When I Could No Longer Go Back to Who I Was

Not knowing how I wanted my life to unfold was deeply uncomfortable for the part of me that loves to create strategies.

The Strategist.

Even as I write those words, I can see the irony.

That was another label I had allocated to myself.

The identities I had created weren't imaginary. They had been lived. They had helped me navigate my life, make choices and understand myself.

But something had changed.

I knew I couldn't simply go backwards because I wasn't that person anymore.

So instead of trying to return, I made a commitment to rediscover myself.

And one of the first things I realised was that if I genuinely wanted to do that, I needed to create the conditions that would allow discovery to happen.

Time.

Space.

The right amount of pressure.

Enough resources.

Flexibility.

This became one of my first important learnings about transformation:

You can't grow a pine tree in the desert.

As I continued searching, I began to notice something else.

The process wasn't linear.

There would be periods when I simply didn't know.

My mind could see chaos. Confusion. No clear direction.

Emotionally, that was extremely uncomfortable.

Then something would reorganise.

Suddenly I could see more clearly again. I could make decisions. I could predict. I could strategise.

And there was an enormous temptation to stop there.

Great. I understand now. This is what I'm going to do.

But somewhere inside me, I knew I wasn't there yet.

I began to recognise that sometimes the clarity I was creating wasn't necessarily coming because the exploration was complete.

Sometimes I was creating clarity because I wanted to get out of the discomfort of transformation.

The Strategist could take the information available, organise it into something coherent and give me a future again.

And that felt good.

But the deeper process of understanding what no longer served me — and getting closer to what felt deeply true — wasn't necessarily finished.

I started to see how quickly a part of me wanted to cling to something known, concrete and definable.

Another identity.

Another form.

Another answer.

Because I had created the conditions to remain in the search — and because of the practices and tools I had developed through years of self-awareness work — I was sometimes able to stay beyond that first moment of discomfort.

And I kept returning to one question:

It became almost like a mantra.

Most days, the answer was:

I don't know.

Other days, familiar answers appeared.

But there was something about them that tasted of dissatisfaction.

They sounded like things I had heard before. Things I thought I should want. Things that fitted the person I thought I was supposed to be.

They didn't feel completely true.

So I kept asking.

And then one day, a different answer came that I could never have predicted. It came from a different place within me.

And with that came an enormous release.

What surprised me was that accepting my limits did not mean ignoring them, fixing them or getting rid of them.

It meant seeing them.

And embracing them.

For so long, my limits had felt heavy. They were things to be ashamed of, overcome or hide.

And because I was so afraid of them, another part of me had learned that it needed to be perfect.

Give the perfect answer.

Create the perfect plan.

Know where I was going.

When that fear began to soften, something else became possible.

I could have a more honest conversation with all of me.

And from there, I began to notice myself making VERY different choices — choices with more integrity, compassion, curiosity and love for life. This was transformative. This was what the Ancient Greeks called Metanoia.

I started welcoming life's invitations differently.

And I began noticing a mechanism that had probably been operating for a very long time.

Life had always been offering me invitations.

But my mind had a fairly rigid picture of how I was supposed to get where I wanted to go.

When something didn't match that expected picture, my mind rejected it almost immediately.

No, I don't like that.

No, that's not me.

No, that's not part of my plan.

I was not seeing beyond the picture it had created. I wasn't taking the time to see what was actually there — or how that invitation might form part of a much bigger picture that I couldn't yet see.

Once I noticed this pattern happening again and again, I changed the question.

Instead of:

I began asking:

Something changed in the way I interacted with possibility.

I began to see that I could mould these invitations into opportunities that were valuable to me. I could interact with them, experience them, learn from them and allow them to show me something about myself that the mind alone couldn't reveal.

I didn't need every invitation to become my future. But I could use all of them as an opportunity to connect to myself and continuously rediscover who I was becoming.

Perhaps this has been one of the most important shifts in my own passage of transformation.

I used to think I needed to know who I was in order to then know how to move forward.

Increasingly, I am discovering something different.

I let go of defining who I am and I deepen my discovery of what I really want through moving with life.

Through experiencing.

Through noticing.

Through experimenting.

Through meeting what arrives with curiosity and resisting the urge to come to a conclusion.

The question is no longer:

Who am I?

Or:

What am I becoming?

It is a question that keeps me searching for the wonder and beauty in life:

Because perhaps the journey of becoming isn't about arriving at another fixed definition of ourselves.

Perhaps it is about becoming increasingly able to see what is true at this precise moment in our lives — and having the openness to interact with what life places in front of us.

For me, that has meant learning to engage with life rather than constantly trying to protect myself from it.

And perhaps that is part of what it means to consciously participate in our own transformation.

It may have begun through motherhood, a career that no longer fits, the end of a relationship, a new stage of life — or simply the growing sense that the person you have been can no longer fully contain who you are becoming.

These are passages I work with through my coaching and research into Human Transformation.