In this chapter, Catherine Compton-Lilly unsettles and explores her shifting trajectory of being and becoming a researcher. Specifically, she revisits the cases of Peter and Adam, two students who participated in longitudinal case studies that span her 24-year academic career. After briefly describing the methodology for each longitudinal study, she revisits three critical dimensions of each child's trajectory that she has written about in the past. She then examines the reflexive stances that she brought to her longitudinal projects, highlighting the ontological -- her being and becoming a literacy scholar (Parkin, 2016). Compton-Lilly ends by considering how race has affected this work. Along the way, she explores previously under-recognized and generally unspoken dimensions of research as she unsettles her own position as a researcher and considers the intellectual biases, experiences, and presuppositions that limited and directed how she made sense of students' experiences. [For the complete volume, "Unsettling Literacies: Directions for Literacy Research in Precarious Times. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education. Volume 15," see ED673643.]