Between the Pages and the Packing Tape: A Meditation on Books, Belonging, and Becoming
Slowing my stride this week to unpack my thoughts while packing up my life
It’s that time again: time to move house. Life is always a state of moving toward or away from something. And though it’s one of life’s inevitabilities, like death or taxes, it never seems to get easier. The time has come to uproot myself once more, and my heart is aggrieved.
This isn’t a typical HerPace essay about running routes or fitness milestones, though in many ways it’s still about movement. This week, I’m trying to keep pace with the changes I’ve endured and the quiet milestones and messiness of adulthood. It’s about movement, yes, but also stillness. About navigating the slow, strange terrain of identity. You could call it a meditation on impermanence and on what we carry with us, what we unknowingly shed along the way, and what we quietly choose to leave behind.
Those of us trapped in the cycle of renting know all too well the stress and quiet trauma of losing and searching for home every few years. This week, as packing began, I found myself sifting through drawers, boxes, and the forgotten corners of my flat, uncovering pieces of the self I’ve been making and unmaking over the years. Identities and ideas I’ve pursued. Some with overwhelming vigour, others with the briefest flicker of enthusiasm.
My bookshelf alone is a testament to the kaleidoscope of beings I have tried to become. It’s such a strange moment of self-reflection as I pack them one by one. Fiction, non-fiction, self-help, finance, diet, fitness, feminist texts (and an innumerable number of fantasy books). They fill every shelf and corner of my home as relics of selves I once tried on, or stories I’ve claimed along the way. As I try to cull 10 to 15 of the 500+ books I own (a sensible target, I believe), I realise that my book collection is like revisiting past lives, past Milenas. It’s a strange experience to say the least.
Looking at these books, I’m reminded not just of who I’ve been, but of who I’ve tried to become. Identities aren't always claimed with clarity. They often accumulate, sometimes with hope and even with shame.
These books are artifacts of longing, of trial and error, of a self shaped as much by aspiration as by accident.
My friend Tyler recently wrote in her blog Girl Resting about a book called Splinters by Leslie Jamison. Though the book is about divorce and motherhood, Tyler mentioned “how it captures the ache of becoming someone new while still dragging around all the old versions of yourself like wet laundry.” When I look at my bookshelf and the boxes of my life packed haphazardly around me, what I see are old versions of myself caught in the ache of wanting to become. And the reality is that I have always been stuck somewhere between belonging and unbelonging as the child of migrants who has then gone on to choose a migrant life.
That ache, the quiet longing to become, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It plays out against the backdrop of other people and of other places. Because while we unmake ourselves in solitude, we also seek mirrors in others and the places we live to affirm who we’re becoming or who we have become. We all walk through the world wanting community and seeking the connections that make us feel safe and seen. These help us know we are not alone. But connection is never neutral. To draw a circle of belonging, we must define who falls outside of it. Community, by its very nature, requires othering. Who is the “we” if we don’t know who we are not?
We each carry a cacophony of identities around, though not always quite literally in boxes or between the pages of books like I seem to. Depending on context, we wear some more than others to signal that we belong, that we are here. But no matter how we see ourselves, others will project their own interpretations onto us. Even when we think we are self-made, we are not immune to the shaping forces around us. We both create our identities and have them assigned to us.
Yet so many of us hold pieces of ourselves that are already formed, in the process of forming, or quietly (and sometimes desperately) being unmade.
I am struck by how often we navigate the world looking for acceptance and reassurance by seeking out values and identities that mirror our own. Do you like my music? Do you speak my language? Do you come from my culture? Do you know, love, live like me? And so we walk through the world seeking belonging by unbelonging those who don’t reflect what we deem worthy. That exile of our whole selves or fragments of us is what many of us fear most. And yet we do this over and over again to others.
I realise my making and unmaking of self is fraught with all the traumas and dreams of a lifetime. My bookshelf is a living testament to both.
As I pack them away one by one, considering which to let go and which to keep, I’m faced with the quiet grief of all the selves I’ve lost, and the ones I’ve outgrown.
I know who I am is not necessarily reflected in how I am seen by the world around me, or even those books on that shelf. Part of this packing process is forcing me to rethink the identities I’ve once worn like badges, like shields, like shorthand: "nerd," "boss bitch," "entrepreneur," "fat girl," "migrant," "feminist." While some we self-select, others like race, gender, and ableness, are not chosen but lived. They arrive wrapped in layers of inherited struggle and intersectional experience, shaped by where and how we exist in the world. But yes, some are like coats we slip on or off, shed or bud with the seasons, or pack and unpack with necessity.
And maybe that’s what identity really is. Not a single self to discover, but a wardrobe of selves we try on over time that can change with the seasons. Our favourite stories captured in worn pages. Some stitched by choice. Some handed down. Some we outgrow, others we’re still learning how to wear. Connection, then, is not about finding someone who matches our scent or mirrors our choices. Rather, someone who understands all we carry and still sees. And wants us. And that carrying is its own kind of becoming. We are never fully one thing but the world rarely grants us the space to be many things all at once.
Howeve,r in the privacy of our homes, in the books we keep, and the boxes we pack, we tuck away versions of ourselves. The selves we’ve outgrown, reclaimed, or still hope to become.
And so, as I move house once more, I’m not just carrying furniture or memories. I am carrying the quiet weight of identities and dreams made and unmade. Some I’ll bring with me. Others I’ll leave behind. Because moving is never just about changing place. It’s about choosing, again and again, who we are becoming.
Next week, I’ll return to our regular running, health and fitness programming. But this week, I needed a different kind of pace to pause, to take stock, to breathe, to honour all the versions of my self I’ve outgrown, reclaimed, or am still moving toward.
Maybe you are not quite where you want to be. That’s ok, my love. Becoming was never meant to be a straight line. Some chapters take longer to write, while some pages we reread again and again.
And some, we quietly choose to turn when we’re ready.
xo