Lessons from 19 Moves: What Reinvention Has Taught Me About Identity
Not packing yet, but already feeling that familiar mix of anticipation and unease. Every move asks the same question: who will I choose to be this time?
I’m not packing yet.
But I can feel it coming — the low hum of anticipation that always precedes another move.
In a few weeks, we’ll box up our lives once again. I already know how it will sound: the thud of folded cardboard, the steady zip-hiss of tape, the echo of half-empty rooms. I know the rhythm of it by heart — and yet, it still stirs something inside me.
I keep bouncing between the anxiety of starting over again and the excitement of starting over again.
Two sides of the same coin, forever flipping.
After 30 years of military life, this will be our 20th move, with at least one more on the horizon. Our current home has become increasingly untenable, but even the next place is only temporary — a short stop on an unfinished map while we wait for clarity about what comes next after my husband’s retirement.
Nineteen moves have taught me a lot about logistics and adaptability — but far more about identity.
Because when you’ve lived in Provo, Ohio, Texas, California, Florida, Virginia, India, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Colombia, Utah/Pakistan, and now Arizona, you begin to realize something profound:
Reinvention isn’t the opposite of identity — it’s how identity is revealed.
The Myth of a Fixed Identity
For years, I thought identity was something you discovered — like a single, hidden truth waiting to be unearthed. But identity, I’ve learned, isn’t found. It’s forged.
Every move stripped away the familiar markers of who I was: my routines, my roles, my relationships, my community. And in the quiet spaces between what was and what would be, I had to meet myself again.
Who am I when everything familiar is gone?
What remains when nothing around me looks the same?
Even though it took me years and years to understand, the answer, again and again, was this: I am who I choose to be.
Identity isn’t a fixed state; it’s an ongoing practice — a series of choices made in motion.
Each new place has asked me the same question in a different dialect: Who will you be here?
And each answer has shaped me into someone I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Reinvention as a Practice of Courage
Reinvention sounds glamorous when you frame it as “fresh starts.” But the lived version rarely feels glamorous. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and filled with the ache of uncertainty.
Every move means releasing control — letting go of what was working, even if only halfway, to make room for what’s next.
There were times I resisted, wanting to cling to stability. But each reinvention proved that courage doesn’t always look like bold leaps; sometimes it looks like quietly saying, “Okay, let’s begin again.”
That willingness to begin again — to trust that growth can coexist with fear — is the heartbeat of antifragility.
It’s the Heroic ideal lived out in real time: becoming stronger because of the challenge, not despite it.
Each transition refined me: deepening empathy, expanding perspective, building endurance.
Reinvention wasn’t erasing my identity; it was strengthening it — tempering it like steel in fire.
The Constant Question: Who Am I Here?
Every place has revealed a different version of me.
In Provo, I was a student discovering independence.
In Ohio, a young wife building a foundation.
In India… everything changed.
New Delhi was unlike anywhere I’d ever been — an all-out assault on every sense. The colors were impossibly vivid — saris like moving sunsets against the dust and smog. The sounds never stopped: horns blaring in symphonies of chaos, vendors calling, dogs barking, prayers echoing through the air at dawn and dusk. Even the air itself had a weight to it — thick with spice and diesel and something sweet I could never quite name.
At first, I resisted. Everything felt too much. Too loud. Too crowded. Too foreign. The heat pressed in, the "rules” of traffic made no sense, and even simple errands felt like navigating a maze. I missed predictability. I missed quiet.
But somewhere between the frustration and fascination, something inside me softened.
Because India doesn’t let you stay the same.
It stretches your thresholds — for discomfort, for patience, for understanding.
You learn to accept contradiction: beauty and poverty side by side, peace in the middle of chaos, holiness rising out of noise. You begin to see that “sense” isn’t universal — that life can thrive in patterns that look like nonsense from the outside.
I learned compassion there — for others, for difference, and eventually for myself. I learned how to slow down and really see people: the shopkeeper sweeping dust off his threshold, the woman in bright orange carrying water—or bricks— with regal grace, the children waving as if joy were a given.
India taught me acceptance — not the passive kind, but the kind born from humility. It showed me that growth often arrives dressed as discomfort. It revealed that I could feel lost and still be expanding.
And it taught me something about identity I hadn’t yet understood:
you don’t have to fully belong somewhere for it to change you.
India changed me — not by erasing who I was, but by enlarging the container that could hold all that I am.
In Hawaii, I learned to slow down, breathe, and find peace in simplicity.
In Colombia, I witnessed resilience and began to cultivate it more intentionally.
In Tucson, I’m learning to root — even in impermanence.
Nineteen moves have taught me that identity is not a single story — it’s a mosaic.
Every place adds a new tile, every season a new shade.
And the pattern only becomes clear when you step back far enough to see the wholeness of who you’ve become.
The Emotional Cost — and Gift — of Change
There’s a price to this kind of life.
Each move comes with its own quiet grief — friendships stretched across time zones, routines dismantled, roots pulled before they can deepen.
Change demands both courage and mourning.
But here’s what I’ve discovered: when you stop fighting the impermanence, you start to see the beauty in it.
Moving so often has taught me to create connection quickly, to appreciate the present before it passes, to find gratitude in the in-between.
Every ending holds a lesson in resilience. Every beginning, an invitation to hope.
Reinvention, in the end, is less about escape and more about evolution.
Home as an Inner Landscape
For a long time, I thought “home” was something you arrived at — a final, rooted destination.
But after nineteen moves, I understand home differently.
Home is something you create — not through permanence, but through presence.
It’s in the familiar ritual of a morning walk.
In the laughter that fills a half-unpacked kitchen.
In the moments of courage when you choose to show up fully, even while you’re still finding your footing.
Home isn’t where you unpack your boxes.
Home is where you unfold into yourself.
It’s the quiet assurance that home isn’t found in a place, but in the person I’m becoming — and with the people I love.
The Next Chapter
And so, here I am — not yet packing, but already carrying the weight and wonder of what’s next.
We don’t yet know where we’ll land for good.
But perhaps that’s the lesson life keeps offering: we don’t need perfect clarity to live with intention.
Because identity isn’t about where you’ve been or where you’re going — it’s about how you choose to show up now.
So as I prepare for move number twenty (and twenty-one beyond that), I return to the same question that has carried me through every transition:
Who do I choose to be today?
I choose to be grounded, even in transition.
Grateful, even in uncertainty.
Courageous, even when the next step is unclear.
Because reinvention isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something that happens through us.
It’s how identity grows.
It’s how we become.
“We are not defined by where we live, but by how we live — with courage, with integrity, and with the quiet faith that every move brings us closer to who we’re meant to become.”
Reflection for You
If you’ve ever stood at the edge of change — whether by choice or circumstance — you know this feeling.
The restlessness. The ache. The pull toward something both uncertain and necessary.
Take a breath and ask yourself:
What part of me is being invited to evolve right now?
What identity am I ready to release?
What new version of me is waiting to emerge?
Because no matter how many times you’ve started over — or how many times you’ve avoided it — the truth remains:
Reinvention doesn’t erase who you are.
It reveals who you’ve been becoming all along.
