There is a theory that each cell in your body is replaced every seven years. By that logic, you are not who you were as a child, nor even the same person who once cried beneath a stranger’s ceiling or laughed in a city whose name you’ve long forgotten. Your skin has shed, your bones have rebuilt, your blood has rewritten itself. But what of the self beneath the self? What of memory, belief, identity?
Biologists can explain the turnover of tissue. Neuroscientists will tell you your memories are reconstructions, each recollection a distortion, a fiction pretending to be fact. And philosophers — well, they’ll ask if the self exists at all. Are you a continuous being, or just a series of moments pretending to know each other?
You were born knowing nothing but the warmth of a body, the safety of arms. And slowly, over time, you were taught to unlearn that. To build walls. To be cautious. To chase gold stars and count calories and measure your worth in other people’s eyes. You were taught to clench your fists instead of reach. To perform. To perfect. To survive.
But survival is not the same as living. Somewhere between adolescence and obligation, we lose the art of becoming. We stop shedding. We begin holding on.
What if growing up is not about accumulation, but about subtraction? About learning which voices in your head were never yours to begin with — the ones that tell you you’re too much, or not enough, or that your softness is weakness. What if it’s about unlearning everything you were taught to believe without question? That grief should be hidden. That love must be earned. That joy is only permissible once the to-do list is done.
Psychologists speak of neuroplasticity — the brain’s stunning ability to reshape itself in response to experience. Trauma wires us for vigilance, for silence, for control. But healing? Healing is rebellion. It is your neurons choosing a different path, again and again, until one day the scream inside you softens into a whisper, and that whisper starts to sound like freedom.
So much of being young is about becoming who we think we’re supposed to be. So much of aging is about mourning who we never got to be. But what if we are not meant to return to anything — not childhood, not innocence, not some imagined wholeness? What if we are mosaics, not mirrors? Built from the shattered remnants of who we once were and who we still hope to be?
There is no final form. Only new arrangements.
Perhaps that is the beauty of life: it’s not a straight line, but a spiral. We return to the same themes, the same wounds, the same questions — but each time with more clarity, more courage. You learn to see your past selves not as failures, but as necessary iterations. Each version of you was trying, reaching, adapting. Each version of you deserves to be thanked.
The friend who taught you laughter when all you knew was caution. The love who broke you, not out of cruelty, but because neither of you knew better. The parent who gave what they could, and the absence that gave you strength when they couldn’t. All of them live inside you still, not as ghosts, but as scaffolding. And even the ones who betrayed you taught you something — about boundaries, about resilience, about the power of walking away.
Maybe love is not meant to last forever. Maybe its point was never permanence, but impact. Maybe the heart was designed to stretch, to break, to rebuild itself again and again — not because it’s fragile, but because it’s infinite in its capacity.
And maybe suffering is not the price of being human, but the invitation.
You see, science tells us that feelings are just electrical impulses. That sorrow is serotonin in retreat, that longing is a trick of the dopamine receptors. And yet — why does a smell unravel you? Why does a song resurrect a decade? Why does loss feel like drowning in a sea that exists only in your chest?
If it’s just chemicals, then why do you ache in poetry?
Because we are not only neurons. We are stories. We are myths in motion. Every belief you hold, every rule you follow, every fear you flinch from — those are inherited narratives. But stories can be rewritten.
What if the purpose of your life is not to be right, or safe, or admired, but to wake up?
To question the scripts you’ve memorized. To drop the mask. To ask yourself what parts of your identity are habits, not truths. What if anxiety is not weakness, but a signal from the body that you are living out of alignment? What if the anger is sacred — a map back to your values?
And what if joy is not the reward, but the way?
There are people who will tell you to chase success. To optimize. To conquer. But nature doesn’t optimize — it adapts. The tree grows toward the sun because it must. The flower blooms not for applause, but because blooming is its nature.
Maybe you, too, are meant to unfurl. Not into what the world expects—but into who you were before the world taught you shame.
So unlearn the silence. Unlearn self-doubt. Unlearn the idea that you are broken, that you must earn rest, that love is a ledger. And in its place, build a new myth.
One where healing is not a destination but a direction.
One where presence matters more than permanence.
One where you are allowed to outgrow people, places, beliefs—and even versions of yourself.
Because growth is not betrayal. It is just returning.
And perhaps, at the end of it all, the most radical act is to stay open. To love despite the risk. To trust even after the betrayal. To stand at the cusp of the unknown and choose wonder over fear.
Maybe the goal isn’t to be whole, or happy, or healed.
Maybe the goal is simply to just keep becoming.