It’s funny, the things that make sense in reverse.

When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to type on a typewriter. Not a computer keyboard with a delete key acting as a safety net every time I accidentally hit the wrong letter as I was trying to type out a sentence. A typewriter. Which, at the time, felt incredibly unfair.

A typewriter doesn’t care how fast your brain works. It doesn’t care that you’ve already figured out what you want to say. If you get ahead of yourself, the machine lets you know. The hammers cross over each other. The keys jam. Everything stops in its tracks, stopping you in yours. And suddenly, you become painfully aware you’re no longer moving forward. You’re fixing the thing preventing you from moving forward. And assuming you know how to fix the problem successfully, your reward is simple:

You get to keep going. Slower. More deliberately.

I was young when I learned how to type. I hadn’t even taken a computer class in school yet. But when that day finally arrived, and I found myself sitting in a classroom full of students learning to type for the first time, I quickly realized I wasn’t learning something new. I was practicing something I could already do with my eyes closed. Literally. And the more I practiced, the better I got at executing the task.

I was the fastest typist in the room.

Which, looking back, feels like exactly the sort of thing my dad would’ve smiled about.

He was the computer person in our house. The kind of person who takes things apart to understand them. Computers, electronics, whatever happened to be sitting in front of him at the time. At one point, our basement looked like a graveyard for abandoned technology. Monitors, towers, cables, and random computer parts that always looked like chaos to me and always seemed to make perfect sense to him.

My dad always seemed to know exactly where that somewhere was. I would’ve bet my entire allowance he could’ve taken one apart and put it back together in his sleep. The same way he taught me how to type in the dark.

Which is why I’ve always found this next part strangely funny. Years later, after I’d grown up and looked back at the lessons about precision he’d spent years teaching me, he somehow became the person who taught me why precision matters. I don’t even remember what email service it was anymore. Yahoo. AOL. Something ancient by internet standards. I just remember sitting there while he was helping me create my first email address. Both of us were there to catch the mistake, but neither of us actually did.

At the time, it meant absolutely nothing. It was nothing more than a typo. Which seems to recur so often in my life that it has become its own theme.

Because the things that end up mattering the most seldom look important while they’re happening.

They look ordinary. Forgettable, even. They look like a typo.

Nobody says, “Pay attention to this, you’re going to carry it for the rest of your life.” Nobody even regarded the typo as a relevant problem needing to be fixed.

And I guess it didn’t matter much to me, either. Because without complaint or regret, I kept the email address. Maybe because it seemed easier. Maybe because I was a kid and I didn’t care. Maybe because I was just so excited to have my very first email address that I’d already forgotten there had been a mistake in the first place.

I couldn’t tell you.

What I can tell you is that once that email address started circulating among my friends, my name evolved into Kimberbly faster than a wildfire spreads in a drought.

Over time, Kimberbly became too much of a mouthful.

Berbly stuck.

It wasn’t long before Berbly became a version of me. Not legally or officially, not really. But in all the ways that actually matter.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about it as a typo. I stopped thinking about it as a mistake my dad made while creating my first email address.

It happened the same way most important things happen. Not because they’re planned, but because they accumulate. Gradually. Quietly. Until one day you look up and realize they helped shape the person you’ve become.

And I realize now that it happened the same way the typo did.

By accident.

And I think that’s the part I’ve spent years staring at.

At some point, it stopped being about the typo and became about the way things become part of someone without asking permission first. A nickname. A habit. A belief. A relationship. A loss. A question.

You don’t notice it happening while you’re still inside it. Then one day, you look over your shoulder at decades of life and realize you’ve been carrying it the entire time.

And the older I get, the more I think life works like that, too.

Meaning rarely arrives on time. Most of the things that shape us spend years disguising themselves as insignificant details.

For me, it was a typewriter. An email address. A misplaced letter. And a father who I thought was teaching me how to type.

But now, looking back, I’m not entirely convinced that’s all he was teaching me.

I think he was teaching me how to pay attention. How to slow down intentionally. How to understand why something wasn’t working before trying to force it forward.

Because once you understand how something works, you have a much better chance of fixing it when it breaks.

When I was a kid, I thought my dad was teaching me how to do something the hard way simply because it was harder. Something I regarded as unfair. Something that often felt like punishment.

And becoming unstoppable isn’t about never getting stuck. It’s about learning what to do when you are.

The Berbly Project exists because I’ve spent a lot of my life pulling those moments apart and trying to understand what was actually happening underneath them. Not necessarily while they were happening. Not always. Most of the time, it isn’t until years later that I can see the lesson at all.

But over and over again, I’ve discovered the same thing:

The thing I thought was the story usually wasn’t the story.

It was just the doorway.

The first thing that got my attention before I realized there was something underneath it.

Stories about grief, relationships, identity, loss, and growth. The strange ways life shapes us while we’re busy looking in a different direction. The moments that didn’t seem important until they were. The questions that took years to answer.

And the things that only make sense in reverse.

Welcome to The Berbly Project