This week, a question has been sitting with me, the way a pebble in a shoe makes itself known on a long walk. How much of who I am today is actually me?
We are born, arguably, the most ourselves we will ever be. Unfiltered. Unapologetic. Loud when hungry, soft when held. And then slowly, gently, relentlessly, the world begins its work on us.
It starts with parents. The first mirrors we are ever handed. Their fears become our caution. Their love languages become our emotional vocabulary. Their silences teach us what is too heavy to name. We absorb so much before we even have words for what we’re absorbing.
Then come friends, the ones who laugh at your jokes and teach you which version of yourself is worth performing. Partners who soften certain edges and sharpen others. Children who demand a kind of selflessness that quietly, permanently rewrites you. Each relationship is a new layer. Each layer is a small departure from whoever you were before.
How much of who we are today is us and how much is the accumulated sediment of everyone who has ever loved us, needed us, or shaped us?
The Archaeology of Self
Think of identity like layers of sediment. Each year, each relationship, each role we take on, parent, partner, daughter, colleague, deposits something new. And here’s what unsettles me: the original rock, the bedrock self, becomes harder and harder to reach.
The influences arrive uninvited and often unnamed.
Parents. Friends. Partners. Children. Workplaces. Culture. Time. Grief.
None of these are villains. This is not a story about damage. It is a story about permeability, the fact that we are, by nature, porous creatures. We seep into each other. We take on the colours of the rooms we spend the most time in.
Is the Chipping a Loss or a Becoming?
Part of me mourns it. The girl who had opinions before she had an audience. The version of me that hadn’t yet learned to edit herself before speaking. There’s something in that unguarded self that feels like the truest version, or at least the most original one.
But another part of me wonders if the chipping is the point. A sculptor doesn’t ruin a block of marble by chipping at it; they reveal something. Maybe the people in our lives are doing the same. Not taking from us, but uncovering us. Even when it hurts.
Perhaps we don’t disappear into the people we love. Perhaps we expand into them and lose track of where we end.
Still. There is value in the audit. In pausing long enough to ask:
Which parts of me feel chosen? Which parts feel inherited? Which parts would I keep, if I were starting from scratch?
Identity isn’t a fixed object to protect. But it isn’t nothing, either. Somewhere between the self we were born as and the self that’s been shaped by decades of love and loss and compromise, there is a thread. A continuous note running through all the versions.
This week, I’m just trying to listen for it.
What I’m Reading
Mattering- Jennifer Breheny Wallace (Finished)
Mattering examines how the need to feel significant shapes our ambition, relationships, and identity, and why true confidence comes from knowing we matter beyond achievement.
10% Happier - (Currently Reading
The book follows journalist Dan Harris after a live TV panic attack leads him to explore meditation and mindfulness. He shows that training your attention helps quiet the constant chatter in your mind, making you calmer and slightly happier about “10% happier.
What Else Dropped This Week
Under the Hood
How to Think About Funding Your Business: A Founder’s Guide
Skin Deep
The Beginner’s Guide to Moisturizing: Everything You Need to Know to Start Your Skincare Journey
On My Reading Desk
Brands Are Ditching Purpose. Rare Beauty Is Doubling Down—and Winning
This CEO explains what’s really behind layoffs—and it’s not AI
Jamie Dimon Says These ‘Dumb Things’ in Our Current Economy Could Point to Another Financial Crisis
Note to My Future Self
There will always be people who come into your life, and there will always be reasons they do.
Let them in. Let them change you in the ways that matter.
But hold on, quietly and firmly, to the part of you that existed before any of them arrived. The part that is not a reflection of someone else's needs, not a response to someone else's presence.
The part that is just “YOU”. That part is worth protecting.
Don't let it get so buried under layers of love and adaptation that you forget it's still there. It is. It always has been. Keep it close.
Be bold. Be real. Be Anomalous.
— Sai Menon