Another me is always becoming

There’s a woman I haven’t met yet. She’s older than me and she is quieter than me. She moves through the world with a kind of authority I haven’t yet earned, the kind that doesn’t come from knowing all the answers but from no longer needing to pretend she has them. And she is me. But she is also not this me. She is another I entirely. One who is being built, right now, in the marrow of everything I am living through. In the decisions I am making and the ones I am avoiding. In the slow, daily, unglamorous work of becoming a person I can’t yet see but can sometimes, in the quietest moments, feel moving toward me.

I don’t know her but I know she’s coming. And I know that who she will be depends entirely on what I do with who I am now.

The woman I am now

Let me be honest about her. About me. About this version, the current one, the one writing these words with hands that are still learning to be steady and trust myself.

She’s equally brave and terrified. She’s survived things that should have broken her and some of them did break her and she rebuilt herself from those pieces with a kind of stubborn, inelegant persistence that felt like scrambling up a crumbling rock face.

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

She is not who she will be.. And the knowing is both a relief and a grief. A relief because it means this is not the final version. There is more to come. More depth, more clarity, more of the settled, sure footed presence she catches glimpses of in wiser women who have stopped performing and started simply being. And a grief because letting go of this version that is still figuring it all out, means admitting that she is still unable to fully let go of the defences . That the woman she has fought so hard to become is just another stage. Just another room in a house that has more rooms than she can imagine.

The wiser woman who is waiting

I think about her sometimes. The woman I will be at sixty, at seventy, at whatever age I will be when I let go of performances and defences and sit with acceptance. I can’t picture her clearly. She’s more like a feeling, a quality of presence that I have encountered in other women and recognised instantly, the way you recognise a language you can’t yet speak but know you were supposed to learn.

She’s the woman who has stopped apologising for her own existence. Not in the defiant, clenched fist way of someone who’s performing liberation. But in the settled, bone deep way of someone who simply doesn’t have the energy or the interest to make herself smaller any more. Not because she’s given up, the opposite -  because she’s allowed herself to arrive. At herself. Finally.

After decades of trying to arrive at someone else's or society’s idea of who she should be, she now says what she means, respectfully and thoughtfully. Not cruelly. But 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 don’t  rush. Not because they have nowhere to be. Because they’ve stopped believing that speed is the same as purpose. 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 has learned to call transformation. Softer in places. Slower in others. Marked by time in ways that are visible and unapologetic. She doesn’t try to hide the marks. She doesn’t mourn the version that came before. She inhabits this body the way you inhabit a house you have lived in long enough to love, not for its perfection but for its familiarity. For the way it has held you through everything.

The distance between us

Me and 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.

But the me changes. Not just in circumstance or in substance. The things that consume me now, the anxieties, the ambitions, the need to be seen and understood and validated - fall 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 am in awe of her sometimes. Of the older woman I’ve not yet become. Jealous of her clarity. Of her ability to let things go without the agonising, drawn out process of releasing that I am still stuck in. Of her freedom from the opinions of others, which I’m working toward but have not yet reached. Of the way she wears her history openly, without shame or performance.

She just lives. That’s what I imagine - lives. Without the constant narration or the relentless self examination. You see, 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 am 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 of living, in the mundane repetition of choices and routines and small acts of courage or cowardice, is that I am 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 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, without accumulation. We treat the present as though it is 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 magnificent. Not in the visible, performative, look at what I accomplished sense. In the quiet, settled, I have lived fully and honestly and I am not finished yet sense. I want her to be a woman who has earned her lines. Who wears her age not as a burden but as evidence. Evidence that she showed up and she stayed in the fire. That she didn’t flinch, or when she did flinch, she went back.

Always beginning, becoming and changing me

Its begun. I choose honesty over comfort. In the decisions that prioritise the long game over the immediate relief. In the slow, almost imperceptible strengthening of my resolve.

She’ll look different, sound different, want different things. She’ll have let go of things I currently hold with white knuckled desperation. She’ll have stopped caring about things that currently keep me awake at night. She’ll have surrendered battles I am still fighting and won battles I haven’t yet started.

But she will remember me. The woman I am now. The one who was terrified and did it anyway. The one who was uncertain and chose anyway. The one who could not see what was coming and walked toward it anyway.

She will remember me with tenderness. I am sure of it. Because she will 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.