The girl I left behind: on becoming, identity shifts and the art of letting go.
- Helly Jo
- Jun 3
- 4 min read
Somewhere between the girl who smoked a packet a day and the woman doing morning mantras with her mala beads in Bali, something shifted. Multiple somethings, actually.
For ten years I smoked. Four nights a week I went to the pub after work. I worked in editorial fashion in London, wore my exhaustion like a badge, and genuinely believed being French meant I didn't need to think about what I ate or whether I moved my body. The dream was to make it in the industry. To be in the city. To grind until something gave.
Something gave. Just not in the way I expected.
In 2018, at 2am on the day of my birthday, I ended a situationship that had been costing me more than I was willing to admit. Not glamorously. While being, let's say, not entirely sober.
That day I'd had a conversation with a friend. The kind you can't take back because you've finally said the thing you've been thinking for too long. I was unhappy with my life and I was feeling the weight of how long I had been carrying it. I wanted to be loved properly. I wanted work that didn't hollow me out. I wanted to stop settling for crumbs and calling them the whole cake.
What followed was not a graceful awakening. It was a breakdown. The kind that ends in a hospital and a choice: take care of yourself properly, or face consequences I wasn't willing to face. Something in that moment snapped back in place and cut through the fog. I looked around, and I committed.
It was an uphill battle. But I turned my life around.
Sometimes I wish it hadn't taken hitting the ground that hard. But we live and we learn.
Since then there have been other shifts. That same year, the decade of smoking ended (this month I’m actually celebrating my 8th year stopping!). The grinding-until-I-break relationship with work ended. The belief that making it meant being in a city that was slowly making me miserable, that ended too.
Most recently, six years of relationship, ending. Learning how to be on my own again, which is stranger than I expected, and also more clarifying than I thought it would be.
What I've come to understand across all of it is this: identity shifts are not events. They're not a single moment of clarity or one dramatic decision. They're a slow, disorienting process of becoming someone while still partly being who you were.
The gap between those two versions is one of the most uncomfortable places to exist. Nothing is technically wrong. You've already moved far enough that going back isn't possible. You haven't yet settled enough into what's next to feel at home there. That in-between is real. And it tends to go unnamed.
Who you become is shaped by many things - the experiences you move through, the people around you and what they reflect back, what you eventually stop accepting, the values you choose deliberately rather than inherit without thinking, and the version of yourself you hold in mind when you make decisions. The future you. The one living the life you're building toward, even when you can't see her clearly yet.
One thing matters more than any of it though: you are not defined by what happened to you, or by who you've been. You get to choose who you become. That choice is entirely, sometimes uncomfortably, yours.
It requires letting go. Not just intellectually. Actually.
Of places where you built beautiful things but where you've stopped growing. Of friendships that have lasted years because they've lasted years, rather than because they still bring something real to your life. Of the identity that was necessary for a chapter that has now closed. Of the story you've been telling: about what you're capable of, what you deserve, what's possible for you.
Marie Kondo had the right idea, applied a little wider than a wardrobe: does this bring joy? Not nostalgia. Not familiarity. Not obligation. Joy.
Because what is the point of a life that doesn't feel like yours?
And maybe underneath all of it, the letting go, the becoming, the choosing, is trust. That releasing the shape of what you thought your life would look like isn't loss. It's just making room.
If you're in the in-between right now, between the version of yourself you've outgrown and the one you're becoming, that's not a problem to fix. It's a passage. And it helps to understand how you're actually wired to move through it. How you make decisions. What conditions you need. What your specific design looks like in a season of transition.
The Seeker Report is a personalised written Human Design report that maps exactly that.
And if you want to work through this kind of season with proper support alongside it, Seeker of Sun is a 3-month 1:1 mentorship built for women in exactly this chapter.
THE SUNSEEKER STUDIO | The Sunseeker Studio is a creative studio for visionaries, dreamers, and seekers making art out of their lives - where creative work, business, money, and the nervous system are held as one.
The Sunseeker Edit | A newsletter for seekers, creatives, and dreamers who are drawn to light - exploring self-discovery, creativity, and the rhythms of a deeply intentional life.
Comments