While editing Rogue, I realized I wasn't simply revising scenes.
I was revisiting a question that followed me for most of my life.
Who am I when everything changes?
Not when life is comfortable.
Not when everything is working.
Not when I know exactly where I belong.
But when the foundations crack beneath me.
I've moved more than thirty times.
I've watched marriages begin and end.
I've lost homes I loved.
I've built careers and left them behind.
I've changed my understanding of faith more than once.
I've trusted systems that promised certainty, only to discover they could not keep the promises they made.
For a long time, I believed that if I made the right choices, worked hard enough, said the right things, and followed the rules, life would eventually become stable.
It never did.
Eventually I stopped asking, "Why doesn't the universe love me?"
Instead, I began asking a different question.
Who do I choose to be now?
That question changed everything.
Because when certainty disappears, the unexpected remains.
Choice.
I cannot control what tomorrow brings.
I cannot control what others believe.
I cannot control who stays or who leaves.
I cannot control the systems around me or whether they succeed or fail.
But I can choose my next thought.
My next word.
My next action.
Perhaps that is where identity lives.
Not in the stories we tell ourselves when life is easy.
But in the choices we make when those stories fall apart.
People often talk about finding themselves.
I'm not sure that's quite right.
I think we spend much of our lives constructing identities from the expectations around us.
Our careers.
Our politics.
Our beliefs.
Our relationships.
Our successes.
Even our failures.
Then life asks us to set those identities down.
Not to destroy us.
But to reveal what remains.
There is a saying in tarot that a Tower built on a faulty foundation must fall.
For years I thought the lesson was about loss.
Now I wonder if it is about revelation.
When the tower falls, we discover what was built from certainty,
and what was built from the self that existed before the stories began.
My daughter said something recently that stayed with me.
"The people who question deeply are not always the happiest people."
There is wisdom in that.
Questioning removes easy answers.
It asks us to stand where certainty once stood.
It asks us to admit that we may not know.
But I have also discovered something else.
Questioning has not made me less joyful.
It has made me notice joy differently.
The trees outside my window.
My eclectus parrot, Erza, making me laugh with her attitude.
Boo the rooster announcing another morning.
The laughter of my grandchildren.
The quiet privilege of sitting down to write another chapter.
None of those moments require certainty.
They only require attention.
Perhaps ignorance is bliss because it is easier.
But I no longer think ease is the highest goal.
I'd rather live awake.
Awake to beauty.
Awake to grief.
Awake to love.
Awake to the possibility that every ending asks a new question.
As I continue editing Rogue, I realize this isn't only Inara's question.
It's mine.
Perhaps it's ours.
When everything changes...
Who are we?
More importantly...
Who will we choose to become?