You can only move the core of your identity slowly.
This is easy to miss, because there are usually rapid, sudden changes overlaid, and these are naturally what grab the most attention. But these are really just natural adjustment to a slow deep shift, dramatic but secondary. By the time they arise, everything essential has already been decided.
A strange corollary to this is that enormous life changes can be curiously lacking in drama. By the time they hit reality, they have been brewing in your soul for months or years, reshaping you from within. Impossible until they became inevitable.
The beauty of all this is that we can do astonishing things, astonishing to our past selves, and do them with ease.
And yet? There’s a sadness, too. The version of us who acts is rarely the same as the one who dreamed, who planted the seed that would grow into action. We never quite arrive, the princess always in another castle.