Reading · Pack Light Live Full with Carmen Van Kerckhove

I'm obsessed with Severance on Apple TV. Like, deep-in-the-Reddit-theories, watching-YouTube-recaps-at-midnight obsessed. After posting one silly Reel, I ended up on their PR list and got invited to an event at Bell Labs in Jersey, where they film the show. Full cast was there. It looked exactly like Lumon HQ. Peak influencer moment.

Here's the premise, if you haven't seen it: To work at this company called Lumon, employees get their brains "severed"—split into two selves. The "Outie" lives outside work. The "Innie" only exists inside the office. Neither remembers the other.

Even though they're technically the same person, they feel like two completely different people.

In real life, we already do this.

We sever ourselves. One version at work. One at home. One online. One at family dinners. One on first dates. One on LinkedIn. One in late-night talks with our closest friends. One when trying to be the perfect mom. Another when performing as the ideal wife.

Each role demands its own script, its own personality, its own priorities. And over time, we lose track of who we really are.

There’s a version of you underneath all that performance. Unedited by rejection, burnout, or the need to be impressive.

They’re who you were before life told you who to be.

That version still lives in you. And they’re tired of waiting.

Pretty much all through childhood, I wanted to be a writer—short stories, essays, fiction—I was always scribbling. In college, that dream sharpened: I wanted to be a journalist. I wrote for the school paper, launched a student publication, stacked my resume with journalism internships—including two summers at South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where I grew up.

Then senior year at Columbia hit.

Everyone around me was applying to investment banking or consulting jobs. Even if your dream had nothing to do with either, it felt like failing if you didn’t land one.

So I caved and took a job at Goldman Sachs right out of college.

On paper, it was everything I was supposed to want. But deep down, I knew—I had sold out.

Nobody tells you that selling out isn’t one big dramatic decision. It’s death by a thousand tiny yesses. Each time you agree to something that looks good but feels wrong, you drift further from yourself.

We’ve built an entire economy around that drift. Companies don’t want your authentic self—they want your useful self. And we've learned to comply, believing our real selves aren’t valuable enough to pay the bills.

The result? Millions of people who look successful on paper but feel like strangers to themselves.

Still from “The After Hours” episode of The Twilight Zone

There’s a Twilight Zone episode called “The After Hours” (which gets referenced in Severance, actually). A woman named Marsha discovers she’s not a customer in a department store—she’s a mannequin who forgot she was one of them.

The other mannequins whisper to her: “Remember now? You remember, Marsha.”

That line gives me chills. Because that’s what happens when you’ve performed for so long, the performance starts to feel like the truth.

At the height of Top Flight Family—our luxury family travel brand with over a million followers—what we showed online was real. The joy, the adventure, the togetherness? 100% authentic.

But at home after our trips, we’d drift into our corners: my husband on his laptop, me buried in work, the girls in their rooms. Not fake—just... fragmented.

And what scared me wasn’t that we were pretending. It’s that the version on camera felt more alive than the one living it.

Presence came easier on the road—but when that became the only place we could access it, I knew something had cracked.

High-functioning performance is deceptive. Sometimes it feels like truth. Like alignment. Like your best self. Until you realize the real you has gone silent.

From the start of Top Flight Family, I posted a travel vlog every single week. No exceptions. Each one took around forty hours to edit. In 2021 we did 21 Resorts in 2021. In 2022 it was 22 Cities in 2022. By 2023, I dropped the annual theme—but kept grinding out weekly vlogs.

Until one week, I didn’t post.

No big deal, I thought. I’ll post next week.

Then two weeks passed. Then four. Then eight.

And it felt... good.

Stepping off the hamster wheel felt like turning the volume down on my life. I could think again. Creative ideas flowed. My brain felt like it was coming back online.

Think of it like a fogged mirror. You keep wiping, trying to see. But the image only clears when you stop and let the air settle.

Sometimes rebellion isn’t dramatic. Sometimes it’s just... stopping.

Writing on Substack has brought me back to someone I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Even after I stepped away from the dream of being a journalist, I never stopped writing. When I was running Racialicious—a blog I co-founded about the intersection of race and pop culture—I was writing constantly. But I didn’t feel like I had the right to call myself a writer. No editor, no paycheck—did it really count? With Top Flight Family, every caption was crafted, every YouTube narration was scripted. The writing was always there, but I still hesitated to own the title.

Recently, I started using my maiden name again—Carmen Van Kerckhove. It’s the name I used when I was a journalism intern, and when I was running Racialicious. But when I left that world to help run our family’s martial arts school, I started using my married name instead. It was a strategic move—an SEO decision more than anything. I didn’t want people Googling our business and getting confused when they stumbled across years of commentary about race and pop culture. Even though I never legally changed my name, it marked a clean break. A new chapter. And when we launched Top Flight Family, I just kept using it.

But returning to writing changed something. It didn’t just feel like a career pivot. It felt like coming home. The writer in me has always been Carmen Van Kerckhove. And I’m not the only one who noticed the shift. The people closest to me could feel it too—like something long-dormant had come back online.

One friend who’s known me since college said it best: “You feel like the Carmen I first met again. The writer.”

That’s when I realized: you don’t need permission to claim your identity. You just need to stop asking for it.

What’s moved me most is this: as my writing has taken off, people have been sharing it—and they’ve been sharing it under my real name. Carmen Van Kerckhove. That hits in a deeper place. Like the right name is finally attached to the right work.

And that, more than anything, makes me feel like I’ve come back to myself.

We live in a culture that profits from your disconnection from self. When you forget who you are, you’ll buy anything that promises to define you.

The self-help industry. The productivity complex. The lifestyle brands. They all rely on you believing you’re not enough.

But maybe the problem isn’t that you need to become someone new. Maybe the problem is you’ve forgotten who you already are.

So what does “remembering” look like?

It’s not a grand rebrand. It’s smaller than that. Quieter.

It’s noticing what energizes you and what drains you. Asking what you loved before you were told it wasn’t practical. Saying no to things that feel off—even if they impress others.

It’s permission to be curious without monetizing it. To pursue joy that doesn’t have a LinkedIn title.

The most radical thing you can do in a culture that profits from your self-doubt is to remember that you were enough all along.

You just forgot for a while. And that's okay. Forgetting is part of the human experience.

But so is remembering.

Remember who you were before the world told you to forget

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