The system had already decided who I was. My dad had not.

I was the kid in the trees.

This was the 1970s in a small rural Wisconsin town, and I was supposed to be a certain kind of girl. I was the one up in the trees, the one who buried the birds that hit our big back window, the one begging for a treehouse and outside as much as a body could be.

Mostly I was out there with my dad — at the farm, filthy in the dirt and the pond, shooting BB guns from early on. Outside, with my dad, was home.

School read me differently. In elementary school, I was in the low reading group because I did not like reading aloud. In eighth grade, an English teacher gave me a D minus minus without ever sitting down to help. A guidance counselor laughed — actually laughed — when I told her I was going to college.

In a small rural Wisconsin town, the education system had already decided who I was supposed to be. But my dad had already shown me something else.

He handed me a soldering iron.

My dad taught me to solder an old radio when I was just a little kid. I got a 160-in-one electronics kit as a gift — a kit not designed for a child — and I built it.

No limits in his mind. That foundation was there from the beginning. He was a maker. I was a maker.

The parts of school I actually remember are the hands-on ones. Shop class in middle school. Drafting in high school. Band with my clarinet. Painting alongside my grandma, who sold her own art, for as long as I can remember. The making — that was where I came alive.

I kept leaving maps that did not fit.

At eighteen, I enrolled at DeVry Technical Institute in business operations. I did not know my dad had gone there. One trimester in, I asked myself what I was doing at a technical institute studying business operations — and I walked out.

For the next thirty-five years, I kept doing the same thing: I would walk into a system, see what was broken, and do what it needed — fix it, learn from it, or move on.

Military service in the U.S. Navy and later the Wisconsin Army National Guard. Teaching fourth grade from the late 1990s into the 2000s. Building computer science curricula when most schools did not have them yet. Certifications. A Doctorate in Instructional Design for Online Learning. Technology. Academia. More moves and homes than I can count.

Every one of those was less about collecting credentials than refusing to accept “this is how we do it” when I could already see how it could be different.

Then the cost caught up with me.

The day-to-day got so intense, so unsustainable, that my personal life just dropped. I was the fixer, the one who wanted to redesign the systems — the website, the process, whatever was in front of me — because that is how I am wired.

But the cost was everything else.

My body had been telling me for a very long time. In 1998 and 1999, I kept dehydrating. Not because I was refusing to drink water. I was drinking the water. My body was not holding what it needed. I had been asking why since 1995. No one had an answer, so I kept going.

In May 2022, I was forced off my tenure track in computer science. In November 2025, the health battle I had been carrying landed me in emergency surgery.

I did not yet have the phrase for the cost of a whole life being split into pieces. I do now: the Fragmentation Tax.

The last night.

On January 5, 2026, I woke to a message — my dad was in the hospital. Fifteen days later, he died in hospice.

I busted my ass and made my way there that first night. I was there as much as I could be — early mornings and late nights — fighting to be present while everything was falling apart.

That last night, when there was finally some peace, I sat and read with him. The book was The Purpose Factor — I was reading it for a certification I had just started. I always have a book with me.

One passage kept hitting me: “Purpose does not simply add years to life; it adds life to the years.” Sitting there, watching my dad breathe, I finally understood what it meant. My dad had lived that way his whole life.

He was working on house projects the night of his stroke. He did not stop building. He did not retire into comfort. He lived on purpose until he could not anymore.

The foundation was always there.

That is when the dots connected backward — the flexibility I did not force, the life I did not plan, the bearings I never set.

The foundation was always there. It just needed to point somewhere.

That is the HUBREX Hypothesis in lived form: Human Understanding Builds Resiliency, Expertise, and X-factor. My dad lived it without ever naming it. I named it because I had to — because the next person standing where I stood needs somewhere to land.

The lineage is older than either of us. Adriaan Huijbregt, born in Westkapelle, Zeeland, in 1859, made the passage across an ocean and started building under load.

Five generations later, the Fragmentation Tax is not a new problem in this family. It just never had a name.

Aspirateering is the living R&D.

Now I am building something for people with dreams too big to keep filing under someday — before life, health, systems, grief, or time make the choice for them.

The deeper work asks what it takes for a whole human to move: health that can carry the life, work that is distinctly yours, a dream you are actually building, legacy already underway, and people and tools around the build without taking away your helm.

I will not invite anyone to take a leap I have not taken. The work stays alive because I keep living it, questioning it, testing it, and documenting what happens.

— Dr. Sarah HUBREX

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