Another me is always becoming

Sometimes I think about the woman I’m hoping I’ll become. She’s older and quieter than me and I imagine she walks through the world with lightness and authority. The kind of confidence that doesn’t come from knowing all the answers but from no longer needing to pretend she has them.

She is another version of the me who is here now. She’s in progress, being built in my intentions and actions, in how I’m living today. She come’s to mind when I make certain decisions or avoid other ones. She’s there in the slow, daily work of becoming a person I can’t quite always see but can sometimes, in the odd moment, feel her moving toward me.

I don’t know her so well yet, but I do know she’s coming. And I know that who she’ll be depends entirely on what I do with who I am now.

The woman I am now

So let me be honest about me now. About this version, the current one writing these words. She’s equally brave and terrified and has survived things that should have broken her (and some of them did break her), she rebuilt herself from those pieces with stubbornness and an scrappy persistence that felt like inching up a slippery poll.

She’s learning and still making some mistakes she thought she’d outgrown and catching herself in patterns she thought she’d broken. Still standing in the mirror some mornings and seeing a woman she doesn’t entirely recognise, someone who is neither the person she was nor the person she’s becoming, but something in between. In transit.

She’s not who she’ll be. And the knowing is both a relief and a grief. A relief because it means this isn’t the final version and there’s more to come. There’s more depth, more clarity and sure footed presence. A wiser women who has stopped performing and started simply being. And there’s also a grief because letting go of this version that is still figuring it all out, means admitting that she’s still unable to fully let go of all her defences.

The wiser woman who is waiting

I think about her sometimes. The woman I will be at sixty, at eighty, at whatever age I’ll be when I let go of performances and defences and sit with such fuller acceptance. I can’t picture her clearly, she’s more like a feeling or a quality of presence that I’ve encountered in other women and recognised instantly, the way you recognise a stranger you think you know from another time.

She’s a woman who has stopped apologising for her own existence, she’s stopped the defiant, clenched fist way of someone who’s performing liberation. She has settled, in the simple and grounded way of a woman who doesn’t have the energy or the interest to make herself smaller any more.

She says what she means, respectfully and thoughtfully - not cruelly. She says it without the elaborate scaffolding of qualifications and timid apologetic phrases.

She doesn’t rush about like she’s constantly late for life. This is the thing I notice most about the wiser women I admire. They just don’t rush. They’ve stopped believing that speed is the same as purpose and they move through the world at their own pace, and their pace isn’t determined by anyone else’s urgency.

She has a body she’s stopped fighting. I imagine this is the hardest thing and the most freeing. A body that has changed in ways that the culture would call decline and she’s learned to call transformation. Softer in places and slower in others. Marked by time in ways that are visible and unapologetic. She doesn’t try to hide the marks or mourn the version that came before. She inhabits this body fully and proudly.

The distance between us

Me and the not me yet. That is the strange, disorienting truth of aging. You’re continuous. There’s a thread that runs from the child you were to the woman you are to the older woman you will become, and it’s the same thread, the same consciousness. The same me.

And that me changes. Not just in circumstance or in substance, but also in the things that consume me now. Maybe by then all my anxieties, ambitions, and the need to be seen and understood and validated will have fallen away.

The me I am now cares deeply about things the older woman will find irrelevant. And the older woman will care deeply about things the current me can’t yet comprehend because we’re living in different bodies, different stages, different rooms of the same life. And each room has its own concerns.

I’m in awe of her sometimes. Of the older woman I’ve not yet become. Jealous of her clarity and of her ability to let things go without the agonising, drawn out process of rumination. Envious of her freedom from the opinions of others, which I’m working toward but have not yet reached. And of the way she wears her history openly, humbly and proudly.

She just lives. That’s what I imagine - she just lives. No constant narration or the relentless self examination. because she’s already made the meaning. She’s on the other side of it now. And the other side, from what I can tell, looks a lot like peace.

What she’ll know that I don’t

She’ll know that most of the things I worried about didn’t matter. Not in the way I thought they mattered. The career anxiety, the relationship drama, the obsessive monitoring of whether I’m doing life correctly. All of it will have softened into the background noise of a life that turned out to be both harder and more beautiful than anything I planned for.

She’ll know that the body I am currently at war with was the only home I ever had. And she will wish, gently, without reproach, that I had been kinder to it sooner. That I had spent less time trying to change it and more time being grateful for its function. That I’d have understood earlier what she understands now, which is that the body is not a project but a dear companion and it deserves tenderness and care.

She’ll know that she was never broken. That the years of therapy and recovery and self work were not about fixing something that was wrong but about uncovering something that was always right. That underneath all the patterns and the wounds and the adaptations and the noise, there was a self that was whole. A self that didn’t need to be repaired. Just found again and nurtured to grow.

The bridge between us

The thing I can forget in the daily chaos and minutiae of life, is that I’m constructing that woman I’ll be. Every decision I make is a brick in her foundation and every boundary I set or fail to set shapes the structure she’ll live inside.

When I stop and think about it, it feels like a huge responsibility. We live as though the future self is someone else’s problem. As though the choices we make now exist in isolation, without consequence or accumulation. We treat the present as though it’s all that matters and then we wonder why the future arrives and feels like a house we don’t recognise. A house we built without paying attention and reflects not our intentions but our defaults.

I don’t want to arrive at an older age by default, waking up in a life that was shaped by the things I didn’t choose because choosing felt too hard. I don’t want to meet the older woman I am becoming and discover that she’s smaller than she needed to be because I was too afraid to take up space. That she’s quieter than she wanted to be because I never learned to use my voice..

I want her to be totally magnificent. I want her to be a woman who has earned her lines and who wears her age not as a burden but as evidence. Evidence that she showed up and she stayed in the fire. She didn’t cower or if she did, she went back and tried again.

Always beginning, becoming and changing me

It’s all begun. Right this instant I choose honesty over comfort. I’m trying to make the decisions that prioritise the long game over the immediate relief. In the slow, almost imperceptible strengthening of my resolve.

When I get to be the woman I’m becoming, she’ll remember the me of today with tenderness and care. Because she’ll know what I don’t yet know, which is that this version, this scared, striving, not yet finished version, was the one who built her. Who made her possible. Who did the hardest part, which was not the arriving but the becoming.

She is on her way

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