Existential Thought - What Is The Cost Of Becoming Who You Were Meant To Be?

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
Richard Bach

Everything we become comes at a cost.

We celebrate the final, polished transformation while ignoring the heavy toll of shedding our old selves. In her memoir, Michelle Obama captured this exhausting friction, noting that becoming isn't a permanent destination or a static state of arrival. Instead, she described it as a rigorous process of forward motion—a continuous series of evolutions that demand we constantly outgrow who we used to be. The butterfly looks effortless, but the cocoon is a battleground.

Because we talk a lot about becoming.

Becoming successful.

Becoming wealthy.

Becoming a parent.

Becoming a leader.

Becoming the best version of yourself.

It all sounds incredibly positive.

Inspirational even.

But we rarely talk about what becoming actually requires. We also don’t often talk about what staying stagnant means.

Because to become something new, something old usually has to cease to exist.

And that is the part nobody puts on the motivational poster.

Becoming Requires An Ending

One of my best quotes at the moment is:

“Everything Ends.”

Simple right? Yet so profound and extremely misunderstood. Largely because we are emotional creatures.

Evolutionary biology wired us to crave permanence, safety, and connection, leaving us poorly equipped to handle the abrupt finality of change. Because our emotional brains react to loss before our logic can process it, we mistake an ending for a tragedy. We instinctively mourn the close of a chapter, forgetting that the universe is built on a cycle of completion—and that without a definitive end, nothing new can ever begin.

Think about every major transformation in your life.

When you become a parent, the person who could think only about themselves disappears.

When you become a spouse, complete independence gives way to partnership.

When you become an entrepreneur, certainty often gives way to risk.

When you become successful, anonymity may disappear.

When you become wealthy, your relationship with money, people and responsibility changes.

When you become older, youth disappears whether you consent to it or not.

Every beginning contains an ending.

And perhaps this is why change can feel so painful even when we desperately want what is on the other side.

We are gaining something.

But we are grieving something too.

The Death Of Previous Versions Of Ourselves

I sometimes think about all the people I have been.

The child.

The model.

The student.

The entrepreneur.

The club owner.

The father.

The husband.

The person who thought he understood everything.

The person who subsequently discovered that he understood almost nothing.

They're all me.

And yet none of them completely exist anymore.

Parts remain.

Others had to go.

Some disappeared naturally.

Others I had to consciously kill off because they could not accompany me where I wanted to go.

Beliefs.

Habits.

Relationships.

Ego.

Fear.

Expectations.

Sometimes even dreams.

That sounds dramatic.

But perhaps becoming requires us to repeatedly mourn people who never technically died.

Including ourselves.

You Cannot Take Everyone With You

This may be one of the hardest parts of becoming.

Not everyone who begins the journey with you will finish it with you.

Some relationships are for life.

Others are for a season.

And some relationships work precisely because of who you were when they began.

Then you change.

They change.

Life changes.

And suddenly the relationship doesn't fit in quite the same way anymore.

The conflict within - who you were then, who you are now and the promises you made.

This is what makes letting go particularly hard.

It doesn't necessarily make anybody bad.

It doesn't always require betrayal. It should not require betrayal.

Sometimes two people simply evolve in different directions.

But there is another uncomfortable version of this.

Sometimes people love you but don't particularly like the person you are becoming.

Your growth changes the relationship.

Your boundaries make you "difficult".

Your ambition makes you "different".

Your independence makes you "selfish".

Your success makes you "arrogant".

Your healing makes you less willing to tolerate things the old version of you accepted.

And occasionally, people will fight desperately to keep you as the person they understood because your transformation forces them to reconsider themselves.

Perhaps one of the costs of becoming is accepting that not everyone will recognise the person who emerges.

The Loneliness Of Transformation

There are periods of becoming that can be extraordinarily lonely.

You have left somewhere.

But you haven't arrived anywhere yet.

You’re in the cocoon. This is undoubtedly the hardest and most vulnerable time you may ever experience.

The old life doesn't fit.

The new life doesn't exist.

You are somewhere in between.

I think many of us underestimate this space.

The business isn't successful yet.

The relationship has ended but the new life hasn't begun.

You've left the job but haven't established the new career.

You've changed internally but the world still relates to the old version of you.

There is no applause here.

No obvious progress.

Just uncertainty.

Perhaps that is why so many people turn back… regress.

Not because where they came from was better.

But because at least it was familiar.

The world is a scary place and it is not easy to be brave.

Familiar Pain Versus Unfamiliar Possibility

Human beings have a remarkable capacity to remain in situations that make us unhappy simply because we understand them. It goes back to our primitive wiring for survival and belonging. Where emotion overruns logic. Certainty trumps uncertainty everytime and besides, happiness is overrated!

So we tolerate the job we hate.

The relationship that no longer works.

The friendship we've outgrown.

The business model we know is dying.

The identity that no longer fits.

Familiar pain often feels safer than unfamiliar and unknown possibility.

Because possibility carries no guarantees.

You know what happens if you stay.

You don't know what happens if you leave.

And perhaps every meaningful transformation eventually asks us the same question:

Do you want certainty badly enough to remain who you are?

The Cost Of Ambition

There is a price attached to ambition.

I know this one particularly well.

When you want to build something that doesn't yet exist, other people cannot always see what you see.

Sometimes you can't fully see it either.

