Hi, I’m Aliyah.
For a long time, I was really good at building a life that looked right.
I had multiple good jobs with “respectable titles”. I have a Master’s Degree that I worked myself into the ground for because I was told it was the thing that would finally make me secure.
I followed the path that everyone and their mother advised me to follow, and I made it look so good that I had everyone fooled. I was exhausted in a way I couldn't explain to anyone. I was tired from working too hard, but what sat heavier for me was the never-ending performance. I spent a sad amount of time performing a version of myself that I'd never actually chosen and sitting in rooms that drained me. I was tired of watching the gap between what my life looked like and what it actually felt like get wider every year, and not having language for any of it.
I didn’t have a dramatic breakdown moment. I just got to a point where I couldn’t pretend the gap wasn’t there anymore.
At some point, I started paying close attention to a question that had been whirling around in my subconscious: why does it feel like everyone else has figured something out that we haven’t? I’d watch people on social media who seemed to have built their dream life, found freedom, started a successful business, and significantly increased their income.
I never saw a struggle. There was no “middle” documented. Just the arrival.
I knew that wasn’t the full story. I knew because eventually, my partner and I were living the full story, and it looked nothing like that.
The full story was years of unlearning, disorientation, a vicious cycle of “Am I doing this right or am I just destroying everything, trying that didn’t work, staying in things too long because we didn’t trust our own instincts yet. It was years of watching people around us moving through life with such ease that we couldn’t seem to adopt or figure out. I’d wonder what they knew that I didn’t. Whether something was wrong with me. Whether I was the problem.
Nobody shows you the middle
You see the before, and you see the arrival. The mess in between, the nights you want to quit, the moments you genuinely question your own intelligence and worth… Those parts get edited out. And when you’re living in that middle, and all you can see is everyone else’s highlight reel, it’s incredibly easy to believe you’re doing it wrong.
Mid-Becoming exists because the middle deserves to be documented. Not performed. Not packaged. Documented. Honestly, from inside it, by someone who is still there.
If something in you recognized itself in what you just read, you’re in the right place.
→ Want to understand what has been influencing your decisions in life? The free Self-Sabotage Style Quiz takes 3 minutes, and it’ll name something you’ve probably been feeling for years.
New essays every Thursday. Written from the middle, not the other side.
A few things worth knowing about outside of all this
I don’t trust systems that were designed to keep you dependent on them. I don’t believe there is one right way to build a “serious” or “respectable” life. I think most of us are on a long, slow journey back to the version of ourselves that existed before the world told us to be someone more acceptable, and I think that journey is worth taking seriously.
I also believe you can’t do any of this work, not really, without first getting honest about what's actually been driving your choices all this time. That’s what this space is for.
Outside of the work: my partner of over ten years and our three cats are my whole world. The long-term goal is a cat condo large enough for them to live like the royalty they are. We’re working on it.
