The Versions of Me I Have Outgrown (And the One I Kept)

A small archaeology of becoming.

There is a photograph of me at twenty-two that I almost did not recognise the last time I found it.

She was wearing a blazer that did not fit, holding a folder she was using as a prop, in a corporate hallway whose details I have forgotten. The expression on her face was a careful arrangement of confidence and worry. She was trying very hard to be the woman she thought she needed to be. She was very young. She was also, in some quieter way, already old. Older than she should have been at that age. Older because she had been told to be.

I have spent the years since that photograph becoming, in slow sequence, four different versions of myself. I have outgrown three of them. The fourth, the one I have kept, is not the one I would have predicted.

This essay is about who they were, and what I learned from each, and which one stayed.

The Striver (22 to 28)

The first version of me wanted to prove something. She is not difficult to describe, because the culture has trained all of us to recognise her. She was hungry. She worked late. She said yes to everything. She felt the pressure of being the daughter of immigrants, or of an unstable household, or of a family in which competence had always been the currency of love. (Pick one. The pressure was there. The shape of the pressure was particular. The motive engine was the same.)

She was good at her job. She was praised for it. The praise made her work harder. The harder she worked, the more she was praised. The loop ran for six years.

What she got right: she built the muscles. She learned what she could do under pressure. She earned, in real terms, the credibility that the next versions of her would draw on for the rest of her life. The Striver was not a mistake. She was a foundation.

What she got wrong: she confused the praise with the point. She thought the point was to be excellent. The actual point was to be alive. She missed entire years to deadlines. She forgot to ask herself, in any of those years, what she actually wanted to be doing. The asking happened later. It happened because she finally, in her late twenties, ran out of road. The road did not run out because she had failed. It ran out because she had succeeded at everything she had been told to succeed at, and the success was not feeding her in the way she had expected it to.

I have outgrown her. I respect her. I would not be here without her. But I do not want to live as her again.

The Pivot (28 to 33)

The second version of me thought the answer was reinvention.

She left the job. Or she changed industries. Or she moved cities. Or all three. (Adjust to your specifics.) She believed, with the conviction of someone who has only had one model of being broken, that a different setting would produce a different self.

She was wrong about that. She was right about other things.

The Pivot taught me that the woman I was bringing to the new room was the same woman who had been in the old one. The setting did not transform her. The skills did not transform her. The new colleagues did not transform her. She brought herself with her, in all her unresolved fullness, and the new room reflected her back to her with the same questions, just in different vocabulary.

What she got right: she learned that there was no version of “outside” that would do the work of “inside.” She had to face the actual self, eventually, and the Pivot was the necessary intermediate step. She had to try the geographical solution before she could rule it out.

What she got wrong: she spent four years thinking she was getting closer to herself by accumulating more experiences, when in fact she was just adding more pages to a file that needed to be closed before any new chapter could be written.

I have outgrown her. I am grateful for the courage she had. I am also relieved that I do not need to keep proving the same thing to myself by changing settings every two years.

The Settler (33 to 38)

The third version of me wanted to belong somewhere.

She had been moving. She was tired. She got married. Or she had children. Or she bought the small flat. Or she joined the company she stayed at for six years. (Adjust.) She wanted to put roots down, and she did, and the roots were real, and the settling was real, and for a while she thought this was what she had been looking for all along.

The Settler was wrong about that in a way that took her a long time to admit.

What she got right: she learned to commit. She learned that depth was a different kind of growth than breadth, and that some of the most important development of her life would happen in the years where, from the outside, nothing was visibly happening. The hard work of staying. The hard work of building a life with the same person over time. The hard work of being a mother, or a partner, or an employee, in the same place, with the same constraints, year after year.

What she got wrong: she mistook settling for arriving. She thought the goal was to plant the flag. The flag was not the goal. The flag was a stop, an important one, but not the destination. The destination would turn out to be something different entirely, something neither the Striver, the Pivot, nor the Settler could have predicted.

I have outgrown her too. Some of her habits remain (the desire for continuity, the appreciation for slow growth, the willingness to commit). The illusion that arrival is a place has not survived.

The Version I Kept

Here is where the essay turns.

You would expect, given the arc, that the version of me I kept is some integration of the three. A wiser, more whole self that has metabolised the Striver’s drive, the Pivot’s courage, and the Settler’s commitment into a single new woman.

That is not who I kept.

The version I kept is younger than all of them. She is around fourteen. She is the one who had no idea yet who she was supposed to become, and who had not yet started performing for any of the audiences who would later shape her. She is the version of me who used to write in a notebook for hours and not show it to anyone, because the writing was the point, not the showing.

She is the one who, when she had a hard day, would walk to the corner shop and buy a Mars bar and eat it slowly on the way home, and the eating of the Mars bar was a complete and sufficient response to the hardness of the day. No therapeutic framework. No analysis. Just a slow Mars bar, walking, evening light.

She is the one who could be bored, and tolerate the boredom, and notice things during the boredom. The leaves moving. The way the light fell. The small interesting fact about something her teacher had said. She had the capacity for attention that the later versions of her would spend years trying to recover.

The Striver, the Pivot, the Settler, all of them, in their different ways, were performances of being a woman. Performances directed at different audiences (the boss, the new city, the family she was building). The fourteen-year-old was not performing. She had not yet learned to.

The version of me I kept is the one who came before the performing started. She is the bones of the rest of them.

What this means, if anything

The arc of growing up is often described as the accumulation of selves. You add the striver self, the pivoting self, the settled self. You become more, in some sense.

The arc that has actually proved true for me is closer to the opposite. The growing up is the slow shedding of the selves that were never quite me, and the slow excavation of the one who was there the whole time. The fourteen-year-old who knew how to sit with herself, before anyone had told her sitting with herself was selfish.

I do not always live as her. I cannot. The world I live in now has a calendar and obligations and a child who needs his shoes tied. But she is the one I check in with, when I have a hard decision. She is the one I ask, before the older, more developed, more credentialed selves get a chance to weigh in. She is faster, and she is usually right.

If you are reading this and trying to work out who you have been, and who you are becoming, I would suggest one small experiment. Picture yourself at the age before any audience started watching you. The age before you started performing. Picture her clearly. Where she lived. What she did with a free Saturday. What made her laugh until she could not breathe.

She is still in there.

The work of becoming is, often, just the work of letting her back into the room.

The closing

I have outgrown three versions of myself, and I have kept one. The one I kept is the youngest one. She is also the wisest. Not because she knew anything. Because she had not yet been told to forget what she knew.

The selves you outgrow do not disappear. They become muscles. The Striver gave me the muscle to deliver under pressure. The Pivot gave me the muscle to leave when staying was costing me too much. The Settler gave me the muscle to commit. The muscles are real. I use them every day.

But the woman underneath the muscles is the fourteen-year-old. She is the one I am, when I am most myself. Everything else is in service of letting her live as much of her life as the world allows her to live.

The versions of me I have outgrown were necessary. The version I have kept is the point.

If this landed, you might also like:

On Being a Mother and a Person at the Same Time

The Art of Beginning Again When You Thought You Were Halfway There