After the Last Page

If you've arrived here after reading Unbecoming, thank you for walking this path with me. And if this is your first encounter with the collection, you're welcome here too.

There are things I can see now that I couldn't see while I was writing it. Patterns that only became visible once enough pieces had fallen into place. And there are things I wrote then that I am still learning how to live now.

In many ways, Unbecoming began long before I knew I was writing it.

The first poem in the collection, Spring, was written seven years before the rest of the book took shape. I could never have anticipated where my life would go from there. Yet even then I was writing about death and decay giving birth to something new—about endings as part of a larger cycle of becoming.

Years later, about ten months before this collection existed, the word Unbecoming came to me as the title for a potential prose memoir. I held onto it, even as that book never materialized. And I kept writing poems.

At first, there was no plan. They emerged one by one from whatever I was living, feeling, questioning, grieving, discovering, or trying to understand. It wasn't until late May of 2026 that I began to recognize how many of them seemed to be tracing the same underlying movement:

I decided the title Unbecomingbelonged to these myriad stanzas instead. Even then, I don't think I understood quite how well it fit. Not until I wrote the eponymous poem, Unbecoming, on June 2, 2026.

There are at least two meanings held inside that word for me. The first is the most obvious throughout this collection: un-becoming as a process of unraveling false identities and shedding what was never truly mine. Of letting expectations, beliefs, obligations, performances, and ideas of who I thought I needed to be fall away. Not becoming someone new so much as discovering what remains beneath everything that was never really mine.

But there is another meaning that I find equally important.

We sometimes describe behavior that violates our expectations of someone as “unbecoming.” Improper. Inappropriate. Unsuitable for the person we believe them to be.

And I have come to think that unbecoming in the first sense often requires being unbecoming in the second.

Authenticity is not always polite.

Sometimes it looks like saying no where you were expected to say yes. Wanting what you were taught not to want. Refusing responsibilities you were praised for carrying. Breaking rules that once made you legible to other people. Being louder, stranger, softer, angrier, queerer, more sensual, more selfish, more honest, more alive than the version of you that others learned to expect—and perhaps even than the version of yourself that you believe is tolerable.

Sometimes becoming more fully yourself requires becoming profoundly unbecoming of who you were supposed to be.

I think these poems trace my discovery of that. But discovering something is not the same as fully embodying it.

I wrote in Mutation that:

Mutation happens in an instant

Integration does not

I understand those words better now.

There are moments throughout this collection when I touched something that felt completely true. Moments when I understood power, freedom, sexuality, self-compassion, integrity, or my own indestructibility with a clarity that felt almost absolute.

I can write about being unshakeable and still wake up the next morning feeling shaken. I can understand that power does not depend upon my circumstances changing and still desperately want them to change.

I can believe that my desires and needs are worthy of being honored and still ache when they remain unmet. I can glimpse a freer relationship with my body, sexuality, intimacy, and pleasure without yet knowing what it will mean to fully live those things.

I wish I could tell you that the final pages of this collection resolved everything contained within them.

They didn't.

Many of the circumstances named in these poems remain unresolved even as I write this. I am still living in the childhood home I returned to. My parents' divorce is still unfolding. I am still helping care for my mom. I still carry questions about my relationship with my dad that I have not answered. I am still single and learning how to hold deep romantic longing alongside a life that feels simultaneously whole and incomplete. My body still hurts quite often. I still struggle with faith, trust, money, uncertainty, and the terrifying inability to know what comes next.

I do not know where I will be living six months from now. I do not know what shape love will take in my life. I do not know exactly how I will support myself.

I do not know whether some of the things I have hoped for so fiercely will ever arrive. I do not know whether the person I am becoming will agree with everything the person who wrote this book believed.

What I still don't know is so much.

Perhaps that is why I resist declaring Unbecoming a completed transformation—as though I moved cleanly from one definite state into another.

There is no finished state here.

There is only the strange rhythm I was already writing about seven years ago:

Again and again.

The first poem in this collection says:

For out of old death

may seeded life beget:

That all the many cycles

of life unto death

Are merely the exhale

'ere the next breath.

I did not know then what those words would come to mean in my own life. I still don't know everything they will mean.

Perhaps I never will.

This book is my path. I don't expect yours to look anything like it.

But perhaps somewhere within these pages you recognized a question that belongs to you, too…