Unbecome, the book I wrote, is about the selves we build to get through, and what's underneath them. Its central line is one sentence: "You are not broken. You are buried." Over sixteen chapters it moves from a fable about a lion raised by sheep, through how the burying happens, to the two movements the book names side by side, unbecoming and remembering.
There's a story I stop halfway through, every time I tell it. It's an old fable, and I didn't write it.
A lamb who asks too many questions finds a lion cub crying in the long grass, and the flock takes him in. They call him Leo. He eats grass that never agrees with him, bleats badly, and learns to make himself small. Then an old lion walks down off the mountain, finds him trembling in the grass, and leads him up to a lake near the top. Leo bends to drink.
That's where I stop.
Someone once found me a year after hearing it, in another city, and before saying hello asked what the lion saw. That story is chapter 1 of Unbecome, and the book leaves Leo at the water until chapter 15. This summary leaves him there too.
What is the book Unbecome about?
Unbecome is about the selves people build as children to get through, and what's underneath them. The book argues you never had a defect to fix. Layers were put on, and what's underneath them is still intact. The work it describes has two movements, unbecoming and remembering, and it sets them side by side rather than in order.
The full title carries the argument: Unbecome: Stop Fixing Yourself. Start Remembering Who You Are. Released in July 2026, it became an Amazon best seller at launch.
How does the book begin?
Before any chapter there's a letter. It says plainly, "I am not promising you a better you." Then it makes one promise only, which it calls "a strange one": "Nothing will be added to you here."
Chapter 1 is Leo's story, told slowly, and it builds to the sentence I tell it for: "Not one day of sheep-life subtracted one gram of lion from him."
Chapter 2, The Fixing Years, holds an autopsy on every fix you've tried, and finds two things. The first: "Your system has a setting." Picture an air conditioner that keeps pulling a room back to twenty-four degrees however many windows you open. The second: you've been searching where it's easy to search, like the drunk in the old joke hunting for his keys under a streetlight, far from where he dropped them, because "the light is better."
That's where the book first says the line it rests on: "You are not broken. You are buried." Then, kindly: "The searching was never the mistake. Only the street was."
Some of what's ahead goes near old pain. If it stirs anything up, stop, and get in touch with a friend or a professional; if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
Much of what follows is about who you became along the way. For your own answer, the free quiz Who Did You Become to Survive? asks that question in twenty-one parts, and it leaves the fixing out. Or read on.
Where does the burying come from?
Chapters 3 to 6 start at a door, in the second before it opens, when a person slips into the version of themselves that room expects. That's where the book's central question waits: "If you put that person on at the door, who took the car ride?"
Then the book goes to my own door. At our dining table in Serbia I had a soft face for my mother and a firm one for my father, and switched mid-sentence. Decades later, in South Africa, I woke with "Who am I?" sitting on my chest, and by lunch I'd tidied it away. The book is blunt about which part mattered: "Not the question. The lunch."
Chapter 4 is a kitchen. An old woman in my family, drying plates, answered a seven-year-old's plans with one sentence. "You'll never have anything." It went in as law. Then it opens her like a nest of painted dolls, a girl in a harder kitchen inside her, another inside that. The line it arrives at is a favourite of mine: "You were buried by the buried." How to unlearn conditioning looks at rules handed down that way.
Chapter 5 names what a child builds. Survival identities, the book calls them, and it introduces five by name: "the careful one", "the strong one", "the funny one", "the invisible one" and "the one who keeps the peace". I was the last. The chapter thanks each of them first, for getting a small person through, then says: "They are not character flaws. They are layers."
Chapter 6, The Part of You That Votes to Stay Buried, refuses to cast that part as the villain: "It is not your enemy."
What does the book mean by subtraction?
Subtraction, in Unbecome, means clearing away what was laid on, not adding what seems to be missing. Chapter 9 makes the case; chapters 7 and 8 lead up to it.
