THE BERBLY PROJECT
Berbly: The Origins
THE STORY BEHIND THE PROJECT & WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
Berbly existed long before the project did.
My first email address was supposed to include my name. My dad was creating it for me and, somewhere between intention and execution, Kimberly D became Kimberbly D.
It was the kind of mistake that should have survived only as long as it took someone to notice it. Instead, my friends shortened Kimberbly to Berbly with the casual efficiency people tend to demonstrate when converting someone else’s typo into a permanent identity.
And then it stuck.
At the time, it didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t attached to some larger idea about identity, imperfection, or the strange ways accidents can quietly outlive the intentions that created them.
It was just a nickname.
Although, in retrospect, the fact that my name was accidentally altered before being released into the world does feel unusually consistent with what eventually followed.
I don’t remember deciding to begin The Berbly Project. Mostly because I didn’t.
I started writing because there were too many thoughts, observations, contradictions, losses, questions, and unfinished emotional calculations accumulating in the background of my life at the same time.
Individually, they seemed manageable. Collectively, they had begun occupying a concerning amount of internal real estate. Writing became the only place they would hold still long enough for me to examine them properly.
At the time, I thought that was the entire point.
Get the thoughts out of my head. Put them somewhere visible. Create enough distance to determine what they were and why they had refused to leave. I gave the process maybe two or three months, which suggests I believed my inner life would respect a projected completion date.
But, that’s not what happened. Not even remotely.
The first problem was that writing something down rarely made it smaller. More often than not, it actually made it more specific, because once I could see an experience in front of me, I could also see the assumptions holding it together.
I could see where memory had preserved certain details and quietly discarded others.
I could see the difference between what had happened, what I had believed was happening, and what I later needed the experience to mean.
Those were not always the same story.
Sometimes they were not even particularly well acquainted.
The more closely I examined one experience, the more often it began pointing toward another.
A reaction in the present would lead back to a fear I thought belonged to the past. A story about failure would expose something about identity.
Anger would turn out to be protecting grief.
Strength would reveal the fear that had required it.
The experiences I had stored separately began behaving less like isolated files and more like witnesses who had compared notes.
That was when writing changed for me. I was no longer using it only to document what had happened. I was using it to investigate the distance between the event and the meaning I had assigned to it.
For a while, I believed the story was whatever had brought me to the page.
The race. The loss. The relationship. The job.
The conversation I had replayed so many times that my memory had become both archivist and defense attorney.
But the obvious event was rarely the whole story. Most of the time, it was only the point of entry.
The thing I thought was the story usually wasn’t the story.
It was the doorway.
Writing meant walking through it without knowing where it would lead.
Sometimes the path was direct. More often, it moved backward, doubled over itself, disappeared underneath something I had dismissed as irrelevant, and emerged years earlier in a place I had not realized was connected.
If I had to describe the process, it would be less like inspiration and more like psychological archaeology.
Not digging because I assume something terrible must be buried there. Digging because the visible structure rarely explains itself, and because I have learned not to confuse the first available explanation with the most accurate one.
What initially looked like a collection of separate experiences slowly revealed an architecture.
Not a neat one. But an architecture nonetheless.
The writing was private before it was public.
Privately, I could follow a thought wherever it went without worrying whether anyone else could follow me.
I knew the people, the history, the context, and the emotional shorthand.
I could leave entire sections unexplained because I already understood what I meant.
Publishing removed that luxury.
If I wanted someone who had not lived the experience to understand it, I had to become more precise. I had to separate facts from interpretation, identify the assumptions connecting them, and account for the possibility that the version I had carried for years was incomplete.
That changed more than the writing. It changed the way I understood my own memory.
Private writing gave me somewhere to put what I felt.
Public writing required me to examine whether the story I was telling about those feelings could withstand being seen from outside of me.
The distinction mattered.
It still does.
There was no single moment when the writing became a project.
One piece led to another. Certain questions returned in different forms. Experiences I believed were finished continued producing information long after the events themselves had ended.
Eventually, the work stopped feeling temporary. Not because I had reached some decisive conclusion about what it should become, but because I could finally see that it was already becoming something whether I had defined it or not.
It needed a name.
I considered names that sounded intentional. Names capable of implying that I had understood the purpose from the beginning and had been building toward it with impressive strategic foresight. But none of them fit what it felt like this project was about to become.
The work had grown through revision, accident, persistence, and connections I could recognize only after they had already formed.
And then, it clicked. It was there all along.
BERBLY
A word created by mistake, carried forward by repetition, and given meaning only because it stayed around long enough to acquire one.
It did not summarize the work. And that was precisely why it fit.
The word project mattered, too. A project is allowed to remain in progress. It can change when new information arrives. It can return to earlier conclusions and discover that they were built with insufficient evidence. It can hold contradiction without treating contradiction as failure.
But most importantly, a project does not require me to write as though I’ve reached the end of anything. I haven’t… reached the end. Not even close.
Some pieces are written with distance. Others are written while the experience is still moving and I’m trying to understand its shape without pretending I can already see the whole thing. The beauty of the word is that it leaves room for both.
The Berbly Project is not a record of everything I have figured out.
It is a record of what became visible when I was willing to look again.
My dad created the typo. My friends gave it a shorter name. Life gave me enough material to turn that name into a project.
None of those things occurred as part of the same plan. And I use the word plan loosely because… there really was no plan.
There was only an accident that stayed, followed years later by a body of work that did the same.
Somewhere along the way,
Berbly stopped being something people called me and became the place I went to understand why anything had called me back at all.