Patterns in Becoming… | 029

The final "What Brad Did"

Welcome to the final essay of “What Brad Did”.

I’m so RELIEVED… and sad.

Back in May I started this thing without really knowing what I was doing. Seven and a half months of grasping at something I couldn’t quite see yet but yearned for everyday.

When I woke up this morning everything felt the same… except for the migraine. 40mg of caffeine and an ibuprofen took care of that.

Made it to my plasma appointment where I earned $65 for reading “Supercommunicators,” which for some reason I keep calling Superconnectors when people ask me what I’m reading.

I could feel tension building in my left shoulder and chest all morning. And when the title of this post crystallized in my mind’s eye… I knew why.

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Waves of grief

I felt that familiar lump in my throat. Slowly rising between the tasks of my morning. And realized I was grieving. I could have told myself to suck it up and get on with my life.

But I’ve come to recognize how waves of grief shape me, carving out spaces I didn’t know I had. Even the crashing ones seem to leave something behind… maybe a shell of wisdom or a tide pool of unexpected gratitude.

This morning I felt the rising relief in my body and sinking sadness in my heart carving into the sands of my mind that had felt so firm just last week.

The tide had come in on this cycle of life and I could do nothing to stop it. Nothing would stay dry.

This publication turned into something I wasn’t expecting. Week after week of digging around in my own stuff. Working through the messy, non-linear process of trying to grow up at 40 something.

Like this week I caught myself asking my wife if it was okay to cry in front of her and ask for a hug. Not because I needed the permission… because I needed the validation that I wasn’t weak. The Pattern was using her response to prove my worth. The Being just cries in her arms and moves on.

Here are some other things I’ve learned…

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The weird thing about self-improvement

You know what I eventually realized? Most self-improvement is about efficiency. Do more, be faster, hack your habits.

But becoming is actually inefficient. When you’re in a pattern, you’re on autopilot. It’s fast and requires no thought.

When you witness a pattern and stop it, you become slow, clumsy, and uncertain.

To me, this clumsiness is the fleshy thud of becoming. It signals the moment I stop being a programmed machine and start being a conscious human.

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The house I’ve been living in

Okay so if I use the metaphor of a house… The pattern is the old foundation and wiring that got built when I was a kid to keep me safe.

The problem is I’d outgrown the house, but I was still trying to live by the old wiring.

Becoming was the messy process of living in the construction zone. I had to rip out the old wiring, all those survival mechanisms, before I could install new ones.

These periods during each week were often characterized by this feeling of groundlessness. Or emptiness.

Three months in I realized I couldn’t renovate this house alone. The wiring was too tangled, the foundation too unstable. I called in a general contractor…my therapist to help me not electrocute myself in the process.

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Staying in the room

I’ve been using my patterns to escape the present moment for a really long time.

If I stayed busy, I didn’t have to feel.

If I was angry, I didn’t have to be honest.

If I was becoming successful, I didn’t have to face my current inadequacy.

Becoming, for me now, is the act of staying in the room with myself when every programmed instinct tells me to run, hide, or perform.

It’s the shift from doing something to prove my worth to just being because my worth is inherent.

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The witness

The witness is the part of me that isn’t the pattern.

And as I practiced witnessing, the witness got stronger and the pattern got weaker.

Eventually, I didn’t have to try to change… the old pattern simply lost its grip because I’d seen for what it really was… a distraction.

I became someone else because the old me, that collection of patterns, had been observed out of existence.

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Why patterns in becoming

The word “in” matters here.

Patterns are the raw material. You don’t get to becoming by ignoring your patterns… you get there by going through them.

And it’s a constant state. You never become a finished product. You are always in the process of seeing a pattern, witnessing it, and allowing a new way of being to emerge.

Like how I had to feel the uncomfortable vulnerability of asking for a hug in tears before I could break that pattern. Going through it meant sitting with the discomfort, not bypassing it with another distraction.

I’m not trying to fix myself. I’m trying to see myself clearly enough that the things that aren’t me can finally fall away.

And that’s gonna be the recurring sentiment in my writing going forward.

I want it to feel like a quiet conversation. Or like you’re reading someone’s private notes on how to live more authentically.

The themes will stay introspective and grounded.

No corporate jargon. Just specific, relatable moments that point at bigger ideas.

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Here’s the shift

I’m turning the camera around. Gonna stop documenting only my becoming. Start documenting patterns across all the becomings I’m observing.

I’ve got almost 8 months of data sitting here from all the ways I’ve been showing up as myself.

Here’s what I learned by doing this for 29 weeks… vulnerability performance is just another pattern. It masquerades as authenticity, but it’s actually extraction disguised as growth work.

So I’m done extracting. Done performing becoming for an audience. The work now is witnessing what’s already here… in me, in you, in all of us trying to shed what we’re not.

The relief is real. So is the grief.

But the tide’s already turned.

Welcome to “Patterns in Becoming…”

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