Becoming

Some people meet me now and only know this version.

the employed version.
The dependable version.
The leadership version.
The one who knows how to steady the room when things get hard.

But if you pulled random people from random ages of my life and asked them where they thought I’d end up?
Some of them would’ve never guessed this life for me.

I have lived in my car behind the same bar that fed habits I thought would swallow me whole.
I have skipped meals so my kids wouldn’t have to.
I have shown up to work knowing the electricity was out until payday.
I have smiled through workdays while privately trying to survive my own life.

I’ve buried people I loved.
Watched some disappear into prison systems.
Watched others lose battles nobody could see from the outside.
I’ve learned that grief doesn’t always come with funerals.
Sometimes people leave in pieces while they’re still alive.

And maybe that’s exactly why I see potential in people so quickly.

Because when you’ve lived through versions of life that don’t match where you are now, you stop believing people should be defined by the hardest season they’ve survived.

You learn that some people are carrying entire wars inside themselves while still showing up to work every day pretending they’re fine.
You learn that survival can make someone look distracted, guarded, angry, quiet, inconsistent, or exhausted.
You learn that struggle and potential can exist in the same person at the same time.

I think people who’ve had to rebuild themselves develop a different kind of vision.
We recognize the look in someone’s eyes when they’re trying to hold their life together with shaking hands and pure willpower.
We recognize it because we’ve worn it ourselves.

So when I tell people I see something bigger in them, it’s not motivational fluff.
It’s pattern recognition.

It’s knowing firsthand that a person’s current circumstances can lie about who they really are.

Because some of us became everything nobody expected us to be.