When Life Interrupts Who You Learned to Be

Sometimes life doesn't create the pattern.
It interrupts it long enough for us to see what had already become familiar. 

We all need some way of answering the question, Who am I?

We answer through our names, relationships, responsibilities, histories, beliefs, abilities, and the roles we hold within the lives we are living.

But much of what eventually feels like me was not consciously designed.

We learn ways of responding.
We adapt.
We inherit expectations.
We develop ways of protecting ourselves, belonging, caring, coping, and continuing.

A response happens once and it’s an experience. It happens repeatedly and becomes familiar. And what becomes familiar can eventually become something through which we recognize ourselves.

This is what I do.

This is how I am.

This is who I am.

And then sometimes life interrupts the pattern.

When the Pattern Breaks

Becoming a mother was one of those interruptions in my own life. Motherhood didn’t suddenly create every pattern I was carrying. It changed the conditions through which I had been able to continue them. My time, body, and relationships changed. And I encountered needs that couldn’t simply be organized around the ways I had already learned to function.

The interruption made something visible.

Ways of caring, coping, taking responsibility, and continuing that had felt like me could now be seen as patterns with histories.

Some had been consciously chosen. Others had formed through relationship, culture, necessity, adaptation, and survival.

They were real, but they weren’t the whole of me.

Sometimes the experience we initially identify as the problem is also the place where an established way of being can no longer continue without being examined.

Life interrupts the same.

And in that interruption, we might finally be able to see what sameness had been sustaining.

My newest reflection, When Life Interrupts Who You Learned to Be, explores how identity takes form through repetition, why interruption can expose patterns that were previously difficult to see, and what it means to become more conscious of the person continually taking form through our participation.

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You do not need to answer Who am I? once and for all.

Instead, begin closer to where you actually are.

What have I practiced so consistently that it now feels like who I am?

Where did this way of being begin? Was it choice, relationship, necessity, inheritance, protection, survival, or something else?

From what state am I currently seeing myself?

What receives my attention because it confirms the identity I already know?

What becomes possible when I can see this as a pattern rather than the totality of who I am?

And perhaps the question that sits underneath the entire reflection: Who are you practicing yourself to be now?

Not because you control everything that shapes you, but because what you repeatedly meet, reinforce, value, and practice participates in what becomes familiar next.

Slow down.
Gather yourself.
And return to what is true.