Becoming, Still

You made it to.. Friday

Enjoy this day of being alive in a world that has done its absolute level best to convince you that hope is naive, engagement is exhausting, and the most rational response to everything happening right now is to pour a large glass of something and wait for the credits to roll.

You did not do that.

You are here.

Still reading.

Still thinking.

Still — and this is the part that genuinely moves me — still becoming.

I want to sit with that word for a moment.

Becoming.

Not arrived. Not finished. Not finally, perfectly, Instagram-caption-worthily complete.

Becoming.

Still in motion. Still unresolved. Still reaching toward something that keeps revealing itself in new shapes the closer you get to it.

We live in a world that is deeply uncomfortable with becoming.

It wants your final form.

It wants to categorize you, summarize you, reduce you to a bio and a brand and a clean, consistent narrative that fits in a box and stays there.

It wants to know which team you’re on, which camp you belong to, which version of yourself you have definitively and permanently become so it can market to you accordingly.

And here you are.

Inconveniently in progress.

Stubbornly unfinished.

Still changing your mind about things.

Still surprising yourself.

Still occasionally saying “I don’t know” in a world that mistakes certainty for intelligence and volume for wisdom.

Good.

Stay that way.

I want to tell you what I have learned — slowly, imperfectly, with significant resistance and occasional dramatic backsliding — about becoming.

It does not happen in the moments you expect.

It does not happen at the retreat or the workshop or the carefully curated life event with good lighting and a photographer present.

It happens in the Tuesday afternoon when nobody is watching and you make a different choice than you would have made a year ago.

It happens in the conversation where you hear yourself say something true that you didn’t know you believed until the words were already in the air.

It happens in the moment you finally stop doing the thing you always did — the shrinking, the apologizing, the making yourself smaller so others feel more comfortable — and you notice, quietly, without fanfare, that the world did not end.

That you did not end.

That you are, in fact, still here.

Still standing.

Taller, maybe.

Just a fraction.

Just enough.

Here is what I know about the people reading this.

You have been through something.

Maybe many somethings.

You have navigated loss and uncertainty and seasons of life that nobody prepared you for and wouldn’t have believed you if you’d described them in advance.

You have sat in waiting rooms with bad news pending. You have held people you love through things you couldn’t fix. You have woken up at 3 a.m. with the particular brand of dread that has no name but that everyone who has ever been a thinking, feeling adult human being knows intimately.

You have also — and I need you to hear this part — kept going.

Not because you had a plan.

Not because you felt ready.

Not because the fear went away or the uncertainty resolved or someone finally gave you the green light you were waiting for.

But because becoming does not wait for optimal conditions.

It happens in the mess.

In the doubt.

In the trying and failing and trying differently and failing better and getting up one more time than you fell down.

It happens in the middle of everything.

It is happening right now.

And here is the part that I think we forget.

The part that gets buried under the noise and the urgency and the relentless pressure to have it all figured out:

You do not become alone.

You become in relationship.

With the people who believed in you before you believed in yourself.

With the strangers who said the exact right thing at the exact right moment and never knew it.

With the writers and the artists and the activists and the quiet ones who held the thread before you picked it up.

With the teachers you’ve never met whose words found you at 11 p.m. on a hard night and shifted something small but permanent.

With each other.

This — this strange, tender, improbable little community of people who showed up, week after week, to read words about staying awake and staying human and staying engaged in a world that makes all three of those things genuinely difficult —

This is becoming, together.

And that matters more than I know how to say.

I started writing to you because I believed something.

I still believe it.

That awareness matters.

That words matter.

That the quiet, deliberate, unglamorous act of paying attention — to yourself, to each other, to the world — is not a luxury or a lifestyle choice or a retreat for people with disposable income and a linen aesthetic.

It is survival.

It is resistance.

It is the most human thing we can do in an inhuman moment.

Stay aware.

Stay engaged.

Stay human.

Stay yourself.

Not because it is easy.

Not because it always works.

Not because the arc bends on a schedule that fits inside your lifetime.

But because you are here.

Because you are still becoming.

Because the world — this broken, beautiful, bewildering, still-worth-fighting-for world — needs people in it who refuse to sleepwalk.

Who refuse to numb out.

Who refuse to stop growing just because growing is hard and the times are heavy and some days the most radical thing you can do is simply remain.

Remain curious.

Remain open.

Remain in motion.

Remain, against all reasonable odds and in the face of everything, hopeful.

Not the naive kind of hope.

Not the kind that pretends the hard things aren’t hard.

The stubborn kind.

The Claudette Colvin kind.

The Methuselah kind.

The kind that adds one quiet ring to the record of its own persistence and shows up again tomorrow and does not require an audience and does not wait for applause and does not stop becoming simply because becoming is taking longer than expected.

That kind of hope.

That kind of human.

That kind of you.

You are not done.

You are not too late.

You are not too tired, too old, too ordinary, too anything.

You are becoming.

Still.

And still is enough.

Still is everything.

Still is where we go from here.

Together.

Julie Bolejack,
The Mindful Activist

🎲 Bonus: Random Info You Didn’t Know You Needed

There is a species of jellyfish that is, technically, immortal.

Turritopsis dohrnii — known, with appropriate drama, as the Immortal Jellyfish — is the only known animal capable of reverting to its juvenile state after reaching full maturity.

When stressed, injured, or simply old, it does not die.

It becomes young again.

It starts over.

Not as a different creature. Not as something unrecognizable. But as itself — the same essential jellyfish, beginning again, carrying forward whatever a jellyfish carries forward, which we can only assume is something profound and entirely beyond our comprehension.

Scientists discovered this in the 1990s and have been slightly unsettled by it ever since.

The jellyfish, for its part, seems unbothered.

It does not appear to find this remarkable.

It simply does what it does.

It becomes.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Biologists are currently studying Turritopsis dohrnii in hopes of understanding the mechanics of biological immortality. So far, the jellyfish has not offered comment.

It is, presumably, busy becoming.