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 Instagram reels. I don’t mean it like enlightenment in a dramatic, epiphanic way. It’s 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. It’s less about becoming perfect and more about quietly rearranging your inner furniture so you don’t bump into the same guilt again and again.

I told this to a close friend recently. That I feel tuned, 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. 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 part of the cycle. You’re born, and then you begin the painstakingly slow, 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 thinking it’s philosophical weather. 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. Quietly becoming and quietly afraid.

The existentialist Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that we are “not born, but rather become” women. Through heartbreak and hope, through illness and recovery, through the repeated collapse of what we once believed would save us. And what’s more baffling is 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 in gold and carrying them into the next version of yourself.

The Grant Study followed hundreds of men throughout their lives. Tracking health, relationships, happiness, regrets. What surprised even the researchers was this:
the single greatest predictor of fulfilment wasn’t the wealth or the success. It was the capacity for mature emotional processing. The slow, repeated decision to face your inner world without running away from it.

And so, I continue to hold 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. Just an ongoing becoming. A slow and tiring journey of being human, again and again, in public and in private.