WHAT IF THE WORK ISN’T SELF IMPROVEMENT, BUT SELF REMEMBERING.
Rethinking growth in a culture that treats people like projects
We live in a culture that is constantly asking us to become someone else. Not in an obvious or overt way, but through a steady stream of messages that seep in over time and quietly shape how we relate to ourselves. We’re encouraged to become a better version, a healed version, a more regulated, productive, evolved, achieved version of who we are now. It’s rarely stated outright, but the suggestion runs like a movie in the background, subtly reinforcing the idea that who we are, as we are, is not quite enough. With more effort, more insight, more discipline and more self awareness, we might finally arrive somewhere that feels acceptable and settled. And so the pursuit continues, often without us pausing long enough to question any of it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to grow. Curiosity, learning and change are part of being human and part of being alive. Somewhere along the way though, growth began to feel less like a natural evolution and more like a renovation project. As if the self is something to gut, rework and upgrade in order to keep pace with whatever version is currently being sold as the ideal. Tear this part down and fix that part. Replace what no longer fits. Progress stopped being relational and contextual and started to look more like a personal responsibility, something to manage, optimize and get right.
I’m writing this as someone who has worked in mental health, has sat on the other side of the therapy room as a client and has also spent time inside self help culture.
To be fair, many of the ways we are encouraged to grow can be helpful. I’m not outside of that world. I have shelves full of books that offered language, relief and perspective at different points in my life. The trouble begins when growth turns into another performance, another place to strive, another way of chasing worth, without ever stopping to ask what’s actually being asked of us underneath all that effort. Is it belonging, approval, safety or relief from the sense that we’re falling short?
What if the work is not about becoming someone new and improved at all. What if it is about remembering who we already are. Who we are made to be. Who we were before adapting, over functioning, performing, perfecting, grinding and achieving became second nature, programmed into us like a computer chip as ways of coping, compensating and staying safe. When so much of life becomes about improvement, it feels worth pausing to ask what we are still trying to prove, and who do we imagine is keeping score.
From a psychological lens, much of what we call growth is actually a process of unburdening. We are not adding traits so much as loosening the grip of the strategies we once needed to stay safe, belong, be loved or be approved of. Patterns like perfectionism, hyper independence, people pleasing, emotional containment, staying busy and staying agreeable are not character flaws. They are survival strategies, often developed unconsciously in response to earlier environments and relationships. They made sense once and they helped us adapt. Over time, they can also become constricting, especially when we keep living from them without realizing how much they are still shaping our choices and reactions.
Remembering who we are isn’t a dramatic transformation or a shiny reinvention of the self. It’s usually more low key than that and far less impressive from the outside. It rarely follows a neat or linear path. More often, it looks like doing less instead of more, saying no instead of pushing through, disappointing people or letting go of identities that once provided structure or approval but no longer feel true. It can also mean noticing where we’ve allowed ourselves to be typecast by others and slowly finding our way back to an internal sense of direction, including stepping out of boxes that were created to benefit other people.
Self remembering asks different questions than self improvement. Instead of asking how to fix what feels wrong, it asks what happened that made this way of being necessary in the first place. Instead of asking what we should be doing next, it asks what feels true when we stop performing, chasing and hustling for our worth. Sometimes that hustle hides behind productivity. Sometimes behind responsibility, service or being the reliable one. This is where nuance matters. Remembering yourself does not mean rejecting growth, responsibility or accountability. It does not mean romanticizing the past or refusing change. It means allowing development to be relational and contextual rather than absolute, and recognizing that insight without compassion often turns into self surveillance rather than self understanding.
We don’t grow by constantly monitoring ourselves. We grow in relationship. In honest relationship with ourselves and with others. That often means being around people who are willing to let us be exactly who we are in the present moment, while also holding the reality that we are not static and never have been. People who can honor the many versions we’ve lived through and the many versions still unfolding, with empathy and care rather than judgment or moral policing. Part of remembering ourselves is accepting that no one else can fully tell us what to do with our lives. Others can offer perspective, experience and guidance, and sometimes that support is essential, and sometimes it isn’t. No one else is living your particular life, with this history, body, temperament and set of relationships. Growth asks for discernment, and for staying in relationship with our own inner knowing when no single framework fully explains what we’re living.
Remembering isn’t something that happens once and then gets checked off a list. It’s cyclical. We remember, we forget and then we remember again, often at deeper levels and in different seasons of life. Different truths surface as our capacity and openness to hold them grows, and what once felt out of reach slowly becomes familiar. In a culture obsessed with optimization, self remembering offers a different orientation, one rooted less in fixing and more in relationship, less in performance and fear and more in presence and trust.
What if the work is not to improve yourself into someone “better.” What if the work is to remember who you are, again and again, including the parts that learned to protect, adapt and survive, even the shadowed parts we’d rather not lead with. And maybe that return can happen with a little more honesty, understanding, acceptance and grace.
That might be enough. And you are enough, right now and always, just as you are. An imperfect, evolving, messy, beautiful human, still learning, still evolving, still allowed to change without erasing who you’ve been.
xx,
Michel