I was looking for something else when I found it. A Notion dashboard still pinned, the same one where my diary, reading list, and monthly expenses sit. Psych-UP. I hadn’t opened it in years.

Everything inside is intact. A financial model I attempted first, full of gaps and guesswork, before a friend generously stepped in to make it seem like someone who actually, truly understood excel built it. A clickable Figma prototype. Two pitch decks: the ppt I designed before I won the competition, rough and overambitious, and the polished version a designer rebuilt with proper branding after. Research notes. Correspondences with an organisational behaviour professor who agreed to review the psychometrics on a Friday morning. A survey with 51 responses. And tucked in a subfolder, the first drawing I made of the logo concept: a child holding a bundle of balloons, being lifted.

Nobody archived it. Nor did anyone delete it. At some point it just stopped being something I opened and became something I scrolled past.

The venture was supposed to address something I’d been painfully conscious of long before b-school gave me the vocabulary for it. A gap I’d seen from both sides; close enough to the bottom to understand what was missing, privileged and stubborn enough to have tipped things in my favour. And aware, always, that there were others who, given the same chances, could’ve done far more with them. I won a three-month entrepreneurship competition with the concept. The instruction was wide enough that the freedom felt almost constraining: build something that falls in line with social impact.

So I tried to build something that addressed the gap I couldn’t stop thinking about.

For a while, it had the shape of a real thing. An angel investor willing to put in 25k. A school in Germany for the pilot. A principal in Dublin I was in talks with. Interns assigned to me to help with the financial modelling and the prototype. I was meeting with researchers, figuring out psychometrics based on a professor’s feedback, coordinating a designer who was building something I could see.

I could see it.

I could actually show someone a screen and say, this is what it does, this is who it helps, and they could click through it. Wild.

I was also carrying a loan I couldn’t afford to default on. And the venture needed more of me than I had left to give alongside a degree I hadn’t finished. There’s a version of this story where I bet everything on the idea. I ran that version in my head more than once. But I’m not the kind of person who can afford the risk.

I may be bad at math, but I wasn’t that bad. It’s basic arithmetic after all.

So I chose the degree. And the venture, which had an investor and a pilot school and a prototype and a survey with 51 responses—stopped.

The dashboard’s still there. It holds everything the same way. It doesn’t know that none of it turned into anything. I simply scroll past it.

And isn’t that how most things end?

Not with the ending, just the scrolling.

I found out the way you find out most things these days: someone else’s story. A group of people I’d considered close, together somewhere I hadn’t been invited. No falling out. No message I missed. Just a gathering I wasn’t part of, posted casually enough that it was clear my absence wasn’t something anyone had thought twice about.

In b-school, the divide wasn’t simple. There were Europeans who moved through expensive cities without calculation. And international students, who carried their own quiet awareness of not quite being at the centre. I gravitated toward the latter. We shared something, or I thought we did. But at some point the Europeans figured out I was one of them: passport, cultural cues, the way I spoke—and began to include me accordingly. Not unkindly. Almost instinctively. I’d find myself at tables where everyone else looked nothing like me and everything like each other; included because someone had done the maths on where I technically belonged. The people I actually felt closest to weren’t always extended the same courtesy.

Even within that closer group, the calibration was there. Narrower. Subtler. But there. Close enough to belong to the plans but not always to the list. Not enough for anyone to say it. Enough for me to feel it: in the invitations that thinned, the group chats that went quiet for me a beat before they went quiet for everyone else.

Nothing broke. It thinned. The way sound thins at a distance— still there if you listen, but no longer meant for you.

I keep expecting it to be louder. A door that slams, a line that gets crossed; some moment where the thing is definitively behind me.

And I can point to it and say: there. That’s when it ended.

It never comes. You just look up and the distance is already too wide to shout across. By then, you’ve stopped wanting to.

What unsettles me is the quiet. How little sound any of it makes on the way out.

lecture hall of my old uni

For a while in undergrad, I carried a copy of Beloved everywhere. Toni Morrison. I'd arrive early to the humanities building and read in the empty lecture theatre before anyone else showed up. Next to the woman on the campus bench on sunny days. At home, I'd underline passages that arrested me for reasons I couldn't yet quite name. I wrote an impassioned paper on it later.

Sometime after graduating, the novels stopped. Replaced with case studies, pitch decks, and things with executive summaries. Texts that read more like instruction manuals than anything else. I didn't notice the swap until years later, by which point the person who sat alone in lecture halls underlining Toni Morrison had somehow become someone I used to be.

I started Unsent Letters in the same room where the Psych-UP dashboard was born. Same Notion workspace. Same desk, if I’m honest. I remember the evening I published the first post, to an audience of roughly no one. And felt the exact same electricity I felt the afternoon I named the venture. The same stupid, reckless certainty that this might become something.

Only this time, I also knew what the dashboard looks like three years later.

I built it anyway; like most things now with that painful awareness: it might be yet another folder I scroll past some day.

It hasn’t made me more cautious. It’s made me less willing to leave things unread.

The dashboard is still pinned to my workspace. I didn’t open it fully while writing this. I got as far as the sub-folder with the logo sketch and closed the tab.

The child is still holding the balloons. Still being lifted.

It didn’t make it. But it didn’t disappear either. It just sits there, between the things that did, keeping its quiet record of a version of me that tried.

- it’s michelle d.

p.s. we’ll be back to regularly scheduled unsent letters next weekend; just needed some breathing room ~

Hiii, in case you stumbled upon this serendipitously,

A quick intro:

I’m an intersectional human trying to figure out life, love, business, and help others a long the way. I write about the human stuff: the relationships we navigate, the decisions we second-guess, and the quiet confessions we keep to ourselves until someone asks the right question. Or rather, until someone gives us a safe space to voice out our questions.

One thing I learned from writing essays is how much I love the interaction and community around it. Hence the core concept of this newsletter: unsent letters.

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