The life that started once everything fell apart
Part III of my mental health story
So… I somehow, both accidentally and intentionally, turned my mental health breakdown into a brand. Wild, I know, but stick with me for a moment.
Last year, my entire life came to a crashing halt. I’ll fast forward here for my well-read subscribers, but you can catch up by starting with the below Substack. If you’re new here and don’t want to spin the block, imagine nearly every pillar holding your life up collapsing at the exact same time.
Career. Identity. Stability. Routine. Future plans. All’a’it. The version of yourself you had carefully constructed over years suddenly no longer fitting right on your body.
It was not pretty. And it was certainly not fun.
But when that happens to a natural-born storyteller with a decade of integrated digital marketing experience, something unexpected starts to happen. Eventually, the pain begins looking like material.
And not like that.
Not in a how can I optimize this into “content” kind of way. Not in a cynical way. More like your mind trying to make meaning out of suffering, turn confusion into language. Trying to build a bridge between what you’re feeling internally and what other people might be carrying too.
The UNBecoming started as my first real act of catharsis.
Originally, it was just a short film series. Ten minutes of raw, experiential storytelling created because I genuinely did not know what else to do with the weight I was carrying. It was messy. Emotional. A little abstract. But for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t trying to optimize myself for engagement or package my emotions into something easily digestible. I was just telling the truth, in my unique way.
And somewhere inside of that process, I realized something important: becoming is overrated. Or at the very least, incomplete.
We spend so much of our lives focused on becoming. Becoming more successful. More healed. More attractive. More productive. More desirable. More accomplished. More. More. More. We are constantly encouraged to add, layer, achieve, and improve.
But very few people talk about the opposite process: the shedding, the unraveling, the releasing.
The UNBecoming.
The UNBecoming became a framework for releasing the things that were never truly mine to begin with: expectations, fear, performance, perfectionism, survival patterns, and identities I outgrew years ago but kept carrying because they made other people comfortable.
It became less about reinventing myself and more about returning to myself. Over the past year, that idea has grown into something much larger than I originally intended.
What started as a short film became a 60-page reflective practice and gave way to a public art installation, Take What You Need, or TWYN. A project where people are invited to physically take letters written to specific emotional experiences: “to the one who is always performing,” “to the one who holds everyone else together,” “to the one afraid to start.” People take the letters home, gift them to friends, leave with something they needed words for but maybe didn’t know how to articulate themselves.
Watching that project unfold in real life has been one of the most affirming experiences of my career. There is something deeply human about watching someone quietly walk up to a wall of emotions and immediately know which letter belongs to them.
However, The UNBecoming was never meant to exist solely as a book, short film series, or installation. In many ways, it’s becoming an umbrella for the kind of things I want to create moving forward: emotionally grounded works of art and stories about identity, anxiety, grief, transformation, control, shame, and what it means to rebuild yourself after life forces your hand.
That’s where projects like Picture Perfect come in.
Picture Perfect is my next creation, and probably the clearest example of where my screenwriting voice is headed. It follows Samantha Higgins, a meticulous interior designer whose carefully curated life begins unraveling after an unexpected separation from her husband. But rather than treating anxiety as something purely internal, I wanted to explore what it would feel like if that discomfort, that looping inner voice, actually took physical form. It’s psychological. Uncomfortable in the way anxiety itself is uncomfortable. And more than anything, it feels honest.
I think that’s what I’m chasing now: honesty. Not polish. Not performance. And definitely no perfection.
Just honesty.
As I sit here reflecting on everything that’s happened over the past year, it’s surreal to think about where all of this started. What once felt like the painful ending of my life has slowly transformed into the foundation of my next chapter. I recently stood in front of a room full of people at Mental Health KC speaking about work that, not too long ago, only existed as private pain sitting quietly inside of me.
And for the first time in a very long time, the work I’m creating and the life I’m building actually feel aligned. Not perfect and not fully figured out.
But mine.
— Kasim