Being on the Druid path is a commitment to change.

We aren’t aiming to find a final form, where we can stop and become some rigid and fixed thing. We’re here to learn and grow, and that means the person we will be in the future is not the person we are today.

There’s a charming meme that goes ‘don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out’. Clearly there are balances to find between being open, and having enough sense of continuity to be coherent to yourself. A person can change a lot and still feel that they have inner integrity. Equally, a person can drift about, responding to things they encounter, changing to fit in and not really having much coherence of self at all.

Every experience we have changes us, if by no other means than simply adding to the sum of our experience so that we  are more than we previously were. When we’re growing in ways that are good for us, it feels like becoming more yourself. If the changes bring a greater sense of being the person you truly should be, then you are heading the right way. That doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else, or represent a simple trajectory.

Sometimes it’s good to experiment with identity, to try on different ways of being and presenting yourself to see if anything works better for you. Many people handle that by going into new spaces where others have no prior experience of them, and therefore no expectations. It can be a useful strategy, especially when trying to break out of limiting patterns, or to escape from an identity that has been forced onto you. In experimenting, it’s important to be able to back out of things that don’t work.

There may well be people who resent you changing, for all kinds of reasons. It’s an especially delicate issue when it impacts on people who have been close to you. Sometimes growing involves growing apart from someone. Not everyone will be with us for all the versions of ourselves that we might discover during a lifetime. They too will be changing as well, and you can care about someone a lot but not be on parallel paths.

If you find yourself jumping from space to space, recreating yourself but never settling into someone who makes sense to you, this can be disconcerting. For some of us, fluidity itself is the coherence. I’ve found this is true of me around how I relate to gender, particularly. For some of us, the underpinning coherence is around the need for novelty, adventures and exploration. The need to learn, discover and explore is a form of coherence that can also make your surfaces seem fickle and erratic. It’s ok not to want to stay put and be the same thing forever.

Fickleness can itself be a personality trait. Some of us are nomads by nature. Authenticity is not about being easy for other people to describe, it’s about how you experience yourself. Some of us will build our nests in the rookeries we grew up in. Some of us will take to the air and seldom even touch land. The only thing to guard against is an inclination to discard your sense of self in order to be what someone else wants you to be. If you aren’t the ideal person for someone, let them carry on and find someone who is, rather than clipping your wings because they wanted something smaller than you, or pretending you can fly when you were never that sort of creature in the first place.

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