The Emergent Self

Questioning what we're told it means to be human

Topic

Becoming

How a self takes shape over a lifetime through experience, interpretation, and response, and why it is never too late to begin again.

Sleigh tracks and reindeer prints in deep snow leading away from a farmhouse back door at dusk on Christmas Eve, a broom leaning against the wall

Nobody Found the Holidays Under a Tree: How the Season Was Assembled

The most magical Christmas of my childhood was built by my grandfather with a broomstick and a dog. So was the holiday itself, two centuries ago, by people with problems to solve. Knowing that costs us nothing, and it frees us to decide what we keep.
Sunlit empty classroom doorway seen from the hallway

Who Can I Become Here?

Violence came into a classroom on East 38th Street. Years later I am still asking what brought those men there, and what it would take for a different life to emerge.
Growth through suffering: a young tree growing from a crack in a stone wall

Growth Through Suffering, and What It Costs

For years I've called my dark years a gift. Here I put that claim to the test: suffering can become a place of growth, but growth never makes the harm good.

The Weight of a Cloud

A fair-weather cloud weighs over a million pounds and looks like nothing at all. We make the same mistake about the people around us.
Illustration of the systems we build: many hands of different skin tones assembling an open scaffold in sage green, pink and blue, with people inside it and others watching from its edges.

The Systems We Build, and the People They Make of Us

People build systems, and then those systems quietly build us. What the research on corporate leaders reveals about privilege, who pays the price, and why what we built we can also rebuild.
A luminous figure dissolving into flowing fabric and light in golds and warm tones, suggesting human transformation and becoming

People Are Verbs: The Quiet Rebellion Against How We’ve Been Taught to See Ourselves

What if you are not a thing at all, but a happening? Whitehead's quiet rebellion against the grammar of nouns — and the freedom it offers.
Watercolor of a man seen from behind on a bench in a dim office break room, a second coffee cup set beside him as dawn light comes through the window, asking whether depression was really a gift

Was My Depression Really a Gift?

Was my depression really a gift? A former priest tests his own claim that the dark years after he left the priesthood were a gift.
Watercolor of a man standing in a doorway with his back to the viewer, a black clerical shirt left on a chair in the dim room behind him and a bright 1990s office ahead, where a plane climbs past the window.

Leaving Can Be Its Own Kind of Arriving

After I left the priesthood, I spent a year in temp jobs, standing in a doorway between who I had been and who I would become. Leaving, I have come to believe, is its own kind of arriving.
A hiker stands at a fork between a wide, easy road and a narrow, rocky path climbing into misty woods, with index cards scattered along the narrow path

The Road Less Traveled: Why Becoming Asks More Than Getting

Why do most of us take the path of least resistance? A dissertation Chair, nine drafts, and a social constructionist look at what it means to become, not just get.
Young man driving through a small town at dusk on graduation night, cap, gown and diploma on the seat beside him

“You’ll Be a Factory Line Worker”: Overcoming Humiliation and Becoming Who You Are

My high school guidance counselor told me I’d be a factory line worker for the rest of my life. Here’s what that moment taught me about humiliation, and about choosing my own story.
Older woman standing in an open doorway, looking out from a cozy room onto sunlit countryside — starting over later in life

Starting Over Later in Life: Why We Never Stop Becoming

We tend to think becoming happens early, and that after middle age we just maintain what we have. My retired friends prove otherwise.