IDENTITY

What happens when your own mind becomes such good company that the external world has to compete for your attention? Sometimes it scares me how self-sufficient I am. Not in the practical sense. I don’t mean I can change a tyre or survive for six months in the wilderness with a penknife and a packet…

On the feathered edges of life Over the past few months I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people here on Substack. On the surface, their stories sounded different… One woman was learning to live after divorce. Another had just retired. Someone else had moved countries. There were stories of grief, burnout, diagnosis, redundancy, empty nests,…

I’m beginning to wonder whether growing older isn’t about becoming someone new at all. Maybe it’s about finally making room for everyone we’ve ever been. The more time I spend reading the conversations unfolding beneath my Substack Notes, the more I think we’ve misunderstood identity. We talk as though our lives are divided into chapters……

The versions of ourselves we carry never really disappear, they simply wait for us to remember them… One sentence appeared so often in my Substack comments that I eventually stopped counting. “I feel like I’ve lost myself.” Different people. Different lives. Different ages. Exactly the same feeling. After hundreds of conversations and thousands of thoughtful…

You were never starting from scratch. You were starting from experience… One of the saddest things I’ve noticed after hundreds of conversations on Substack is how often people underestimate everything they’ve already lived. Whenever someone tells me they’re thinking about changing careers, writing a book, leaving a relationship, moving abroad, learning something new or simply…

The long journey back to ourselves rarely begins with becoming someone new. More often, it begins with remembering who we were before life became so loud. There’s an idea that appears almost every time we talk about midlife. Not in exactly the same words and not with exactly the same story. But after hundreds of…

Maybe the biggest shifts in our lives aren’t the ones that happen overnight, but the ones that quietly loosen our grip on the person we’ve always been. There’s a stage of life I’m not sure we have words for. Not because it’s rare. Quite the opposite. Because once I started paying attention to it, I…