I read something online a bit earlier today. There was no acknowledged author, just a few lines waiting for someone awake enough to notice them. It spoke about how we are shaped by the books we reach for, the music that settles into our bones, the people we bump into who change us without even realising it.

It said we are the conversations that stretch our thinking, the dreams that keep tugging at us even when life gets difficult and the memories that cling like saltwater on your skin after a swim in the ocean. It was a simple compilation, but it stopped me because it reminded me that we are all basically a collection of echoes which are joined together into something that still somehow grows, shifts, heals, unravels, and reforms again.

If I had to describe myself honestly, I would probably have to start with some kind of a disclaimer: I am unfinished. I am the ocean on one day and the cramped cupboard on another. I am the loud laugh that escapes at the wrong moment, and the silence which lands when I am thinking too hard about things no one else can see. I am the bright bits I’m proud of and the dark corners I had to walk through in order to understand myself better.

All of it counts. All of it builds something. We like to convince ourselves that growth arrives conveniently like an expected package delivered to your door, though that is rarely the case. I will say this though, We definitely do grow through what we go through. Not because the tough moments are poetic (they’re usually not), but because we keep moving anyway. Us humans can be annoyingly persistent that way. We bend, we swear, we improvise, we fall apart for a bit, and then we continue with this stubborn determination that doesn’t always make sense until much later.

And while we are busy living, we are also collecting things. A sentence from a book that shifts something inside, a look from someone who sees you more clearly than you see yourself, a dream that refuses to let go, a conversation that sits in your mind long after the person has left. All these tiny, seemingly ordinary details, they fill us with colour. They become the architecture of who we are busy becoming.

I think that’s what moved me about those random words. The reminder that we are shaped by what we allow in. That every day, we are absorbing the world and letting it sculpt us. Choosing what we feed ourselves. To let in the things that lift us. To surround ourselves with people who add warmth and light, not noise and doubt. To give ourselves permission to learn, to feel, to start over, to soften, to sharpen, to become. We are not static. Not a single one of us.

We are rewired with every experience, every connection, every moment that leaves a mark. We are truly made of all the pieces we collect and it makes sense to reach for the ones that make us better. Let your thoughts stretch. Let your colours expand. Let your life leave fingerprints on you that you’re proud to carry. You (and I) are still becoming and there is so much more of you left to discover.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” - Ernest Hemingway