Identity Is a Moving Target. Break the Shape You Were Given.
Nothing Holds—Why Should You?
Nothing in me settles. Even my shadows keep moving. I let go of who I was, not gently, but like something torn free.
I don’t build a life the way I was taught to. I don’t stack identities, don’t polish them into something stable. I let them erode. I let them move through me and out of me.
What I make—what I am—is never fixed. It shifts, fractures, disappears on contact. If you try to hold it still, you’ve already lost it. Maybe I have too.
I don’t document who I am. I trace the act of becoming. Again and again. Without asking permission to stop.
There’s a kind of violence in that. In refusing to stay recognisable. In letting every version of myself fall away before it can harden into something I have to defend. I don’t want a final form. I don’t trust anything that pretends to last.
Identity, to me, is not something I own. It’s a current. And I’ve stopped asking where it’s taking me.
I’ve learned this much: I cannot step into the same self twice. Not because I’ve changed—but because I was never still to begin with.
What I am is already gone.
And I don’t mourn it.
There is no loss here. Only motion. Only the quiet certainty that whatever I try to hold will dissolve—and that this is the closest thing to truth I know.
I am not becoming something permanent.
I am becoming.
— Monika K. Adler, London, 2026.
