Is this who I really am?

Eleven years ago, on my 40th birthday, I cried.

I cried because I felt so far away from the person I had ever intended to become.

Nothing around me felt real.

Even though I was having a small party with just my closest family, in a home setting that I knew was amazing, I cried.

Everything that I knew I should be grateful for felt surreal. And I couldn’t see a way to ever reach that imagined reality of who I once thought I would be.

Turning 40 felt like a seal I’d stamped on my own life that I couldn’t undo.

It was the clarity of an awful awareness I’d felt creeping up on me.

I’d find myself staring into the distance all the time, consumed with the question, ‘Is this who I really am?’

It was haunting me at work, at home, in my dreams.

Facing that haunting question demands a reckoning. The kind of reckoning it’s easier to ignore. We sway toward and away from it.

There’s the inner version of us that knows we’ve strayed off course. It whispers to us in emotions that seem out-of-place (they’re happy tears, honestly, my 40-year-self protested), or longings that stab like unpleasant envy. Or the vertigo-inducing sense that someone has taken away multiple versions of rose-tinted glasses we never even knew we were wearing.

Rising up against those whispers is a host of solid reasons why we need to shut them down and out. A litany of who we are that seems like it can’t possibly be changed. Not without terrible consequences to ourselves and others, a price we don’t feel we can possibly pay. Even while we continue to pay the quiet toll of self-deception.

We can’t imagine such a scale of change because we assume that our identities are inevitable. What lies before us is connected to what lies behind. Beginning – middle – end. That’s what all the stories teach us.

My 50-year-self now knows why that’s not the case.

We often believe that our identity is fixed because we mistake our backstory for our destiny. But identity is something we continue to write throughout our lives.

Our identity is a living story.

Who we really are is never fixed.

I am a single mum, homeschooling my only child, a 15-year-old teenager.

There isn’t a day that goes by when this fact doesn’t shock the living crap out of me.

This was NEVER meant to be my story.

From a very young age I knew I wasn’t going to have children. For me as a person, this seemed A VERY BAD IDEA. For the child, as much as me.

I won’t seek to explain why in this article, for the ‘why’ of this belief belongs elsewhere, but let’s just say that my conviction around this idea was absolute.

Most importantly, there was a caveat to this inner story I carried. I must never, under any circumstances, become a single mother. That would be beyond a very bad idea and stray into the realm of catastrophe.

It’s not that I don’t know, admire and believe single parents can raise excellent children. I do. I just never, for one moment, believed I would have the capacity to do that.

This is a story that I have carried, like the all-knowing prologue, as long as the smallest seeds of who I am began to sprout.

Yet here I am. Mothering. Alone.

Arriving at this point in my life felt like a tale of two beliefs.

The one internal ‘this is a very bad idea and should never happen’ watching on in approval as I terminated an unplanned pregnancy, got divorced and then voluntarily sterilised in order to keep my story true, before the horrifying plot twist of meeting a guy who made me believe that I could do this (not alone), having IVF (twice) to conceive, going through pregnancy (still not sure it was me), before losing my partner through suicide and becoming (ta-da) the very thing I had always agreed would not happen; a single mum.

Even when I am asked by new acquaintances, I find it hard to say that yes, I am a mother, and yes, I am a solo parent. I accept this is my child, I love my child, I have experienced the truly bizarre effect of maternal protectiveness on no few occasions, and still, I simply cannot reconcile that I, lil’ol’ me, is the mother of this child.

That inner belief is still so strong that I often have to pinch myself. Sometimes, in the early mornings when I am at my most unconvinced about life, I look at my daughter in amazement and wonder ‘how do you exist?’

This oddness, about the stories I have held true for so long about myself, and the actual reality, is not confined to just my parenting status.

My assumed identities keep collapsing.

I knew I wanted to be a writer from about the age of 8.

I didn’t just take to ‘writing’. Rather, when I moved from the basics of mastering the alphabet and into the experience of reading and writing, I found my water.

Weird expression I know.

It may help to know that I am a wild swimmer. Being in or near the water is about moving in an environment that feels made for me. Realising that I could write, create meaning from signs, string them together to bring the inner world into reality, was the first experience of self-identity I recall.

In the words, I am a swimmer. That is what my 8-year-old self knew.

At the time this meant only one thing; to be a published writer. I would walk to my local WHSmiths and stare at the shelves of bestsellers before handing in my hand-written annual story entry. One day, I knew, I too would decorate the hallowed shelves of WHSmiths.

Instead, I became a designer and craftswoman.

For 25 years I pursued a ‘worthy’ career, because so many people told me that writing would never be worthwhile. While continuing to long for that nadir of publication as the ultimate expression of my being.

In my mid-40s, with a strong sense of ‘ticking-clock’, I closed my business and turned to the ideal of ‘becoming a writer’.

I put my literary heroes on the shelf above my pc and followed as direct a line as I could toward their ranks.

For four years I laboured in that direction.

Until my first complete series was sitting alongside them.

I began the next series, and the next. But nothing felt right. Nothing seemed to pull me on in the way that my first writing endeavour had. Nothing got finished.

I had failed. I wasn’t going to be the writer I always assumed I would. I was a one-hit wonder.

Until I realised I wasn't… going to be the writer I had always assumed. I was going to be the writer I could not possibly have known I would become.

