Field notes on the one process that never asked my permission, the five ways I have tried to argue with it, and why owning the mess turned out to be what handed me back the wheel.

You are becoming something right now. While you read this. Whether or not you signed up for it, whether or not you are paying attention, whether or not you have any interest in the project at all.

That is the part I find genuinely disorienting. Almost everything else in a life requires your participation. This does not. It runs in the background like a program, and the only real question is whether you have any say in the direction, or whether you are simply along for it.

I have been arguing with that question for years.

The five ways I have resisted

I have been through all of them, and I suspect most people cycle through the same set in a different order.

I have grieved it. Stood at the edge of a change I could feel coming and mourned the version of myself who was about to be left behind, even when she was not serving me, even when I had already outgrown her, because she was mine and I knew how to be her.

I have denied it. Decided there was nothing here that needed changing, that the discomfort was situational, that the people around me were the variable. That one can hold you down for years if you are stubborn, and I am.

I have tried too hard at it. Which looked like the opposite of resistance and was not. More on that in a moment, because I think it is the trickiest of all.

I have been furious about the timing. Not the change itself, the schedule of it. Why now. Why during this. Why did this have to come up while I was already carrying a monumental burden. As though becoming were a delivery service I could reschedule.

And I have been completely oblivious to it. Whole stretches where I did not notice I was changing at all, and only saw it later, looking back, the way you notice a child has grown when you find an old photograph.

And here is what strikes me now: it happened during all five. It did not slow down for the grief. It did not wait for the denial to resolve. It did not accelerate because I was working so hard at it, and it did not stall while I was not looking.

Which tells me those five things were never about direction. They were all attempts to negotiate the rate. I could not stop it, so I argued with its pace.

The one that looked like participation

I want to sit with the trying-too-hard version, because it fooled me the longest.

It does not look like resistance. It looks like devotion. You are reading, practicing, journaling, working, doing the thing. Nobody accuses you of avoidance when you are that busy.

But underneath it, in my case, was a very specific demand: I was not willing to become. I was willing to become something specific, that I had already picked out, on a timeline I had approved. That is not surrender to a process. That is project management with a really woodsy incense.

And it fails in a way that is hard to see, because you can generate results. You do change. You just change into the thing you were trying to prove you could be, which is not always the thing that was actually forming.

The tell is exhaustion. Real becoming costs something, but it does not usually feel like straining against a current. Striving does.

The question I was asking wrong

So I kept trying to settle the metaphysics. Is this something I am doing, or something being done to me? Am I the author or the reader? Do I have free will here, or is there a plan already written that I am simply walking into, one apparently unavoidable step at a time?

I do not think I can answer that from inside a life. I am not sure anyone can. But I have started to think the question itself is the wrong one, because it assumes those are alternatives.

Here is the frame that has held up better for me: becoming is not a decision. It is a metabolism.

You do not choose to digest. It happens with total indifference to your opinion about it, hour after hour, and it will keep happening whether you approve or not. But you choose completely what goes in. And what goes in determines what the process has to work with.

That reconciles the whole thing for me. I do not control the becoming. I control the inputs. And it turns out I had written the list myself years ago, without noticing I was describing a diet: we are what we surround ourselves with. We become like the people we spend time with. We are what we eat. We are what we believe. We are the story we tell. We are the energy we are standing in and the energy we generate.

None of those are the outcome. All of them are what we feed it.

Free will, briefly, and then I will stop

On the predestination question, I have made a kind of peace that is less an answer than a concession with dignity behind it.

Suppose it is all written. Suppose every turn is already set and the universe has a plan I am merely walking out. Even then, I still have to make the choice. It will still arrive as a choice. I will still stand in the kitchen at eleven at night deciding whether to send the message, and I will still live inside the consequence of whichever way it goes.

So the metaphysics may be undecidable, but the practice is identical under either possibility. Which means I can stop spending energy on it, and that is not intellectual laziness. That is honestly acceptance.

And I notice something about which one of those answers I reach for, and when. When I am doing well, I believe in free will. When I have made a mess, predestination becomes suddenly the compelling answer for me. That pattern is not my philosophy. That is the Parasite finding a voice, and it is something I try to have more awareness around.

