Becoming

It’s taken us time—years—to understand that this is just how each of us is built, that we are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them. Over time, we have figured out how to express and overcome our irritations and occasional rage. When we fight now, it’s f

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.

“I’m not raising babies,” she’d tell us. “I’m raising adults.”

It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging—the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.

zipped myself back into my junior-associate existence,

Until now, I’d constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami. I had labored over its creation. I was proud of how it looked. But it was delicate.

It’s a small moment, insignificant in the end. It’s still with me for no reason but the silliness, for how it unpinned me just briefly from the more serious agenda that guided my every day.

Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

I was still privately and at all times focused on the agenda.