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 finished 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.
It can sound like freedom. Most of what you become, though, you do not choose, and nothing promises that it will be an improvement. We are remade by the books and the friendships, and as much by the accident, the estrangement, the job that ends without warning, the people who learned exactly where we could be hurt.
Watch small children: one is a different person in each game, each friendship, each mood; another is steady almost from the start. Then we teach them to be consistent, to be themselves, as though there were a single finished self in there to be true to and changing were a kind of lying. The changing outlives the lesson: the adult who learned it is still one person at work and another in the kitchen, someone else again with a stranger on a train.
And the changing comes round in 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, 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 only two permitted kinds of person. For anyone the world was not built around, much of what looks like becoming is 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.
Much of it is subtraction: you become by letting go of who you were certain you were, by unlearning the very habits that once kept you safe. The caterpillar is usually told as a story of total loss, and it keeps more than the story allows. In the pupa a large part of its body is broken down and rebuilt as a moth, while parts of its nervous system are kept and remodelled; in one laboratory, caterpillars taught to avoid a smell still avoided it as moths, the old lesson turning up in a new body. Often a becoming buries a self, wanted or not. Some we fight to keep, and some we are glad to see go and grieve anyway, the way someone getting sober can miss the person who drank.
The practice of becoming is mostly the art of living through what unmakes us without pretending we chose it, of making room to grieve the selves we lose on the way, and of refusing the forms that would make us smaller. Where there is a choice, it is also the art of taking something up on purpose, a language, a friendship, a sober year, and letting it change you. You steer it about as much as a river steers itself, and a river still works its banks as it passes. 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. The last self is the one you die as, with no one arriving after it.