Your Life Is Happening While You Are Becoming

You may not realise this, but I tend to write a lot about what's wrong with the world. I've written probably 60 "essays" at this point, a concerning amount of which involve the political and economic state of the world, insert Jaden Smith. So, in order to bring some balance to the Force, today we're discussing your brain's miraculous ability to change xx.

That ability stems from Neuroplasticity. Stay with me now.

In February of 2026, the Winter Olympics took place in Italy, and competing was a freeskier named Eileen Gu. During the Games, Gu went viral for her response to a reporter who asked whether she viewed her two silver medals as "two silvers gained or two golds lost". In typical Eileen Gu fashion, she laughed before pointing out that she was already the most decorated female freeskier in Olympic history, and called the idea of viewing two Olympic medals as medals "lost" a ridiculous perspective. She spoke about the increasing pressure that comes with success, how expectations rise every time you achieve something, and how proud she was that she continued to showcase skiing that quite literally had never been done before.

I already loved that answer, but later in the Games another reporter asked her a question that gave me my absolute bread and butter. The reporter, after complimenting how quickly and comprehensively Gu seemed to answer questions, essentially asked her to explain what happens inside her head. Gu spoke about spending a lot of time thinking, journalling, breaking down her own thought processes and applying an analytical lens to the way she thinks. She said she consciously tries to modify those patterns and approaches her mind in much the same way she approaches her craft as an athlete: something that can be trained, practised and improved. Then she said the part that ended up on my Reels and, obviously, sent me down a rabbit hole: with neuroplasticity on her side, she believed she could continue becoming the person she wanted to be. She said

"You can control what you think. You can control how you think. And therefore, you can control who you are."

I LOVE this mentality, partly because I relate to it on a fundamental level, and partly because there is something incredibly liberating about realising that so much of what we describe as simply "who I am" is actually something we have been practising for a very long time.

Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to change its structure, function and connections in response to experience and use. This isn't something cooked up by a manifestation guru who wants you to buy a $70 course on becoming magnetic, it is a real biological property of the nervous system. Our brains remain capable of adaptation throughout our lives, and one of the most well-known principles underlying learning is Hebbian plasticity, often summarised as "neurons that fire together, wire together".

To put it simply, patterns of neural activity that are repeatedly used can become stronger and more efficient, while connections that are used less can weaken over time. The brain is constantly responding to what we ask it to do. Obviously, this does not mean you can think yourself into literally anything. Genetics exist, temperament exists, circumstances exist, illness exists, things happen to people that they absolutely did not choose, and no amount of positive thinking makes us omnipotent. I also don't think that caveat makes the actual idea any less extraordinary. We have an enormous capacity to learn, adapt, practise new responses and reinforce different patterns throughout our lives, which means there is a considerable amount of ourselves that we are participating in the construction of, whether we consciously acknowledge that participation or not.

Think about learning any skill. Something that feels completely unnatural in week one can eventually become something you do without consciously thinking about every individual movement, because repetition changes what your brain becomes efficient at doing. I think the more interesting question is what happens when you take that principle outside of obviously learnable skills and begin paying attention to the patterns you rehearse every day: where your attention goes, which thoughts you return to, the reactions you default to, the stories you continuously tell yourself about yourself. Because I think we have a habit of treating personality as a description of who we are, when, sometimes, without realising it, we start using it as an instruction for who we have to keep being.

"I'm just an anxious person." "I'm terrible under pressure." "I'm impatient." "I'm an overthinker." "I've always had a temper." "I'm not confident." Maybe some of those things accurately describe the way you tend to behave right now, and there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that. The problem comes when an observation becomes a permanent identity, because once you have decided that something is simply who you are, you have very little reason to practise being anything else. Every situation becomes further evidence for the story you have already written, and it is self-reinforcing in ways we barely notice.

If every time pressure appears you immediately tell yourself that you are terrible under pressure, then you walk into the next difficult situation already expecting a particular version of yourself to show up. If you make a mistake and instinctively spend the next hour absolutely obliterating yourself internally, you become very practised at self-criticism. If every social interaction is followed by a forensic analysis of how you were perceived, congratulations, you are becoming extremely skilled at monitoring yourself. I know this because, unfortunately, I have done plenty of reps.

And this is where I think Gu's mentality becomes so useful. She pays attention to the way she thinks, identifies patterns she wants to change and then actually practises something different. There is a difference between introspection and endlessly analysing yourself for the sake of analysing yourself. The purpose of noticing a pattern should eventually be to decide what you want to do with it. Maybe "I'm impatient" becomes "I have a tendency to become impatient, and I'm practising patience." Maybe "I'm bad under pressure" becomes an opportunity to notice what you actually do when pressure arrives and deliberately work on the response. Maybe you have spent years believing you are inherently insecure, quick to anger, overly critical, incapable of discipline, emotionally reactive, bad at public speaking, whatever it is. Some of those traits may come more naturally to you than their opposite, but I think we should be extremely careful about turning what comes naturally into what is inevitable.

