MY BRAIN HAS BEEN CUTTING ME LOOSE FROM WHO I USED TO BE, ONE UNUSED CONNECTION AT A TIME.
Curator’s Note: The author reflects on a personal journey of self-discovery, questioning which aspects of their identity have been quietly set aside. Rather than emphasizing major life changes, they focus on the seemingly minor details, like adjusting laughter and reevaluating hobbies that once conformed to social expectations. Emphasizing that identity is more about subtracting unwanted influences than accumulating traits, they draw parallels to neuroscience’s synaptic pruning. This introspective process leads to significant lightness and clarity, revealing that genuine selfhood often comes from recognizing and laying down external burdens. They encourage readers to inventory what they have stopped pretending to be for deeper authenticity.
Here’s a question I’ve been sitting with for longer than it seems to deserve:
What version of myself have I retired?
Not the big, dramatic reinventions. Not the career change or the move across the country. Something smaller and stranger.
The way I used to laugh a little louder than felt natural in meetings. A hobby I kept up only because it photographed well. Opinions I held onto because they were the ones my family, my friends, or my industry expected of me.
At some point a few of these just fell away. Not with fanfare. Quietly, the way a coat you no longer need slides off your shoulders, and you don’t notice until someone asks where it went.
That’s basically what I wrote about in What Have You Finally Stopped Pretending to Be?, and it’s still the thing I can’t stop turning over in my head.
The treasure hunt that never made sense
I started by pushing back on a popular idea about self-discovery. You know the one.
Somewhere beneath the layers of a job you fell into and a personality you cobbled together as a teenager, there’s supposedly an original, fully formed self just waiting to be dug up like buried treasure. Take the personality test, get your four letters, and there it is. The “real you,” filed and labeled at last.
I don’t buy that anymore.
I think the excavation metaphor has it backwards. The self was never buried. It’s been standing in plain sight the whole time, just weighed down by luggage that belonged to other people. Expectations. Roles. Beliefs I never actually chose for myself.
Becoming who I am hasn’t been about digging deeper. It’s been about setting bags down, one at a time, and being surprised every time by how heavy that particular one turned out to be.
The bag I didn’t know I was carrying
I think about a specific bag I put down a few years ago.
For most of my adult life I was the reliable one. The person who answered the phone, who showed up early, who said yes before fully hearing the request. I liked being needed that way. It felt like proof I mattered.
But somewhere in my forties I noticed I’d built an entire identity around being available, and it wasn’t really a personality trait at all. It was a habit formed early and never questioned.
Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. So I started saying no to things I used to say yes to automatically.
Nobody clapped. A few people were mildly annoyed.
But something in me got lighter, and that lightness is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it.
What Jung called a privilege
This is where Jung comes in.
He described the process of becoming who you actually are, instead of who you were conditioned to be, as the privilege of a lifetime.
Not a guarantee. A privilege.
Because plenty of people spend decades performing a self that was assembled for them by circumstance, hauling bags they never agreed to carry in the first place, and some of them never notice they’re doing it. It takes a strange kind of attention to catch yourself mid-performance and ask whose script you’re actually reading from.
What neuroscience calls pruning
The neuroscience gave me a way to think about all this that isn’t purely emotional or philosophical.
The brain doesn’t mature by simply adding more. More neurons, more connections, more capacity. A huge part of growing up is actually subtractive.
Synaptic pruning strips away the connections that aren’t being used and sharpens the ones that are. It happens most dramatically in adolescence, but it never fully stops.
The brain I have now isn’t a fuller version of the one I started with. It’s a leaner one, shaped as much by what got cut as by what got kept.
What strikes me most is how involuntary that process is at the biological level. Your brain doesn’t ask permission before it prunes a connection you stopped using. It just notices the silence and acts on it.
I wonder if identity works the same way. If the parts of us that go quiet for long enough eventually get cut loose, whether we consciously decide to release them or not. Maybe some of what I’ve called growth was really just my mind catching up to choices I’d already made without noticing.
Subtraction, not accumulation
Put those two ideas side by side and something clicked for me.
Maybe identity works the same way psychologically that the brain works physiologically. Maybe becoming yourself was never about accumulation:
- a better job title
- a clearer five year plan
- a more polished bio
Maybe it’s been about subtraction the whole time. Noticing which parts of you were actually load bearing, and which were just weight you’d agreed to hold for someone else without ever asking why.
The inventory worth taking
So here’s the question I keep coming back to, and the one I’ll leave you with:
What have you finally stopped pretending to be?
It might be the most honest inventory you take all year.
About the Author:
Gary L. Fretwell is a #1 international best-selling author and practitioner of Intentional Living, blending neuroscience with Stoic philosophy to help creators and leaders build a life of lasting significance.
He’s the author of eight books on intentional living and retirement, including the #1 international bestseller The Magic of a Moment, Intentional Retirement, Embracing Retirement, and Rewiring the Ring, which explores the cognitive science of tinnitus, and The Identity Ghost, a blueprint for designing a life of purpose through ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience. His latest releases are The Second Mile and The Linking Gap.
On Medium, Gary founded and edits Illumination: Retirement, Aging & Legacy and Illumination Beyond Identity, and serves as an editor across the broader ILLUMINATION network.
Off the page, he serves as Board President for Prescott Meals on Wheels and Mentors MBA students at Western Governors University.
📖 garyfretwell.com · 📬 The Wise Effort on Substack · ✍️ Follow on Medium
Interview with Dr. Mehmet Yildiz.
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