There’s a romantic little lie we like to tell ourselves.
That we are who we are.
Fixed.
As if we’re doomed to follow childhood scripts, horoscope blurbs, unhealed wounds, and a few oversized quirks masquerading as fate.
As if our identity is some ancient tree we’ve merely grown into.
Roots too deep to cut.
As if “authenticity” means never changing.
As if the child who dreamed, or the teenager who rebelled, or the twenty-something who tried and failed… still has a vote on what the thirty-something adult should do now.
But here’s the trouble with that story:
The version of you that got here—into the job you don’t love, into the relationship that drains you, into the finances that leave you gasping for air, into the habits that numb rather than nourish—
That version of you is not the one who will get you out.
Nietzsche said it as an invitation: Become who you are.
Not who you were. Not who they expect you to be.
Who you really are—underneath the deadwood.
And that means death.
Little deaths, every day.
Old beliefs must be buried.
Outdated dreams must be mourned.
Expectations—yours, theirs, society’s—must be burned at the altar of becoming.
There’s a reason most people in their 30s feel stuck.
They carry the past like a legacy instead of a draft.
They treat “this is how I’ve always been” as a personality trait instead of a design flaw.
Jordan Peterson calls it pruning the deadwood.
A quiet violence you must do to yourself.
Not because you’re broken. But because you’re outdated.
And yet, we cling.
To the dream that didn’t pan out.
To the friend group we’ve outgrown.
To the version of us that once made sense in a different context.
We romanticize the stuckness.
We forget: the real work is not in looking back with regret or forward with anxiety.
It’s in looking within—with a knife.
Not to harm.
But to cut away what no longer fits.
And sometimes, you don’t need a knife—you need a match.
Not to destroy yourself.
But to cremate what’s already dead.
So you can become the person who can lead you out of the mess.
Because the one who got you here…
Can’t get you there.
And that’s not sad.
That’s freedom.
But even freedom comes at a cost—
You will have to face the grief of letting go of who you thought you were.
(Read our follow up post on this theme- Carrying Fire Forward)