“THIS IS ME NOW!” -Gene Belcher
There’s something about Gene's line that feels both intensely sincere and unintentionally funny. He's so certain!
We all do this to some extent, right? Although maybe without such great costume changes...
We move through different seasons of life, exploring new things, and trying on different roles. Somewhere along the way, though, almost without noticing, our explorations turn into something more solid. Interests become declarations. What we play around with stops becoming something we do, and starts becoming something we are.
In my experience, there’s often an unspoken assumption built into that. If this is who I am now, then this is who I will be from now on. Does your mind do that, too? That belief feels like landing in something stable, something that won’t shift out from underneath me. Finally! I figured out who I am! And in that, there’s a (perceived) sense of safety.
But life doesn’t really work like that, does it?
If you step back just a little, you can start to notice this whole "Selfing" process unfolding in real time. The way the mind organizes experience into identity. The way it claims things and turns them into “me.”
I’ve been watching this play out in my own life lately...
As you may (or may not) know, I’m currently in a Shamanic Reiki Master Teacher apprenticeship. And here’s the nuance: I didn’t enter it out of lack or a feeling that something in my life was missing. I was already full. Calm. Comfortable. Secure in who I am and where I am.
Yet even in that space of enoughness, the mind does its thing. Selfing selfs. Patterns of ego still appear, labeling and organizing, imagining and projecting. My mind naturally notices my new title, wonders how it will fit into my work, and starts picturing what might evolve in my practice, my teaching, and my life. That’s not a problem, by the way. It’s just how minds work.
But there’s still a difference between imagining something and identifying with it.
When imagination is seen for what it is (i.e., passing thought/feeling energy), there’s a lightness to it, a sense of openness. When imagination tries to crystallize into identity, it starts to feel heavier, more fixed. The future my mind is picturing begins to feel like something I need to make happen... as if I have to control it to be happy or successful. That’s where things can get sticky. Not because dreaming is a problem, but because it can start to feel like life needs to match the dream in order for things to be OK.
Look, the mind is just doing what it does. It wants both expansion and stability. Growth and evolution, and at the same time, something solid it can point to and say, “This is who I am.”
And it wants that to be consistent.
I have a lot of conditioning around this, both from my family and from the wider culture. It used to look to me like you should choose a career and stick with it. That you work hard to become something, and then you stay that thing.
But when I look back, my own life hasn’t followed that pattern.
I worked hard to become a teacher, and then I stopped teaching. I worked hard to become a speech-language pathologist, and then I moved on from that. I became a Change Coach (and I still am), but even that continues to evolve as I explore new directions like energy work.
And there’s a tension there that feels familiar.
Part of me loves the expansion, the learning, the sense of becoming more. At the same time, another voice questions it. Why can’t I just stay with one thing? Why does it keep changing? What does that say about me?
It’s fascinating to see that both of these seemingly opposing voices come from the same place: The Selfing Process. The Ego. The same system that wants me to grow and improve also wants to lock everything into something stable and recognizable.
Again, none of that is actually a problem.
The difficulty only comes when all those thoughts are taken as truth—when they’re assumed to be saying something real about who I am, rather than being seen as part of the ongoing, habitual movement of egoic mind.
When there’s even a little space around it, it starts to look different. Less like something to fix, more like something to notice. A pattern. A tendency. Human nature at work.
And there is such freedom in that! If identity was never solid in the first place, change is not failure. It is simply life moving. Stability is not found in a role or label, but in the simple fact of being before it gets shaped into something definable.
So yes… this is me now.
And when something shifts, that will be me too.