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 discover that what she really needed was Felipe, the Brazilian man who became her second husband. Then, in 2016, she realized she was in love with her best friend, Rayya. She left Felipe, cared for Rayya through her final months with cancer, and after Rayya’s death, found herself realizing yet again that their relationship—and perhaps all her relationships—had been shaped by codependency and addiction.
“Is that all?” my husband asked, eyebrows raised.
“Well, until her next book,” I shrugged.
It was a lot of realizing, I realized—a kind of occupational hazard for memoirists. It reminded me of Glennon Doyle, whose Love Warrior, about saving her marriage, was barely out before she had another reckoning and left that marriage for Abby Wambach, a love story that became Untamed.
There’s plenty one could say about Liz and Glennon—plenty that has been said. You could roll your eyes at their perpetual revelations or wonder if their lives are being lived for the plot.
But my take is that they’re not doing it for the plot, at least not consciously. Rather, they give us a front-row seat to a particular human fallacy: the belief that we are ever finished human beings.
Maybe their turns are especially dramatic—falling in love with a dying friend, meeting a gold medalist soulmate—but I think most of us live by a similar story arc. We treat our lives like unfolding narratives leading toward a tidy conclusion, imagining that we’re on a path to discover the truest version of ourselves.
There are certainly aspects of framing our lives this way that I enjoy. I love the idea that we are all these puzzles to be solved. I can eat up the idea that we can have these turning point experiences in our lives that reveal our most fundamental nature. As I’ve said before, we all want the breakthrough.
And we want it because we are so hungry to know who we really are and what will make us happiest. We are drawn to stories about major self-discovery. The woman married to a man for 16 years who discovered that she was actually gay. The woman who realized that she was never meant to be an attorney, but instead a baker. The woman who discovered her underlying ADHD diagnosis or repressed memories of trauma.
I believe that there are absolutely clarifying seasons in life, ones that help us put aspects of our personality and identity into sharper focus. Sometimes those seasons are the catalyst for a major life transition, while at other times the life transition is what opens up the season of self-discovery. Either way, we often walk away from them with some version of believing that now we know who we really are. Whereas before we were confused or clouded, now we have been revealed.
The fallacy isn’t in the idea of self-discovery. The fallacy is believing that we have one true nature to be uncovered. It’s in the idea that we could ever arrive at the last chapter. Because inherent in the idea of the breakthrough is the idea that we have one true identity. One real us.
But the reality, as far as my own observations and philosophy tell me, is that there is in fact no such thing. We don’t have one enduring version of ourselves, but rather a constantly evolving self.
As I write this, I’m aware of how countercultural this might seem. I see the way that so many of our paradigms in psychology, therapy, self-help, and wellness are built on the idea that if we continue to take apart the nesting dolls, we will eventually find the tiniest one deep inside. Metaphors like this abound, in fact, making it easy to imagine ourselves as deeply hidden within layers, waiting to be discovered.
But I think we’re more metamorphosing than nested. Consider for a moment that because the atoms and molecules that make up our physical bodies are in constant exchange with the earth, almost none of the actual atoms that made up our bodies as a child or a decade ago or last year are in us now. We are no more materially continuous with our younger self than with a stranger. I find this wild.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we aren’t substantially shaped by our early experiences or that we shouldn’t consider our past selves “us.” But it’s interesting to ponder. It reminds us that we are, in very literal terms, in constant flux. We are being shaped by the continuous flow of experiences that we have.
There is no one unchanging you. There is only a constellation of parts, continuously shaping the world and being shaped by the world.
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 fell in love with a good man wasn’t a less true version of herself than the me who has now rebuilt a different life with a different person.
There is such an impulse to reflect back and think that we just hadn’t figured it out quite yet. But what if we had figured it out in just the right way for that particular version of us? For that self that was full of a completely different set of atoms and wanted and needed different things?
We could talk about neuroplasticity here – the brain’s incredible ability to rewire and reshape. It affirms for us that we have the capacity to change. But what if we take it a step further? What if we don’t just have the capacity, but are constantly changed – whether we want to be or not – by the flow of our lives?
Maybe instead of nesting dolls, we are more like rivers. Our banks, the paths we carve, the way that we move may stay mostly the same. But at every moment, new water is rushing in. We can never look at the same river twice.
Why does any of this really matter? I’m not totally sure, if I’m honest, except that something to me feels important about acknowledging our constantly evolving selves. I think it allows for a different level of self-compassion when we think about our former selves. I think it actually gives us more room to grow and change when we aren’t tethered to the idea of one essential truth about who we are. I think it ultimately lets us stay in the realm of curiosity about ourselves, which to me means more humility and grace.
It’s still worth doing the work of self-discovery—to learn real things about who we are. We just need to hold that knowledge lightly, knowing it’s true for this moment in the river’s flow.
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 suspecting there will be more versions—and books—to come. And if there’s a me who curls up one day to read them, she’ll surely be a different version, too.
Author’s Note: I’ve now read the book. And, wow.
