We spend years becoming somebody.
A name gathers meaning. A talent becomes a profession. What we practice becomes something we’re known for. Along the way, we recognize ourselves in what we’ve made of our lives. Someone we know ourselves to be takes shape.
That recognition can hold enormous love.
I loved being a fashion designer—imagining what did not yet exist, then choosing the fabric, the shape, every stitch and button that would bring it into being. Long after I left the profession, I understood that I had left one form of expression. I hadn’t left the part of me that needed to express.
Fashion designer was somebody I had become. But it could never describe the whole someone I was.
The Somebody We Become
Our identities can fit beautifully. We choose them, grow into them, devote ourselves to them. They give something real within us a place in the world.
Then life moves.
What once expressed us may no longer be large enough for everything asking for expression. And it can feel strange to loosen our hold on a self we worked so hard to become.
The self we worked so hard to become can become the self we feel obligated to remain.
Leaving fashion didn’t erase the designer in me. I still recognize that eye in the colors I reach for, the instinct for proportion, the pleasure of bringing something into existence that wasn’t here before. I didn’t lose any of that when the expression changed.
The form changes. The current keeps moving.
Even the question Who am I? can send us searching for a noun. We answer with the names we’ve earned, inherited, chosen, loved.
Yet a name can only take us so far.
No somebody we become can ever contain the whole someone we are.
Somebody tells part of the story. Someone is the life that cannot be contained by the telling.
The Whole Someone
Sometimes we simply know when we feel most like ourselves.
We become absorbed in what we’re doing. Attention gathers. Something within us opens and moves without asking what to call itself. We’re no longer trying to define who we are. We’re fully inhabiting our experience.
For me, it feels like freestyle.
I knew that freedom as a child, making things. I knew it designing clothes. And I feel it now when I write, paint, draw, dance. Different expressions, yes, but all of them give the same essential part of me room to move.
I know myself by that feeling.
What is the feeling of you, fully expressed?
You may have known that feeling in many versions of your life by now. It may be showing up in ways you never imagined when you were busy becoming the somebody you once dreamed of being.
Even the expressions we love most can never hold all of who we are.
The whole someone we are has room for all of them—and room for more. We don’t have to outgrow what we’ve loved in order to keep growing. Nothing true has to be left behind to make room for more.
And still, something moves: another expression, another opening, another way for this one life to come fully through us.
There is more of us to live.