Chapter 7, You Are Feeling Your Thinking, opens on a café table: "A friend of mine once tried to get a waiter fired over a centimeter of spilled coffee." Later he says, "It's not the coffee. It's my whole week." I was thinking it was years. A feeling, as the chapter tells it, is a report on the thinking underneath.
Chapter 8 is my own story, told without a hero. A war, one bag, washing cars on Mykonos so I could eat, nights on a factory line in Germany, then a good job in South Africa that ended after eleven years. For five mornings I drove to a car park and sat there, because I couldn't yet say it at home. Two people sold their own home so I could stand back up. The chapter won't end on a healing in Las Vegas, because that isn't what happened: "The coats still hang by my door." Of that low point it says, "I was not broken either."
Chapter 9 is the hinge: "Addition cannot fix what subtraction solves." It says outright, "Addition is not the villain of this book." Where something is missing, a language or a skill, adding is how you solve it. Being buried is the other kind of problem. For that kind, the book names unbecoming and remembering together, and is clear they aren't a sequence: "Movements, not stages".
What do the later chapters add?
Chapters 10 and 11 test the idea at the extremes. Chapter 10 sets a young man a classroom once called stupid beside a block of marble Florence once called ruined, then turns to you with a claim it says it's making "about you now, not about him": "Whatever they buried is intact." More on the marble: Michelangelo and the statue in the stone.
Chapter 11 puts a professor with five doctorates, who stood up on the first day to say this couldn't be done, beside a man thirteen years into an addiction, and says of burial: "It does not check credentials at the door, in either direction."
Chapter 12 comes back to ordinary, capable lives nobody worries about: "A crisis gets attention. A burial gets compliments."
Chapter 13, on worth, borrows an old seminar bit with a twenty-dollar bill: "Worth comes with existence." Self-worth tied to achievement takes up the version where worth hangs on results. Chapter 14, the shortest, is about waiting. "Waiting is not neutral." Then it won't make a threat of it: "There is no clock in this chapter."
Chapter 15 finishes Leo's story, which I'm keeping for the book. Nobody in it changes alone; another pair of eyes is always near. Chapter 16 is the book's last exercise, and I'll leave it to the book. The epilogue is a dream about a lake in the desert. The two sentences at the heart of it all appear in chapters 9 and 15: "Unbecome everything you're not. Remember everything you are."
None of this book, or the exercise below, is therapy or medical care. If you're in treatment, keep working with your doctor or therapist. If the exercise unsettles you, stop and reach for a friend or a professional. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
What's one exercise from the book you can try?
Chapter 13 runs its twenty-dollar bit on the reader. Here's a version for your own wallet.
- Take out a paper note. Any currency, any value.
- Crumple it in your hand, as tightly as you can. Then open your hand and look at it.
- Ask whether it's worth any less than it was a minute ago. The chapter's sentence for it: "Nothing that happened to the paper ever touched what the paper is worth."
- Smooth it out.
Should the exercise stir up something heavy, stop there. A friend or a professional can hear about it, on your terms.
Is a summary enough, or is the book worth your time?
A summary gives you the outline. Whether the rest is for you depends on three things.
- It tells you which stories were built. The letter sets the rule: "When a story in this book has been built to make a point, I will tell you it was built."
- It puts my own story in. The same letter says, "My own story is in here, the parts I am proud of and the parts that still sting".
- It doesn't ask for your trust up front. Chapter 10 says, "I don't want your complete trust by default and I don't expect you to take my word for it."
There are two ways to buy it, per the book's page: Amazon, or an order from us at "AED 99 + AED 50 courier", for UAE addresses only. And from the same page: "The access code to the Who Am I? masterclass is inside."
I haven't finished unbecoming. On some mornings I still find an old coat halfway onto my shoulders before I've noticed it.
Safae, reviewing Unbecome on Amazon: "This is a different way of seeing life, of seeing ourselves and of living."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Leo is still standing at the water, and chapter 15 is where he looks. Get The Paperback