Religion Hawes

A few weeks ago an essay titled “The Hunger to Be Everything” passed my hands. It has stayed heavy on my mind. The premise was simple, and devastating: that our culture no longer allows any single version of ourselves the time or space to mature. We abandon one potential identity the moment another appears glossier, more enviable, more immediately rewarding. “We’ve become spectators of everyone,” the author, Amber, wrote, “and participants in nothing of our own.” The line reverberated, because it captures the strange, fractured way so many of us grow up now—half in our own lives, half in the curated projections of others.

In this environment, identity becomes an endless carousel. We imagine the more disciplined version of ourselves, the more effortless version, the more luminous version—the one whose life photographs well from every angle. We’ve been conditioned to see the self as an interchangeable product line, each model promising improvement if we simply discard the last. It is a subtle tragedy: in the pursuit of becoming everything, we slowly erode the possibility of becoming someone.

We often inhabit lives that were never ours to begin with. We put on roles the way we put on clothing—borrowed, tailored to someone else’s measurements, restrictive to the point of suffocation. The overachiever identity. The reliable one. The composed, unshakeable one. These selves accumulate quietly, and before long, they dictate the architecture of our days. Some hang loosely, never quite aligning with who we are; others bind so tightly we forget what unrestricted movement feels like. And yet we persist because we have been taught that shedding them is an act of a shortcoming rather than an act of liberation.

Margaret Edson’s Wit offers a striking image of this shedding. In the final chapter, Vivian Bearing steps out of her hospital gown—not in theatrical revolt, but in a profound gesture of relinquishment. The gown, thin and institutional, represents the intellectual armor she wore her entire adult life: the performance of control, the precision, the relentless pursuit of brilliance as a proxy for worth. When she removes it, she is not stripped bare but rather restored to a self that exists beyond accomplishment. That moment, quietly revolutionary, illuminates a truth that applies far beyond the stage: we, too, are constantly stepping out of lives that were once necessary but are no longer authentic.

Yet the pressure to remain inside those inherited identities persists relentlessly. We hunger to be everything because we’re convinced our value depends on it. But Mary Oliver disrupts this entire worldview in Wild Geese. “You do not have to be good,” she writes—an almost heretical reminder in a culture obsessed with optics and performance. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Oliver’s voice cuts through the noise with the clarity of something ancient. Her poem is not permission to fall short; it is permission to exist without apology. It offers belonging without prerequisites.

If The Hunger to Be Everything diagnoses the exhaustion of our fractured identities, Wild Geese provides the counterweight. One reveals the cost of performing a dozen borrowed selves; the other insists we already belong “in the family of things” simply by virtue of our being.

But beneath all this—literature, culture, aspiration—there is a quieter revelation: it is extraordinary to be an individual. We underestimate the miracle of inhabiting a body that is irreproducible. Our hair grows in its own pattern. Our skin carries the memory of our lineage. Our fingerprints form spirals no other human shares. We are the product of a thousand improbable convergences, yet we speak about ourselves as though sameness is the ideal.

Being young, this truth becomes jaded and obscured. It convinces us that identity is something we must solve early and perfectly. The lives we chose to lead are beyond customizable. The life ahead is not scripted. It is not a mold we must fit into. It is something malleable, something we are allowed to author.

And we do not have to be everything to be worthy.

Perhaps the ache to become is not a flaw but a signal—evidence of our aliveness, our curiosity, and our capacity for growth. But the most meaningful form of becoming is not rooted in comparison or spectacle; it is rooted in the slow, steady reclamation of a life that feels like our own.

In the end, maybe the ultimate task is not to become everything, or anything impressive at all, but to become someone true—someone unborrowed, unduplicated, unmistakably themselves.

And maybe, after all this striving, that will be enough.