You Haven’t Lost Yourself

Not every change is something to mourn

In the first year of my daughter’s life I said yes to every wedding and bachelorette party I was invited to. I flew across the country alone to see Taylor Swift. I told myself I was reclaiming my life, and part of me was. But I was also trying to prove I wasn’t like the other moms I’d spent years judging — you know the ones, whose entire Instagram is their kid’s face and who seem to have vanished into the word “mom.” I was different from them. I was still me.

We talk about change like it’s a threat. Don’t let the job change you, don’t lose yourself in the relationship, stay true to who you are. Underneath all of it is a belief that people come with a fixed, essential nature, a “real you” that any drift betrays. You hear it in every wedding toast and every parent describing their kid: “I knew the day she was born that she would grow up to be a leader because of how ferocious her cries were.”

We talk about character like it was issued at birth and never revised. Of course, some of this is true. We are all wired a little bit differently. Temperament is a real thing, and so is neurodiversity. But life will influence and change us all whether we like it or not. The person you were ten years ago wanted different things, feared different things, would be baffled by half of what your life looks like now.

Since my daughter was born, I have barely been on vacation. When I have, I’ve spent most of it flat on a lounge chair. The woman I used to be hovers over me like the Ghost of Christmas Past, covering her eyes in disbelief. What happened to your sense of adventure? You swore you’d never let a kid slow you down. She had a clear picture of who I’d turn out to be, and she is watching me fail to be that person in real time.

But here’s what we forget — she’s not a reliable witness. She has never lived a single day of the life she’s judging. She doesn’t understand what a year of chronic overstimulation and sleep deprivation feels like or how the mental load of motherhood zaps any interest in planning an elaborate vacation, let alone an adventure.

And even more interestingly, at every age of our lives, we seem to believe that we are fully evolved and done changing. Psychologists call this phenomenon the end-of-history illusion. Researchers asked thousands of people, young and old, how much they’d changed in the past ten years and how much they expected to change in the next. Everyone reported a lot of change behind them and almost none ahead. Of course, almost everyone was wrong. Your previous version of yourself judges you by standards set a long time ago.

So the next time that older version of you shows up to judge, don’t argue about whether you’ve changed. You have. Remind them what they’re missing. Tell them about the job that swallowed you whole, the diagnosis that changed your body, the current political environment, or whatever reorganized your life. It’s not fair to judge yourself by a standard that is no longer relevant or a life that no longer exists.

But sometimes you hand over everything and a clear-eyed part of you still feels disappointed. How you got here makes sense, but you don’t like the direction it’s headed… or you feel as though you aren’t living in alignment with your values. This is worth listening to. It usually means you’ve drifted from something important. Maybe you’ve lost touch with important people in your life or fallen into bad habits and aren’t taking care of yourself.

The version of you reading this article won’t be your final form. In ten years you’ll look back and marvel at how finished you thought you were. But there’s always an opportunity to change your life. This doesn’t mean you have to get back to “who you were”, but you can always choose which way to walk from here.