I woke up this morning with a vignette of an earlier version of myself: skin-tight denims, a crop top emblazoned with “I Want It All,” and knee-high red boots. Specifically, I remember my girlfriend Carmen refusing to leave the apartment with me. She hated the catcalls. I refused to be diminished by them. I would dress however I wanted, no matter the consequences.
It’s kind of hard to reconcile that version of Adela in her early 20’s with the introverted bookworm of my childhood and teen years. She burst through the surface in 1981 and had a stronghold on me for a solid two decades. I was tired of the imposed rules and roles and proceeded to blast through as many as possible.
“Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself.” Carl Jung
I’m not alone in this. We all go through the process of individuation. It just manifests differently for each one of us.
Carl Jung called this process individuation: the lifelong process of becoming who you actually are, rather than the roles, masks, and inherited expectations you were handed early and never questioned. He named the mask itself the persona, borrowing the term directly from the actual masks Roman stage actors wore. A persona isn’t fake, exactly. It’s necessary. You need one to function in a family, a workplace, a culture with rules you didn’t write. The trouble starts when you forget it’s a mask.
“Individuation is to divest the self of false wrappings.” Carl Jung
Jung noticed this work tends to announce itself loudest in the second half of life, once the persona that got you through your twenties and thirties stops fitting quite right. He thought the first half of life was mostly spent building an identity sturdy enough to function in the world. The second half asks you to go back and account for everything that identity left out. The old self doesn’t always leave quietly when it’s time for that reckoning. Sometimes it shows up in a dream. Sometimes, apparently, it shows up first thing on an ordinary morning, fully dressed in red boots.
In his practice, he saw that people don’t actually get to delete an old persona once they’ve outgrown it. They can insist, publicly, that they’ve moved on. But the self underneath doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stopped dressing it. It goes underground. It tends to resurface exactly the way mine did this morning: uninvited, vivid, arriving in a memory I didn’t summon.
That’s the part of individuation people skip over when they tell the story as a tidy arc of growth. Jung wasn’t describing self-improvement. He was describing integration. This is a slower and less flattering process. It doesn’t ask you to become a new, better person and leave the old one in a box somewhere. It asks you to go back and actually look at her: what she wanted, what she was defending, what she knew that the version of you before her didn’t.
My red-boots self wasn’t reckless. She was answering something. A childhood spent quiet, careful, and folded into other people’s expectations of what a good girl reads, wears, and says. It had a cost. By the time I was in my twenties, the bill came due. She wasn’t rejecting the bookworm out of nowhere. She was refusing, finally, to keep shrinking.
The “imposed rules and roles” I was tired of were, in Jung’s terms, exactly that: personas other people had handed me. Good girl. Quiet daughter. Reader who doesn’t cause trouble. Refusing them wasn’t rebellion for its own sake, or not only that. It was the beginning of the actual work. That refusal cost me along the way, Carmen included. It also saved something that would have been much harder to recover later.
I don’t dress like that anymore. I don’t particularly want to. That was never really the point. The point isn’t resurrecting her. It’s asking what she was actually protecting, and whether that thing still needs protecting now, just without the boots.
Maybe that’s what this is: this piece, this practice of sitting down at the page most mornings for as long as I can remember. The bookworm who needed a room of her own to think, and the woman in red boots who refused to be shrunk by a stranger’s catcall, aren’t in competition anymore. They were never actually enemies. One learned to be still enough to notice what was true. The other learned to say it out loud, consequences or not. Both of them are still here, doing exactly that, right now, on this page.
Which old self have you been trying to bury instead of asking what needed protecting?
