Who I’m Becoming Is Not Who I Planned

 

 

I thought I knew what my life would look like.

 

I thought I’d still be nursing—moving through long shifts, caring for others with the certainty that came from knowing my place in the world. I thought I’d be married to the person who felt right, settled into a life that made sense from the outside. I imagined a beautiful home, stability, and a future that unfolded in a predictable order.

 

That’s not what happened. Life happened instead.

 

Illness arrived quietly at first, then stayed longer than expected. Stress accumulated. Losses layered themselves into memory. Some experiences left marks I’d rather forget—moments that reshaped me without asking permission. The life I planned didn’t disappear all at once; it slowly became unreachable.

 

For a long time, I measured myself against what should have been. I compared who I was becoming to the version of me I once expected, and I felt behind—off course, unfinished, displaced.

 

But becoming doesn’t follow plans. It follows reality.

 

What I’m learning now is that becoming is not failure just because it looks different. It isn’t weakness because it arrived through hardship. The person I’m becoming carries more awareness, more restraint, more compassion than the one I imagined years ago. She moves more slowly. She listens more carefully. She understands limits in a way she never needed to before.

 

This version of me is not defined by titles or timelines. She is defined by survival, adaptation, and the quiet work of staying present in a changed life.

 

I didn’t plan this becoming—but it is honest. And it is mine.

 

Some days, I still grieve the life I expected. Other days, I recognize that becoming doesn’t require approval from the past. It only asks that I live truthfully now. And that, too, is a kind of arrival.