At sixteen years old, I was asked what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Sixteen.
I couldn’t legally buy a bottle of wine, vote, drive or get a tattoo and I had absolutely no idea what a pension was, but yet somehow, I was considered mature enough to make decisions that would determine the entire trajectory of my career.
Choose your GCSEs.
Choose your A Levels.
Choose your university course.
Choose your career.
And choose very carefully.
For some reason we were sold the idea that life is a straight line.
School. College. University. Get a good job. Work nine ’til five.
Meet someone. Get engaged. Buy a house. Get married. Have children. Work until retirement.
And, if you’re lucky, squeeze in a nice holiday once a year.
There you go.
Life. Completed it.
Except nobody really explains what happens when you reach thirty-something, look around at the life you carefully constructed and think, ’is this actually me?’
We Were Taught to Choose a Life Before We’d Even Met Ourselves
There was an unspoken panic around education when I was growing up (and, after working in a school for many years, I can confidently say that panic has only intensified).
Your GCSEs mattered. Well, not just mattered, they were spoken about as though they were the tiny paper gatekeepers standing between you and a successful life.
Don’t do well and that’s it. You’ve ruined your chances. No good career.
No good career means no good money.
No good money means no good life.
Obviously, I’m being deliberately dramatic. Well… only slightly, because that’s how it felt.
We were encouraged to choose subjects based on the careers we thought we might want before most of us had experienced anything beyond school, family life and perhaps a Saturday job.
I chose fashion. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I just knew I wanted to enjoy whatever I did.
And at the time, it made sense. I loved clothes. I loved creativity. I loved the way something as simple as an outfit could completely change how a person carried themselves.
So I studied fashion at university. Then, five months before I was due to begin, my brother died.
I still went, because that’s what you did.
I’d chosen the path. I’d been accepted. The next step was university.
So I went.
But the girl who had chosen that degree wasn’t quite the same girl who arrived there. Grief had changed me, my priorities had changed and the questions I was asking about life had changed.
Suddenly, things that had once felt important didn’t carry the same weight. I hadn’t chosen the wrong degree. I’d simply changed.
And I think that’s the part nobody prepares us for. You can make the right decision for who you are at eighteen… and still outgrow it.
Why Does Our Identity Change in Our 30s?
We often see changing our minds as a sign that we got it wrong the first time. That perhaps we didn’t really know ourselves as well as we thought we did.
But what if we did? What if we’ve just simply changed since?
Because identity changes in our thirties, just as it does throughout our lives. We aren’t supposed to figure ourselves out once and then carry the same version of ourselves unchanged forever.
Research into identity development suggests that the process continues through early adulthood and beyond. Our sense of self is influenced by the roles we take on, the experiences we live through and the environments we find ourselves in. Researchers have even begun looking specifically at career identity between the ages of thirty and forty-five as its own developmental period.
In other words, the science doesn’t really support the idea that you should have yourself completely figured out by thirty.
Thank God for that, because I certainly didn’t.
The person you are at eighteen hasn’t experienced the relationships you’ll have at twenty-five. She doesn’t know the loss you might experience. The confidence you’ll build. The boundaries you’ll learn. The things you’ll tolerate. The things you’ll eventually decide you will never tolerate again.
She hasn’t met your children. She hasn’t had her heart broken in all the ways it might be broken. She hasn’t walked into rooms that make her feel alive. She hasn’t sat in jobs that slowly drain the colour from her. She hasn’t yet discovered the parts of herself she had to quieten, in order to belong.
How could she possibly make every decision for the woman you’ll become?
She couldn’t.
And she was never supposed to.
Maybe Your Life Didn’t Go Wrong. Maybe You Changed.
I think this is where so many women become confused, because nothing is necessarily wrong.
You might have the house, the partner, the career, the children, the life you once imagined and yet something feels different.
The job you once desperately wanted now feels restrictive. The friendship you’ve had for twenty years suddenly feels harder to maintain. The clothes in your wardrobe don’t feel like you anymore. The conversations you once enjoyed leave you feeling flat.
Perhaps even the person you chose to build a life with feels more aligned with a version of you who no longer exists.
That’s a difficult thing to admit. But I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that two people can choose each other honestly and then evolve differently.
The person you chose at nineteen may have been perfect for the nineteen-year-old version of you, but what happens when you’re thirty-seven and you’ve lived another eighteen years?
When you’ve become a mother, built a career, lost people, found new interests, changed your beliefs, or learnt to use your voice.
Research continues to show that we don’t simply stop changing when we reach adulthood. Our personalities, identities and even the way we see ourselves can continue to shift as we move through relationships, careers and major life experiences.
Changing doesn’t automatically mean you need to leave your marriage, quit your job and move to Bali.
Although, admittedly, Bali does sound lovely.
Sometimes changing simply means becoming curious. ‘Who am I now?’
Not who was I at eighteen.
Not who did my parents expect me to be.
Not who does my partner need me to be.
Not who have I become really good at performing.
Who am I now?
Motherhood Has a Habit of Asking That Question Very Loudly
For me, motherhood accelerated everything.
