Now in Beta
Final_FINAL
WendyLC
May 09, 2025
That’s how I used to think of myself: polished, reliable, fully deployed. Finalized.
I had spent years optimizing—streamlining how I moved through the world, how I worked, how I was seen.
There were bugs, of course. Everyone has them. But I knew the workarounds.
And then something shifted. Not a crash, exactly.
More like a slow system failure—functions fading, connections dropping, synapses misfiring—
until I could no longer trust the interface.
We know (or think we know) how to deal with bad tech:
Reinstall the old version. Restore from backup. Reboot.
Get back to how things were.
But that version is gone.
What’s left is something quieter. Incomplete. Still learning.
Now, I live in beta.
There’s something oddly freeing about that.
I used to think I needed to return to full capacity—
to reclaim the version of myself that once ran clean and fast.
But that version was built on code I didn’t write.
An operating system installed in childhood, shaped by expectation and adaptation—not necessarily by choice.
One of the ketamine therapists put it this way:
your original OS gets installed when you’re young.
And it’s rarely—if ever—updated.
The theory was that the treatment might unlock something.
Let the system rewire. Maybe even overwrite the old version.
It didn’t.
What did, eventually, was the reckoning.
Writing through the static.
Learning to sit with the glitches instead of fixing them.
A friend once asked if I had grieved—
the way you grieve after a loss.
I told him yes.
But it was slow.
Like a seed of grief buried inside a ball of confusion.
It took years—and the hard, necessary work of writing—
to free that seed.
To let it crack open.
To look it in the eye and say: yes, I remember you.
Beta isn’t a holding pattern.
It’s not a failure to launch.
It’s a form of living that doesn’t pretend to be finished.
There’s a strange relief in that. A kind of beauty.
The beauty of a work in progress.
The elegance of still figuring out the right fit.
And—unexpectedly—a new kind of certainty.
Not the brittle kind that comes from being right or complete,
but the quieter kind that comes from no longer pretending.
The old version of me ran fast, but she also ran scared.
Afraid of crashing. Afraid of being found out.
She passed for whole—
but only because the seams were hidden.
Now, the seams show.
The bugs surface.
The system stutters and recovers and stutters again.
And it’s okay.
Because it’s mine.
I know how it works.
I know what it can’t do.
And I know what it can.
I won’t call this the final version.
But it’s the truest one I’ve had.
And for now, that’s enough.
Completion is seductive. Like a false prophet.
It promises peace, applause, a place to rest.
But I never felt at home in completion.
It always came with qualifiers—
a to-do list tucked just out of sight.
There’s something richer—wilder, even—in the incomplete.
Not unfinished as in lacking, but open.
Not broken, but in motion.
To live in beta is to live with room.
For updates. For rewrites.
For patches. For reboots.
For buzz and hum—
but also for stillness.
For days when nothing works,
and days when everything, somehow, does.
There’s dignity in the draft.
In the version that hasn’t been locked.
It doesn’t mean I’m lost.
It means I’m still becoming.
Final is a fiction.
We print it on diplomas.
Etch it into gravestones.
Attach it to software builds and personal milestones as if it signals truth.
But truth often lives earlier—
in the struggle, in the shift,
in the messy middle where meaning starts to form.
If there’s a kind of holiness here,
it’s not in the flawless line of code.
It’s in the human one.
The patchy, the revised, the heartfelt attempt.
This version isn’t perfect.
But it’s alive.
And it’s learning.
People talk about reinvention like it’s a makeover.
Something sleek. Branded. Ready for rollout.
But real reinvention doesn’t look like What Not To Wear.
It looks more like trial and error.
Like holding your breath while the new code runs.
Like failing quietly and adjusting—
mid-sentence, mid-self.
I used to think reinvention meant becoming someone new.
Now I think it means finally becoming someone true.
There’s an intimacy to living in beta.
It strips away the buffers.
You learn what your system can tolerate.
What overheats it.
What brings it peace.
You stop optimizing for scale and start optimizing for soul.
That might mean slower load times.
Less polish. Fewer shortcuts.
But it also means more room for wonder.
For presence.
For something approaching joy.
Because here’s the secret:
perfection never delivered what it promised.
Not really.
It kept me busy. It earned applause.
But it never let me rest.
Now I rest.
I recalibrate. I revise.
And in doing so, I’ve started to trust something I never did before:
the version of me that doesn’t need to prove anything to run.
I used to run as vFinal_FINAL—
the one with the clean edges, the performance specs, the illusion of completion.
Now, I run in beta.
Still glitchy. Still evolving.
But present.
The updates come slow.
Some days, not at all.
But I’m learning not to fear the pause.
Not to treat quiet as failure.
Not to confuse stillness with stalling.
I don’t know if there will ever be a “final” again.
And for the first time—
I don’t need one.
#TraumaticBrainInjury #ChronicIllness #Anxiety #Recovery #MentalHealth #Grief
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