When You Stop and Ask, “Who Am I Now?”

The Script We’re Given

When we talk about life transitions, we talk as though they are solely the big things that happen to us: leaving school, graduating from university, getting married, having children, retiring. They are presented as the milestones that mark one stage of life ending and another beginning, and we have some idea of what those transitions are supposed to look like. We may not know exactly what our own experience will be, but we have a script of sorts. We know that leaving school marks us as an adult, that getting married will shift our lives and that having children will turn everything upside down. We expect to change because of these things.

But there is another kind of life transition that we often don’t have a script for. It is the point we reach, often after a life event, although not always, when we stop and take stock and think, “I’m not sure who I am anymore.” Or perhaps, “I know who I am, but I’m not sure I like who I’ve become.”

The Roles We Become

We all have a core identity. Although we will grow and change throughout our lives, and our identity will evolve, there are fundamental parts of who we are that remain at our centre. Life, however, has a way of hiding these parts. Roles, responsibilities, expectations and the stories we absorb about who we should be can gradually obscure our connection to those parts of ourselves, until the person we have become looks very different from the person underneath.

Throughout our lives we take on roles. We become a student, wife, mother. We become an employee, a business owner, a carer. We become the person who organises everything, remembers everything, keeps everyone else going. We absorb expectations from our families, our friends and society, and we develop our own stories about who we are and who we are supposed to be.

Some of those changes are entirely deliberate. We choose them, and often we love them. Becoming a mother was something I wanted, and becoming Josef’s mum was something I was incredibly proud of. But I don’t think I realised how much of my identity would be consumed by that role.

It began very early. Even when I was pregnant, my health visitor would arrive and say, “How’s Mum today?” and there was a part of me that was proud and excited to be 'Mum'. But my name is Esther.

Then Josef was born and being 'Mum' became such a huge and important part of my identity. For years I would be greeted with “Oh, you’re Josef’s mum”, and after a while I just stopped saying "Yes, Esther". It was easier. Without realising it, I allowed the role of ‘Mum’ to further obscure my core identity, and the parts of myself that sat underneath it became quieter and quieter.

And I think that happens to many of us, often without us noticing. We don’t wake up one morning and decide to become somebody completely different. It happens incrementally. We take on the role that is needed at the time. We learn the new normal, often working out what everybody needs from us and becoming very good at providing it.

Then, of course, life changes again.

For me, a big life change was becoming a carer. In my case, not an elderly parent or another relative, but a child - my child - who needed a different level of care than I’d expected. Nobody chooses to be in the circumstances that make someone need caring for, even if they willingly choose to become the person who provides that care.

When I consciously stepped into that role, there was so much to learn: new skills, responsibilities, battles to fight and things to advocate for. I became the central point around which everything else had to balance. My own needs didn’t disappear because I didn’t care about them. They disappeared because there simply wasn’t enough time, energy or attention left to put them anywhere near the top of the list.

And the difficult thing is that what begins as a temporary prioritisation can become a permanent way of living.

When the Pathway Changes

Then there are the points in life that change us fundamentally, like grief.

Losing someone we love is obviously enormous in itself, but grief also changes our understanding of who we are. Losing a parent can mark a particular shift in the family structure and in our own sense of where we belong within it. Losing a partner or a child can be even more fundamental because so much of our lives and our identities have been built around that person.

When a loved one is gone, the pathway they carved, that we have been following, through the terrain of our lives, disappears with them.

We may remember that there are things we enjoy, things we need to do and things we might still want to experience. But where do they go now? Suddenly the future is this enormous open space where there used to be a shared life, shared plans and shared expectations. That pathway, shaped by the person we loved, is no longer there to orient our decisions and experiences.

And eventually, somewhere within that space, comes the question: who am I now?

There is another particularly interesting transitional point that women are given a title for, but not much of a script, and that is menopause. We know it's coming. We are told that our periods will stop, that our hormones will change and that we might experience hot flushes. We are given the broad strokes of what is happening to our bodies, but much less often are we prepared for what menopause can mean for our identity, our relationships and the way we experience our lives.

