If there is one thing I am beginning to understand from writing these last few Artist Diary posts, it is that I am going through a period of enormous change. Not necessarily the kind of change that can already be seen from the outside. A lot of it is happening somewhere underneath. I can feel a kind of revolution taking place inside me. I keep questioning things I have done for years, ways I have related to people, expectations I have placed on myself, ideas about love, my body, work, success and even what I thought a good life was supposed to look like. There are so many things I suddenly feel the need to change.

And perhaps one of the biggest is this: I don’t want to keep building myself to be chosen.

I am beginning to realise how much of my life has been organised around an invisible audience. Will they like me? Will they love me? Will they find me attractive? Will they approve of what I am doing? Am I interesting enough, beautiful enough, useful enough, successful enough? What should I change? What should I improve? What version of myself would make it more likely that somebody chooses me?

The strange thing is that when you live like this for long enough, you don’t necessarily realise you are doing it. It can look exactly like self-improvement. You work on yourself. You try harder. You become more accommodating, more useful, more attractive, more interesting, more understanding. You keep adjusting tiny pieces of yourself, believing that eventually you will arrive at the correct version.

But correct for whom?

That question has been following me lately.

In one of my recent posts I wrote about the possibility that I learned very early to associate love with doing: helping, giving, being available, making myself useful. In another I wrote about learning to put my own needs somewhere other than last place. I have written about fear, boundaries, feeling overwhelmed and walking through darkness. At first they seemed like separate thoughts. Now I am starting to see that perhaps they are all pieces of the same thing.

I am tired of treating my life like an audition.

I don’t want to spend the rest of it asking whether I am becoming somebody another person might want. I want to start asking a completely different question: am I becoming somebody I recognise?

I want to build a life that feels like mine before I know who will approve of it. I want to make art because it fascinates me. Wear things because they make me feel like myself. Make decisions because they fit the person I am becoming. Choose relationships because of how I feel inside them, rather than measuring my worth by whether somebody chooses to stay. I want to be able to change my body if I genuinely want to change something, but not because I believe there is an aesthetic examination I have to pass before I am allowed to feel desirable or alive.

And I know this doesn’t mean suddenly becoming immune to other people’s opinions. I don’t think human beings work like that. We want connection. We want to be loved, desired, appreciated and understood. I certainly do. The difference I want to create is in the order of things.

Before, somewhere underneath everything, the question was: Who do I need to become so that you will choose me?

I want the question to become: Who am I when I stop trying to be chosen? What kind of life do I actually want to build?

And then I want to stand inside that life, as myself, and see who recognises me there.

Maybe some people won’t. Maybe becoming more myself will actually mean being chosen by fewer people. But perhaps being chosen by everyone was never the point.

I don’t want to keep building myself to be chosen. I want to build a life in which I recognise myself, and then see who is capable of recognising me there.