It starts innocently. We pick up a new habit, let’s say, learning a language we’re too shy to speak, or rolling out a mat to bow in silence before anyone else has even considered coffee, or brushing our teeth with the non-dominant hand. And at first, it feels like adding something. Like building something: a brick placed here, a layer of intention there. Progress. Growth. The kind of thing that earns praise from mentors and the algorithm alike.
But then, months in, something weird happens. We catch our reflection one early morning and realize we’ve misplaced the person who did not have the time to do that kind of stuff. We try to recall what we believed, how we spent our Sundays, what our grocery shopping list used to look like and whether we also whispered funny words at the kettle or just waited for the water to boil.
This is when it begins to dawn on us… the slow, disorienting truth: that practice doesn’t actually build us. It deranges us. And… the more we practice, the more distant we grow from the self that we were just trying to improve a little.
Slowly we realize: repetition is not a staircase. It's a dissolve.
No one tells us this at the beginning.
The motivational posters shout things like No pain, no gain! and Fall down seven times, get up eight (folks, this messes with basic math) or You don’t get the ass you want by sitting on it! (thank you, Serina from crossfit class). But they conveniently forget to add the fine print: that daily practice comes with a slow unravelling of the previous us. That impermanence isn’t some lofty Zen concept: it’s embedded in our Google Calendar, marked under “Boxing Class, 7pm.”
While we return again and again to our modest little “just improving this a bit”-practice, thinking we would perfect ourselves, we are actually letting go of who we were yesterday.
It’s funny, in a kind of existential slapstick way, how earnestly I can chase mastery, all while standing on a mat that promises nothing but deeper undoing. The rope-skipping boxer isn’t who she was last week. Neither is the writer, looking at old drafts and thinks, Ah yes, bold, confident, and entirely wrong. Nor the triathlete watching pictures from seasons ago, wondering how she moved so freely with that much tension in her jaw.
The discipline isn’t in becoming, it’s in shedding.
Practice is a slow dance with disappearance. Like stretching. Not the elegant kind you see in ballets or yoga tutorials, but the slightly awkward kind, where something deep in the body begins to exhale. Tension slips out slowly, armor softens, and the borders between muscle and space become less certain. We stop holding ourself together quite so tightly, and we end up not being entirely sure where we end and the room begins.
It’s freedom, yes, but the kind that comes with increased permeability. You are welcome to come back every day: not to arrive, but to dissolve with slightly more grace.
Identity as melody
If I am what I repeatedly do… but what I repeat keeps changing me, then what am I?
I used to think the “real me” was waiting somewhere, still and steady underneath. A kind of essential self, pure and untouched, buried beneath the decades of adaptation. If I trained long enough, reflected hard enough, held still in enough warrior poses or sit long enough in silence with my hands folded just right, I would arrive. Peel back the layers, burn off the noise, and there she’d be. The true one. The final draft.
But she never showed.
What showed up instead was… improvisations. New postures, new metaphors. I’d catch myself mid-step and think, Wait, this isn’t how I used to move. Even my language changes slightly depending on who I was with, which book I’ve just read, or how my spine decided to stack itself this morning.
So who, then, is doing the talking right now?
Maybe I’ve misunderstood the assignment. Maybe there is no “self” waiting at the bottom of the well. No singular truth beneath a mask. Because… I am the mask.
Because everything I think of as “me” has been rehearsed. The way I listen. The way I argue. The way I do my hair and raise my eyebrow and reach for the mug with the chipped rim, because it just feels right. None of it arrived fully formed… or formed at all. All of it is practiced. I’ve been shaped by family dinners, staged by school hallways, softened by heartbreak and hardened by being asked to explain myself in rooms where no one else had to.
A million versions of me. The girl who wore ambition like armor. The one who tried out gentle. The one who tried out fierce. The one who stopped trying. They’re all still here. None of them the whole story. None of them a mistake.
Aristotle taught me that I am what I repeatedly do. But repetition is not a circle. It’s a spiral. We return, but never again to a place we’ve already been. And maybe this is the strange comfort of it: that we are not fixed roles. We are improvisation. The notes we practice today become tomorrow’s melody, and then fade again.
