Reading about author Kristin Hannah’s newest novel, The Four Winds, in this New York Times article (“Kristin Hannah Reinvented Herself. She Thinks America Can Do the Same.”) got me thinking about the word reinvention.
Reinvention is the essence of who we are. It can be as frippy as a changing a hairstyle, or as significant as starting over, as with the Depression-era single mother in Hannah’s new work. Reinvention can be born of pain — when “what is” isn’t working and something new must take its place, or born of circumstance and adaptability — think Zoom college reunions and restaurants-turned-grocery stores.
Reinvention can stretch over decades, from childhood to adulthood. One moment playing Barbies with my best friend and tape recording ourselves singing, “There’s a land that I see, where the children are free.” Then, seemingly the next moment, graduating from college, focused on answering The Question: “what should I be?”
Twenty years and one day ago the answer to that question changed for me, when I became a mother. The most fundamental reinvention of my life, a transformation from individualistic, self-reflective, vocationally-defined, to protector, nourisher, and gobsmacked baby-obsessor. Everything changed — down to the extra deliberate care I took crossing the street. I was now someone’s mother; my life was important beyond the borders of my own skin.
Not long after becoming a mom, I reinvented myself from lawyer to a mom who sometimes writes. Other times, like now, I am a writer who sometimes lawyers. I still struggle with the push and pull of my writing and lawyering vocations, with how to honor both in a culture that wants you to choose, which loves the question “what do you do?” and also loves a pithy answer.
I have wrestled with this professional tug-of-war for years, but over the past pandemic year have come to a greater sense of peace with my duality. We are all more than one thing. Carving a path where we can be all of who we are starts with giving ourselves permission to be all of who we are. And recognizing that we are works in progress, always reinventing.
Or perhaps the word I need is not so much “reinvention” as it is “becoming,” in the sense Michelle Obama wrote about in her memoir of that name. If “reinventing” imagines a shedding of one skin for a new one, then “becoming” envisions a layering of our next choices over our existing selves, adding their sheen to our lives. “Becoming” recognizes the magnitude of what we have done, where we have been, and who we can be.
As a country, maybe the question is not can we reinvent ourselves, but can we become who we want to be, and what the world needs us to be?
I like to think we can, as the words of inaugural poet Amanda Gorman urge:
“When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
“The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman
May you recognize your power to reinvent, if need be, and to become whatever it is you dream of becoming.
Laura Nicole Diamond 