GRACE, on Human Being with Dr. Susan - Episode 1 (The very first episode!)

Being human is not a linear achievement.
It’s a messy, iterative prototype.
We break. We rebuild. We make meaning out of the rubble.
And somehow—through all of it—we keep becoming.

The culture tells us to optimize.
Our families tell us to be pleasing.
Our jobs tell us to perform.
But the self—your actual self—has an entirely different KPI:
Integrity.
Congruence.
Alignment between the life you’re living and the life you’re here to live.

Most people don’t fail at life because they’re weak.
They fail because the gap between “role” and “soul” becomes unbearable.
They stop recognizing themselves in the mirror of their own calendar.

I used to believe becoming was additive.
More knowledge. More hustle. More credentials. More ambition. But becoming is often subtraction.
Less noise.
Less compliance.
Less pretending.
Less managing other people’s comfort.

If you want to meet the truth of who you are—your life will eventually orchestrate a disruption.
A divorce.
A diagnosis.
A layoff.
A betrayal.
A calling that refuses to be silenced.
These are not punishments.
They’re pattern interrupts.

“Every exile contains the seeds of return.”
Becoming always begins in exile—when the identity you’re outgrowing no longer fits, and the new one hasn’t yet arrived.

This is why we thrash in the middle.
That’s where the anxiety comes from.
Not because we’re broken, but because the operating system is re-writing itself.

Psychologists call it identity dissonance.
Spiritual traditions call it the dark night.
Leadership scholars call it liminality.
Mystics call it initiation.
Same pattern.
Different vocabulary.

We don’t get to precision-engineer our becoming. We get to cooperate with it.

Becoming the self is the most individual project you’ll ever undertake, and yet no one becomes alone.
We are formed by our people—by our mentors, our enemies, our loves, our disappointments.
The village shapes the pilgrim.

Becoming rarely announces itself. It sneaks in through disruption, fatigue, and thresholds we didn’t plan for. One day you realize the life you built doesn’t quite fit anymore. It’s not failure; it’s evolution calling for an upgrade.

We’re taught to chase stability. But stability often becomes camouflage for stagnation. Growth requires discomfort. Comfort requires conformity. You have to choose which psychological economy you want to live in.

The great traditions all understand this. Buddhists talk about impermanence and detachment. The Stoics talk about character and agency. The Vedantic tradition talks about dharma and liberation. Different ways of mapping the same human problem: how to become without losing the plot of who you are.

Most of us delay becoming because it threatens the systems around us. Families get anxious. Organizations get offended. Friends get confused. People who benefit from your old identity rarely cheer for the new one. That’s not malice; it’s homeostasis.

Identity has stakeholders. And those stakeholders have expectations. When you begin to update the code, the ecosystem pushes back. That’s normal. That’s data. That’s also how you know you’re in the threshold.

The most dangerous moment in becoming isn’t the beginning or the ending; it’s the middle. The middle is where you can’t see the shore you left or the shore you’re headed toward. That’s when people panic. That’s when they go back to what’s familiar. That’s when they collapse into old patterns because the uncertainty feels unbearable.

But the middle is where the upgrade happens. Research on adult development calls this the “transformational hinge.”

Our culture doesn’t teach that process. We teach resilience like it’s about grit. We teach success like it’s about credentials. We teach happiness like it’s about consumption. But becoming is about integration. If the parts don’t integrate, the self doesn’t stabilize.