Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash
The circumstances change. You keep leaving fingerprints.
Maybe becoming more fully yourself isn’t always about adding something new. Sometimes it’s about finally recognizing what has been there all along.
We change enormously over a lifetime.
We become daughters and sons, students, spouses, parents, professionals, leaders, caregivers, retirees, widows and widowers. We live in different houses and communities. People enter our lives and leave them. Careers begin and end. Our beliefs deepen and sometimes change.
The person we were at thirty might barely recognize the life we’re living at seventy.
And yet, lately I’ve been wondering: Across all the people we’ve been, who keeps showing up?
Not our habits or preferences. Not whether we still like the same music or vote the same way or order the same thing for dinner.
Something more fundamental.
A way of moving through the world that may have been there before the career, before the marriage, before the accomplishments and losses.
I started looking backward at my own life.
On paper, I’ve been a surprising number of different Susans: teacher and counselor, consultant, business owner, part of building TechSmith, workplace writer for millions of readers, Bill’s wife, widow, and now the writer of ValuesCrafting.
Those lives can look remarkably different.
But when I stopped looking at the titles and asked what I was actually doing, I began to see something.
As a consultant, people brought me complicated human situations. I listened, noticed patterns, and tried to make what was happening clearer and more useful.
At TechSmith, I kept asking whether the way we treated people actually matched what we said we believed about them.
For more than twenty years as an online workplace writer, strangers brought me their problems: My boss is doing this. My employee is doing that. How do I handle this conversation? How do I lead? How do I build trust? What do I do now?
Again: Listen. Notice. Understand. Clarify. Teach.
Then Bill died.
One of the largest roles of my life changed overnight. I was still Bill’s wife, but the daily life that came with being his wife was gone.
I had to learn how to make decisions that had always been we decisions. I made a life in Florida. I returned to our home in Glen Arbor. I brought a small, occasionally naughty Papillon puppy into my life. I made new connections.
And I kept writing.
It took me a while to see that I was still doing essentially the same thing I had always done.
People still told me their stories. I still noticed things. I still turned experiences over in my mind until I could understand what they might mean.
And then I wanted to give this understanding away.
That’s ValuesCrafting.
Not a reinvention, really. A continuation of who I am.
Priscilla Chan recognized something similar in her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, by watching one of their daughters.
She showed writer Jeremy Stern the astonishing assortment of things their daughter had created—stories, a blog, a podcast, websites, games, apps, even plans to market them.
Mark hadn’t told their daughter to do any of it. The creating came from the girl herself.
Chan had known her husband for more than twenty years. At one point, she had wondered why they couldn’t simply finish all the relentless building and do nothing more.
Then she watched that same impulse emerge spontaneously in their daughter.
And suddenly she understood something about her husband in a different way.
Maybe this wasn’t simply what he did. Maybe it was part of who he was.
Now look at your life.
Your through-line may look nothing like mine.
Maybe you were the child who organized the neighborhood game. Years later, you were the parent who kept a household moving. At work, you became the person everyone trusted when something went wrong.
Maybe at eight you noticed the child sitting alone. At thirty-five, you were the person who drew the new employee into the conversation. At seventy, you still notice who’s standing outside the circle.
Maybe you have always built things. Questioned things. Protected people. Taught. Repaired. Created. Challenged. Connected. Made people laugh. Brought order to chaos. Seen possibilities other people missed.
The circumstances change. You keep leaving fingerprints.
Try picturing yourself at different ages.
Go back before the résumé. What absorbed you when you were young? What did people come to you for before anyone paid you?
Now move through the chapters. Your twenties. Thirties. Forties. Sixties. Today.
What keeps recurring even though the setting changes?
Listen to the things people have been saying about you for years:
You always…
You’re the one who…
I knew you’d…
And look at the choices that didn’t quite make sense on paper. When did you depart from what was expected because something in you wouldn’t cooperate?
What have you been doing your whole life without realizing you were doing it?
We tend to think of growth as becoming someone new. We acquire skills. Learn from mistakes. Change our minds. Develop wisdom. Shed things that no longer fit.
All of that is real.
But perhaps some growth comes from recognition.
You look backward at the child, the young adult, the person building a career or family, the person weathering loss or change, the person you are today—and suddenly you recognize someone.
The person who appears in every photograph, even when there isn’t a photograph.
Not the twenty-five-year-old or the forty-five-year-old or the seventy-five-year-old. Not the employee, spouse, parent, executive, caregiver, retiree, or widow.
Those selves were real. But the roles kept changing.
Perhaps something closer to an essential self exists: the recognizable human being who kept moving through all of them.
The person who kept leaving the fingerprints.
Across all the people you’ve been, who keeps showing up?
Continue the Conversation
After writing this article, I keep thinking about how much easier it can be to see the changes in our lives than the continuities.
The jobs changed. The relationships changed. The places changed. We changed.
And yet, something recognizable may have kept showing up.
So I’m curious:
What have you been doing your whole life without realizing you were doing it?
Maybe you’re the one who has always gathered people, questioned assumptions, fixed things, made people laugh, noticed who was left out, or brought order when things became chaotic.
I’d love to hear what you recognize when you look back across your own life.
I also continue these conversations in Substack Notes, where I share the smaller observations and questions that often become future ValuesCrafting essays.
What kind of world do you want to live in?
ValuesCrafting believes every one of us has the capacity to help create a world where people are treated with dignity, trust, respect, kindness, and integrity. Live what you believe. And if this is the world you want, invite someone else to join us.