By Kyra Oakland

I’ve spent most of my life performing.
Not on a stage, not in a theatre,
but in classrooms, gymnasiums, social media feeds,
and quiet conversations where I softened my truth
just enough to keep everyone else at ease.

For ten years, volleyball was my script.
I knew the lines by heart.

Hustle harder, push through pain, earn your worth.

It was a role I played well.
Because when you’re constantly in motion,
there’s no time to feel.

When my volleyball career ended,
I thought the curtain would finally fall.
But life doesn’t wait for an intermission.

In May of last year, during the final weeks of my master’s degree,
my little brother died.
It was a week before his 20th birthday.
A week before I was meant to fly home to see my family
after 10 months living abroad.

Instead of writing my final papers,
I found myself writing his obituary for his funeral.
I had to condense his entire life:
his laughter, his dreams, his everything
into seven paragraphs.

That broke me in ways I never could have anticipated.

But the world didn’t stop spinning.

I spent the whole summer in Montana.
Trying to live in a house that suddenly felt too quiet,
surrounded by people who didn’t know what to say.

I numbed the days with weed and alcohol,
doing anything to blur the sharpness of reality.
Because survival felt easier than feeling.

But eventually, life demanded I return.
I flew back to England.
Numb, exhausted, and pretending to be ready.
But I wasn’t coming back to the life I had left.

I had to finish my final exams.
I had to find a place to live.
I had to write my master’s thesis.
I even moved cities,
chasing some kind of fresh start.

But grief follows you.
It doesn’t unpack in the places you expect.
It waits for quiet moments and ambushes you.

When the exams ended and my degree was finally complete,
I thought things would get easier.
But life after graduation felt like an empty void.
I applied for hundreds of jobs.
Hundreds of rejections.
Hundreds of invisible auditions.

I felt stuck.
So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense,
I kept moving.
I traveled.

New Zealand. Australia. Austria. The Netherlands.
Maybe if I kept going,
the weight of failure and grief wouldn’t catch up.

But no matter how far I went,
I was still carrying it with me.

Eventually, I stopped chasing job titles
and started building relationships.
I connected with local business owners.
I offered my skills, my creativity, my hustle.
And one freelance job turned into two.
Two turned into four.
Suddenly, the thing I was doing “on the side”
became my full-time career.

Now, I’m a business owner.
Not because it was part of some perfect plan.
But because surviving taught me how to build from scratch.
Because grief stripped away every illusion of control,
and in that mess,
I found a different way to exist.

I’m starting to see the light in the tunnel.
Not at the end.
But here, with me, flickering in the everyday work.

I know I have a long way to go.
But when I look back on everything I’ve overcome,
I can’t help but pause.

I’m no longer performing.
I’m building.
And this time,
it’s for me.

Simply yours, Ky