The other day I was listening to a podcast interview with Elizabeth Gilbert about her latest book, All the Way to the River. My husband was in the car, and I figured he needed some context to fully appreciate it. He didn’t think so, but I graciously filled him in anyway.
“I’m really okay,” he assured me.
“I’ll just tell you real quick,” I insisted.
I explained how in Eat, Pray, Love, Liz realized her first marriage was over and set off around the world to find her truer self — only to later discover that what she really needed was Felipe, the man who became her second husband. Years later, she realized she was in love with her best friend, Rayya, left that marriage, and cared for Rayya through the end of her life. After Rayya’s death, she found herself questioning the patterns that had shaped those relationships.
“Is that all?” my husband asked, eyebrows raised.
“Well, until her next book,” I shrugged.
It was a lot of realizing.
It reminded me of Glennon Doyle, whose book Love Warrior was about saving her marriage, only for her to later leave that marriage and fall in love with Abby Wambach, a story that became her next book.
There are plenty of critiques that have been lodged at Liz and Glennon, many of them valid. You could roll your eyes at the repeated revelations or wonder if their lives are being lived for the plot.
But watching their cycles of “realizing,” I found myself thinking something different: maybe the issue isn’t that they keep getting it wrong. Maybe the issue is the belief that lives underneath it all — that there is a final, correct version of ourselves to arrive at.
This belief runs steadfastly through so much of the self-development and healing work we turn toward. It tells us that if we look closely enough, dig deeply enough, or heal thoroughly enough, we’ll uncover our truest self. The real us. The one that was there all along.
It’s a compelling idea, but I think it can also be misleading.
We want the breakthrough — the moment that clarifies everything. Who we are. What we want. How we’re meant to live. We’re drawn to stories of dramatic self-discovery because they promise resolution: the woman who finally understands herself, the one who changes her life, the one who gets it right.
And there are, of course, seasons in life that do bring things into sharper focus. There are moments that feel clarifying, moments that change us. But clarity is not the same thing as arrival.
The problem isn’t self-discovery. The problem is the assumption that there is one true, enduring version of us to be discovered — and that, if we just keep going, we’ll eventually get there.
What if we’re not uncovering ourselves? What if we instead looked at it as continuously becoming?
Even at the most literal level, this is true. The atoms that make up our physical bodies are in constant exchange with the world around us. Over time, almost none of the physical material that made up our younger selves remains. We are, at the anatomical level, not the same person we were.
That doesn’t erase continuity. Our histories and patterns matter. The throughlines of our lives are real. But so is this: there is no single, unchanging you. There is only a self that is continuously shaped by experience, by context, by time.
The child version of me who hated her curly hair and spinach wasn’t a less true version of herself than the me who now loves both.
The young adult version of me who built a life with one person wasn’t a less true version of herself than the me who later built a different life with someone else.
We’re so quick to look back and think: I just hadn’t figured it out yet. But what if we had? What if that version of us understood something essential about what she needed, given who she was and where she was standing?
We are always being shaped, whether we intend to be or not.
Maybe instead of thinking about ourselves as something to be discovered, it’s more accurate to think of ourselves as something like a river. The shape may feel familiar. The direction may hold. But at every moment, new water is moving through. What we are is never exactly what we were.
This matters, I believe, because it changes how we relate to ourselves.
I think it can soften how we look back on who we’ve been. It can make more room for compassion and ease self-correction. It can allow for the possibility that we weren’t wrong or misguided at earlier point — we were responding to our lives with the capacities and needs we had at the time.
It also might loosen the grip of identity. If there isn’t one fixed “true self” to live up to, there’s more space to change without feeling like we’re betraying something essential.
And it keeps us in curiosity. Less certain, perhaps, but also more open. More honest about what it means to be a person over time.
Self-discovery still matters. We do learn real things about who we are. But that knowledge belongs to a moment. It isn’t a final answer.
At the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t read Liz Gilbert’s All the Way to the River. I’m curious to learn who she is today, even while knowing there will be more versions (and likely more books) to come.
And if there’s a version of me who curls up one day to read them, she’ll be a different version, too.
