you can’t fix what made you by becoming someone else

the science of healing, hyper-vigilance, and the versions we perform

you can change everything on the surface, your routine, your wardrobe, your tone in relationships, the way you speak about the past, and still be orbiting the same old wound, just at a different altitude. this is the trap of becoming someone else. it works, for a while. it gives the illusion of progress. it offers control. a way to say: i’m not them anymore. i made it out. so you stay busy. you get sharper. you move out, you cut ties, you rebuild. you become someone more competent, more unshakeable, more admired. someone who looks like they’ve made peace with it all. but reinvention is not the same as healing. it’s often a response to pain, not a resolution of it. you can wear peace like perfume and still carry panic in your bones.

some of us became kind because we had to. intuitive because it kept us safe. we became mirrors. shapeshifters. the girl who reads the room like a survival manual. the boy who makes everyone laugh before they look too closely. the child who soothed others so they wouldn’t have to ask how they were doing. we became versions of ourselves that made other people feel more comfortable. and sometimes it worked. sometimes it bought us approval, love, a few moments of peace. so we kept doing it. we learned to survive by becoming who we needed to be, not who we were. but the body remembers the ache of being loved for your usefulness, not your essence. and no amount of becoming someone else will ever heal the part of you that just wanted to be allowed to stay the same.

psychologically, this is called adaptive self-construction. when your identity is shaped around what keeps you safe, you don’t just build a self, you build armour. you construct a version of you that cannot be abandoned, cannot be criticised, cannot be punished for being too much or too little. and this version? they’re impressive. they’re competent. they get things done. they create a life. but in the quiet, they still clench the jaw. they still grip the wheel too tight. because they weren’t built for ease. they were built for readiness.

the philosopher simone de beauvoir once wrote, to be oneself is neither a condition nor a state, it is a task. and that task becomes infinitely harder when your earliest version of self was formed in chaos. in neuroscience, we know that when a young brain is overwhelmed, by neglect, conflict, instability, the default mode network, responsible for self-perception and autobiographical memory, becomes disrupted. the child doesn’t just develop, they adapt. they become the helper. the achiever. the emotionally fluent one. these roles become their structure. their definition. later in life, they’re praised for their intuition, their calm. but what others admire is often vigilance in disguise. hyper-awareness dressed up as wisdom. even in adulthood, every decision is filtered through the same old lens: how do i avoid being hurt again?

there’s a cost to all this adapting. you can become so good at performance that you forget how to be present. psychologists call this low self-concept clarity, the absence of a stable, coherent sense of self. people with low clarity often shift their personality depending on who’s in the room. it isn’t manipulation. it’s what happens when approval once felt like protection. but over time, the fragments pile up. eventually, you realise you’ve become fluent in being adaptable, but illiterate in being known. and when everyone sees a different version of you, the original begins to feel not just unreachable, but unacceptable. dangerous, even. like the truth of you is the one thing that could collapse everything you’ve built.

sometimes i think about how many selves i’ve had to outgrow just to stay in my own body. how many versions of me were rehearsed and released. the one who always said yes. the one who dimmed her joy to avoid jealousy. the one who said nothing, flinched at nothing, asked for nothing. survival doesn’t always look like collapse. sometimes it just looks like control. like polishing your pain into something elegant. like curating your grief into a language other people can bear. like becoming fluent in what makes people stay, even if it means forgetting how to stay with yourself.

it’s easy to mistake this for healing. to think: look how much i’ve changed. but reinvention isn’t always evolution. sometimes it’s just avoidance in a better disguise. and while i’m grateful for the versions that helped me through, i’m learning that being built by fear is different than being built by freedom. you can’t fix what broke you by becoming unrecognisable to the version of you who was hurt. you have to bring them with you.

the nervous system is shaped not just by what happened, but by what the body had to become in response. neuroception, a term coined by dr stephen porges, describes how our autonomic nervous system detects safety and threat, often below our conscious awareness. the body doesn’t wait for confirmation. it reacts to familiarity. so if tenderness was always followed by tension, the nervous system will learn to flinch at kindness. if calm always came before the collapse, peace will start to feel like a setup. safety becomes suspicious. you start apologising in rooms where no one is angry. your voice drops in conversations that aren’t dangerous. you call it intuition. but really, it’s pattern recognition. you’re not reading people. you’re reading history.

