Who you are is not who you have to be. What you want is a clue to who you can become. What you do about that makes a life worth imitating.
The old ways of seeing and navigating have stopped working—not because you failed them, but because they were answering the wrong question. And underneath that: forces you didn’t choose have been shaping what you want and who you’re becoming, long before you had language for any of it.
This is what I’ve been writing about for years: how do the forces we can’t quite see reshape desire and formation? What does it look like to name them, and then choose otherwise? I've come to believe that a located life isn't a destination. It's what happens when we keep choosing to notice what's actually forming us, and keep asking what it would look like to want differently.
“The truest thing I know to say is that I live in hope.”
I remember saying these words to one of my seminary professors. It had been a rough couple of years: illness, moving across country, learning to live on my own in a new city. It had also been a lifetime of struggling to find the goodness in things, of seeing what was absent more than what was possible.
Hope as a posture toward life, as a practice of seeing and behaving in anticipation of abundant goodness… It’s hard-won.
But more than an orientation toward life, hope is the condition that makes a different kind of life possible. As one who lives within the Christian faith, it’s hope in the person of Christ that transforms it into a way of being.
And it’s hope that runs through one question that I’ve been circling my whole life: how do we become who we’re designed to be? I’ve come to believe that our becoming begins when we take seriously that our desire to change means that we can actually do something about it.
Be(com)ing x Megan J. Robinson is a place to name how stories, systems, and infrastructures shape what we want and who we become. Essays and field notes invite us to notice where we are, befriend what we find, and practice what a located life looks like right where we are.
Other ways to be here
If you want to think out loud about what you’re noticing, what feels stuck, what’s beginning to move, I offer a free 15-minute Curiosity Call as a starting point.
If you’re ready for something more direct, 1:1 work is available.
Or, stay in the reading.
About Megan
I’m a formation coach and writer. I’ve spent twenty-plus years inside evangelical institutions as a staff member, student, and administrator at organizations including a megachurch and two seminaries. I left convinced that growth without formation doesn’t last, and that the systems we inhabit shape us whether we’ve chosen them consciously or not.
In 2022, I founded R21.5 x MjR as a formation house: built to welcome and support others in becoming who they are designed to be by connecting the inner work with outer structure.
Together, we participate in personal formation: deliberate, embodied action practiced in conversation with trusted guides, which builds a specific kind of character on the foundation of a given identity. Formation is both process and outcome: you can’t point to a single moment and say “it’s finished.” You’re always on the way. But you can notice the person you’ve become.
I write as someone doing this alongside you, not as someone who has it figured out.
It’s a hard, strange world, and it matters that each of us keeps creating and sharing what we find beautiful. Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise—together.
Shalom,
Sister publication
People Watching explores what it looks like to become someone worth imitating. It’s where we name how imitation and influence shape what we want and who we become.
What’s with the logo?
The skull represents our present life and mortality.
The wings embody our hope for resurrection and eternal life.
And the Bowie-inspired lightning bolt reminds us to stay weird.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
