There is a particular kind of grief that no one warns you about — the grief of realizing that the life you carefully built, the one that looked so right from the outside, was never really yours. Not the relationships, not the career, not even the version of yourself you showed the world every single day. Somewhere along the way, you handed over the pen and let everyone else write your story.

I know this grief. I lived inside it for longer than I want to admit. It is quiet and disorienting, the way a room looks different in different light. You wake up one morning and the familiar suddenly feels foreign. The life you constructed starts to feel like a costume — beautifully tailored, perfectly pressed, and suffocating you slowly.

Unbecoming is not a failure. It is the most honest, courageous thing a woman can do — to look at who she has been and choose, deliberately, to become something truer.

The moment everything shifted

For me, it wasn't a dramatic moment. There was no single event I can point to and say: that is where it started. It was more like a slow accumulation of mornings where I lay in bed a little too long. A gathering of small moments where I smiled at the right time, said the right thing, wore the right face — and felt nothing behind it.

The shift came when I stopped performing and started listening. Not to the noise outside — the opinions, the expectations, the well-meaning advice — but to the quieter voice underneath all of it. The one that had been waiting, patient and persistent, for me to finally get still enough to hear it.

What unbecoming actually looks like

It is not glamorous. Unbecoming looks like canceling plans because you need to sit with yourself. It looks like saying no to things that used to define you. It looks like the strange, uncomfortable space between who you were and who you are growing into — a space with no map, no GPS, and no guaranteed arrival time.

It looks like grief, and then relief. Like loss, and then freedom. Like falling apart, and then — slowly, tenderly — choosing which pieces to keep.

You didn't lose yourself. You outgrew a version of you that was never really free.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this right now — if you are sitting in the wreckage of a life that no longer fits and wondering how you got here — I want you to know something: this moment, as uncomfortable and disorienting as it feels, is not the end of your story. It is the beginning of the one that was always meant for you.

Bloom at your own pace, in your own season. I'll be right here.

With love,
Shardane'

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. I know it well — the bone-deep tiredness that comes from years of shaping yourself around the needs, the opinions, and the unspoken expectations of everyone around you. From shrinking in some rooms and performing in others. From saying yes when every cell in your body was whispering no.

For most of my life, I was very good at this. I called it being adaptable. I called it being selfless. I called it love. It took me a long time — and two cities, and more than a few quietly broken seasons — to understand that it was none of those things. It was disappearing. Slowly. Politely. With a smile on my face.

I wasn't living my life. I was managing everyone else's comfort at the expense of my own becoming.

Chicago cracked me open

On April 30th, 2023, I moved to Chicago. I did not know then how much that city would undo me — in the most necessary way.

There is a slowness to Chicago that a lot of cities do not allow — a kind of groundedness in the architecture, the neighborhoods, the pace of ordinary life — that made the noise inside me harder to run from. I could not outpace myself there. And eventually, I stopped trying.

For a little over two years — through the winters that felt endless, the summers that felt like grace, and every quiet Thursday evening in between — I began the slow and uncomfortable work of asking myself a question I had spent years avoiding: What do I actually want? Not what looks right. Not what makes me easier to love. Not what keeps the peace. What do I want?

The answers surprised me. Some of them scared me. Some of them required me to disappoint people I cared about, to step back from relationships that had been built on the version of me I was retiring, to grieve a self that had served me well for a long time but had finally outlived her purpose.

Choosing yourself is not a single dramatic moment. It is a thousand small decisions to stop abandoning yourself for other people's comfort.

New York showed me how far I had come

On September 13th, 2024, I moved to New York City. And everything was different — not because the city was different, but because I was.

New York does not let you be small quietly. The city has a velocity that either pulls you forward or swallows you whole. But I arrived there as someone who had already done the hard work of getting still. I had already sat with the uncomfortable questions in Chicago. I had already made the difficult choices. I had already started becoming someone I actually recognized.

For 18 months in New York — in all its noise and relentlessness and beautiful overwhelm — I discovered something I needed to see: that the woman who had learned to choose herself in the quiet of Chicago could hold onto herself even in the loudest city in the world. That the work I had done was real. That I was not performing anymore.

New York gave me everything I thought I wanted. And this time, I actually knew the difference between wanting it and needing it to feel whole.

What living for everyone else actually costs

We do not talk enough about what it costs. Not the big, obvious losses — but the slow, quiet accumulation of the ones that happen when you are too busy managing everyone else's experience of you to notice.

It costs you your voice — the real one, not the edited version that you've learned is easier for people to receive. It costs you your instincts, because you spend so long overriding them in favor of what seems reasonable, what seems kind, what seems like the right thing to do. It costs you time — years of it — that you spend in places, relationships, and versions of yourself that never quite fit because you chose them for someone else.

And perhaps most quietly devastating: it costs you your own company. When you have spent so long being who everyone needs you to be, you stop knowing who you are when no one is watching.

I had become so good at being who everyone needed that I had completely forgotten to ask who I needed to be.

The moment I chose differently

It did not happen all at once. There was no single morning I woke up transformed. What happened was more like a series of small, imperfect, sometimes terrifying choices — each one a little more honest than the last.

I started saying no to things that looked good but felt wrong. I started showing up to conversations as myself rather than as the version of me I thought the other person needed. I started making decisions — small ones first, then larger ones — based on what I actually wanted, rather than what would cause the least disruption to everyone around me.

It started in Chicago — in the quiet, in the cold, in the slow accumulation of mornings where I finally stopped running from myself. And it continued in New York, where I arrived not as a woman searching, but as a woman who had begun to know herself. Two cities. Two chapters. One long, necessary undoing — and the most important beginning of my life.

She didn't find herself all at once. She found herself in the choosing — again and again, imperfectly, until the choosing became who she was.

And now — San Francisco.

I am writing this from a city I am still learning. San Francisco is new ground — unfamiliar streets, a slower sky, a different kind of light. I am not here because I have it all figured out. I am here because I finally trust myself enough to stay somewhere without needing it to be permanent. To be present without needing it to be the answer.

This is what choosing yourself actually looks like in practice. Not a dramatic arrival. Not a perfectly planned next chapter. Just a woman, in a new city, staying over — and for the first time in a long time, feeling entirely at home inside herself while she figures out the rest.

San Francisco is not the destination. It is proof that I no longer need one.

What I want you to know

If you are somewhere in the middle of this — if you are exhausted from being everything to everyone, if you have forgotten what it feels like to make a decision that is entirely for you — I want you to know that the version of you who chooses herself is not selfish. She is not difficult. She is not too much.

She is the woman you were always meant to become. And she has been waiting, patient and persistent, for you to finally get quiet enough to hear her.

You are allowed to stop performing. You are allowed to disappoint people in the direction of your own becoming. You are allowed to take up space — not the space that was assigned to you, but the space that is actually yours.

The life that fits you is not the one you built around everyone else. It is the one you build, slowly and courageously, around the truest version of yourself.

That is not the easy work. But it is the only work that matters.

With love,
Shardane'