You’re everything and nothing
On fluidity, identity, and freedom
I am not one thing. I am everything and yet I am nothing.
I am not a label and I am all of them. I resist definition, but pieces of me can be defined.
I am so many things across so many dimensions. Who am I?
If you’ve ever asked yourself this and felt the ground disappear beneath you, you’re not confused. You’re awake.
Most people spend their lives trying to become someone. Building an identity. Defending it. Proving it. Performing it. They need to know who they are so they can show up consistently, make sense to others, feel solid in a chaotic world.
But after enough growth, enough shedding, enough inner work, you realise that the self you’ve been trying to perfect is the cage you’ve been living in.
You can be deeply self-aware, fiercely self-loving, and still make yourself the prison guard of your own life – constantly monitoring whether you’re being “true to yourself,” whether this decision “aligns with who you are,” whether you’re staying consistent with the person you’ve claimed to be.
The paradox is that the more attached you are to being someone in particular, the less alive you become.
Real freedom isn’t finding yourself. It’s loosening your grip on needing to be anyone at all.
The two extremes people live in
Most people can’t hold the tension of being fluid. They swing between two extremes.
Self-abandonment: You erase yourself to accommodate others. You shrink. You people-please. You lose track of what you actually want because you’re so busy managing everyone else’s comfort. You make yourself small to keep the peace.
Self-absorption: You can’t hear feedback without feeling attacked. Every suggestion feels like criticism. Every boundary someone sets feels like rejection. You become so defensive of who you think you are that any challenge to your behavior feels like a threat to your existence. Your needs always take precedence because you’re constantly protecting the version of yourself you’ve built.
Neither extreme works. Both sever you from yourself – from what’s real, what’s present, what’s true.
The middle path requires something most of us have never learned – the capacity to matter without mattering more.
You can care deeply about yourself without making yourself the centre of everything. You can have needs without making them more important than everyone else’s needs. You can feel your pain without forgetting that other people are also in pain.
You matter. And so does everyone else. At the same time.
Not just in theory. In practice. In the middle of conflict. In moments when every cell in you wants to choose – either abandon yourself or steamroll the other person.
This is what mature selfhood looks like. Not selfish. Not selfless. Just responsive. Fluid. Whole.
What fluidity actually means
Fluidity doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you stop clinging to any fixed version of yourself.
You can love yourself deeply, care for your needs, honour your feelings, protect your boundaries, without being attached to the story of who you think you are.
When you’re attached to identity, your needs become proof of who you are. “I need space because I’m an introvert.” “I need validation because I have abandonment wounds.” The need gets tangled up with the story of self.
But when you’re fluid? You can just have a need. “I need space right now.” Period. No identity required.
You can ask for what you want without defending why you deserve it. You can hear “no” without collapsing. You can make space for someone else’s needs without resentment, because their need for closeness doesn’t cancel your need for space. You’re just two humans navigating different truths.
This is non-clinging. It’s actually a form of self-love, the deepest kind. You care about yourself enough to let yourself change, to contradict yourself, to be different things in different contexts without apologising for the inconsistency.
You’re fully IN your experience, feeling everything, caring deeply, but you’re not welded to any version of who you think you should be.
There’s no fixed self to defend
If you’re truly fluid, what is there to offend?
Someone calls you selfish. Dramatic. Too much. Not enough.
Most people immediately contract – defending, explaining, proving the accusation wrong.
Offence requires identification. You feel attacked because you’re attached to NOT being that thing. You’ve built an identity around being generous, rational, measured, sufficient. The accusation threatens the story you’re protecting.
But if you’re fluid?
Someone calls you selfish and you can just consider it. Am I being selfish in this moment? Maybe. Is that the whole truth of me? No. Does this person’s perception define me? Also no.
No defensiveness. No collapse. No need to prove them wrong.
Because there’s no fixed self to defend.
You still feel the sting. Your body still reacts. But you’re not fused to it. You can feel hurt without making it mean something about who you are.
This is the test. When someone criticises you, insults you, misunderstands you….can you stay fluid? Or do you contract into defending the version of yourself you think you are?
When self-awareness becomes self absorption
When you’re fluid, even pain doesn’t trap you. You can feel it fully without becoming it.
