The Versions We Leave Behind.

I’ve been thinking lately about how people carry versions of us in their heads long after we’ve already become someone new. There are people who still remember me before motherhood softened and sharpened me at the same time. Before my life became measured in snack cups, library books, forgotten water bottles, tiny shoes by the front door, and the emotional weather systems of small children. Before grief changed my voice a little. Before exhaustion settled into my bones in ways sleep no longer fully fixes. Before I became rooted. 

I don’t think people always realize they’re grieving older versions of us when they ask us to be easier, lighter, freer, more available than we are now, but sometimes you can feel it. That subtle reaching backward. That quiet hope that somewhere underneath the layers of responsibility and change, the old version still exists exactly as she was before life touched her. 

Maybe she does, but she isn’t the whole story anymore. I think adulthood surprises us this way. When we are young, we imagine change as something dramatic and cinematic. We think transformation announces itself loudly. Trumpets, fireworks, some great obvious crossing from one life into another, but most change arrives quietly. 

One day you realize your conversations revolved around entirely different things than they once did. One day your body feels older. One day your dreams become less about escape and more about stability. One day you stop buying decorations for apartments and start thinking about fruit trees and soil quality and whether your children feel safe in the world. One day you look around and realize you became someone else while you were busy surviving, and survival has a way of carving people down into their truest shape. 

The last few years have felt a little like standing in the ocean during a storm, trying to keep my footing while wave after wave rolled in. We lost people we thought would always be there. Three older souls in our lives passed away not far apart from each other, and their absence left strange hollow places in the landscape of our family. The kind of people who felt permanent until suddenly they weren’t. 

At the same time, other losses arrived in quieter forms. A fallout fractured a community that once felt deeply woven into our everyday life. Friendships shifted. Invitations stopped. Rooms that once felt warm started to feel uncertain. There is a very specific grief in losing a place where you once belonged without even realizing it was disappearing while it happened. 

Then came the instability. A job loss that pulled the floorboards out from underneath us. The kind of season where every decision suddenly feels heavier because survival becomes attached to all of them. We moved into a rental carrying boxes full of uncertainty and exhaustion, trying to convince ourselves it was temporary, trying to make strange walls feel like home. Then eventually we left the city entirely for a different town, a different rhythm, a different version of life. 

And somewhere in all of that, I changed. Not all at once. Slowly, like water shaping stone. I became less interested in performing ease for other people. Less interested in pretending I could carry everything without consequence. Less willing to shrink the hard parts of my life so others would feel more comfortable around them. 

Even my arguments changed. A few years ago I had a disagreement with someone in my family that shook me more deeply than I expected. Not because the argument itself was world-ending, but because it forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth; sometimes people hold tightly to older versions of us because accepting who we are now requires them to adjust too, and adjustment is uncomfortable. 

It asks people to let go of the stories they built about us. 

The carefree one. 

The available one.

The agreeable one.

The version before children. 

Before grief.

Before boundaries. 

Before exhaustion. 

Before life carved depth into us. 

But life does carve us. Motherhood carved me. Loss carved me. Fear carved me. Instability carved me. Love carved me too, especially love. The fierce, terrifying kind that comes from building a family and realizing your heart now walks around outside your body every day. 

I cannot separate myself from that life now. I cannot untangle myself from the little voices yelling “Mom!” from the other room. From bedtime stories, from emotional meltdowns and sticky kitchen counters and tiny shoes abandoned in impossible places. From the overwhelming ache of wanting my children to move through this world feeling deeply loved. 

This life changed me. Not into someone lesser. Not into someone who disappeared. Just someone different. And maybe maturity is learning that not everyone is meant to walk with us through every version of who we become. Some people belonged beautifully to earlier chapters, and maybe there is grace in loving those chapters without demanding they become the entire story. 

And who knows where my story will end up. I doubt this version of me will stay this way forever. It is possible that future versions will look different than they look now, they might even look more similar to the ones before all the survival and grief and responsibility, and maybe someday in the future there will be a surprising return of a character once thought dead, but we won’t know those plot twists until we get there.