You are allowed to become someone you haven't been before. And this is where the idea becomes even more exciting to me, because when, precisely, does any of that becoming actually happen?

We spend an unbelievable amount of our lives imagining ourselves in the future. Future me will be more confident. Future me will be more disciplined. Future me won't care so much what people think. Future me will be calmer, wiser, healthier, more patient, more successful, less reactive. I LOVE thinking about future me, probably too much, because it's very comforting to imagine that there is a more evolved version of you waiting somewhere ahead and that eventually, through the natural passage of time, you will arrive and collect her. Unfortunately, she does not exist anywhere yet. The future is not a physical place where any action can occur. Nothing you have ever done has happened in the future. Everything that has ever happened to you happened as a present moment, followed by another present moment, followed by another one. Which means the person you imagine becoming one day can only ever be constructed through what you repeatedly do now. The rep that makes you more patient doesn't happen once you have "become a patient person". It happens in the extremely annoying conversation where you feel yourself becoming irritated and manage, maybe for once, to respond differently. Confidence isn't built in the imaginary future where you finally stop doubting yourself; it is built when you feel self-conscious now and do the thing anyway. You don't develop a kinder internal voice once you have magically healed every insecurity you've ever had. You practice it after making a mistake on some random Tuesday when the familiar urge to tear yourself apart arrives and you decide, just this once, not to indulge it quite as much.

That is the part I find both liberating and mildly terrifying. The future version of you is being rehearsed all the time. Neuroplasticity often gets folded into conversations about manifestation and "becoming your future self", and I understand why because the language of becoming is exciting. I love the idea of constantly growing towards something. But if you follow that idea all the way down, becoming eventually brings you straight back to being. You cannot construct a future self in the future because you cannot act there. The person you are becoming is being shaped through the boring, ordinary, almost completely forgettable present moments that make up your day. The future is a direction. The present is the only ground there is to stand on while facing it. We think once I'm confident, I'll do it. Once I'm less anxious, I'll put myself out there. Once I'm disciplined, I'll be consistent. Once I'm happier, I'll stop thinking so negatively. Meanwhile, perhaps some of those qualities are developed through the exact moments where we practise them before they feel natural.

So I encourage you, and myself because God knows I need this too, to pay attention to what you are practicing. What thoughts take up the most space in your head? When you walk into a room, is your attention constantly pulled towards how you might be perceived? When you are exhausted, do you practise patience or immediately hand the steering wheel to irritation? When you make a mistake, how quickly does accountability become judgement? When something goes wrong, do you automatically look for evidence that everything always goes wrong for you? When you achieve something, do you allow yourself to enjoy it or do you move the goalpost before you've even had five minutes to be proud? None of this requires policing every thought that enters your head, which would be both impossible and probably a fantastic way to make yourself insane. I think it means becoming more intentional about which thoughts and behaviours you continually give rehearsal time to.

There are so many things about life that we cannot control, and I actually find that to be even more reason to become interested in the things we can influence. You have this absurdly complicated, adaptable organ sitting inside your skull that is constantly learning from what you repeatedly ask of it. You can teach it things. You can practise responses. You can build skills that currently feel impossible. You can notice a pattern you have had for ten years and begin interrupting it. You can decide that a trait which accurately described you at 18 does not automatically get to write the biography of you at 22.

How COOL is that???

I think sometimes we talk about personal growth like our current self is something we have to escape from, and I don't really like that. I love who I am now. I also hope I am different in ten years. I hope I am more patient, more knowledgeable, more emotionally regulated, more generous, more kind, better at the things I care about and still curious enough to discover entirely new things I want to become good at. I don't think wanting to develop yourself requires disliking who you currently are. If anything, self-love is taking yourself seriously enough to believe you are worth developing. And I think it is equally important to remember not to become so obsessed with Future You that Current You becomes nothing more than a construction site.

Your life is happening while you are becoming.

The journalling is happening now. The conversation is happening now. The person you love is sitting across from you now. The walk, the dinner, the mistake, the opportunity to respond differently, the opportunity to take a chance, the ordinary Tuesday you will never remember, all of it is happening in the only place anything ever does. So yes, think about the person you want to become. Think big. Think about the way you want to react, love, work, learn, speak to yourself, treat other people and move through the world. Then bring it back down to the smallest possible unit: what does that person practise today? Practise gratitude when your brain wants to move immediately onto what is missing. Practise being slower to judge, quicker to apologise, harder to provoke, more willing to learn. And when you inevitably do whatever extremely human thing you were hoping Future You had transcended, congratulations, you have another rep available.

There's nothing quite like learning more, growing, and realising that one of the most powerful tools you will ever have is already at your disposal. Your brain is constantly adapting to the life you are living, and I find it ridiculously exciting that we get some say in what we repeatedly teach it. The self is something we inherit, something life shapes for us, and something we continue shaping ourselves.

And if you spend a lot of time in your head, make it a beautiful place to be.

Anyway.

LOVE U BYE XX