Every Wednesday, Kionna is telling the truth about what it actually cost to leave — the parts that don't make it into the photos. This is Part 4.

There is something weird about leaving a job and feeling like the whole experience almost never happened.

That is how Marigold feels to me sometimes.

Imaginary.

Like I worked there, built relationships there, talked to people every day, shared parts of my life with people, went through all kinds of shit while working there, and then one day it was over.

And I mean over.

Nobody calls.

Nobody checks in.

I don't really talk to anybody from there.

It feels like I stepped out of one universe and into another one.

When I lost my job, I knew somebody had shared information about me.

What I didn't know was who.

And for a while, I was convinced I did.

I had connected dots in my head. I looked at who knew certain things, who I had been having tension with, the timing of everything, and the information I had been given.

I thought I knew exactly who had reported me.

I was wrong.

That might be one of the most uncomfortable parts of this entire story.

Because later, through the unemployment process, I learned that it was actually Jenn who had given HR our text messages and voice memos.

Not the person I had blamed in my mind.

Jenn.

And that changed the way I looked at the whole situation all over again.

Before I knew who it was, betrayal felt like suspicion.

You start replaying conversations.

Who knew what?

Who did I tell this to?

Who had access to that?

Who was mad at me?

Who would have had a reason to say something?

Your mind becomes its own little investigation room.

And sometimes you convince yourself you solved the case.

I did.

And I was wrong.

Finding out that Jenn had actually provided HR with our texts and voice memos forced me to sit with two different truths at the same time.

The first was that somebody I communicated with privately had taken those communications and handed them over to my employer.

The second was that I had spent time being angry at somebody who didn't do what I thought they did.

And honestly, it made me think even harder about trust.

Because trust isn't only about figuring out who betrayed you.

It is also about understanding what happens when information leaves your hands.

Once you send a text, leave a voice memo, tell somebody something personal, or let someone into a private part of your life, you cannot completely control what happens to that information afterward.

That doesn't mean you should never trust anybody.

But it does mean access matters.

A lot.

Anybody can be your friend when everything is good.

That is easy.

We laugh.

We talk.

We share stories.

We complain about work.

We tell each other personal shit.

We feel close because we spend so much time together.

But what happens when something changes?

What happens when somebody's feelings get hurt?

What happens when there is conflict?

What happens when the relationship no longer feels good?

And maybe the biggest question of all:

That is where I think friendship really gets tested.

Because somebody knowing your personal life is not the same thing as somebody being trustworthy.

I think I understand that more now than I ever have.

Someone can know your trauma.

Your marriage.

Your plans.

Your fears.

Your location.

Your dreams.

Your mistakes.

Your weaknesses.

And none of that automatically means they deserve access to those things.

Sometimes all it means is that you told them.

That's it.

I won't pretend I immediately reached some peaceful, enlightened place where I wished everybody blessings and moved on.

Hell no.

I was mad.

I'm still capable of getting mad.

There are moments where I think about everything that happened and that old part of me wants to react.

Twenty-year-old Kionna was wild. She partied. She fought. She was unserious about a lot of things. She had a lot of growing to do.

Forty-two-year-old Kionna does not have the same kind of time.

I'm married.

I'm a full-time student.

I'm building a business with my wife.

I'm traveling the world.

We're planning our future and planning a family.

My priorities are completely different.

So now when somebody tries to pull me down, my response isn't:

How do I hurt you back?

My response is:

And if I'm being real, sometimes there is still a little:

I'm going to glow up harder.

Maybe that's a little petty.

I can live with that.

At least it's productive.

After what happened, it would be easy for me to say coworkers aren't your friends.

But I don't believe that.

My own life proves otherwise.

I worked at Comcast years ago and still have relationships with people I met there.

I have friendships from Verizon that lasted long after I left that job.

There are people I knew from RadioShack back in the early 2000s who I still have relationships with today.

Cam and I met working at ID.me in 2021.

Now that's my wife.

So yes, coworkers can absolutely become real friends.

The workplace might be where you meet somebody.

It doesn't determine what the relationship becomes.

What people do with the information you trusted them with matters too.

That's the part I'm paying much more attention to now.

