The Version of Me I Haven’t Met Yet

There’s a version of me I thought I’d be by now.

She feels almost like a stranger and yet familiar — someone calmer, steadier, someone who doesn’t get rattled by little things. Someone who walks into a room without replaying every step in her head. I keep waiting for her — that future self — to finally arrive. To stand in front of me and say, “It makes sense now. We made it.”

But most mornings, I wake up still guessing. Still improvising. Still stitching myself together as I go.

There’s a kind of weight that comes when you’ve always been seen as the strong one. The dependable one. The one who knows how to figure things out. People admire the resilience, but what they don’t see is how heavy it can feel. You start believing that if you keep meeting expectations, keep pushing through, keep achieving, you’ll eventually earn a kind of peace. That one day, life will just settle and you’ll finally arrive.

But maybe it never truly settles. Maybe the truth is that I’ll always be in the middle of becoming.

Some days, I feel like I’m made of fragments. Old versions of myself I’ve already outgrown, stitched together with the fragile outlines of a self I haven’t met yet. I still carry dreams I’ve outlived, like clothes that no longer fit but I can’t bring myself to throw away. And when it comes to new hopes, they arrive like whispers — small, tentative, fragile — and I’m still learning how to listen to them without doubting.

We don’t talk enough about this middle ground. The not-yet, the in-between. I wrote about something similar in Losing Interest Doesn't Mean You Are Broken, It Means You've Outgrown Your Life, how even the things that once lit me up can suddenly feel distant. That space where you’re not broken, but you’re not blooming either. Where you’re still soft in places the world insists you should harden. Where you’re questioning things you once thought were certain.

And I wonder if maybe everyone feels it too. Maybe behind the certainty people show, there’s a quiet tangle of doubts and fears they don’t share. Because from the outside, people look so sure of themselves. But when you look closer, maybe we’re all carrying contradictions, unfinished stories, and questions we’re too shy to name.

Maybe growth isn’t about finding answers at all. Maybe it’s about learning to stay with the questions. To keep walking even when the map runs out. To let yourself be seen in progress, still unfinished but still enough.

I used to imagine becoming as a straight climb — steps that lead you upward until you reach that final version of yourself. But now I think it’s more like a spiral. You circle back. You stumble. You stretch. You forgive yourself. You try again. It’s not linear, it’s messy. And it demands patience — a kind of patience that I’m still practicing.

Most of all, it demands that I live with the discomfort of not knowing. To allow myself to grow without rushing into labels. To let my identity be something breathing, not a headline or a fixed story, but something living and shifting.

And yes, that’s uncomfortable. But it’s also human.

So if you’re reading this from that same middle place — unsure, unraveling, rebuilding — I want to say this clearly: you’re not behind. You’re not failing. You’re in the very space where becoming happens.

The fact that you’re still here, still trying, still asking — that means something. That is something.

We don’t need to punish ourselves for being unfinished. We don’t need to race through the in-between. This isn’t wasted time. This is where the truth is being shaped in us.

Maybe we’ll never fully arrive. Maybe we’re not supposed to.

Maybe becoming itself has always been the point.