entry 049 / are you becoming who you wanted to be, or just who you ended up as? 💡

at some point, maybe in middle school, maybe even younger, you had an idea of who you were going to be. not necessarily a specific job or a mapped-out life plan, but a feeling. a sense of the kind of person you wanted to grow into. brave, maybe. or creative. deeply kind. someone who mattered in a way that felt important and specific to you at the time, even if you couldn't have fully articulated it then.

how close are you to that person now? and, maybe more importantly, are you getting closer or further away?

there's a real difference between becoming someone intentionally and simply becoming someone because time passed and circumstances shaped you and you went along with it. both produce a person. but only one of them involves you. the second version is unintentional and more common than we like to admit. we drift into identities the way water finds its level, following the path of least resistance, adopting the values of people around us, building habits we never examined, until one day we look up and realize we've become someone we didn't exactly choose.

this isn't always bad. sometimes who you end up as is genuinely good and surprising. sometimes the unintentional version of you is gentler or stranger or more interesting than whatever you would have engineered if you'd stayed on the original plan. life has a way of building character through detours you didn't plan for. the things that break or reroute you often leave you more textured than the straight path would have.

but there's still something worth asking. are there things the younger version of you cared about that got deprioritized, not because you outgrew them, but because they got inconvenient? are there ways you wanted to show up in the world that you've been postponing, not because the time isn't right, but because it never feels right and somewhere along the way you stopped expecting it to? that's the gap worth looking at with honesty.

who you wanted to be at twelve wasn't fully formed and doesn't need to be your permanent blueprint. growth is real and some early visions deserved to be revised. but somewhere in that early version of yourself there was intention. there was wanting. there was a sense of what mattered. and wanting something specific about who you become is one of the most human things there is.

the question isn't whether you've changed. of course you have. the question is whether you're still steering, or if you've handed the wheel over to momentum and circumstance and just started calling it fate. both feel similar from the inside. but they lead to very different places.

thanks for reading !! sincerely,

studybutterfly 🦋💫