All my life I was told who I should be, but no one ever asked who I was. Not once. I was trained to follow, to keep quiet, to smile at the right time and apologize even when I wasn’t wrong. That version of me still shows up sometimes, uninvited. But she’s not the only one. There have been so many. The one who stayed when she should’ve left. The one who said yes out of fear. The one who lied to herself just to keep the peace. I never thought of these as different lives, but maybe they are. Maybe every time I changed, I left behind a ghost. And maybe I’ve been haunted ever since.
Becoming anything takes loss. Nobody tells you that. You lose who you were to make space for who you’re becoming, and then you do it again, and again, and again. I’ve been naive. I’ve been cruel. I’ve been generous to the wrong people and distant from the ones who cared. I’ve punished myself for things I didn’t understand. And yet, I keep unfolding. Some days I’m proud of that. Other days I feel like I’m patching together pieces of someone I don’t fully recognize. There’s beauty in that, but also grief. You can’t carry every version of yourself and expect to walk lightly.
Caution was my first language. I learned to speak in what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. Desire came with warnings. Anger came with shame. I wasn’t raised to be free, I was raised to be acceptable. But that didn’t last. Eventually, my body rebelled. My thoughts stopped asking for permission. I kissed who I wasn’t supposed to. I said things I couldn’t take back. And I don’t regret it. Even the mess taught me something. Even the pain showed me what I needed to see. I didn’t become better. I became more aware. And maybe that’s enough.
Distance helps me see the patterns. How many times I made myself smaller just to be loved. How many times I confused silence with safety. How many things I accepted not because I wanted them, but because I thought I didn’t have a choice. I’ve outgrown so many skins I barely remember what it was like to fit in one. And still, I catch myself wanting to go back. Just for a second. To feel what it was like to not know what I know now. But I can’t. And I shouldn’t. Every version of me had her own purpose. Even the ones that broke something.
Eventually, you realize that no one is coming to hand you your voice. You have to dig it out from underneath everything they taught you to be. I’m not aiming for perfection. I don’t want to be good. I want to be honest. I want to be full. I want to hold space for every woman I’ve been and still believe there’s more coming. That’s the point, I think. One life is never just one story. It’s a collection of selves, of moments, of turns you didn’t see coming. And maybe the most honest thing I can say is that I’m still becoming. Still undoing. Still learning how to stay with myself, even when I change again.
