Unbecoming: The Journey No One Prepares You For

A few mornings ago, I got a message from a stranger named Caleigh. But it didn’t feel like a stranger wrote it.

She said, “The person you are becoming — or unbecoming — is the purpose of the path.”

I froze. Stared at those words like they were written in highlighter on the back of a job rejection email. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Because lately, I’ve been unbecoming.

Not by choice. Not with grace. But the kind of unbecoming that looks like staring out the window at 2 a.m. with a half-melted popsicle in hand, whispering, “Lord, I am tired. And also, do popsicles count as a meal now?”

You know what I mean. This season where everything you thought was stable — your career, your routine, your sense of identity — just kind of… evaporates.

It starts when you lose a job, or get ghosted by a company that told you they were “thrilled to meet you.” You try to make sense of it. You write another cover letter, reframe your résumé, take another assessment that tells you you’re “a blue-leaning yellow with empathetic overtones and moderate conflict avoidance.”

And after all that?

Silence.

So what do you do? You start questioning not just the process — but yourself.

“Was I not good enough?”

“Too old?”

“Too honest?”

“Too… me?”

That’s when the real unbecoming begins.

You begin to shed the parts of you that were built for other people’s approval.

You let go of the version of yourself that kept showing up with a fake smile in toxic meetings.

You release the mindset that told you, “Don’t speak up — they might not like you.”

You discard the pressure to have a perfect LinkedIn summary and an even more perfect answer to “Tell me about yourself.”

Unbecoming is terrifying. It’s lonely. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t come with a certificate or a shiny new title. It’s just… raw.

But it’s also holy.

It’s where you find yourself again.

Somewhere in that mess, you rediscover the parts of you that weren’t born from a performance review. The parts that loved people deeply. That created. That laughed. That dared to dream before corporate culture told you dreams had to come with quarterly KPIs.

Caleigh — in the middle of her own journey — turned her unbecoming into music. She made it art. She made it a soundtrack for people like us who are trying to heal out loud.

And maybe that’s the whole point of all this: when you lose what defined you, you make room for what sustains you.

Maybe you weren’t supposed to fit into the systems that burned you out.

Maybe your greatest strength was never your “adaptability” or your “strategic mindset.”

Maybe it was your willingness to unbecome everything the world told you to be — so you could finally become who you actually are.

So here’s to the unpolished.

To the ones in transition.

To the folks sipping microwaved coffee while rewriting their résumés for the fifth time this week.

To the people crying on the floor and calling it “resting in the Spirit.”

To the ones who still dare to hope.

You’re not falling apart. You’re unbecoming.

And that’s not failure.

That’s freedom.