There’s a narrative we’re fed from a young age: that life is about becoming. Becoming successful. Becoming respectable. Becoming someone the world will accept.

But no one told me that in chasing all that becoming, I might lose myself entirely.

As a non-binary person navigating a binary world, I was handed two boxes: male or female. Pick one. Play your part. Don’t ask questions. Don’t make a scene.

And for a while, I tried. I really tried.

I became the overachiever. The people-pleaser. The version of myself that felt the most “palatable” to those around me. But inside, something was quietly unraveling. It started as a whisper in the dark: “This isn’t who you are.”

That whisper grew louder until I couldn’t ignore it.

What followed wasn’t a breakdown—it was an unbecoming.

Unbecoming the roles I was assigned.
Unbecoming the gender I was expected to perform.
Unbecoming the person I had built for survival, not truth.

And then — I found drag.

People often think drag is about putting on a mask. For me, it was the opposite. It was about taking the mask off. It gave me a new language to express the parts of myself I had long hidden — the femme, the fierce, the fluid, the soft, the too much and the not enough.

For the first time, I wasn’t pretending to be someone. I was reclaiming all of me.

Onstage, in full drag, I felt grounded. Alive. Seen.
And offstage, something inside me shifted too. I began to carry that same boldness into my everyday life — into my speaking, into my presence, into how I move through the world.

Today, my work as a performer and speaker is rooted in that same truth: Authenticity isn’t about adding layers. It’s about peeling them back.

It’s about creating space — on stage and in the boardroom — for people to question who they’ve been told to be, and to reconnect with who they really are.

Because unbecoming isn’t about destruction. It’s about return.
A return to joy.
A return to freedom.
A return to the you that existed before the world taught you how to shrink.

So when I speak, when I perform, when I step into drag — it’s not just a show.
It’s a portal. A protest. A possibility.

And if you’re somewhere in your own process of unlearning or unraveling, know this: you are not lost. You are unbecoming. And that’s a sacred, powerful thing.

Because once we’ve shed what never belonged to us…
We finally make space for who we’ve been all along.

Shaun Lee(they/them) Version 3.0.