Work was not the only place where my definition of relationships started changing.

Moving abroad showed me some things about family too.

When you're home, you see people.

You hang with certain cousins.

You talk all the time.

You're physically close, so the relationship feels close.

Was this relationship as close as I thought it was?

When I was living in Colombia, there was a cousin I had been extremely close with.

At one point I was literally crying because I could not understand why he wasn't answering my calls, returning my messages, or responding to me.

I genuinely did not know what I had done.

Cam eventually called him and basically told him, "Stop being a little bitch and talk to your cousin."

That sounds harsh if you don't know Cam, but she wasn't being malicious.

She knew I was hurting.

She was basically saying, Talk to her. She loves you. She doesn't understand what happened.

Months later, when I returned to the United States, I reached out to him because I was excited to be back.

And instead of having a conversation with me, he asked where my wife was and told me he had somebody who could beat her up and that until she got her ass whooped, we weren't going to talk.

I said okay.

Then we don't ever have to talk again.

And I meant that.

Because here we are, grown as hell, in our 40s, and your answer to hurt feelings is still finding somebody to fight?

I'm not there anymore.

And maybe that's another uncomfortable part of growth.

Sometimes you grow away from people you genuinely love.

Not because you suddenly think you're better than them.

Not because you hate them.

Not even necessarily because something catastrophic happened.

You just don't operate the same anymore.

The things they want to entertain are no longer things you want in your life.

I've realized there are people walking around in adult bodies who are still responding to life from a much younger place.

Holding grudges.

Choosing violence.

Operating out of jealousy.

Operating out of envy.

Refusing to communicate.

Refusing to grow.

And I don't want to live around that energy anymore.

People say everybody isn't meant to be in your life forever.

I used to hear that and think about romantic relationships or friendships that had some dramatic ending.

Now I understand it differently.

Some relationships simply reach their expiration date.

Family included.

Coworkers included.

Friends included.

You can appreciate what somebody meant to you during one season without forcing them into the next one.

That doesn't erase the good memories.

It doesn't necessarily mean the entire relationship was fake.

It means life changed.

Maybe you changed.

Maybe they changed.

Maybe both of you did.

That one hurt me to learn.

I am still a very open person.

Hell, I am building a public business with my wife while traveling around the world.

People can literally see where we are half the time.

I've had somebody tell me I'm rich before.

I said, "Yep."

Because what does rich mean?

Money?

Love?

Health?

Freedom?

Experiences?

Community?

I'm rich in some areas of my life.

I'm abundant in love.

I'm experiencing things I used to dream about.

I'm not going to deny my blessings because somebody else assumes something about my bank account.

There is a difference.

I rarely talk to people about problems inside my marriage or family anymore.

Part of that is because I don't want outsiders building a perception of the people I love based only on the moment when I'm angry.

If I call you every time Cam and I have an argument, you only hear the arguments.

You don't see all the love.

You don't see the laughter.

You don't see the everyday life.

You don't see everything that makes our marriage what it is.

Then we make up and move forward, and you're still sitting there remembering everything I told you when I was pissed off.

So I'm much more intentional now about what I share and who I share it with.

And after seeing private texts and voice memos become part of something much bigger than the conversations they originally came from, I understand that lesson on an entirely different level.

I don't need everybody in my business.

I probably have hundreds of contacts saved in my phone.

Those are the people I feel the most comfortable talking to about almost anything.

I don't need 50 best friends.

I don't need everybody to know everything happening in my life.

Somebody has to earn that level of access.

And time matters.

Conflict matters.

Ups and downs matter.

I need to know what happens when things get uncomfortable between us.

I need to know whether we can disagree and still respect each other.

I need to know whether you'll protect things I trusted you with even if one day you don't particularly like me.

I also don't rely on friendships the way I used to for processing every problem.

I journal.

I talk to a therapist.

I use coping skills.

I sit with things.

I problem-solve.

I take action.

I've gotten to a place where I don't really enjoy sitting around complaining for long because eventually I'm going to ask:

Okay, what are we going to do about it?

Complaining alone doesn't change anything.

And maybe that is another sign of how much I've grown.

