From Shattered to Seen: An Outlier’s Return

Being Bold in Egypt: Awakening #8 — Hatshepsut, the Outlier Who Refused to Stay Buried (Thanks to The Met)

Each time I return to the Met after my trip to Egypt, there’s a faint voice that follows me. A quiet whisper — not loud or urgent, but persistent, almost conspiratorial. She doesn’t shout. She waits. And every time I pass the granite sphinx displayed near the Temple of Dendur, she reminds me:

“You haven’t told my story yet.”

That voice belongs to Hatshepsut — pharaoh, outlier, and survivor.

In the early 20th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Expedition uncovered the remains of Hatshepsut's once-glorious image. Her statues had been systematically smashed and dumped, ordered so by her own nephew and successor, Thutmose III, in an attempt to erase her from Egypt’s sacred memory. He didn’t just want to dethrone her; he wanted to rewrite the ritual landscape — so that his temple and his statues would become the eternal carriers of divine presence at Deir el-Bahri.

And yet, what was intended as an act of erasure became a form of preservation.

Instead of being lost to time, the broken fragments found their way to the Met. They were carefully reassembled, piece by piece, by curators who saw not just the aesthetic beauty, but the resilience encoded in every fracture.

That’s what brought me to write this: not the perfection of the statue, but its story of imperfection. A queen who was shattered for being too bold — and yet, now speaks louder than ever from the granite silence of her fragments.

She is not just a historical figure. She is a mirror for every person who’s ever been told they don’t belong, that they went too far, claimed too much, or dared to lead where they "shouldn’t."

And so, this post is my long-overdue response to that whisper in the museum.

Hatshepsut, I hear you now.

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Long before her statues were dragged and shattered, Hatshepsut had already broken a far more entrenched norm: she ruled Egypt as a king.

Not as queen regent. Not as a placeholder for a boy-king. She claimed the throne of the Two Lands in full regalia. In a deeply patriarchal system, she wrapped herself in the iconography of male kingship, not to deceive, but to reframe power itself. She understood that to lead Egypt was to enter a divine, gendered role, and rather than challenge the system directly, she used its own symbols to subvert it from within.

That’s what makes her an outlier — not just because she was the exception to a rule, but because she redefined the rule by playing it better than anyone else.

When Thutmose III, the young king who technically shared the throne during her reign, took sole control after her death, he did what many powerful men do when confronted with inconvenient brilliance — he erased her name. Not immediately. Not in rage. But methodically and symbolically. He had her statues ripped from temples, smashed, and dumped into pits and quarries.

It was a calculated campaign to reclaim the narrative.

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Nearly 3,500 years later, the Metropolitan Museum’s excavation crews began to collect the scattered pieces… It became an act of historical retrieval, and eventually, of reconstruction. The curators and conservators at the Met saw what the ancient workmen could not: that even a broken story can be put back together — if someone is willing to listen to the silence and sort through the dust.

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We often talk about reinvention as a choice.

But what if it begins with destruction?

Hatshepsut didn’t get to choose what happened to her legacy. Her statues were smashed not because she failed — but because she succeeded too well. She broke norms, reshaped power, and created a vision of kingship that was too bold to fit the next ruler’s agenda.

And yet, across millennia, she returned.

This is why her story moves me — because it reminds me that being an outlier is never safe, and never simple.

To step outside of the expected — to lead differently, to build your life or career against convention — invites misunderstanding, even suppression.

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So many of us, especially in our encore years, carry fragmented versions of ourselves.

And sometimes, someone — maybe even your future self — will come back for them.

That’s what makes this a koffeemocha moment:

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about having the courage to collect your fragments, one by one, and reassemble them — not into what you were, but into who you were always meant to become.

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I didn’t expect to find myself reflected in a shattered statue after revisiting the Met. I felt something familiar. Not in the history, not in the dynasty, but in the arc:

Break. Bury. Rebuild. Return.

It’s the rhythm of some of our lives — especially for those of us in bold transitions.

When I left Silicon Valley and stepped into my encore chapter in New York, I didn’t yet know how many parts of myself would have to be dug out, reexamined, and reassembled.

But over time, through writing, reflection, and walks through spaces like Riverside Drive, Central Park or the Met, I’ve begun to reclaim what felt lost. Hatshepsut’s story is not just ancient. It’s alive — especially here in New York City, where reinvention is a civic tradition. And perhaps that’s why her statue belongs here, too.

So if you, too, are standing before the pieces of a former identity, a past version of yourself, know this:

You are in the quarry.

And that, my friend, is where bold stories begin.

With deep gratitude,
Kefei