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.
You are always becoming, we are told, and it is offered as freedom: grow, change, reinvent. It is harder than that 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 accident, the estrangement, 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 small children and whatever selves they have are worn in the open. One is a different person in each game, each friendship, each mood; another is steady almost from the start; none of them is performing the steadiness yet. Then we teach them to settle, to be consistent, to be themselves, as though there were a single finished self in there to be true to, as though 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. What the teaching ends is the openness.
And the changing does 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 only 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. Instead of sprouting wings onto the body it has, it dissolves, almost entirely, to something close to liquid, and the butterfly is built out of the ruin. Almost entirely: a caterpillar taught to fear a smell still avoids it after the wings, the old lesson arriving in a body with no use for it. The caterpillar does not survive into the butterfly, and its fear does. So every becoming buries a self, which is why we fight it even as it happens anyway, and why we grieve, quietly, the people we are made to stop being.
The practice of becoming, then, is the harder, sadder art of living through what unmakes us without pretending we chose it, of grieving well the selves we lose on the way, and of refusing the forms that would make us smaller. 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 different. It ends. What remains becomes the soil out of which someone else begins.