the need to shrink yourself to fit a room that was never built for you — this is for you.

— If you have ever moved through a season of loss and let it confirm the oldest lie about yourself — this is for you.

— If you have scrolled through a feed full of curated versions of other people’s lives and felt lonelier for it — this is for you.

— If you have one person in your life who has seen all of you and stayed — hold them close. They are not coincidental. They are confirmation.

— And if you’re still waiting to find your people — they are looking for you too. In the same quiet, stubborn way you’ve always known they existed.

You were never too much.

You were just in the wrong rooms.

The right ones are still coming. Keep unbecoming.

From the right room, finally —

May🖤

UN-BEcomME™ · SUNDAY LETTERS VOL. 3

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