An entry from my journal written in the back of a yellow cab last week:
How do we become?
Is becoming something that happens after we arrive, once the story finally sounds respectable? Or does it happen earlier, before anything is resolved, when we are still living inside something that did not work, and do not yet know how to say it.
What are we in those stretches?
When a marriage ends and reorganizes your life. Or the work you believed in does not find its audience. Or when you want desperately to say the right thing, but your voice fails you and you cannot undo it.
Do those moments reduce us?
Or do they simply find us in the middle of something unfinished?
I keep coming back to an idea that becoming depends less on achievement and more on permission.
The permission to be unfinished in front of other people without being humiliated for it. The ability to speak without rehearsing — to try without having to prove that the attempt will pay off.
There is research emerging that points to this. This isn't motivation or advice, more of an observation: People grow more honest, more capable, more themselves when they are not bracing for punishment. When uncertainty is not treated as incompetence, being human comes more naturally.
I can tell you that safety does not arrive after success. It must exist before. It is built through steadiness, trust, and restraint — while someone is still figuring out who they are becoming.
The world offers loud explanations: that you are nobody until you are chosen. And being chosen requires a kind of self-erasure. The best in the world constantly tell us that we must harden, perform, or burn in order to belong.
I do not believe that.
There is a way to move forward without disappearing. A way to be shaped by pressure without being reduced by it.
And if you stay there long enough, people stop asking for proof.
They want to know something else, and those questions are way more interesting.
How did you carry yourself like that when nothing was guaranteed? How did you stay intact while the ending was still unclear?
Those answers will bring you closer to becoming than success ever will.