The Undivided

Of a high achiever

There is a voice deep within that is always there.

I just stopped listening to it.

I don’t remember exactly when the noise started drowning it out. It was gradual. The way fog rolls in — you don’t notice it until you can no longer see your hand in front of your face.

First there was the move. Then the adapting. Then the achieving. Then the performing. Then the optimizing and the building and the becoming everything everyone needed me to be.

And somewhere in all of that becoming — I stopped hearing it.

The noise is convincing. That’s the thing nobody tells you.

It comes dressed as ambition. As responsibility. As practicality. As gratitude — you should be thankful for what you have. As duty — this is what you’re supposed to do. As identity — this is who you are now.

The noise doesn’t announce itself as noise.

It announces itself as life.

And you live it. Fully. Completely. Until one day you’re standing in a ballet studio feeling nothing, singing in your car with the windows up wondering why even that feels hollow, and writing words into the void because something unnamed is pushing you to.

That something is the voice.

It never left.

I used to know it clearly. Years ago — before the immigration, before the career, before the roles accumulated like layers of clothing I put on for different rooms and forgot to take off.

There was a version of me that moved without thinking about how she looked moving. That sang without wondering how she sounded. That wrote because the words needed to exist, not because they needed to perform.

She wasn’t trying to be anything.

She just was.

That is the undivided self. The one that exists before the world gets its hands on you. Before you learn to edit yourself for survival. Before worthiness becomes something you have to earn instead of something you simply are.

I used to think that version of me was gone.

Lost somewhere between Greece and Texas. Between who I was and who I became. Between the girl who danced and the woman who manages accounts and optimizes systems and checks all the right boxes.

But here is what I am learning slowly, reluctantly, in the quiet spaces between the noise:

She was never gone.

She was just waiting.

The soul doesn’t divide. That’s the thing.

You can layer things on top of it. Roles. Titles. Wounds. Beliefs. Decades of adapting and performing and surviving. You can pile so much on top of it that you forget it’s there.

But underneath all of it — undivided, untouched, unchanged — it remains.

It remained through Greece. Through California. Through every boardroom and every client file and every moment of feeling like not enough.

It was there in the ballet studio even when I felt frustrated. It was there in the car when I sang with the windows up. It was there when I wrote the first word of The Unbecoming.

It has been there the entire time.

Patiently. Quietly. Waiting for me to stop long enough to hear it again.

I am not fully there yet.

The noise is still loud some days. The unforgiving voice still shows up. The flatness still visits.

But something has shifted.

I am writing again. Not for an audience. Not for a strategy. Because the voice inside asked me to and for the first time in years I said yes.

That yes is everything.

You have a voice too. Underneath the titles and the roles and the noise and the years of becoming what life required of you.

It has not divided. It has not abandoned you. It has not grown tired of waiting.

It is there right now. In the quiet behind this moment. Behind the scroll and the noise and the performance of daily life.

You don’t have to find it.

You just have to stop long enough to remember it was never lost.

Pull up a chair.

Get quiet.

It’s still speaking.