Why My Relationship With the Becoming Process Feels Exhausting

The work of becoming who you need to be should — at some level — feel purposeful. And often it does. There are moments of clarity, of genuine movement, of feeling like you’re actually building toward something real.

And there are also stretches where the whole project of becoming feels exhausting. Heavy. Like another thing you should be doing and aren’t doing well enough. Less like a purpose and more like a burden.

That exhaustion is worth examining. It usually has a specific source.

When Becoming Becomes Performance

The most common source of exhaustion in identity work is the unconscious shift from genuine becoming to performed becoming.

Genuine becoming has the quality of growth: it’s effortful in the way that learning is effortful — uncomfortable, sometimes challenging, but with an underlying sense of aliveness.

Performed becoming has the quality of maintenance: constant effort to present as a version of yourself that you don’t yet actually inhabit, with the accompanying energy drain of managing the gap between presentation and reality.

Most people in extended identity work cycle through both. The exhaustion is often the signal that you’ve been in the performance mode for an extended period — that the energy is going into looking like you’re becoming rather than actually becoming.

The Constant-Monitoring Cost

When identity work is operating well, it has natural rhythms: periods of active engagement and periods of rest. The practice has a beginning and an end each day.

When it’s producing exhaustion, it often means the work has become constant monitoring — an ongoing assessment of whether you’re being the right version of yourself, whether this moment represents the old identity or the new one, whether you’re succeeding at the becoming.

That constant monitoring is expensive. It depletes attention, interrupts presence, and produces the background exhaustion of never being fully in anything because part of your attention is always assessing.

The intervention: legitimate periods of not doing identity work. Not every moment is a growth opportunity. Rest is necessary, and rest means genuinely resting — not monitoring whether you’re resting correctly.

The Pressure of Arrival

Some of the exhaustion comes from an implicit belief that the becoming is supposed to be a finite project with a clear endpoint — and that the endpoint should have arrived by now.

This belief makes every week of continued becoming feel like falling behind. The work isn’t exhausting per se; the gap between where you are and where you feel you should be by now is exhausting.

The self-concept that makes peace with ongoing development — that holds the becoming as a feature of life rather than a project to complete — is significantly less exhausting than the one that’s waiting to arrive.

Rebuilding Relationship With the Work

Reduce the intensity, not the commitment. Sustainable identity work is less intense than exhausting identity work. The nervous system builds through gradual accumulation, not through constant pressure. Reducing the intensity isn’t giving up — it’s sustainability.

Find genuine moments of not-working. The practice has hours and the rest of life has hours. Making that boundary explicit — and genuinely resting in the rest-of-life time — restores the relationship to the work.

Reconnect with the genuine pull. Underneath the exhaustion, there’s often a real impulse toward the becoming — something that wants to emerge that’s more genuine than the performed version. The identity work at its best follows that impulse rather than managing an external standard.

Build community. The exhaustion of solo becoming is real. The becoming that happens in community — where others witness you, where you witness others, where the work is held in relationship — is typically less exhausting because it’s less alone.

The exhaustion is not evidence that you’re weak or that the work is wrong. It’s a signal about how the work is being approached — and that signal is worth following.

The Abundance GPS community on Skool makes the work sustainable. Join free for the first week.