Uncanny Valley of the Self: How Reflexive Writing Tracked a Becoming I Didn't Know I Was Living

Written during a year of deep cultural change, this reflection traces how my own transformation was unfolding quietly inside the work itself.

I’ve never tracked myself like this before. Not like this.

Writing has always been part of my process—reflecting after workshops, mapping what I was noticing, capturing what was still forming. But something different happened on this project. Looking back, I can see it clearly:

I wasn’t just writing about the work. I was writing myself into it.

There are moments in my old reflections—phrases, metaphors, quiet signals—that now read like a version of me I hadn’t yet grown into. Not because I planned it. But because something in me already knew.

At the time, I thought I was documenting.

Now I understand: I was becoming.

Imagination at Work

There’s something eerie about reading a sentence you wrote months ago and recognising yourself in it more now than you did then. As if the writing was waiting for you to catch up.

It wasn’t a mirror. It was a threshold.

My imagination, unstructured and unforced, reached ahead of me. Not in strategy, but in intuition. Not in branding, but in feeling.

I didn’t know what I was building yet—but I knew how to stay close to it.

I wasn’t writing deliverables.

I was tracking a frequency.

And somehow, that was enough.

The Strange Power of Reflexive Practice

We’re often taught to reflect after the fact. But what I’ve learned is that reflection can also lead.

When done with openness—without agenda—reflexive writing doesn’t just describe change. It catalyses it.

I wasn’t making sense of what had happened.

I was listening forward.

The writing didn’t just chart where I’d been.

It started to build the ground beneath my feet.

Knowledge Emergence is Self-Emergence

I see that culture is both a canvas and a system. Now I know: the self is too.

We are not fixed identities. We are living processes.

And the more relational and intuitive the work becomes, the more we must stay in dialogue with our own unfolding.

The reflections I wrote weren’t about the work.

They were part of it.

And now, I see that I was growing—not just alongside the project, but inside it.

Sometimes, our practice reveals who we’re becoming before we’re ready to claim it.

Writing as Witness, Writing as World-Making

There’s a form of leadership that doesn’t announce itself.

It doesn’t arrive with fanfare or frameworks.

It begins with noticing—softly, steadily, again and again.

That’s what this project gave me.

Not just a story to tell, but a self to meet.

Now, reading back, I see that I was never just reflecting.

I was weaving a thread—through language, intuition, and trust.

I didn’t know I was writing a map.

But here I am, standing where it pointed.