The Poem That Made Me Ask: Who Have I Become?

I reread Derek Walcott’s Love After Love this week, and it stopped me in my tracks.
Not because it’s a sad poem.
But because since turning 40, I heard it differently.
It made me wonder if I’ve been so busy becoming who I’m supposed to be that I forgot to ask who I really am.

July 20, 2026 | The Unscripted Femme

If you’ve never read Love After Love, I hope you will.

It’s a poem about finding your way back to yourself. But the more I sat with it, the more I wondered if it was asking a much harder question:

Who have you become while trying to be who everyone else needed you to be?

Think about it…

From the time we’re kids, we’re taught how to succeed. Work hard. Be kind. Be productive. Be a good parent. A good partner. A good friend. Look a certain way. Chase the next milestone. Keep going.

We become who we think we’re supposed to be. The version of ourselves that keeps everything moving.

Most of us get so good at becoming that person—the person the world rewards—that we rarely stop to ask whether that person still feels like…us.

Reading the poem, I had one of those rare moments where everything went quiet.

I made a cup of coffee and kept thinking about it long after I’d finished reading.

I thought, Who have I become?

Maybe that’s why so many people wake up one day and feel strangely unfamiliar to themselves.

Sometimes it isn’t that we’ve become the wrong person. We’ve simply outgrown an old version of ourselves. I wrote more about letting go of an old identity recently, and this poem made me think about that all over again.

I think we just get so busy living that we don’t have time to notice who we’ve become.

That’s what this poem stirred up inside me.

It made me wonder if I’ve spent more time trying to fit in—and get somewhere in the world—than becoming the person I actually wanted to be.

If you’ve ever found yourself asking similar questions, I wrote about the experience of finding yourself again while still living the life you’ve already built. It’s something I think many of us wrestle with, especially as we get older.

I won’t share the poem here, but I think it’s one of those rare pieces of writing that’s best read slowly so you can feel the words exactly as Derek Walcott intended.

If you read it, don’t ask yourself what it means. Ask yourself this instead:

If all the titles, responsibilities, expectations, and opinions disappeared tomorrow…would you still recognize yourself?

I’d genuinely love to know what you think, and how it made you feel too.

Till next time

If this poem leaves you sitting with the question, Who have I become?, my collection of 336 journaling prompts for self-reflection and growth might be a good place to keep exploring. Sometimes writing things down helps us hear ourselves a little more clearly.