The Great Reinvention
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about our ability to reinvent ourselves.
We see reinvention elsewhere in the animal kingdom, of course - Caterpillars turning to Butterflies, Tadpoles to Frogs. An entire process of transformation and rebirth that creates a new habitat, physical form, even diet.
But the difference in humans is that we can find ourselves reinventing our identity both out of necessity or choice.
As a child, I was always creating identities for myself. I was imaginative and often lost in books, and that spilled over into creating whole new characters I would play. Little did I know, I was practicing a form of manifestation… imagining up the woman I wanted be when I grew up.
In my university years and early 20’s, my insecurities would cause me to reinvent myself every time I found myself in the company of someone new… shaping and moulding to fit to what I thought would appeal the most. By my mid-twenties I had reinvented myself more times than Madonna and had absolutely no sense of who I really was any more. Enter a deep period of feeling lost, confused and depressed.
A few years later and here I was, reinventing my identity again. No longer the sociable, party girl of my youth. Instead, I became the stay at home step-mum and small business owner. My entire identity was shaped around the version of myself I chose to present across social media. Once again, I created the persona and then became her.
Then came the biggest transformation of all.
4 years ago, my life crumbled around me when my long-term partner chose to end our relationship by cheating on me. I lost him, the stepchildren I’d devoted myself to for 8 years, my home, joint friends, our dogs, and the future I had envisioned for myself.
For the first time in my life, I was on my own. Shortly after the breakup, the world headed into lockdown and I found myself truly alone and living by myself. There is so much I could share about this experience, but the biggest takeaway is that it forced me to be with myself. The real, raw, truest version of myself.
And with that came a realisation, I had floated through life wearing different masks and costumes… trying them on for size to see what would fit. Some came close, but none of them were ever perfectly tailored to my exact shape.
It seemed as though the entire world was going through a reinvention during this time - life as we knew it had fallen away and we were faced with a new reality. According to the Office for National Statistics, divorce rates in the UK rose by nearly 10% during the pandemic. A quarter of the UK workforce quit their jobs over a 2 year period in what has become known as the Great Resignation. It seems Covid was a catalyst for many of us to reinvent ourselves.
For me, this reinvention was different from all the rest. It was partly born from necessity… I was navigating an unprecedented situation in my life and in many ways, reinvention felt like a form of survival. But it was also a choice, somewhere in the depths of my pandemic-induced solitude I had realised that up to this point, my entire existence had been formed out of what other people had expected of me. I had carefully crafted the version of myself that society told me, a woman, I should be.
The last 4 years have been a prolonged process of reinvention that have seen me shedding the layers of societal expectation and stepping into a version of myself who I can genuinely say that I love and accept.
Perhaps, this hasn’t really been a reinvention… but a coming home to myself.