What actually builds a person

Here is the thing that took me the longest to accept, and it is so not glamorous.

Becoming does not respond to declarations. It responds to action and repetition.

Nobody becomes anything by deciding to. We become by defaulting over and over again. The person I am turning into is being assembled almost entirely out of what I do on ordinary days when nothing is at stake and nobody is watching. What I reach for when I am tired. Who I text when I am lonely. What I let run in the background. What I tolerate in a room. What I say to myself at six in the morning before I have decided to be anyone in particular. It is allowing the essence of me.

That is why the enormous resolutions fail and the small environments win. The resolution is only one input. But the environment is ten thousand.

Which is oddly freeing, because it means I do not have to become anything through force of will. I have to change what I am standing in and then let the metabolism do its work. That is much smaller and much more doable than remaking myself, and it is also why the people around you matter more than almost any decision you will make about yourself.

Owning it, and where that gets dangerous

And then there is the part that stings, which you cannot get around and which I have stopped trying to.

This life is mine. Not every event in it, but the shape of it. I made choices. Some of them were made in fear or exhaustion or on bad information, and they were still mine, and I am standing in the accumulated result of them.

It stings. It is supposed to. But I want to say something careful here, because this idea has a cruel version that gets handed to people who do not deserve it.

You are not responsible for everything that happened to you. Nobody chose their childhood. Nobody attracted their illness, their accident, the person who hurt them, the economy, the diagnosis. Any teaching that tells a suffering person they authored their own suffering is not wisdom, it is a way of not having to sit with it.

What you are responsible for is what you do with the material. That is a completely different claim.

And the reason to make it is not about morality. It is practical. Blame points backward and costs you something every time you use it. Ownership points forward and pays. The moment I say this is mine, the steering wheel comes back into my hands, because you cannot steer something you have decided is happening TO you.

Ownership is not a verdict about the past. It is a claim on the present.

Face-first in the mud

I have fallen flat into things I built myself. Looked around at the wreckage, recognized my own handwriting on all of it, and thrown a complete tantrum about it anyway. Not a dignified reckoning. An actual tantrum, in the mud, even at my age.

I used to treat that as proof that none of this was working.

I think differently now. Falling into something you made is evidence that you were making things, which is the only mechanism alive. The alternative to having made some bad choices is not a life of good ones. It is a life of none, which is its own kind of mud and considerably harder to wallow out of.

And the tantrum is allowed. I have stopped trying to skip that part. It moves faster when I let it happen than when I stand above it pretending to being spiritually correct about it. Grief works this way. Anger works this way. Nearly everything works this way.

The traps are the trail

So I am here, on a path I can tell is littered with traps and trenches, some of which I dug.

The thing I have had to accept is that they are not interruptions in the trail. They are the trail. Nobody has ever become anything on the smooth parts. The smooth parts are lovely and I want more of them and they change no one. Whatever this process actually is, it appears to do its work in the places where you are inconvenienced, embarrassed, thwarted, kicking and screaming, and forced to choose without the much wanted information.

That does not make suffering good. I will not go that far, and I distrust people who do. It only means the difficulty is not evidence that I am off the path.

Something lovely on the other end

I can see something out there. I cannot describe it in a way anyone will likely understand. It has the quality of a light through trees at a distance, where you cannot tell how far away it is or whether it is one thing or several.

And I have made my peace with this too: there is no other end. Becoming does not arrive at some destination where it is complete. Whoever I am when I get to that light will already be turning into someone else, and she will be looking at her own light through her own trees, and this will not stop while I am alive.

That used to sound exhausting. Now it mostly sounds like I will not run out of trail.

Because the lovely thing was never a destination. It is a bearing. And a bearing is enough. It is the only thing anyone has ever actually needed in a forest: not a map of the whole country, just something to walk toward, and the willingness to keep choosing it every time the path splits.

So I am trying to be more intentional about what I am feeding this. More open to the lesson when it arrives in a form I did not order. Less interested in controlling the rate.

It is going to happen either way. That is the part I have finally stopped fighting.

I would just like to be present for it.