Menopause becomes a significant transitional point because it isn’t simply that our bodies are changing; something about the way we see ourselves changes too. It's likely we'll reach a point where the ways we’ve been coping, behaving, pleasing people, working, parenting or simply getting through life no longer feel sustainable. Things we have tolerated for years might suddenly feel intolerable, with boundaries we have allowed to blur suddenly needing to become clearer. We might find ourselves questioning relationships, our work, our priorities or simply the life we’ve built around ourselves. It can feel as though something inside us has shifted, and we are suddenly looking at the same life through different eyes.

We may begin asking questions we haven’t allowed ourselves to ask before: What do I actually want? What am I no longer willing to accept? Who am I when I’m not constantly trying to be what everyone else needs me to be? The answers will be different for every woman, but the opportunity is the same: to stop, take stock and begin deciding what we want the next part of our lives to look like.

Life Transitions and the Choices We Make

There are less obvious transitions too. A relationship can slowly change as two people grow in different directions. Perhaps one person is doing a lot of work on themselves and wanting to change, while the other is perfectly happy where they are. What was once a difference between two people can gradually become a chasm.

At that point, the questions become much more personal. What am I willing to accept? What am I not willing to accept? Who am I willing to be? What parts of myself have I compromised? What would it mean to live more authentically?

Sometimes that leads to a relationship evolving. Sometimes it leads to a relationship ending. Either way, the transitional point is about beginning to recognise that we have a choice in how we live our lives. And that, I think, is what a life transition really is. They are moments that make us stop and take stock.

There are countless transitional points throughout our lives. Sometimes we face them, and sometimes we carry on, look the other way, and add another layer which further obscures our fundamental self.

Transitional points aren’t necessarily about returning to the person we were before everything changed. We are not meant to go backwards. They are about looking honestly at who we have become, remembering those fundamental parts of ourselves, and recognising where they have become buried underneath our roles and responsibilities. And then, deciding what authentic looks like to us and choosing what we want to carry forward.

Perhaps there are parts of ourselves we want to bring back into our lives. Perhaps there are parts we have outgrown. Perhaps we have always been passionate about something, but have forgotten what it feels like to make space for it.

Making Space for Who We Are Now

And perhaps this is where we discover our sovereignty. Not in the sense of becoming completely independent of everybody else, but in recognising that we have agency in our own lives. We can give ourselves permission to have boundaries; to decide what stays and what changes; to put ourselves back on the list, ideally somewhere near the top.

Because looking after ourselves isn’t selfish. If there’s one thing flying on an aeroplane teaches us, it’s to put our own oxygen mask on before helping somebody else. There is a reason for that. We cannot continually pour everything we have into everybody else without replenishing ourselves along the way.

Being at a transitional point in life doesn’t mean that we are broken.

Rather it is an invitation. Life has given us a reason to stop and look. To ask ourselves who we have been, who we are now, and who we want to be next.

And we don’t have to answer all of those questions immediately.

Sometimes the first thing we need is simply some space in which we don’t have to be somebody’s mum, somebody’s wife, somebody’s carer, somebody’s employee or anybody else’s anything. Just space to be ourselves for a while and hear what is actually going on underneath all the noise.

That is one of the reasons I value the work I do so much.

When you come to Essential Energies, you aren’t buying somebody to tell you who you are or to fix your life for you. You are buying space to stop. Space to be listened to without judgement. Space to put down some of the things you’ve been carrying and begin to work out what you actually want to take forward.

That might happen through a Gong Bath, Reiki, AromaTouch, Shamanic Work or Card Reading. The treatment itself is different but the underlying principle is the same: you are allowed to stop and give yourself some attention.

A transitional point can feel frightening because you don’t necessarily know what comes next. But it can also be an opportunity to look at the life that has grown around you, decide what still fits, and begin to create something that feels more like your own.

You don’t have to go back to who you were. You get to discover who you are now.

If this has made you stop and think about where you are in your own life, you don’t have to work it all out on your own. You can book a free initial consultation with me, with no obligation, and we can talk about where you are, what you need and whether I can support you.