Notes on Being and Becoming

Identity, Awareness, and the Stories We Inherit

I used to think life was about becoming. Like most young people, I believed life was about becoming someone, someone wiser, more successful, more healed, and more of who she was “supposed to” be. I imagined there had to be a finished version of myself somewhere ahead of me, patiently waiting for me to find her. If I worked hard enough, made the right decisions, and learned the lessons life was trying to teach me, perhaps one day I would finally arrive at myself.

Undoubtedly, life is about becoming, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that becoming without awareness is an incomplete journey. The older I get, the less interested I am in discovering a finished version of myself and the more interested I am in understanding the person who is already here.

Many of us secretly long for someone to emerge carrying the biography of our life, already written and neatly bound, with all the important information inside. Here is who you are. Here is where you’re going. Here are the gifts worth developing and the detours worth avoiding. We search for that biography everywhere: in religion, in our parents, in relationships, in accomplishments, in careers, and in the opinions of people we admire. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we even search for ourselves in the opinions of people who don’t like us at all. We are forever looking for someone with enough authority to tell us who we are so that we can finally exhale and begin living with certainty.

But the older I get, the desire for a finished book awaiting me diminishes.

I’ve come to realize that many pages of my story were written before I was old enough to understand what a pen even was. Some pages were written by my ancestors, some by my grandparents and parents, some by the cultures surrounding me, many by the religion I inherited, some by the people who loved me, some by the people who hurt me, and others by the little girl who was desperately trying to make sense of it all. For a very long time, I mistook those pages for my whole story.

My life began in the mid-1980s. I was the youngest child of two for 17 months before becoming. I was born and raised in Northern California where the landscape itself was colorful enough, but it could not hold a candle to my parents. They were young, vastly different from one another, and often navigating their own unfinished stories. My childhood often felt like an unregulated roller coaster. I learned early and quickly how to read a room, anticipate what might happen next, adapt to changing circumstances, and become whatever version of myself seemed most likely to create safety for the people I believed needed to be protected and those I loved. For years, I believed that was simply who I was. I did not yet understanding that survival skills and identity are not the same thing.

I spent my teenage years longing for adulthood because I imagined it would finally bring me peace. Instead, I carried many of the same uncertainties into independence. The parts of myself that felt too emotional, too wild, too much, or too unsafe were packed away and hidden in dark corners, yet adulthood has a way of reopening locked doors. The things we bury often return, asking to be understood rather than hidden.

About ten years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office in Middle Tennessee and confidently informed her that I believed I was bipolar. I came prepared with evidence, a carefully assembled list of reasons, experiences, and patterns that supported my conclusion. She listened patiently before looking at me with compassion and offering a perspective I had never fully considered.

“I think you experienced a deeply polarized and abusive childhood,” she told me, “and you’re carrying the effects of that childhood. Want to unpack that together?”

That conversation changed the trajectory of my life because, for the first time, I considered the possibility that I had spent years confusing who I was with what I had lived through.

That realization did not instantly heal anything. It did not reveal a hidden version of myself waiting beneath the rubble. What it did do was create space. I began questioning whether the things I had always considered flaws were actually adaptations. I started wondering whether many of my reactions made perfect sense when viewed through the context of the life I had lived. The story I told myself slowly began to loosen its grip as curiosity gradually replaced certainty and compassion slowly took up more space than judgment.

As I revisited old chapters, I became increasingly interested in the stories that came before mine. I wanted to understand the people I came from, the circumstances that shaped them, and the burdens they carried. The more I learned, the more compassion I found. What I once viewed as evidence of brokenness increasingly looked like evidence of survival. What I once saw as personal failures often looked like a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances.

What surprised me most was that self-discovery rarely arrived through grand revelations. Instead, it appeared quietly, hidden within ordinary moments I might once have overlooked. It appeared in the people who I felt completely comfortable being myself with, in the books I read slowly and underlined, in the trails I wandered again and again, in the movies that lingered long after the credits rolled, and it emerged in the activities that caused time to disappear altogether. Belly laughs were leaving clues. The things that clouded my eyes exposed more of me. Even my worries, my daydreams, and the thoughts that repeatedly returned to me seemed to be telling me something. The older I get, the more convinced I am that we are constantly leaving evidence of ourselves behind, and awareness is simply learning how to notice it.