You simply have a conviction that something could exist.

So you begin.

And creating anything requires resources.

Money.

Time.

Energy.

Attention.

Relationships.

Sleep.

Opportunity.

Sometimes sanity.

I have risked things I probably shouldn't have risked.

Worked when I probably should have rested.

Continued when stopping might have been the more rational choice.

I've had moments where conviction looked remarkably similar to stupidity.

Sometimes it still does.

And perhaps the difference between the visionary and the fool is only obvious afterwards.

One succeeds.

The other doesn't.

At this point it is important to remember and I’ve already stated - there are no winners or losers. Only life… and death.

Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.

We only hear the tales of those that lived to tell the tale and we cite those as examples and justifications as to why we should follow (or not) a certain path. We almost never hear from those that lost, save as cautionary tales delivered as gossip and Chinese whispers never with the full context. No one successfully publishes a book on how they lost everything unless there is redemption in the end.

Becoming carries an uncomfortable price.

There is no guarantee that the sacrifice will be rewarded.

What If You Become The Wrong Person?

First, there is no right or wrong, only our perception of it.

We get to choose who we are and who we want to be.

We get to choose the price we are willing to pay.

So the choice is always ours as is the power where there is free will.

That said, this may be the question we don't ask enough.

We assume growth is inherently good.

But people can become worse.

Success can make us arrogant.

Money can make us suspicious.

Pain can make us cruel.

Betrayal can make us incapable of trust.

Power often corrupts.

Repeated disappointment can turn optimism into cynicism.

The experiences that shape us don't automatically improve us.

They simply change us. Alter the states of our existence. Controversially, not all butterflies are beautiful.

Which means becoming must contain an element of choice.

Not simply:

Who am I becoming?

But:

Do I like who I am becoming?

That is a much harder question. But we have the privilege of being able to ask AND more importantly, answer it.

Because you can achieve everything you once wanted and discover that you don't particularly like the person who had to emerge to obtain it.

And if that happens...

Did you become who you were meant to be?

Or merely who you thought you needed to become in order to get what you wanted or in some cases survive ?

Becoming And Survival

There are versions of ourselves created entirely for survival.

The hard version.

The guarded version.

The angry version.

The hyper-independent version.

The version that trusts nobody.

The version that never asks for help.

Sometimes those characteristics save us.

They get us through.

And we should perhaps be grateful for them.

But armour is heavy.

And something designed to protect you during war can become a burden when peace eventually arrives.

The problem is that we become attached to the armour.

We start believing it is us.

Maybe another stage of becoming requires recognising when the characteristics that helped us survive are no longer the characteristics that will help us fully live.

I believe certain words such as “healing”, “trauma”, “woke”, “narcissist”, “abuse”, “gaslight”, amongst others have been hijacked by the internet and social media in particular. They are buzz words now used to describe everyday life and normal situations with the effect that they actually water down real trauma, healing or abuse… But I digress…

The important thing is beig able to recognise patterns of behaviour that are acceptable and those that are not. To distinguish behaviour that is extreme to cause trauma from the joys and trials of a regular Tuesday or a disagreement. Because life in the end is both yin and yang. Light has no meaning without dark.

Becoming Requires Letting Go

Perhaps we think transformation is primarily about adding.

More knowledge.

More discipline.

More money.

More experience.

More skills.

More confidence.

But increasingly I think becoming is equally about subtraction.

Less ego.

Less fear.

Less resentment.

Less need for approval.

Less comparison.

Less attachment to things that no longer serve us.

Less concern about what everybody else thinks.

Perhaps we don't become ourselves by continuously adding things.

Perhaps we become ourselves by slowly removing everything that isn't really us.

The Price And The Prize

So what does becoming cost?

Sometimes money.

Sometimes relationships.

Sometimes comfort.

Sometimes certainty.

Sometimes an identity you spent years creating.

Sometimes a dream you finally have the courage to admit isn't yours anymore.

Sometimes becoming costs you the life you thought you were supposed to live.

But what is the alternative?

Remaining somewhere simply because leaving is expensive?

Remaining someone simply because change is frightening?

There is a cost to becoming.

But there is also a cost to not becoming.

And perhaps that cost is greater.

The ideas never pursued.

The words never spoken.

The business never started.

The love never expressed.

The boundaries never established.

The places never visited.

The person never discovered.

Imagine reaching the end of your life and meeting the person you could have been, living the life you could have lived.

I can't think of many things more terrifying.

A Different Definition

Maybe becoming who you were meant to be isn't about arriving at some perfect final version of yourself.

There probably isn't one.

Perhaps becoming is simply remaining willing to evolve and to fully commit 100% to the process:

To learn.

To unlearn.

To build.

To destroy.

To forgive.

To leave.

To return.

To begin again.

And again.

And again.

Because perhaps we are never finished.

Maybe that is the point.

The cost of becoming is the willingness to repeatedly let go of who you were in order to discover who you might still become.

And perhaps the tragedy is not that becoming costs us something.

Perhaps the tragedy is spending an entire life protecting a version of ourselves we were supposed to outgrow because we had capacity and yet chose to not fulfill it out of fear.

Which leaves us with one final question.

Because if becoming requires courage, sacrifice and the willingness to change...

why do so many of us never become the people we know, somewhere deep inside, we could have been?

But also, even with capacity: when is enough, enough?

What stops us from becoming who we could be?