the language of becoming

notes on resolutions, future selves, and learning to trust what already pulls us

Self-help books always lurk in the bookstores, but they seem to multiply in November, materialising on window displays like early frost. They place themselves in my path with polite determination: their spines straight and promising, their covers decorated with checkmarks and metaphors and the word "habit" rendered in sans serif fonts. Walking by them, I sometimes feel like I’m being watched by a hundred better versions of myself, waiting patiently to be manifested into reality. Lately, I've been thinking about change almost by force, because this year it picked me up and shook me until my teeth rattled: new job, new desk, new creak in my right knee. A romance novel that abruptly ended mid-chapter, right when everyone else was turning their page. (Here's how it goes: you spend months building a future with someone, and then suddenly you're alone on the cusp of the new year, watching couples drift into cafés while you train your algorithms to forget). 

Like the books, my resolutions also multiply. I hunch over my journal against the setting sun, writing out a list of things I'm tempted to promise: Early mornings. Clean eating. Barbed-wire boundaries. A body made muscular through sheer force of will. I try and fail to forget that these same promises echo across years of journals like a stubborn record scratch. I think deeply about why that might be, and realise: 

The thing about resolutions is that you’re trying to negotiate with your future self using the language of your past self. 

You write promises in the voice of who you are now, but make demands of someone you haven’t met yet. You work from an outdated blueprint. You are a caterpillar trying to make future plans, but all your dreams take the shape of what you lack. And so you think you should want to crawl faster, to eat more leaves, to camouflage more naturally. But the caterpillar has no language for flight, no concept of wings. How could it? What lies ahead is written in a vocabulary it hasn't learned yet. The mathematics of transformation don't work in reverse.

So, feeling the particular kind of untethered openness that arrives after life has thoroughly dismantled itself for the time being, I’ve been experimenting with a different question. Instead of asking “what will I force myself to become next year?”, I’m asking myself, “who am I curious about being?” It feels like a subtle semantic change, but it really is more of a paradigm shift. 

What I’m trying to look for, I think, is the difference between pushing and being pulled. From “I should do this” to “I can't be drawn away from this”. Funnily, it’s probably the same action, but an entirely different energy. One feels like pure effort, like forcing yourself against your own resistance. The other feels like following something you can’t resist. I think fragments of this pull already exist in the present. I feel it with reading — there are days when I feel exhaustion in my bones but come back alive at the thought of picking up a Discworld novel. I’ve started feeling it with running, despite never being one for exercise. I see it in others around me, who make time for the gym and play and meditation as effortlessly as they make time for brushing their teeth. The difference: having to convince myself to do something vs. having to convince myself to stop.

This is where my curiosity about my future self helps. My actual future self might look nothing like what my current self thinks they should, especially when shoulds and musts get in the way. Tuning into the frequency of my future self calls for somewhat ignoring the frameworks I'm in right now. What counts according to my current framework might be too insignificant to future me! So following that frequency might mean deliberately ignoring what my current framework defines as 'practical' or 'successful'.

I’m thinking it’s a little like method acting. I’m reminded of that Marylin Monroe quote about feeling your way into your characters, making their emotions your own. That's what I'm learning to do with my future self: get under her skin. Understand her granular reality, her choices and trade-offs, the micro-decisions that make some things an extension of her identity.

To me, this approach to personal evolution feels a lot more nuanced and holistic.

If you think about it, behaviours don't exist in a vacuum — they're tangled up with everything else in our lives. And our lives are entangled with other lives, so any resolution we make will inevitably involve some renegotiation with almost every other relationship we have. I decide to go to bed at 10PM one night, every night, and suddenly I'm staring down the yawning mouth of an unhealthy relationship with my phone. Some people feel abandoned by my early bedtime. Others might read judgment in my new choices. Change, after all, is a kind of betrayal. When we pick at a single thread in our sweater, the whole thing will inevitably unravel in our lap. So our first instinct is to panic, back-pedal, try to stop the unraveling, stuff the loose threads back in. But maybe there's wisdom in letting it come apart. Real change is always going to reshape more than you bargained for.

I'm also slowly learning to look at every resolution as really just an expression of some deeper current. Like, I only realised this year that I really do love movement — I just didn’t enjoy the forms I was forcing it to take. I struggled to go to the gym regularly but I’d throw all other plans out the window for badminton or pickleball. I think when we grip too tightly to the form we think something should take (sometimes because it takes that form for everyone else), we inevitably miss what we’re instinctively reaching for. Instead, when you find the pull, the resonance, it remains constant, but lets you be more curious and experimental about how it wants to move through you. Sometimes what you think is resistance to change really is just resistance to the particular shape you’re trying to force it into. 

As I write this, I'm warming up more and more to the gentler, more forgiving idea that personal evolution is less about action and more about alignment. The person I am right now probably only knows how to evaluate success based on old metrics. A huge part of trying an evolved way of being is figuring out how my future self might measure successes and misses. She might not think of one missed gym day as failure; she might see it as a pause, a natural break in any sustainable pattern. With any new habit, you want to get to a point where the pattern is so embedded that one miss won’t disrupt the system. Even if the behaviour temporarily pauses, the pull remains intact, ever tempting.

I guess that's the resolution I'm making: not to force myself into a predetermined shape based on my limited vocabulary right now, but to stay open and curious about the shapes I’m naturally growing into. To trust that tuning into the frequency of who I'm becoming is a more honest kind of evolution.

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