We talk about finding ourselves as though the self were a lost object, mislaid in the wrong job or the wrong town or the wrong marriage, and waiting to be turned up at last in the right one. But there may be nothing there to find. We are less a thing to be discovered than a thing being made, and unmade, and made again, by every encounter and every choice and a great many things that are neither.
The cheerful version of this says you are always becoming, and offers it as freedom: grow, change, reinvent. The truer version is harder on two counts. Most of what you become, you do not choose. And most of it is not an improvement. We are remade by the books and the friendships, yes, but also by the diagnosis, the bereavement, the job that ends without warning, the people who learned exactly where we could be hurt. The forces that shape a self are not auditioning for the part.
Watch a small child and you see it before the lid goes on. They are one person in this game and another in the next, someone different in each friendship and each mood, trying selves on like coats. Then we teach them to settle, to be consistent, to be themselves, as though there were a single self in there to be true to, as though changing were a kind of lying. There was never one. There were always many, arriving in turn.
And they do not arrive in a tidy order. The story we are sold about change runs crisis, then revelation, then resolution, a clean line up and out. Real change spirals. You think you have grown past an old pattern and then catch yourself wearing it again in unfamiliar clothes, the adolescent fear surfacing in the boardroom, the childhood wound speaking out of a grown mouth. The selves you thought you had left keep coming back to be left again.
A great deal of becoming is simply done to us. The death of a parent that makes you the adult in the room overnight. The diagnosis that quietly rewrites the years you thought were yours. And the standing instructions of the world about who you are to turn into, a buyer for the economy, a believer for the nation, one of the two permitted kinds of person. For anyone the world was not built around, much of what looks like becoming is only survival wearing a kinder word: you grow resilient because nothing softer is on offer, smaller to fit the room you were given, watchful because some ways of becoming get punished. We are turned against ourselves as readily as we are turned towards anything.
We like to call all of this growth, as though a self were built by addition, new skills laid on top of the old ones. Mostly it is subtraction. You become by letting go of who you were certain you were, by releasing the story that no longer fits, by unlearning the very habits that once kept you safe. The caterpillar is the plain fact of it. It does not sprout wings onto its body and fly off improved. It dissolves, almost entirely, to something close to liquid, and the butterfly is built out of the ruin. The caterpillar does not survive into the butterfly. So every becoming buries a self, which is why we fight it even as it happens anyway: the familiar cage feels safer than the open sky, and we grieve, quietly, the people we are made to stop being.
So the practice of becoming is the harder, sadder art of consenting to be unmade, over and over, by what we did not choose, and of grieving well the selves we lose on the way, rather than a course of self-improvement. You steer it about as much as a river steers itself. What is left to you is how you go: with what tenderness towards the one being left behind, with what attention to the one arriving. And the last self dissolves like all the rest, and becomes, the way every becoming finally does, the soil out of which someone else begins.