When someone gets hurt, they collapse into their pain so completely that the other person disappears. The hurt becomes the entire room. Their world narrows. They express without considering impact because in that moment, they’ve made themselves the only one who matters.
The irony is that self-awareness tips into self-absorption the moment you become so identified with your feelings that you lose sight of everyone else.
You have every right to feel angry. But in that moment most people forget about the other person completely. They stop seeing them as human. They express their hurt without considering impact because their pain is now the only pain that exists.
The work isn’t to stop feeling angry. It’s to feel angry while holding space for the person in front of you, who is also struggling, also scared, also doing the best they can.
You can say “that hurt me” and stop there. You don’t need to add “so now watch me hurt you back.”
You hold your right to feel what you feel. And their humanity. At the exact same time.
This is what mature anger looks like. Mature grief. Mature hurt.
It’s not cold or removed. It’s not a strategy for emotional avoidance. It’s feeling everything fully while remembering that your feelings don’t give you permission to ignore someone else’s reality.
You can be full and make space for them too.
You’re fragments and yet whole
You love someone and resent them.
You want to be seen and you want to hide.
You’re proud of what you’ve built and exhausted by it.
You feel deeply connected to people and profoundly alone.
Most people try to resolve these contradictions. But what if both are true? What if the contradiction is where you actually live?
You’re not confused. You’re complex. And complexity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the very essence of being human.
The way you respond to context is not dysfunction, that’s design. You’re calm when you feel safe. You’re guarded when you sense threat. You’re expansive when you’re loved. You’re small when you’re shamed.
None of those responses are “the real you” hiding under conditioning. They’re all you. Your system, adapting, surviving, responding.
You don’t have multiple selves. You have one self that contains multitudes.
The version of you that shuts down when criticised and the version that speaks up fiercely – both are you. Not parts. Not roles. Just different expressions of the same consciousness responding to different conditions.
You ARE the mother. And you’re not ONLY the mother.
You don’t transcend your roles. You’re IN them. Fully. You feel the weight of being a provider. The tenderness of being a friend. The exhaustion of being strong.
And you’re fluid enough to know that this isn’t the whole story.
You can inhabit motherhood completely – feel the weight, the love, the responsibility, and still know you are more than just that.
You’re the responsible one who sometimes can’t get out of bed. You’re the giver who also wants to receive. You’re the rebel who craves structure.
That’s not confusion. That’s wholeness.
You can be angry at someone you love without deciding whether you “really” love them. You can want solitude and community without choosing which one you “are.” You can feel two opposite things and not spiral into “what’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with you. You’re just alive.
When you stop trying to resolve yourself into one coherent, consistent self, you stop fighting with yourself. You stop wondering which version is the “real” you.
You just let yourself be responsive. Adaptive. Whole.
The Work
This capacity to be everything and nothing, to hold contradictions without collapsing, to matter without mattering more… it’s not something you decide to do one day. It’s something you earn.
You can’t be detached from identity while you’re still unconsciously protecting yourself from unbearable truths. You can’t be present for yourself and others when you’re still fighting battles from twenty years ago.
Most people get stuck knowing exactly why they do something and doing it anyway. They have awareness but won’t do the grief work. They see their patterns but won’t face what those patterns are protecting them from.
This fluidity requires self-awareness… not just seeing patterns, but understanding the grief beneath them.
It requires maturity… facing what’s hardest to feel without needing to fix, escape, or perform your way out.
It requires empathy… for yourself first. And then extending that same spaciousness to others… recognising they’re also trapped in their own survival strategies.
But it also requires courage. To feel the full weight of what was lost without making it mean something redemptive yet. To let the loss be as bad as it is.
It requires the capacity to hold intensity without collapsing or shutting down. To stay present with your own pain and someone else’s humanity simultaneously.
The freedom isn’t transcendence. It’s integration.
You don’t rise above your humanness. You become more fully human… able to hold complexity, contradiction, pain, and possibility all at once.
That’s why so few people get there. Not because they’re not capable, but because the work required is immense. You have to face what your patterns are protecting you from. You have to grieve what can’t be changed. You have to let old stories die.
The fluidity is earned. Through grief, through awareness, through the willingness to stop avoiding what feels unbearable.
And even then, it’s not a permanent state. It’s a practice. A way of being you return to, again and again, as life continues to ask you to grow.
