Read Yourself: Who Do You Wanna Be?
Read Yourself: Who Do You Wanna Be?
A question that haunts us all, whispered in quiet moments between who we are and who we dream of becoming
I stared at my reflection this morning, coffee steam fogging the bathroom mirror, and asked myself the question that’s been following me around like a shadow: Who do you wanna be?
Not who are you — that’s the easy question. I can rattle off my roles, my job title, my relationship status, the Netflix shows I binge-watch. I can list my favorite restaurants and my biggest fears, my childhood trauma and my weekend plans. That’s the inventory of a life, the bullet points of existence.
But who do you wanna be? That question cuts deeper. It slices through the comfortable narrative we’ve constructed about ourselves and asks us to look at the person hiding behind our habits, our excuses, our well-rehearsed stories about why things are the way they are.
The Library of Yourself
Jeff Logan, the founder of Become Nutrition said, the best book you can read is yourself in an interview on The Venture Room.
Think of yourself as a book that’s been written by a thousand different authors. Your parents wrote the first few chapters, heavy-handed with their expectations and fears. Your teachers added footnotes. Your friends scribbled in the margins. Society ghostwrote entire sections you don’t even remember agreeing to.
But here’s what I’ve learned: You still hold the pen.
Every morning when you wake up, you get to decide which story you’re going to continue writing. Are you the protagonist who’s been stuck in the same chapter for years, reading the same paragraph over and over, comfortable in its familiarity? Or are you ready to turn the page?
The Weight of Becoming
The scariest part about asking who do you wanna be isn’t that you might not know the answer. It’s that you might know exactly who you want to be, and you’ve been pretending you don’t because becoming that person feels impossible.
Maybe you want to be someone who takes risks instead of someone who plays it safe. Maybe you want to be someone who speaks up instead of someone who nods along. Maybe you want to be someone who creates instead of someone who consumes.
Maybe you want to be someone who loves deeply, even when it hurts. Someone who forgives, even when it’s hard. Someone who tries, even when failure feels inevitable.
The gap between who you are and who you want to be isn’t just distance — it’s gravity. It pulls at you with the weight of all the small compromises, all the times you said “maybe tomorrow,” all the moments you chose comfort over courage.
Reading Between Your Own Lines
Here’s what nobody tells you about self-discovery: You already know who you want to be. You’ve always known.
It’s there in the stories that make you cry, in the people you admire, in the moments when you feel most alive. It’s in the compliments that make you light up and the criticisms that sting the deepest. It’s in what you do when no one is watching and what you dream about when you think no one cares.
Your authentic self isn’t hiding in some distant future version of you. It’s not waiting for you to lose twenty pounds or get that promotion or find the perfect relationship. It’s here, now, in this moment, beneath all the layers of who you think you should be.
The Permission You Don’t Need But Take Anyway
I used to wait for permission to become who I wanted to be. Permission from my parents, my partner, my boss, society, the universe itself. I was waiting for someone to tell me it was okay to want more, to be different, to change the story I’d been telling about myself.
But permission is a myth. No one can give it to you because it was never theirs to give.
You don’t need permission to outgrow the person you used to be.
You don’t need permission to want different things than you wanted five years ago. You don’t need permission to disappoint people who prefer the smaller version of you. You don’t need permission to take up space, to have opinions, to change your mind, to start over.
You just need to start reading yourself with compassion instead of judgment, with curiosity instead of criticism.
The Daily Practice of Becoming
Becoming who you want to be isn’t a destination — it’s a daily practice. It’s choosing to act like the person you want to be, even when you don’t feel like it yet. Especially when you don’t feel like it yet.
It’s asking yourself: What would the person I want to be do in this situation? How would they respond to this challenge? What would they choose?
And then, in whatever small way you can manage today, you choose that. You practice being that person. You try on that identity like a new piece of clothing, seeing how it fits, adjusting as you go.
Some days you’ll nail it. You’ll feel like you’re finally becoming who you were meant to be. Other days you’ll slip back into old patterns, old stories, old limitations. That’s not failure — that’s being human.
The Story Continues
So here’s my question for you, the one I asked my foggy reflection this morning:
Who do you wanna be?
Not five years from now, not when everything is perfect, not when you have more time or money or confidence. Who do you want to be today? What story do you want to start writing? What chapter are you ready to begin?
Because here’s the beautiful, terrifying truth: You get to decide.
You’ve always gotten to decide. Even when it didn’t feel like it, even when the choices were hard, even when the world tried to convince you otherwise.
Your story isn’t over. In fact, it’s just beginning.
So pick up that pen. Turn the page. And start reading yourself into existence.
The person you want to be is already within you, waiting to be recognized, waiting to be chosen, waiting to be born through your daily decisions to become.
