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Documentation Index

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Nobody tells you that becoming someone new is mostly unglamorous. It happens in small increments, in unremarkable moments, in the quiet accumulation of days when you made a slightly different choice than the person you used to be would have made. In these essays, Will Foster-Schmidt writes about that process — not the reinvention narrative with its clean arc, but the actual lived experience of slowly, imperfectly becoming someone else after loss has taken away the person you thought you were.

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What becoming looks like in practice

These essays are about identity in motion. Will writes about the strange work of figuring out who you are when the structures you built your sense of self around — a marriage, a relationship to a person who is gone, a version of the future you expected — are no longer there. The questions that emerge are not rhetorical. What do you like, now that you’re not half of something? What do you want? Who are you when there’s no one watching?
1

The dismantling

Before you can become something new, something has to end. Will writes honestly about the losses and ruptures that preceded change — not to valorize them, but to refuse the lie that transformation comes from nowhere.
2

The in-between

The hardest essays are about the middle — the period when the old self is gone and the new one hasn’t arrived yet. Will writes about sitting in that uncertainty without rushing through it, and what he found there.
3

The slow accumulation

Becoming isn’t an event. It’s a practice. These essays document the small decisions, the new habits, the tentative reaching toward a different kind of life — and the way that accumulation eventually adds up to something you can call yourself.

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Why Will writes about this

Because the cultural narratives around personal transformation are almost universally dishonest. The glow-up story. The pivot. The reinvention. They skip the actual texture of change, which is slow, disorienting, and full of backsliding. Will writes about becoming because he is in the middle of it, and because he believes that honesty about the difficulty of change is more useful than any inspirational shorthand.

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What you’ll find when you read

You’ll find permission to be unfinished. These essays don’t promise arrival — they document the journey with enough honesty that you’ll recognize your own experience in them. If you are in a period of transition, or have been, or sense one coming, this writing will meet you with clarity and warmth.

Grief

The losses that precede transformation, honestly examined.

Divorce

The end of a marriage and what comes after.
These essays are published on Substack. Subscribe at lifeonafaultline.substack.com to read the full series and follow along as the work of becoming continues.