Stay on the journey.
If you enjoyed this read, subscribe to receive new posts and reflections straight to your inbox.
There is a particular kind of loss that doesn’t happen all at once.
You don’t wake up one morning and realise that you’ve forgotten who you are.
It happens slowly.
A compromise here. A decision made to please someone else there. A dream you quietly abandon because life doesn’t seem to be going the way you imagined. A relationship where you learn to make yourself smaller. A failure that changes what you believe is possible for you.
Little by little, you adapt.
You become who you need to be to survive the season you’re in.
And eventually, the person you have adapted into can become so familiar that you forget there was ever another way to live.
Maybe that is what it means to forget who you are.
Not that you literally don’t know your name, your personality or the things you like.
But somewhere along the way, you lose connection with the deeper parts of yourself — your values, your convictions, your dreams, your capacity, your voice and the things that once made you feel alive.
You stop asking, “What do I actually want?”
And start asking, “What is realistic?”
You stop asking, “What is possible for me?”
And start asking, “What can I settle for?”
I think forgetting happens through repetition.
We repeatedly ignore what we know.
We repeatedly choose approval over truth.
We repeatedly silence our own needs.
We repeatedly tell ourselves that this is just how life is.
Eventually, what was once uncomfortable becomes normal.
And this is where the story of disobedience becomes interesting.
Because disobedience isn’t always about doing something obviously wrong.
Sometimes it is simply knowing what you should do and choosing something else.
You know you should leave, but you stay.
You know you should begin, but you keep waiting.
You know something no longer fits, but you convince yourself that it does.
You know the person you’re becoming isn’t the person you want to be, but changing direction feels too difficult.
One decision may not seem significant.
But repeated decisions shape a life.
And eventually, you can find yourself living so far from what you once knew to be true that you no longer recognise the distance.
There are seasons when survival is necessary.
There are times when getting through the day is enough.
We should not romanticise that.
But survival becomes dangerous when it becomes an identity.
When you have spent so long responding to what life demands of you that you forget to ask what life is asking from you.
You become good at coping.
Good at being responsible.
Good at doing what needs to be done.
Good at putting your dreams on hold.
Good at saying, “Maybe one day.”
And one day becomes years.
You begin measuring your life by what you have managed to endure instead of what you are still capable of becoming.
You stop imagining.
You stop expecting.
You stop reaching.
Not because you have consciously decided that you don’t want more.
But because you have slowly forgotten that more was ever possible.
This is where settling becomes particularly subtle.
Settling doesn’t always look like giving up.
Sometimes it looks like being grateful for a life that you secretly know is too small for you.
It looks like convincing yourself that wanting more makes you ungrateful.
It looks like calling fear contentment.
It looks like calling resignation acceptance.
It looks like saying, “At least I have this,” when a deeper part of you knows that you are capable of so much more.
And I don’t mean more in the way the world defines it.
More money.
More status.
More possessions.
More followers.
More recognition.
Sometimes “more” simply means more life.
More courage.
More honesty.
More purpose.
More creativity.
More love.
More room to become the person you know you are capable of being.
Because a smaller life isn’t necessarily a simpler life.
Sometimes it is simply a life shaped around what you believe you are allowed to have.
Perhaps this is why the idea of becoming has been sitting so deeply with me.
For a long time, I thought becoming meant creating a better version of myself.
Working harder.
Being more disciplined.
Achieving more.
Fixing what was broken.
But what if becoming isn’t always about creating someone new?
What if part of becoming is remembering?
Remembering what matters to you.
Remembering what you once dreamed about.
Remembering what you believe.
Remembering the parts of yourself you abandoned because they no longer seemed practical.
Remembering the voice you stopped listening to.
Remembering that you are more than the things that happened to you.
More than your failures.
More than your disappointments.
More than the season you are currently in.
Maybe you don’t need to become someone completely different.
Maybe you need to return to the parts of yourself that got buried underneath everything you thought you had to be.
And perhaps the journey back doesn’t begin with a five-year plan.
It begins with a question.
Who was I before I started performing for the world?
Before I learned what success was supposed to look like.
Before I became afraid of disappointing people.
Before I decided certain dreams were unrealistic.
Before I allowed failure to define what I was capable of.
Before I became so focused on surviving that I stopped imagining.
Who was I?
And perhaps even more importantly:
What did I know then that I have forgotten now?
Maybe the answer won’t come immediately.
Maybe remembering takes time.
Maybe it happens through small acts of honesty.
One boundary.
One dream revisited.
One uncomfortable truth acknowledged.
One decision that feels like coming home to yourself.
One step toward the person you thought you had lost.
Because perhaps you were never completely lost.
Perhaps there has always been a part of you underneath the fear, the disappointment, the expectations and the survival — quietly waiting to be remembered.
And maybe becoming isn’t about building a completely new life.
Maybe it begins with remembering the life that was always possible when you were no longer afraid to be yourself.
Maybe the way forward isn’t always becoming someone new.
Maybe sometimes, it is remembering who you were before you forgot.
If you enjoyed this read, subscribe to receive new posts and reflections straight to your inbox.