My problems are different now.

My life is different.

There are things I experience that some people back home probably wouldn't relate to, just like there are things happening in their lives that I no longer understand in the same way.

That's okay.

Everybody's path doesn't have to look like mine.

I don't think becoming more private automatically means becoming scared.

Maybe there is a little fear mixed in there.

I've been hurt.

I've been betrayed.

Of course part of me wants to protect myself from experiencing that again.

But I also think privacy can be wisdom.

There is information people simply do not need.

Everybody doesn't deserve a backstage pass to your life.

And protecting certain things doesn't mean you're being fake.

It doesn't mean you're hiding.

It means you've learned the difference between authenticity and unlimited access.

That's a lesson I wish I understood much earlier.

And there is another lesson I had to learn:

Being certain about somebody doesn't always mean you're right.

I thought I knew who had reported me.

I was sure.

I had built the whole case in my head.

And then I learned I was wrong.

That humbled me.

Because discernment isn't just about learning to read other people.

Sometimes discernment means questioning your own assumptions too.

For a while, I thought knowing exactly who betrayed me would give me some magical sense of closure.

It doesn't really work like that.

Finding out it was Jenn didn't undo anything.

It didn't give me my job back.

It didn't erase the anger.

It didn't erase the feeling of knowing that conversations I believed were between two people had been given to HR.

But it did give me clarity.

Closure makes it sound like everything is neatly wrapped up.

I don't know if life really works that way.

Sometimes you simply learn the truth, accept what happened, adjust accordingly, and keep moving.

That's where I am.

This might be the strangest part.

Because I can acknowledge that I felt betrayed and still acknowledge that my life changed for the better afterward.

Both can be true.

Losing that job forced me into a different space.

It made me put more energy into the business Cam and I were building.

It gave Sovereign Sundays room to grow.

It pushed me toward my writing.

It pushed me toward school.

It pushed me into becoming even more disciplined.

It made me focus on creating a life where, hopefully, I never have coworkers again.

No offense to coworkers everywhere.

I just don't want them anymore.

I want to build something of my own.

So am I grateful that everything happened exactly the way it did?

That's complicated.

But am I grateful for where my life went afterward?

Absolutely.

Sometimes the person who closes one door has no idea they just forced you toward another one.

And sometimes the door they pushed you toward is the one you should have walked through a long time ago.

Trust isn't about how much somebody knows about you.

It isn't about how often you talk.

It isn't about sharing DNA.

It isn't about sitting beside somebody at work every day.

It isn't about how many years you've known someone.

And proximity definitely does not equal loyalty.

Trust reveals itself over time.

Especially when things get ugly.

Pay attention to how people behave during conflict.

Pay attention to how they speak about people they claim to love.

Pay attention to what happens to private conversations when relationships change.

Pay attention to whether somebody wants resolution or revenge.

And pay attention to your own assumptions too.

Because sometimes you will swear you know exactly who hurt you and discover you were looking in the wrong direction.

Some people will leave.

Some relationships will change.

Some family members will become strangers.

Some coworkers will become family.

Some friends will become memories.

And every ending does not require a war.

Sometimes you just close the chapter.

I still believe in people.

I still believe in friendship.

I still believe in family.

I still believe in being vulnerable.

I'm just much more careful about who gets access to which parts of me.

Twenty-year-old me probably would have wanted revenge.

Forty-two-year-old me wants peace, freedom, growth, my wife, my future family, my business, my degree, a passport full of stamps, good food, video games, music, laughter, and a life I don't constantly need to escape from.

And I think twenty-year-old me would look at me now and be proud.

We're still the same person at heart.

I still laugh too loud.

I still joke.

I still tell stories.

I still write poetry.

I still love music.

I still dance around.

I still play video games.

I still love some damn food.

I'm just more put together now.

More intentional.

More discerning.

And much more protective of my peace.

Maybe that's what trust looks like after you've been betrayed.

Not building a wall around yourself.

Just finally learning who deserves a key.

K Redd, Arequipa

Part 5 of The Uncomfortable Truth drops next Wednesday. If this is the first thing of ours you've read, Sovereign Sundays goes out every Sunday.