Over time, I stopped searching desperately for a final answer to the question of who I was. Instead, I began paying attention to the person I repeatedly encountered. I discovered that I am a woman who notices and ponders. I notice what nurtures peace and what slowly devours it. I notice which relationships invite authenticity and which require performance. I pay attention to the places I wish to return to and the places I am relieved to leave behind. I have learned to create space for curiosity, wonder, creativity, and joy because they continue presenting themselves as faithful companions on this journey.

Motherhood has deepened these discoveries more than anything else. Watching my children grow has revealed how profoundly adults influence the stories young people tell about themselves. As a younger parent, I often felt pressure to provide answers. Now I am far more interested in offering perspective. I no longer want to tell my children who they are so much as I want to help them see themselves. When they share the art of their lives with me, I try not to hand them conclusions. Instead, I tell them what I notice. I tell them what I see and hear. Sometimes my perspective surprises them. Sometimes it creates tension. Yet I hope that one day they will value being seen through another set of eyes while still retaining the freedom to determine what their own story means. I’ve come to believe there is something beautiful in that space between being read and interpreting yourself.

If I could give my children a few tools for the path ahead, I would want them to carry more than pens and paper. I would want them to carry a mirror and a candle. A mirror to honestly see themselves and a candle to illuminate the parts of themselves they have not yet explored. More than anything, I want them to understand that self-expression is not selfish. It is part of becoming fully alive. As I have grown as a mother, I have realized those tools will only be easily approachable by my children if I am willing to use them myself.

Part of that process has involved reexamining my faith. American Christianity shaped much of the first thirty-five years of my life. It influenced how I viewed God, humanity, morality, and myself. Yet over the past several years, I have spent considerable time unpacking many of the beliefs I once accepted without question.

There is one passage in particular that haunted me for years. Like many Christians, I feared the possibility of hearing the words, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.” For most of my life, I heard those words through the lens of rejection. Now, when I hear them, I hear something different.I hear heartbreak.

I imagine two people finally meeting face to face and God saying, “You never truly knew yourself. You spent your life becoming what everyone else expected. You buried your gifts, silenced your voice, surrendered your agency, and abandoned your own story. Because you never showed up as yourself, I never had the opportunity to know you in the fullness of who you were.”

Whether that interpretation is theologically correct matters less to me than the truth it reveals. I have grown to believe that one of the greatest tragedies a person can experience is surrendering their story to the expectations of others. I do not fear becoming the wrong person nearly as much as I fear never becoming any person at all. I fear arriving at the end of my life having mistaken compliance for authenticity and adaptation for identity. To me, that is a form of hell, not punishment but profound loss, the loss of a life that was never genuinely lived.

So who am I?

Today, the best answer I can offer is this: I am a mother, a community member, and a woman shaped by where she came from but no longer confined by it. I am someone learning to honor the chapters that formed her while accepting responsibility for the chapters still being written. I am learning to trust my laughter, make room for curiosity, honor my thoughts, and create space for wonder. I am becoming increasingly comfortable taking up space at the table and offering perspective as a gift rather than a mandate.

I am now a participant in the most common human hobby: collecting stories and writing my own. I approach the stories that came before me with compassion. I acknowledge the pages handed to me, keep what is true, release what is not, and take responsibility for the pen I wield and the pages I fill.

The final answer to who I am may not arrive until my lungs exhale for the last time. Perhaps none of us receive a complete biography while we are still living. Perhaps the beauty was never meant to be found in the beginning or the ending, but in the pages between them, in the moments we suddenly hear ourselves laugh and think, there I am, in the courage it takes to say no when no is needed and yes when yes is honest, and in the freedom that arrives when “supposed to” begins to sound like a foreign language.

For now, I am no longer waiting for someone else to tell me who I am. I am here, with my pen and paper as well as my mirror and candle, paying attention, listening, and becoming aware.