The Fantasy of Instant Becoming, Part 2: I Gave Myself a C

A little over a week into my 5am club experiment, I sat down to assess my performance.

C.

That was my honest grade. Not the grade my friends gave me. Not the grade my husband gave me. Mine.

As I spiraled on my C level performance, they saw action. Real, documented, showing-up-even-when-it-was-hard action. They kept pointing at things I had actually done and saying, look how far you've come. And I kept mentally crossing off everything that didn't meet the standard I had set in my head before I even began.

This is Part 2. If you missed the first one — on urgency, instant gratification, and why we outsource our becoming — you can read it here on Substack."

I wanted perfect. I got human. And apparently I was prepared to call that a failure.

What I haven't shared: I decided to start this challenge at the busiest stretch of my year. Multiple work priorities colliding at once. And at home, we were in the middle of a full HVAC install — running natural gas lines through the house. Not exactly the serene conditions I had imagined for my reinvention.

Then I was listening to Atomic Habits — chapter two, identity change — and something cracked open.

James Clear makes a distinction that sounds simple until it isn't. He says the goal isn't to run a mile. The goal is to become a runner. The habit is just the vote you cast for the person you're deciding to be.

I had to sit with that for a minute.

Because I realized I hadn't been trying to build a morning routine. I had been trying to become a different woman. One who owns her time. One who doesn't outsource her sense of safety to a paycheck. One who isn't quietly handing over her authority to a job and then calling it stability.

That's the thing nobody really talks about. The way we can make our employment into something much larger than it is. Our provider. Our validator. Our permission structure. Our God, even — the thing we unconsciously believe we need to behave for, perform for, not disappoint.

And to be clear: work doesn't do this to me. I do it to me. It's conditioning. Old code running on a problem that's already been solved.

But you can't overwrite that code in a week.

You can't undo years of patterning with eight days of 5am alarms, even good ones, even the ones you actually kept.

What you can do is begin casting votes. Quietly. Imperfectly. One awkward morning at a time.

Here's what I know now that I didn't fully know before: I'm not on a self-improvement project. I'm in the middle of an identity change. And those are not the same thing.

A self-improvement project has a finish line. You optimize, you measure, you arrive.

An identity change is slower and stranger and more disorienting than that. It means releasing old versions of yourself that were actually keeping you safe. It means noticing the evidence of who you're becoming before you feel like that person yet. It means looking at a C and understanding it might be the most honest A you've ever earned.

When I went back through my journal entries from last year, I barely recognized the texture of that thinking. The worry was different. The sadness, the loneliness was heavier. The possibilities felt smaller. The sense of what was available to me had a ceiling I didn't even know I'd accepted.

That ceiling is gone now. I didn't blast through it dramatically. It just quietly stopped being there.

That's what identity change actually looks like. Not a montage. Not a breakthrough moment with a good soundtrack. Just the slow, unglamorous accumulation of votes for a self you're still learning how to be.

I'm releasing old domain names. Rolling over old retirement accounts. Practicing tattooing by drawing a single line. Reducing the neat piles. Showing up to the 5am club even when I only half-show up.

None of it looks impressive from the outside.

All of it is the work.

And maybe that's the thing about becoming: it's less about the performance of transformation and more about the quiet, private decision to keep going even when you'd grade yourself a C.

What I'm really doing underneath all of it is building trust. Between the parts of me that are scared and the part of me that already knows.

The woman I'm becoming doesn't need perfect.

She just needs me to keep showing up.

Part 1: The Fantasy of Instant Becoming → [Read on Substack]