Being the self

Photo credit: Marianne Møllmann 2026

I am watching the tulips my husband bought me last week slowly transform from tiny lime green buds to strange otherworldly creatures with dark interiors they can’t be bothered to hide. May we all be blessed with the peace necessary to progress this authentically towards death.

I feel a deep affinity for these flowers. A straight comparison is deeply uninteresting (youth = hiding self, aging = letting it all hang out), yet there is something I can’t quite capture and that irks me almost as much as the triteness of the comparison. It was not easy for me to become myself. It took work I didn’t want to have to do: stripping off layers and layers of protective veneer that still somehow was me, and therefore couldn’t just be discarded wholesale.

I was lucky: I had help. Therapists, friends, coaches. I was even luckier to have the privilege of the space I needed to even try to be me. And it’s not that I remember the work as only painful — quite the opposite, actually. I remember revelations that quickly turned almost mundane, as if I had suddenly returned to the correct route after a detour: oh, this is the way! I wish I had known all along! My recollection of this work is like my memory of giving birth. I see myself rolled up in fetal position on a hospital bed, nurses coaxing me to breathe. I know it was painful, but I only retain the embodied memory of the overwhelming awe I felt when I finally met my child.

Even so, I can say with confidence that these flowers have it easy. They were always themselves, and their transformation is just a continuation of that: a way to be authentically who they always were.

This, I think, is the elusive element. Somewhere in my body I still think of this becoming as a process with a start, a middle, and an end. But it never was. This is not a linear progression and, unlike the old yogis, I don’t aspire to transcend. All I ever wanted was to be me. Turns out I always was.