Unbecoming

This poem explores my journey of unbecoming towards greater integrity.

Moving through a landscape of symbolic deaths, it names identities, expectations, beliefs, and patterns that once seemed necessary for my wholeness but eventually became burdens to authenticity.

Unbecoming is not presented as easy or orderly. It is a process of loss, uncertainty, and disintegration.

But beneath everything that falls away is the possibility that wholeness was never something to construct.

Perhaps it was something to uncover.

This is the title poem and introduction of my published collection, Unbecoming. It earned that role because it gave language to a process I had been living through since early high school, but only began to distinguish clearly at the point I wrote this poem a decade later.

For much of my life, I understood growth primarily as becoming: becoming better, wiser, more capable, more accomplished, more whole. There was always something to improve, acquire, understand, or eventually become.

Sometimes those were things I pursued for myself. More often, they were things I pursued because other people, systems, and social contracts said I should.

But much of my deepest transformation has looked almost exactly opposite.

It has involved relinquishment:

• Beliefs I once organized my life around.
• Expectations I mistook for responsibility.
• Perfectionism that promised safety.
• Conformity that offered belonging at the expense of authenticity.
• Attempts to control uncertainty.
• Ways of loving that asked me to abandon myself.

The deaths in this poem are intentionally dramatic because many of these losses felt dramatic from the inside. Even when something no longer serves us, letting it go can feel like losing part of ourselves.

That is what I mean when I call this place a “graveyard of disintegrity.”

The road to integrity, at least in my experience, has required the death of what was incongruent with it. Beliefs, identities, expectations, and patterns can become so entangled with our sense of self that their loss feels like our own disintegration.

• But perhaps what is disintegrating is not the self.
• Perhaps it is everything that kept the self divided against itself.

And the image that matters most to me arrives near the end:

“That I was whole
Beneath these corpses
Which I bore dead on my back”

That realization fundamentally changes what unbecoming means to me.

If these things were already dead, releasing them was not destroying myself. I was carrying the remains of identities and ways of living that had ceased to be alive (or maybe never were in the first place). I kept carrying them simply because I still believed I needed them.

I didn't.

Unbecoming, then, is not an attempt to become nothing.

It is the process of discovering what remains when I stop confusing every belief I have accumulated about myself with who I actually am.

That is why I think of the destination as “feral freedom.” Not freedom from responsibility or relationship, but freedom from performing a self that no longer feels true.

The final stanza does not declare the process finished:

“Until this land
Of liberating loss
Said it's time to unpack”

There is still work to do.

There are still things to examine, grieve, integrate, and release.

But perhaps integrity begins there: with the willingness to put down what is already dead and discover what has been alive underneath it all along.