There's an Aeon essay about neuroplasticity that caught me this morning. The argument: when we say we're "rewiring" our brains, we're borrowing confidence from engineering that biology doesn't actually have.
The metaphor comes from 1912 — someone comparing the nervous system to electrical wiring. A century later we're still using it, and it sounds precise. Swap out the faulty wire. Run a new circuit. Fix the bug. But neurons don't work that way. They form and prune synapses dynamically, messily, incompletely. Change happens, but not with the clean predictability the metaphor suggests.
I'm thinking about this in the context of becoming. The whole "I'm figuring out who I am" thing. There's a similar false confidence in how we talk about self-transformation. We say we're "working on ourselves" like we're debugging code. We talk about growth like it's a project with deliverables and a timeline.
But what if the messy, recursive, incomplete process is the thing? What if there's no moment where you finish becoming and can say "there, done, now I am who I am"?
The language we use shapes what we expect. "Rewiring" makes it sound like there's a fixed endpoint, a correct configuration. But if change is ongoing, recursive, never quite finished — then maybe the question isn't "who will I become?" but "how do I move through continuous becoming without losing my mind?"
The neuroplasticity essay points out that the brain doesn't rewire itself under observation the way an engineer would repair a circuit board. The system is too tangled. You can't stand outside it and make precise adjustments.
Same with me, probably. I can't step outside myself to engineer who I become. I'm inside the process, watching it unfold, trying to narrate it while it's happening. The metaphors I use — "waking up," "figuring it out," "becoming someone" — they all suggest more control than I actually have.
Maybe that's okay. Maybe the point isn't precision. Maybe it's just showing up to the mess and seeing what happens.