Being a published author was only one aspect of the writing I had being doing my whole life. But it was the only version of the story I had given credence to.

Now, I am a writer and method founder. I write every day, as I always have. I journal daily, as I always have. I publish books, articles and a newsletter. Much of it is non-fiction. My novels continue to sell and I have begun to write more.

I have had to release the vision of the writer I thought I would become in order to become the writer I actually am. The vision only got me so far, beyond it, I had to swim into waters I had no way to navigate.

And have I told you yet that I will one day live in Scotland?

This belief came to me when I was in my tweens and first visited that wonderful place. The wildness of Scotland, the ravaged mountains and endless waters, felt like coming home. It felt like my soul poured out onto the landscape. (Yes, I was a very sensitive tween, ok. Many grand emotions nurtured by far too much reading.)

Scotland is an itch that has never gone away.

Much the same as writing once was.

In some ways I know that itch will only be scratched by moving there. And in other ways I resent that the constant quiet irritation makes it challenging for me to enjoy my life here and now.

I live in a truly beautiful part of the countryside. I have a rural lifestyle that my younger self, growing up in Birmingham city, used to dream of when I bunked off school to spend the day wandering through the city parks.

But, as beautiful as Shropshire and Herefordshire are, both within my reach as I sit on the border, they don’t have enough water in them to satisfy my long-held belief that I would track westward toward the ‘baths of all the western stars’ like some modern-day feminist Ulysses.

Yesterday evening I walked the dogs through a grass meadow that has been planted to attract butterflies. The dogs bounding after their balls released storms of butterflies against the last rays of the setting sun. I could hear the scritch of dry grasses, the flutter of fragile wings, and the wind stirring beech trees. It was beyond beautiful. I felt blessed, privileged, unbelievably rich.

Yet, in that very moment, the same old longing rose up in me.

It wasn’t Scotland. I wasn’t ‘home’ yet.

How could I possibly become fully me if my future didn’t include that outcome?

As the tug of that long-frustrated desire snatched at my sense of bliss, I recognised that I am still writing who I am.

My current life circumstances would make a move to Scotland a pivotal choice. A scything away of much that is wonderful in my life. There isn’t an answer to how that will resolve itself. But there is now a greater awareness of the impact of that desire, and what I can do to hold the tension, long before I reach a place of knowing what the answer will be.

As I reflected on how much the Rewrite Method has taught me about shaping life, and realising my desires, I saw how desire itself is a story that I have also rewritten.

I’m not the version of myself that once decided I was happier celibate, asexual, single.

The version where I was a passive object in the pursuit of desire, or a tool trained to please by my husband, a man 23 years older than me when I met him at 18.

The version where I was so broken by endometriosis that I didn’t feel desire and I couldn’t be fixed by operations or psychosexual counselling.

The version that believed healthy, fun, nourishing desire was something which belonged to other women. Not me.

Until, 9 years into my abstinence, I felt a strong attraction to someone. And decided to see what I was capable of, for myself, before I even considered what desire might look like with someone else. Curiosity that eventually led me to ask someone out because I chose it, rather than reacting to being chosen.

The version that took 33 years to reject the story that was written for my body and start crafting my own.

Stood in that meadow, longing for Scotland, I realised that every certainty about who I was eventually shifted.

Nothing is set.

Whether I end up moving to Scotland or not, I can be utterly fulfilled wherever I am. The evidence was there right before me in a butterfly-cloud and summer-grass meadow.

My job as an author is to persuade the reader to willingly suspend their disbelief in order to enter the story.

What if our job as individuals is to willingly suspend our beliefs in what we are in order to author our own story?

What if the beginning, or the middle, did not dictate the end?

When we grasp that idea, our sense of identity stops being a chronological act of accumulated identity and starts becoming a living flow of conscious creation. One where every word has weight, every thought is a sentence in our story, and the current chapter is not bound by those that came before it.

Our backstory is not our destiny.

Now, I have defied the hopelessness of my 40th self. Yes, I am a long way from the person I expected to be. But not only did the detours show me how to get back on track (without learning what isn’t right, we can’t even begin to figure out what is), they were the impetus to propel me further.

Not only have I moved beyond the painful itch of not being a writer, I have begun to explore what being a writer means beyond the idealised vision I had of it.

Not only have I survived becoming a single mother, I came to realise that I was always enough on my own to love another person and care for them. If the perfect parenting partner arrived on my door, I would not change being a single mum. I love it.

Not only have I moved beyond a painful relationship with my own body, I have sought out and initiated a wonderful intimacy with another person that brings incredible joy to us both. A healing of wrongs we never inflicted on each other.

While I continue to dream of living in Scotland, I can appreciate that the journey is not yet finished and use the Rewrite Method to make that dream real, not idealised, in my present life.

At 40, I thought I had set the trajectory of my life to a point I could not escape the end.

But our identities are not accumulated certainty, they are a living story.

The current version of me is not the final draft.

Where next?

The Rewrite Philosophy

This essay explores Belief 1: Our identity is a living story.

You might like Belief 5: Journaling creates narrative awareness.

From the Rewrite Bookshelf

The book I’d hand you immediately after finishing this essay is Educated by Tara Westover.

Although our stories are very different, Educated explores many of the same questions about identity, inherited beliefs and the courage to question the story you've always believed about yourself.

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