Last time, I asked you to consider that some of the things you believe about yourself might not actually be true. Not the big stuff, just the little labels you've been carrying around so long you forgot you ever picked them up. I'm the anxious one. I'm lazy. I'm too much. I'm not enough.
Maybe those aren't facts about you. Maybe they're stories you started telling yourself a long time ago and never went back to check if they still fit.
And now you're here, standing in the wreckage, saying: Okay, Thaeda. Thanks a lot. Now what?
I get it. It's genuinely uncomfortable to not know what you thought you knew. Pretty quickly the questions start piling up. Well, what else have I just believed without questioning it? Who's supposed to tell me how to figure this out? What happens if I get it wrong?
Those are big questions. Let's sit with them.
The swing
When my own old identity started to crack (the striving, ambitious, gotta-do-it-all girl), I did what a lot of us do. I grabbed the opposite. I dropped the behaviors that belonged to her and tried on a completely different way of being.
I'd love to tell you I noticed what I was doing. I didn't. I was nowhere near that insightful. I was reactive, and I only saw it years later, looking back.
You may know someone who did the green juice version. They go from "unhealthy" to working out every day, eating "clean," and quietly judging everyone else's choices. It doesn't last. Then comes the shame spiral, and they end up feeling even less like the person they wanted to be.
Here's what I see now. In both cases, the person swapped one identity for its mirror image. The mind grabs the nearest replacement, and the nearest replacement is usually the opposite. We hold the new label as tightly as we held the old one, because underneath sits another belief: I have to be someone definite.
That belief is worth questioning too.
Trying on the clothes
I tried on the new clothes, and they didn't fit any better than the old ones.
What helped me see it was the discomfort, and my inability to sustain the change. At the time, that felt like failing all over again. Now I see it as the fit test doing its job. If you're trying something on and you can't keep it up, you haven't failed. You've gotten information.
You're allowed to try things on. The ones that don't fit are doing their job.
Something new arrived
Eventually I landed somewhere in the middle, and I thought of it that way for a long time. But when I'm honest about it, it wasn't a compromise and it wasn't a hybrid. Something new showed up that wasn't in the old me, the opposite me, or the space between them. It was my version of how to be.
How did I know it fit? Ease. I was in my groove.
That's a different quality from numbness or avoidance, which can feel easy too. Ease like this feels spacious and settled. Energy moves freely. Nothing needs gripping, and no part of you is standing guard over a performance. Notice whether what you're living takes constant effort and shame management to maintain, or whether it holds without you white-knuckling it.
And notice that it took time. It came gradually, and I only recognized it in hindsight. I wish I could give you a number of weeks. I can't. I can tell you it arrived without my forcing it.
Who was in there the whole time?
Here's the paradox I love. We are always changing: adapting, expanding, contracting, resting, starting over. That's because we're alive. And there is also something in us that has always been. Think of a riverbed. The water moves constantly, and the ground holds it.
Which means you can be in complete upheaval and still have ground. The ground was never made of your labels.
The ambitious girl was a way of being, not the whole of you. So was the one who rebelled against her. So is the voice that shames you in the green juice spiral. Every one of them was trying to help, in its own way. You don't have to become someone else to get free of them. You just get to loosen your grip.
Values as fingerprints
What you value can work as evidence of who you are underneath the labels. Someone who calls themselves "anxious" might be someone who deeply values courage. Someone who calls themselves "too sensitive" might care a great deal about tenderness and connection.
A word of caution, because values can be borrowed too. Plenty of us absorbed ours from family, church, school, the military, or the culture around us. A borrowed value usually comes with pressure and a should attached. A value that's really yours tends to feel spacious, even when it asks something hard of you.
And one more thing: you never finish a value. There's no box next to curiosity that says Congratulations, you've achieved Curiosity. Please proceed to Generosity.
So who gets to decide?
I don't think anyone decides by decree, not even you, at least not right away. Who you are isn't fully designed in advance. You take part by trying things on, letting the ill-fitting ones go, and staying in the not-knowing long enough for something true to arrive. The fit does some of the deciding.
If you're in the open space right now, here's a small invitation. You don't have to do anything. Just notice how it feels to not know. See if you can be curious about that feeling the way you'd be curious about a frightened friend.
There's no wrong way to be. You can notice how you feel and choose, one moment at a time, what feels most like you. You'll fall short sometimes. We all do. That's human, and every part of you can be loved, including the one who spiraled.
Next time, we'll talk about who you're becoming.