notes
Notes from Becoming
Notes
Stories from an ordinary life, written not so you can admire mine, but so you may see your own more clearly.
Notes exists to help readers remember parts of themselves they thought they’d lost.
A small library of — fragments, insights, stories, and moments from the path, attempts to notice what was true, and to live more honestly because of it.
These notes are not performances; they’re honest field notes.
I share them to keep you company as you face change in your own life.
Looking back, I can see they were never really about becoming someone else,
They were about returning — again and again — to what was true:
the quiet work of change, growth, and remembrance.
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Not That One
On our first night, an ostrich truck got stuck against a tree. The answer seemed obvious: work around it. Months later, the answer was no longer so simple.
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The Number of Zeros
In 2013, while walking across the farm and trying to work out the finances, I realised I needed another thousand rand—not ten. The pressure remained, but the solution had become infinitely easier.
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Is that a sheep… in the house?
Before we owned the farm, we were already living pieces of the life we imagined: orphan lambs in the lounge, dogs who accepted everyone, and a tiny piglet who thought the bacon belonged to her.
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A Lifetime’s Work
We arrived on the farm believing it was a project: assess the situation, make a plan, do the work. Fourteen years later, the land has taught me something different. Projects move towards completion. Living systems do not.
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What Money Costs
We simply started paying attention to what money was costing — not the price, but the exchange.
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How Little Do We Actually Need?
After abandoning one life and dismantling the next, we began asking a different question: how little did we actually need in order to build something good?
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The Dismantling Phase
Some phases of life are not transitions. They are dismantling phases — where the old structure stops holding long before the new one exists.
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When Something Can Be Saved — But Shouldn’t Be
What happens when something still works — but no longer feels like yours? This essay explores the cost of staying too long, and the quiet moment where misfit becomes undeniable.
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When Everything Closes In
There are seasons where nothing breaks all at once.
It stops working.
The place changes. What you rely on disappears. And slowly, there’s nowhere left to step out of it.
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The Pressure of Proximity
What looks like conflict often begins much earlier — in proximity. A reflection on how closeness reveals the unseen forces shaping how we think, relate, and understand each other.
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The Freedom Before the Friction
There are moments when life feels unexpectedly right.
Not because everything is resolved, but because you stop adjusting yourself to fit.
And for a while, that feels like freedom. -
When the Dream Becomes Real
We think the right decision will settle everything. That once we arrive, the tension will ease and life will begin to hold.
But it doesn’t. The decision is not the resolution. It is the moment the real work begins.
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The Life We Are Able to Hold
Sometimes the path forward does not look like progress. It looks like a circle — leaving, returning, searching again. This essay explores why we sometimes circle before becoming capable of holding the life we truly want.
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When the Body Stops You
Sometimes the body recognises what the mind refuses to admit. A reflection on misalignment, exhaustion, and the quiet moment when a different life begins to reveal itself.
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On Choosing Our Shadows
Realising we have to choose our shadows is only the beginning. The harder question is how.
There are moments when advancement is clear and sensible — when the ladder is visible and the next step makes sense. And yet something in us hesitates. Not because we fear failing, but because we sense the cost.
This essay explores ambition, alignment, and how to recognise when success no longer fits the life you want to look back on.
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There Is No Captain
There comes a point when no one else is steering. A reflection on trade-offs, responsibility, and the quiet moment you realise you must choose your own shadows.
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When the Music Stops
A reflection on ambition, integrity, and the moment you realise no-one is coming to explain your life — the beginning of standing without a script.
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Strength as Armour
Will became identity. Strength became armour. Self-sufficiency became meaning. It worked — until a question slipped through.
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Before Choosing Yourself
NOTES FROM BECOMING On endurance before language, and the years that shape us before we choose ourselves. I didn’t think about meaning then. I didn’t have words for questions like that. What I knew was simpler — and much heavier. […]
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After Choosing Yourself
NOTES FROM BECOMING The part no one warns you about I thought choosing myself would feel like relief.Freedom.Lightness.A sense of rightness settling into place. Instead, what arrived first was grief. Not sharp grief — aching grief.A sadness that surprised me […]
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Choosing Yourself
The first time I chose myself, I lost my footing — and gained agency. A reflection on divorce, misfit, and learning to trust your own knowing.
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It Is Love Made Visible
From childhood, most of us learn to confuse adaptation with aptitude. We become reliable, useful, compliant — or rebellious, difficult, “the problem one” — and call it “who we are.” This essay is about the quieter truth underneath: the work that has always fitted our hands, the aptitudes that never left, and the small, honest steps back toward a life that feels like our own.
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The Work That Fits: Returning to the Aptitudes We Lost Along the Way
From childhood, most of us learn to confuse adaptation with aptitude. We become reliable, useful, compliant — or rebellious, difficult, “the problem one” — and call it “who we are.” This essay is about the quieter truth underneath: the work that has always fitted our hands, the aptitudes that never left, and the small, honest steps back toward a life that feels like our own.
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The Hidden Curriculum
From the moment we arrive, we’re being shaped by blueprints we never consciously agreed to. This Notes from Becoming essay explores the hidden curriculum of our lives — what we absorbed without knowing, what it’s still teaching us, and how we begin to rewrite it, one small shift at a time.
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On Becoming the Bow
A Notes from the Becoming essay on Kahil Gibran’s ‘On Children’ — what it’s taught me about control and becoming a steadier bow for those we love.
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On Children · Kahil Gibran
When I was sixteen, my mother pressed a slim copy of The Prophet into my hands and said quietly, “This is one you need to read.” I’ve returned to it’s passage on children at every turn since — as a woman, as a mother, and as someone who walks with others through their own seasons of becoming. Here I share the lines themselves, as she once shared them with me.
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Changing for Survival — The Beginning
How escape, loss, and the farm taught me that freedom isn’t running away but the quiet daily work of hope, awareness, and choosing a life that you can still call your own.
