What If Being Is Becoming?

Since I was a little girl, I aspired to become a world-renowned psychologist one day, so I shaped my life accordingly without any hesitation.

On the very first day of my degree, our lecturer asked us to write a letter to our future selves, five years later. I imagined giving TED talks, publishing studies, becoming a faculty member, unaware that life merely unfolds as one expects.

What I didn’t know then was that the same intensity that shaped my dreams was also driving me.

All my life, I’ve been on a constant chase of dopamine, unaware that my brain had a wiring problem in its Focus and Pleasure Districts. The roads were there, but the fuel trucks didn’t always deliver enough supplement.

So, I learned to go looking for fuel myself, chasing exciting ideas, novelty, music, and connection. Anything that could give my districts a quick boost has always been my way of getting the next drop of dopamine.

Often, I found myself doing things for the plot, such as going on a date just for the sake of it two months ago. While getting ready, something in me whispered, yet the words blurred so I didn’t pick up its message. As someone who had nurtured her mental compulsions like a second skin, my intuition’s battle ended before it even began.

So I ended up sipping gin while the man across from me claimed that people did not need any degree to become a psychologist. To my surprise, I wasn’t merely having a good time; still, my all-or-none thinking could not accept defeat. Since I bothered going, I demanded at least one good thing to come out of that evening.

So I forced myself to stay long enough for my phone to be stolen. Having to spend the next days like a headless chicken, unable to contact anyone or locate anywhere.

Even so, life would’ve been a lot easier if the only wiring problem was with the Pleasure and Focus Districts.

The breakdown came too early when my city’s Movement District started running out of fuel at the age of 25, eager to meet me when I had only lived one third of my life. My dreams were shattered into pieces when I suspended my master’s in clinical psychology and got diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Owing to my fear of failure, I kept avoiding my weaknesses until my health worsened. When everything started falling apart, I started to be afraid of fear itself. I had trouble walking, and my essence grew tired from facing disappointment every time I tried taking a step. Fear wrapped itself around me before I even moved, making me step back before I even tried.

Later, I came to realise fear was never the enemy.

It was the antagonist, the gatekeeper of the next level.

Since the beginning, humans have feared what they could not dominate, because losing control equalled giving their power away.

All of our fears are born from the fear of death, and it is our lack of control over life’s impermanence that makes the idea so fertile.

For all my life, I’ve been unsettled by uncertainty, operating on a perfectionism pattern, trying to pick the best way by estimating all possible outcomes. In truth, the heart of perfectionism is not the pursuit of excellence, but the gap between who we are and who we feel compelled to prove ourselves to be.

But how could one version of me be truer than another, when every minute I am already someone else?

Through all the battles I fought, I realised that this forcefulness in my need for acceptance was not only rooted in what society demands, but also rose from within. My fear was pointing towards an area of growth.

When I let everything slip instead of forcing outcomes outside of what flow brings, my breaking became my becoming, freeing my essence from a self that felt stuck, forging me to rebuild. My old self started to shed, pulling me away from not who I was but from forcing myself to become who I thought I was supposed to be. In time, a sense of appreciation bloomed within for allowing me to outgrow a former self that no longer served my becoming.

Yet I kept measuring myself against a former way of living, trying to align with a self that no longer existed, chasing dreams that asked too much of me.

Lately, recurring whispers have grown louder, and what worried me most was the quiet knowing that my heart was not settled on the path I was following.

Although my passion for psychology still holds, my heart silently pleads for the place it is allowed to beat most honestly: writing.

Caught between finding the courage to admit it and muting my intuition again, I realised I kept attributing monumental moments in life to milestones, seeing only successes and achievements as if everything in between were just days passing without meaning.

When identity is built on milestones, the self becomes conditional, and one keeps projecting themselves onto the future, thinking they are only valid when they arrived.

We keep talking about this idea of becoming, which keeps us endlessly searching, but what if there was never a treasure to begin with, just like in every adventure movie?

Even philosophy teaches the discussions where ideas are formed, rather than fixed end points.

What if being is becoming?

And if this is the in-between,
let me stay here,
a little longer,
shaping my purpose quietly.

Where intuition recalibrates, fear reveals what matters, identity loosens and reforms, and the self answers:

Who am I becoming while nothing is resolved?

Perhaps becoming was never about arriving at something new, but about undoing what convinced us we were incomplete.

I’m not clueless.
My essence is aware of what’s unfolding.

If being is becoming
then I cannot become
without being.1

I’m not escaping my becoming,
I’m holding myself within it.

I am not lost.
I am listening.

I choose not to rush for answers nor clarity.
I choose to stay.
And in doing so, to allow meaning
to be formed without choosing forcefulness.
To be born from presence,
rather than performance.

In truth, I know the shape of my heart,
and I’m quietly building towards it.

Author’s note:

If I could do this all day, every day, I would choose it without hesitation.

To sit with language, to think slowly, to shape meaning, and to create from the place where things are still forming.

I don’t write to convince. I write to stay honest. And if my words have ever spoken to you, even briefly, if something you read here made you feel seen, less alone, or quietly understood, then you already know what this space is.

Supporting this work means allowing me to keep choosing it. If you’re in a position to do so, please consider upgrading to paid, so I can keep showing up, creating carefully, and doing the best I can for this shared space we’re building.

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