There’s a strange kind of pressure that comes with being told to “find yourself” – as though the self were a lost item, misplaced under a pile of laundry, waiting patiently to be rediscovered once you finally get your life in order.

But what if finding yourself isn’t a one-time event? What if you never actually stay found?

She used to think she knew exactly who she was until life started throwing its curveballs. The job loss that came out of nowhere. The breakup that split her life into before and after. The illness in the family. The betrayal she never saw coming. Each one demanded a new version of her, not because she wanted to reinvent, but because survival required it.

For a while, she clung to the idea of reinvention as salvation. Change the wardrobe. Cut the hair. Start the business. Heal the heart. New year, new me. It worked — until the next blow came. Then another. And another.

At some point, she realised that life never really gives you a second to breathe before it throws the next test. The version of herself she had just managed to build was already being dismantled.

The truth she had resisted all along began to reveal itself: self-discovery isn’t a destination. It’s a cycle.

Every tragedy, every joy, every quiet Tuesday morning remakes you in small, invisible ways. You can be the strongest person in the room at noon and crumble into tears by nightfall — and both versions are real.

She began to see how often the world romanticises transformation — as though there’s a single “after” to arrive at. The glow-up. The reinvention. The healed version. But the glow fades. Healing unravels. The “best self” is a moving target.

Everyone likes to talk about resilience, but nobody admits how exhausting it is to keep rebuilding from scratch. You finally get the hang of one identity — the career woman, the wife, the mother, the entrepreneur — and then something happens that renders all of it obsolete. You are forced to meet yourself again, stripped of the titles, standing bare in front of life’s next demand.

She used to think there was one defining event — the moment she would become the final version of herself. But now she knows there is no finish line. There are only chapters.

Each time life knocks her down, she returns slightly different. Softer, maybe. Or harder. Wiser, but wearier. Still standing but standing differently. And that, she’s learned, is its own kind of beauty.

People often mistake this constant evolution for inconsistency. They call it confusion. But perhaps the truest form of self-knowledge is acknowledging that we are never one thing for too long.

Every heartbreak reshapes us. Every failure humbles us. Every joy expands us. The woman she was before the death, before the breakup, before the friendship fell apart — she no longer exists. But the woman she is now carries them all within her, every version still whispering through the cracks.

Maybe that’s what maturity really is: not becoming unbreakable but learning how to gather the pieces faster each time.

There’s freedom in accepting that you will always be a work in progress. The pressure to have it all figured out lifts. The guilt for changing your mind disappears. You realise that the “best version” of you is simply the one that shows up, with whatever courage remains, in the middle of yet another storm.

So yes, keep reinventing if you must — but not because the world demands it. Do it because living demands it. Because every ending forces you to meet yourself anew. Because the only constant is that the goalpost will keep moving, and you will keep moving with it.

And perhaps this is the #Unshakable truth: we are all becoming, endlessly. There is no final form, no perfect peace, no ultimate version of self. There is only you that exists in this moment — before the next curveball, before the next rebirth — doing her best with what she knows today.

‘See’ you next week.

 

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IG Handle: @unshakable.is.a.state.of.mind