There’s something very odd about feeling evolved/evolving. Not in the grand, spiritual sense that’s sold to us in self-help audio books or late-night viral Instagram reels. I don’t mean it like enlightenment in a dramatic or epiphanic way. It’s way, way smaller than that. Almost too ordinary. Like noticing you no longer flinch at the things you once did. Like apologising faster. Or knowing when not to explain yourself. Or having the guts to look at yourself in the mirror.

I told this to a close friend recently. That I feel tuned and finely aware of where my blind spots hide. And she said something that made my chest go still: “You’ve always been this way. You just didn’t know it.” That every time we meet, I have grown some small, almost imperceptible inch inwards. She noticed. Even when I didn’t. This evolution, it turns out, doesn’t arrive as thunder. It arrives as correct posture. As saying, “I don’t know,” and meaning it kindly and sincerely.

But I’m holding this version of myself close again. This growing version of me, the one that’s still scared and still tender to mortality. I wasn’t afraid of death for a long time. I’d somehow digested the idea that the body ends. I was recently diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. And the moment until we reached the diagnosis turned me upside down. Something shifted the moment my right side went quiet.

There is a fear that comes with what the end of our lives leaves behind. And mine has the face of my mother. It's not the pain of dying that haunts me now. It’s the ache of leaving her alone at the kitchen table, slicing fruit that no one else will eat the same way as me. It’s the thought of her carrying my name like a bruise she can’t show to anyone, but can't also hide away. Absence is what scares me. The kind that echoes louder in other people’s routines than in your own disappearance.

I sometimes wonder if this is just a part of the cycle. You’re born, and then you begin the painstakingly slow and constant work of shedding what you were taught. You improve yourself in tiny adjustments that no one applauds. Because no one claps when you let go of resentment. Or when you stop needing someone to be wrong so you can feel right. But maybe they should. I think that’s where I live now. In that metabolizing space. Where I know my reactions and still can’t always soften them. Where I notice my ego flaring and instead of silencing it, I sit beside it and ask what it’s trying to protect.

But still, there are days when I feel like the only one feeling this. That my self-reflection is self-indulgence. That I’m wandering through a personal fog mistaking it for some sort of philosophical tsunami. But then I see strangers on the street with that same distracted sorrow, that same almost-invisible weight. And I wonder if everyone’s caught in this loop of self-making. We become different selves depending on who is watching. The self I am with my mother is not the self I am in grief, or in ambition, or in solitude.

After I lost that fleeting control over my body, I found myself turning to philosophy more than ever.

The experience reminded me of something the Japanese call "kintsugi”. Yhe art of mending broken pottery with gold, highlighting the cracks rather than hiding them. It’s such a clichè metaphor, but I finally understand it now. You don’t evolve by becoming flawless. You evolve by tracing your flaws and carrying them into the next version of yourself.

And so, I continue to hold the complexity of my inner mind without flinching. I return to my mother’s laugh. I return to the silence in my face that scared me to death. I return to the table where I once sat and hated myself. And I thank that version of me for getting me here. There’s no final form I am aiming for. Just a slow and tiring journey of being human, again and again, in public and in private.