Who Are You Becoming? On identity, onions, and what was never really yours to begin with.

Someone asked me recently how I identified and I had to laugh because it brought me back and involves Jim Morrison.

I was fifteen. I was completely, catastrophically obsessed with him and I genuinely couldn't tell you whether I wanted to love him or be him. A fifteen year old girl, certain that somehow this man, this particular chaos of poetry and leather and self-destruction, was speaking directly to her. Then came Prince. Same feeling. Something in him reached something in me. Again, love him? Be him? Both? Neither? I had no idea. I just felt drawn.

As a middle aged woman, I look back at both of those moments and think, yes. That tracks. That makes complete sense. Not because Jim Morrison or Prince were who I was meant to be. But because something in me was reaching, even then, for something larger than what was immediately on offer.

Something beyond the expected shape of a life.

So how do I identify now?

I have an Irish hat. A mother hat. A therapist hat. An artist hat. I have so many hats I'm happy to abandon them all to sleep. And here's the thing, everyone around me is going to project something onto me regardless. Even the most rigorously trained psychotherapist carries their own lens, their own unexamined assumptions. We can't fully escape that. We project onto each other constantly, tidying one another into categories that make us easier to hold.

So what is this question of identity? What is this hunger to know, to name, to locate, to belong?

I think identity is an onion. Genuinely. Layer after layer, and every time you think you've reached the centre, there's another layer waiting. Sometimes it makes you cry. Sometimes you're not sure if what you're finding is something essential or just another layer of conditioning wearing a convincing disguise.

For years, I thought I had lost myself.

And then, slowly, I began to understand something different. I hadn't lost myself. I was becoming myself. Those are not the same thing at all. But I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to say I shifted my perspective and that's what made things easier. Neat. Tidy. A little too convenient.

I don't think it's quite that.

I think it's something more fundamental. Something closer to this: as long as you are alive, you are becoming. It is not a choice. It is not a perspective. It is the condition of being a living person. The question is not whether you are in process, you are, always, whether you know it or not. The question is whether you are conscious of it.

We arrive into a world that has strong opinions about who we should be. Some of it is biological, the body we're born into, the neurology we carry, the temperament that is simply, irreducibly ours. That part we didn't choose and we can't entirely escape. And there is something actually freeing in accepting that, in recognising what is genuinely given rather than fighting it. But so much of the rest? The identities we've absorbed, the stories we've inherited, the versions of ourselves we've performed so long we forgot they were performances, that is worth examining. Carefully. Honestly. Without too much judgment but with real curiosity.

Who told you that was who you were? When did you agree to it? Does it still fit?

What keeps coming back to me is this: what is actually happening in me right now, and what has simply been imposed?

Not as an anxious unravelling. Not as a search for some pure, authentic self waiting to be uncovered like buried treasure. But as an ongoing, gentle, curious relationship with your own experience.

Because you are not who you were ten years ago. You will not be who you are now in ten years time. And that is not loss. That is life doing what life does.

The becoming doesn't stop. It just gets, with practice and with honesty, a little more conscious.

A little more yours.

What part of your story began somewhere you didn't choose? And what are you building now, from your own hands?