By Anonymous
There is a version of me that I remember clearly. She was certain about things. Not arrogant, but settled — the kind of settled that comes from knowing your coordina-tes even when the road ahead is unclear. She had a plan, or at least the comfortable illusion of one, and she moved through the world with the quiet confidence of someone who had already decided who she was going to be.
I am not sure when she left. There was no dramatic moment, no single morning I woke up and found her gone. It was gradual, the way erosion works — so slow you do not notice until you look down and realise the ground beneath you has changed shape entirely. One day I looked in the mirror and recognised the face but could not quite place the person behind it.
This is not the kind of thing you say out loud. Not really. People ask how you are doing and they want a temperature check, not an excavation. So you say fine, or busy, or good — and you mean none of it, but you say it anyway because the alternative is a conversation nobody has a script for. The alternative is admitting that you are somewhere between who you used to be and who you are supposed to become, and that the distance between those two points is wider and stranger than you ever thought it would be.
I have been living in that distance for longer than I would like to admit.
The hardest part is that from the outside, nothing looks wrong. I show up. I perform. I meet expectations and sometimes exceed them. I laugh at the right moments and say the right things and project, with what I can only describe as exhausting consistency, the image of a person who has it together. And people believe it, which should feel like a victory but mostly just feels like loneliness with better lighting.
Because the person they are responding to is real — she is not entirely a fiction — but she is also not complete. She is the version of me that learned, very early, that the world rewards presentation. That confidence is currency. That if you act like you know where you are going, people will follow you there and rarely think to ask for directions. So I built her carefully, this version of myself, and for a long time she served me well.
But somewhere along the way, the performance started to feel less like confidence and more like armour. And the question I keep circling, the one I cannot seem to answer, is whether I am protecting something real underneath it or whether I have been wearing the armour for so long that I have forgotten what it was ever covering.
Who am I when no one is watching? I have started to sit with that question the way you sit with a person you are not entirely comfortable with yet. Awkwardly. With too much awareness of the silence. I am learning things about myself in these quiet moments that do not fit neatly into the story I have been telling about who I am. Desires that feel too big or too strange or too contrary to the trajectory I set for myself years ago, when I was a different person making decisions I cannot entirely unmake.
There is grief in becoming, and I do not think we talk about that enough. We celebrate transformation as though it is painless, as though growth is simply addition — new layers, new capacities, expanded horizons.
But becoming also means leaving. It means standing at the edge of a version of yourself and understanding that you cannot take all of her with you. Some of what you were does not survive the crossing. And mourning that, the old certainties, the old self-image, the person other people still believe you to be, is its own private kind of loss.
I am grieving someone I am not even fully done being yet. And I am trying to make space for someone I have not fully met.
The strange thing about being stuck between selves is that you become acutely aware of performance everywhere. You notice the scripts other people are running, the masks they have made so comfortable they no longer feel like masks at all. You recognise the exhaustion in other people’s eyes even when their mouths are saying fine. You become a quiet, involuntary expert in the gap between what is shown and what is real — because you are living in that gap yourself, every single day.
I do not have a conclusion for you. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you that the searching led somewhere, that I arrived at some new, more honest version of myself and set down my bags and finally felt at home in my own skin. But I am still in the middle of it. Still asking the questions. Still some days waking up as the old version and some days catching glimpses of whoever is coming next.
What I can tell you is that I have stopped pretending the gap does not exist. And some mornings, that feels like enough.
