You Don’t Have to Get Back to Who You Were

There have been times in my life when I’ve wanted nothing more than to get back to who I was before something happened. Before the loss, the relationship, the experience or whatever it was that shifted something significant enough that life began to feel divided into a before and an after.

I think there is something very human about wanting that. When something happens that we didn’t choose, particularly something painful, the person we were beforehand can start to represent far more than simply an earlier version of ourselves. We remember who we were when life felt safer, or easier, or when we moved through the world without carrying whatever it is we now know or have experienced. It makes complete sense that we might want to find our way back there.

We even use that language when we talk about healing. We want to feel like ourselves again. We want to get our confidence back, get our energy back, get back to doing the things we used to enjoy. I’ve used that language myself, and for a long time I think there was an assumption somewhere in my own thinking that healing meant eventually finding my way back to the person I had been before.

I’m increasingly questioning whether that is always possible, but I’m also questioning why we assume it needs to be.

Some experiences do change us

I want to be careful here because I really struggle with the way we sometimes talk about growth after difficult experiences. Something terrible happens to someone and we can be remarkably quick to start searching for the lesson in it, or talking about the strength they will discover, the perspective they will gain or the person they will become as a result.

I don’t think we need to do that.

There are things that happen to us that we would undo in an instant if we could. There are experiences we did not need to have, losses we would rather never have known and lessons we would have been perfectly happy not to learn. I don’t believe we need to find a silver lining in those experiences, or eventually become grateful for them, in order to move forward with our lives.

At the same time, pretending they haven’t changed us can create another kind of pressure. We can become so focused on proving that something hasn’t changed us, or on recovering the person we were before it happened, that we don’t leave much room to notice the person who is actually here now.

I think that distinction has taken me quite a long time to understand. I can wish with everything in me that something had never happened and still recognise that I am different because it did. Those two things don’t cancel each other out, and recognising the second doesn’t somehow justify the first.

Sometimes change is simply evidence that we have lived.

We are probably being shaped more than we realise

The experiences that dramatically change our lives are easier to recognise because the contrast can be so obvious. We can point to an event and say that there was a version of me before that happened and another version afterwards.

But the more I think about it, the more I suspect we are being shaped continuously, often in ways that are much harder to see while they are happening.

We are shaped by the people we love and by the people who hurt us. We are shaped by the people who believe in us, the work we do, the environments we spend time in, the responsibilities we carry and the things we repeatedly experience. We are shaped by opportunity and constraint, by culture and circumstance, and by things happening around us that we may have absolutely no ability to control.

Some of those influences are enormous. Others are so ordinary that we barely notice them.

Then occasionally something happens and we realise we responded differently from the way we once would have. Perhaps something that used to frighten us doesn’t anymore, or something we once tolerated suddenly feels completely unacceptable. Perhaps we find ourselves having a conversation we would previously have avoided, asking for something we need, walking away from something we would once have stayed in, or simply understanding ourselves differently.

That interests me because it makes me question the idea that there is one fixed, authentic version of ourselves buried underneath everything that happens to us and that our job is somehow to keep finding our way back to that person.

I’m not sure there is.

I wonder whether who we are has always been becoming.

Recognising who we have become doesn’t mean approving of what got us here

This is probably the part I find most complicated, because there are things I value about myself now that have undoubtedly been shaped by experiences I would never have chosen.

For a long time, I found that difficult to reconcile. If something good emerged in me because of something painful, did acknowledging the good somehow mean I was saying the painful thing had been worth it?

I don’t think it does.

I can value having greater compassion without being grateful for the pain that deepened it. I can appreciate having clearer boundaries without feeling grateful for the relationships that taught me why I needed them. I can recognise strength, perspective or courage in myself without deciding that whatever required those qualities was somehow necessary for me to become who I am.

I think we sometimes collapse those ideas together when they actually deserve to remain separate. What happened is one thing. What it shaped in us is another. What we decide to do with what has been shaped is something else again.

There is something quite freeing for me in being able to hold all of that at once. I can still say, with complete honesty, that I wish this had never happened, while also being curious about the person standing here now.

Of course, we don’t get to choose all of this

This is where conversations about becoming can become a little too neat for me, because it is easy to move from acknowledging that we have some influence over our lives to suggesting that everybody can simply choose who they become.

Life doesn’t work that way.

The space available to us is not equally distributed. Our circumstances matter. Money matters. Health matters. Trauma matters. The relationships around us matter. Systems, discrimination, safety, opportunity and access to support all affect how much room somebody genuinely has to move at a particular point in their life.

There have been periods in my own life where I have had enormous agency and others where the space available to me has felt incredibly small. I think it matters that we acknowledge that, because otherwise ideas about choice and personal growth can very quickly become another way of judging people for circumstances they did not create and cannot simply think their way out of.

What I am interested in is whatever space genuinely does exist.

Sometimes that space might allow us to make a huge decision that changes the direction of our life. At other times it may be nothing more dramatic than noticing a response we have repeated for years and wondering whether we still want to keep repeating it. It might be deciding what we carry forward, what we question, what we practise, what we release or what we are finally prepared to stop asking of ourselves.

We may have very little control over some of the things that shape us. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have no participation at all in what happens next.

I’ve become much less interested in getting back

There are parts of earlier versions of myself that I miss, and I suspect there always will be. There are things I miss about the way I once experienced the world, and there are things I would give almost anything not to know.

But there are also things about the person I am now that I wouldn’t willingly give up.

That is an uncomfortable sentence to write because some of the experiences that contributed to who I am now are experiences I desperately wish had never happened. For a long time, I think I assumed those feelings contradicted each other, as though valuing something about who I have become meant I was somehow required to value everything that contributed to getting me here.

I no longer think that is true.

I can miss who I was and still be curious about who I am becoming. I can grieve something that changed me while recognising that I understand myself differently now. I can carry sadness and still experience lightness. I can have days when life feels impossibly heavy and others when I suddenly notice that I am enjoying being in it.

One feeling doesn’t invalidate the other. They can simply coexist as part of a life that keeps moving and a person who keeps changing within it.

Maybe we have been asking ourselves the wrong question

I think this is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that healing means getting back to ourselves. It assumes that somewhere behind us is the person we are supposed to be and that, if we do the work properly enough, we will eventually find our way back to them.

Perhaps sometimes we do. There are certainly parts of ourselves that can become lost or buried during difficult periods of our lives and that we are enormously relieved to rediscover.

But I don’t think that has to be the only version of healing available to us.

Sometimes there may simply be no road back to exactly who we were, because we know things now that we didn’t know then. We have loved people, lost people, made mistakes, survived things, changed our minds, encountered parts of ourselves we hadn’t met before and lived years of life that cannot simply be undone.

That doesn’t mean we need to emerge as a better, stronger, wiser or more resilient version of ourselves either. I’m not particularly interested in imposing that destination on anyone. Sometimes we are simply different, and perhaps there can be enough space in that difference to become curious rather than immediately deciding whether it represents progress or loss.

That is where the question has changed for me.

I am becoming less interested in asking, How do I get back to who I was? and much more interested in asking, Who am I becoming from here?

I don’t think we need to know the answer immediately. In fact, perhaps the point is that we can’t.

Maybe part of becoming is giving ourselves enough space to find out.