exports.id=210,exports.ids=[210],exports.modules={4907:(e,t,o)=>{Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,2994,23)),Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,6114,23)),Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,9727,23)),Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,9671,23)),Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,1868,23)),Promise.resolve().then(o.t.bind(o,4759,23))},2461:()=>{},1506:(e,t,o)=>{"use strict";o.r(t),o.d(t,{default:()=>u,metadata:()=>h});var n=o(9510),a=o(1167),i=o.n(a),s=o(4111),r=o.n(s);o(7272);let l="https://alphaswords.com",h={metadataBase:new URL(l),title:{default:"Alpha's Words",template:"%s — Alpha's Words"},description:"Alpha Sky writes about the things people feel but rarely say clearly. Faith, identity, discipline, business, rebuilding, fatherhood and the strange process of becoming dependable.",authors:[{name:"Alpha Dube",url:l}],keywords:["Alpha Sky","Alpha Dube","Alpha's Words","writing","faith","identity","fatherhood","business"],alternates:{canonical:l},openGraph:{type:"website",siteName:"Alpha's Words",title:"Alpha's Words",description:"Thoughts on identity, faith, business, technology, fatherhood and the quiet work of becoming someone you respect.",url:l},twitter:{card:"summary_large_image",title:"Alpha's Words",description:"Thoughts on identity, faith, business, technology, fatherhood and the quiet work of becoming someone you respect."},robots:{index:!0,follow:!0}};function u({children:e}){return n.jsx("html",{lang:"en",className:`${i().variable} ${r().variable}`,children:n.jsx("body",{style:{fontFamily:"var(--font-inter), system-ui, sans-serif"},className:"antialiased",children:e})})}},1108:(e,t,o)=>{"use strict";o.d(t,{_i:()=>c,C3:()=>p,EE:()=>m});let n=[{slug:"the-version-of-you-people-never-see",title:"The Version of You People Never See",excerpt:"There's a version of you that only shows up when no one is watching — the one who checks on people quietly, who apologizes first, who stays. This is about that person, and why we hide her.",content:`
      <p>Most people meet a curated version of you, and you meet a curated version of them, and everyone quietly agrees to call this getting to know each other. It works well enough. You learn what someone orders, how they take criticism in a meeting, whether they laugh at their own jokes before anyone else does. What you rarely learn is who they are at eleven at night, when the performance has nowhere left to go and there's no one left to perform it for.</p>
      <p>I think about this often because I used to be very good at the performance. Not in a dishonest way — I believed most of what I was showing people. But belief and completeness are different things. You can be entirely sincere and still be editing, cutting the parts that don't fit the story you've decided to tell about yourself.</p>
      <blockquote>The version of you people never see isn't hidden because it's shameful. It's hidden because it's slow, and most rooms don't have time for slow.</blockquote>
      <p>Think about what that private version actually spends its time on. It checks on people without being asked, and doesn't mention it later. It apologizes first, even when it wasn't entirely wrong, because being right felt less important than being close. It sits with a decision for three days before saying it out loud, turning it over, looking for the version of the truth it doesn't want to see. None of this photographs well. None of it fits in a caption. So it stays in the room where it happened, and the public self — the fast, decisive, quotable one — goes out and takes the credit.</p>
      <p>There is a cost to this that we don't talk about enough. When the only self you show anyone is the edited one, you start to believe the edit is the whole story. You forget the slow parts were ever load-bearing. And then, when life gets hard in a way that requires the slow parts — grief, failure, the unglamorous work of rebuilding something you broke — you reach for them and find you've let the muscle go quiet from disuse.</p>
      <p>I don't think the answer is to perform the private self publicly either. Something is lost the moment you narrate the quiet thing — it becomes content, and content wants an audience, and an audience changes the behavior it's watching. The goal isn't exposure. It's integrity in the old sense of the word: the public self and the private self being close enough in shape that meeting one doesn't mislead you about the other.</p>
      <p>That's a slower kind of consistency than most branding advice wants you to build. It doesn't scale the way a persona does. But it's the only version of you that holds up when nobody's there to clap for it — which, if you think about it, is most of your life.</p>
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      <p>Somewhere in your twenties, if you're the kind of person people expect things from, "you have so much potential" quietly stops being a compliment. It starts to sound like a bill coming due. Not because the people saying it mean any harm — most of them are being kind, or trying to be — but because the word itself is future tense, and you can only live in the future tense for so long before it starts to feel like a place you're not allowed to leave.</p>
      <p>Potential is a strange thing to be praised for, if you think about it. It's not a compliment about what you've done. It's a compliment about what you haven't done yet, delivered as if it were already yours. And the longer you carry it without cashing it in, the more it curdles — for other people, who start to wonder what's taking so long, and for you, who starts to wonder the same thing at 2 a.m.</p>
      <blockquote>Nobody warns you that being told you're capable of something is not the same as being told what it will cost.</blockquote>
      <p>I spent years mistaking potential for a promise the universe owed me, rather than a raw material I still had to do something with. That's a comfortable mistake to make, because it lets you keep being the person with promise instead of becoming the person who actually made something — and making something is where you find out you're not as good as the compliment implied, at least not yet, and that's a harder thing to sit with than the compliment itself.</p>
      <p>What eventually changed it for me wasn't a burst of confidence. It was smaller and less dramatic than that: I started finishing things that weren't impressive. Unglamorous, unremarkable, unshareable things. Not because finishing them proved anything to anyone else, but because it quietly retired the identity of "the one who could." You can't be the one who could, once you've actually done it — you just become the one who did, which is a smaller, sturdier, less flattering thing to be. I recommend it.</p>
      <p>If potential has started to sound like an insult to you too, it might not mean you've failed to live up to it. It might mean you're finally close enough to using it that it's stopped being theoretical — and theory was always the more comfortable place to live.</p>
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