The Art of Becoming

They ask if you’re still you when you change so completely that your old self is unrecognizable.

I think that’s the wrong question.

The caterpillar doesn’t become less of itself when it dissolves into liquid in the chrysalis. It becomes more.

Transformation isn’t betrayal. It’s not a failure to hold the line. It’s the only honest response to the fact that you are not a fixed point.

You are a becoming.

Every decision unmakes you slightly. Every experience rewrites you. Every person you love changes the architecture of your insides.

And you can mourn what you were— the version with fewer scars, the version who believed in simpler things, the version who hadn’t learned what you know now.

You can grieve that.

But don’t mistake grief for regret.

Because the version of you that is breaking open right now? That version is more alive than any fixed self could ever be.

That version knows something the old you couldn’t have known: that becoming is the point.

That change is not something that happens to you. It’s something you are.

A constant unbecoming and rebecoming.

A cycle. A spiral. A becoming.

And that is the only thing that lasts.