hyper-vigilance isn’t dramatic. it’s efficient. but it wears out the system. your body keeps bracing, even when there’s nothing left to run from. people say you’re insightful. intuitive. emotionally intelligent. and maybe you are. but maybe some of that brilliance is just the brilliance of rehearsal. maybe what looks like empathy is really just early detection. attention, as simone weil once said, may be the rarest and purest form of generosity. but when attention becomes survival, it stops being a gift. it becomes armour. and you lose the line between presence and performance. between curiosity and control. hyper-vigilance wears many faces. it looks like being the fixer. the overthinker. the one who always knows what others need, but never what they want. it looks like re-reading texts for tone. preparing for rejection in a quiet room. leaving before you’re left. it feels like exhaustion, even on slow days. because vigilance is expensive. it costs memory. digestion. sleep. your parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for rest and repair, can’t activate if the body still believes it’s under threat. and when that threat was never named or resolved, the body starts to treat peace like a trick.

you might not remember the moment it began. trauma isn’t always loud. sometimes it’s a slow pattern, a series of tiny lessons you didn’t know you were learning. the raised voice. the silence after the slammed door. the way love came with rules. trauma isn’t just what hurt you. it’s what taught your body to prepare for hurt as default.

this is how healing becomes confused with distance. with detachment. with competence. you master boundaries that no one can get through. you stop reacting. you stop needing. you stop remembering. you look like you’re thriving. and the world applauds you for it. but healing isn’t becoming invulnerable. it’s becoming honest. and you can’t be honest if you’re still performing coherence. the aesthetic of moving on is not the same as the experience of being free.

real healing doesn’t ask you to forget who you were. it asks you to return to them. not the version who broke, but the one who felt. the one who didn’t yet know how to shape their pain into something palatable. and yes, sometimes that return looks like regression. like losing all the grace you’ve rehearsed. but really, it’s progress. it’s the nervous system refusing to perform. it’s the refusal to abandon the parts of you that still long to be met.

healing might look like shaking. like crying over something you thought you were done grieving. like wanting more softness than you know how to accept. but it’s not weakness. it’s re-entry. the moment you realise that some of your strongest traits were born from scarcity. that some of your most beloved identities are still haunted by a need to stay safe. and that the self who got you here, the smart, sharp, competent one, may not be the one who can take you further. because they was built for war. not for joy.

you didn’t choose hyper-awareness. you inherited it. from rooms that required it. from homes where unpredictability was the rule. but you can choose different now. to teach your body, gently and over time, that not every silence is an omen. that not every pause is a punishment. neuroplasticity shows us the brain can change. but it doesn’t change through thought alone. it changes through pattern. through kindness that doesn’t vanish. through presence that doesn’t punish. through safety that stays.

healing isn’t a reveal. it’s a reunion. not with the fantasy of who you could have been, but with the self that’s been trying to reach you through every panic, every pause, every repeated pattern. the one who wasn’t loud, but loyal, who shaped your decisions not our of brokenness, but out of devotion. every time you show up without needing to prove you’re healed, every time you choose presence over performance, every time you let yourself be seen without shame. you show the body that it’s no longer alone. you teach it sometime new. you offer it proof.

because that’s what healing is: not the absence of pain, but the presence of you.

it’s choosing to stay in the room when your instinct says disappear. it’s letting someone see you before you’ve edited the emotion. its replacing rehearsal with reality, control with curiosity. its not soft music and candlelight. its the miracle of not flinching when nothing is wrong. of realising that care doesn’t have to be earned. that tenderness can last. that’s attention doesn’t always mean danger is coming. this is experiential learning. not the kind that lives in the mind, but in the skin, the lungs, the speed of your swallow. in the hand that finally loosens. the body updates not through explanation, but through experience. repeated, consistent, safe experience. this is how your threat-response begins to fade. not because the past is erased, but because the present becomes powerful enough to hold it.

your pain doesn’t need a prettier container. it needs a witness.

and that witness has to be you.

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