And when the old lines no longer rhyme, the chorus doesn’t land, and the song suddenly no longer fits into my favorite Spotify playlist, I try to tell myself: this is not failure. This might be the first draft of a new melody.
The comfort of vanishing
There’s peace in letting go of me. Practice is not fixing, it’s fading.
Every now and then, there comes a moment, often not even noticed at first, when I stop trying to become someone. My inner narrator doesn’t announce it. The mirror doesn’t show it. It’s more like slipping out of a tight jacket I didn’t realize was lined with too much expectation. I still move the same way I did yesterday. Yet something has loosened. The gestures feel less like performance and more like presence. I’m still here, but I take up just a little less narrative.
This is the liminal space between not-anymore and not-yet, between the before and the after, where everything is optional, possible and unwritten and the self finally stops clearing its throat to make declarations.
Out there, in the structured world, I must be this or that: title, role, temperament, opinion, brand. But here, in this quiet between-breaths place, no one is keeping score. My inner narrator seems to take a long sip of hot chocolate and decides not to comment. I stop bracing against the past and stop rehearsing for the future. I am, in a way that cannot be documented, simply... here.
It’s the kind of here that is quiet and has no words, and no one to tell them to anyway. There’s no applause for the part of me that dissolves. No standing ovation for the ego that steps aside without protest. No planning a beautiful funeral for the dying version of myself that was barely hanging on but still tried really hard. And perhaps that’s what makes it so sacred. In the absence of needing to be someone, something luminous settles in: A quiet coherence that doesn’t ask to be named.
And I begin to suspect that maybe the real transformation is not about finding out who I am, but simply about softening the grip on who I thought I needed to be.
But for all its later symbolism, sounding poetic in retrospect, the realization itself feels like a sharp crack, when the calm fractures without warning. A sudden sense that I’ve gone too far, shed too much, unhooked myself from the version of me that could at least be explained. It arrives as dread, not loud, but dense, like a wrong turn taken miles ago, only just now discovered.
And in those moments, the mat feels less like a sanctuary and more like a corridor with no doors. But I stay. Not because it feels good. But because some part of me hopes: this, too, is part of the ritual.
Return to the mat
Not to arrive, but to remember where I left my balance.
I come back. Again. Slightly altered, dragging the ghost of some past conviction behind me - like a gym bag I can’t quite throw out because the zipper still works and technically it’s fine. I arrive not with answers, but with the soft humming of someone who knows this song by now. Not the notes, but how the melody feels. Because the mat has stopped making me feel like it’s a stage. It’s not even metaphorical anymore. It’s just a rectangle of rubber.
I show up not to finish anything. Because: Finish what, exactly? The self? That project eventually turned out to have more plot twists than a Scandinavian crime series, and considerably worse lighting. I show up because I’ve built a life where starting over is the closest thing I have to certainty. Bowing in, bowing out, forgetting everything, relearning, and somehow not confusing that process with failure.
Always with me, my old selves - not as scrapped versions but as fellow travelers. Each of them convinced they were the final draft. Each of them showing up, like me, just trying to get the damn hakama tied evenly. (30 years into Aikido, I am still working on that.) And maybe tomorrow, I’ll tie it differently again. Just with a little less urgency. A little more affection for the fact that it is never quite symmetrical… and neither am I.
I return, not because I’m enlightened. Certainly not because I’m consistent. I return because the rhythm calls me. And because somewhere between the bow in and the stumble forward, I remember that becoming isn’t something to win at. It’s just what we do.
Until we don’t. And then, surprise, we’re doing it again.
Just in a different pair of pants.
Until someone calls lunch, and I remember I also do snacks.
Very, very well.
Hi, I’m Lena. I’m the co-founder of “House of Leadership”, a performance coach, author and lecturer working with high performers in politics, business, and sports. I believe, “If you want to lead something, it must be in motion.” I’m an Aikido practitioner, a long-distance triathlete and a personal trainer. Here I share thoughts about the body, embodiment, self-leadership, and martial arts and combat sports.