I’ve written before about matrescence – the psychological, social and identity transition into motherhood. Research describes becoming a mother as a major life transition involving changes to a woman’s brain, body, relationships, social roles and sense of identity. The cognitive demands of motherhood also require continuous adaptation.
Which makes complete sense to me, because becoming a mum didn’t just give me children, it changed the way I saw time, work and freedom, It changed the way I saw my body, my relationships, my priorities, but most importantly for me, it highlighted my tolerance for things that didn’t feel right.
Before children, I could ignore dissatisfaction for quite a long time. I could convince myself that things were ‘fine’. That I should be grateful. That everyone gets bored. That this is simply what adults do.
Go to work. Come home. Wait for Friday. Repeat.
Then I became responsible for two tiny people and something shifted. Suddenly time felt incredibly valuable. Perhaps because I could physically see it passing in front of me; my babies became toddlers, toddlers became children, clothes were outgrown, words were spoken and faces change.
And somewhere amongst all of that, I began to ask myself a question I hadn’t really asked before; ‘is this how I want to spend my life?’
Not because my life was bad, but because I was finally awake enough to realise it was mine.
The World Changed. But the Timeline Didn’t.
This is perhaps the strangest part.
The world we live in has changed dramatically. Technology has changed. The way we work has changed. Entire industries have appeared that didn’t exist when I was choosing my GCSEs. People build businesses from laptops. They create careers from skills that would once have been dismissed as hobbies.
In the UK alone, around 2.9 million people changed jobs in 2025, with approximately 1.2 million moving into an entirely different industry.
And yet we still seem strangely attached to the idea that choosing a career is a one-time decision.
Recent conversations about education in England have questioned whether the curriculum and assessment system is keeping pace with the skills young people need for a changing world. Students themselves have reported wanting more vocational, digital and communication skills within their education.
I don’t believe education hasn’t changed at all. It has, in some ways, though so much of the same curriculum still exists today as it did when I was there.
But I do wonder whether the story underneath it has changed quickly enough.
The story that says: choose wisely, stay consistent and build a sensible career. Don’t waste your qualifications, don’t start again and, whatever you do, don’t throw away everything you’ve worked for.
Because what if starting again isn’t throwing anything away? What if you take it all with you?
I didn’t stop being the girl who studied fashion when I became a counsellor.
I didn’t stop being a counsellor when I trained in Reiki.
I didn’t lose my understanding of energy when I began studying astrology.
And I haven’t abandoned any of those things now that I write.
They’re all here.
Fashion taught me about expression.
Counselling taught me how to listen.
Grief taught me about survival.
Motherhood taught me about identity.
Reiki taught me to pay attention to what I couldn’t always explain.
Astrology gave me another language through which to explore myself.
Writing gave me somewhere to put it all.
Perhaps the problem was never that I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be. Perhaps I was never supposed to choose just one thing.
What If You Haven’t Lost Yourself?
We use the phrase finding yourself as though there is one fully formed version of you hidden somewhere underneath the washing pile.
As though, if you journal hard enough, meditate for long enough and finally organise the kitchen cupboard, she’ll appear.
There she is.
Found her.
But I don’t think that’s how it works. I think we meet ourselves in layers. Sometimes through therapy. Sometimes through motherhood. Sometimes through the clothes we suddenly feel drawn to wear. Perhaps sometimes through understanding our personality or noticing what our nervous system has spent years protecting us from. Or sometimes through astrology and the strange experience of reading something about yourself and thinking, ‘ahh. That’s why’.
I don’t believe every tool has to be treated as an absolute truth to be useful. Sometimes a tool simply gives you a better question;
Why do I keep doing this?
Why does this environment exhaust me?
Why do I feel safer being needed than being seen?
Why am I drawn to this?
Why do I keep shrinking here?
Why do I feel more like myself there?
This is why so much of my work has become about creating space for women to become curious about themselves. To explore who they are, what has shaped them and who they might be becoming.
Because perhaps you haven’t lost yourself, maybe you’re just meeting yourself properly for the first time without limitations, expectations or judgment.
Finding Yourself Is an Ongoing Practice
I don’t think there will ever be a morning where I wake up and boldy announce to my husband; ‘That’s it. I know exactly who I am now’.
Partly because he’d probably ask if I was ok and whether caffeine was needed, but mainly because I hope I’m never finished.
I hope I’m different at fifty.
I hope I discover something new at sixty.
I hope I change my mind.
I hope I find new interests.
I hope there are parts of myself I haven’t even met yet.
Because surely that’s the point of being alive? We aren’t static. Our bodies change, our brains adapt, our relationships evolve and our priorities shift. Our understanding deepens and perhaps the discomfort so many women feel in their thirties isn’t always a sign that something has gone wrong.
Perhaps it’s what happens when the version of you who built your life and the version of you who is living it are no longer quite the same woman.
That doesn’t mean you need to flip everything on its head, it might simply mean that it’s time to get curious. To notice, to explore, to ask better questions.
Because you aren’t becoming someone else.
You’re becoming someone you’ve never had the chance to meet before.
And I, for one, can’t wait to meet every version of her.
With warmth,
Becky
Founder, Becoming Her