The shift from seeing myself as a noun to understanding myself as a verb has altered the landscape of my inner life in ways both subtle and profound. After decades as a psychotherapist—listening, witnessing, and holding the stories of others—I believed I understood the architecture of identity. We were shaped by our histories, our roles, our traumas, our triumphs. We were, I thought, definable. Nameable. Something one could point to and say: This is who I am.
Retirement, however, has a way of loosening the scaffolding. Without the daily rhythm of clients and clinical structure, I found myself in a quieter apprenticeship—one that unfolded not in an office but in the spaces between breaths. In that stillness, a realization emerged with the clarity of a bell: I’m not a fixed thing. I’m not a noun at all. I’m a verb. And so is everyone I’ve ever known.
- I’m not a retired psychotherapist; I’m attending to the world in quieter, more personal ways.
- I’m not an aging woman; I’m aging, which is to say: becoming, shedding, ripening, and learning.
One of the most unexpected shifts in seeing myself as a verb is how it’s reanimated my own history. When I lived as a noun, my past felt like a carved monument—static, heavy, and final. Now, I see those years as a series of unfolding movements: some graceful, some clumsy, but all vibrantly alive. I can revisit old memories without becoming trapped by them; they are no longer verdicts on who I am, but currents that have carried me to this shoreline. This shift has softened the edges of old regrets, replacing the stagnant “Why did I do that?” with a more fluid curiosity: “What was moving through me then? What was I in the process of learning?”
Looking back on my life, I no longer see a sequence of static events but a continuous movement—a river carving its way through rock, yielding to the wind, and deepening with the seasons. The roles I once held so tightly begin to shift. Seeing myself as a verb frees me from the illusion that my life can adequately be summarized or appraised. Verbs resist stasis. They refuse to be pinned down. They move.
And when I look back on my years as a therapist, I see that every client was a verb too. They were grieving, resisting, remembering, becoming. Even those who felt stuck were in motion—toward safety, toward truth, toward themselves. The psyche is always moving, even in its stillness.
This movement is the pulse of every living thing. I’m a verb, and you are too. This realization has become a quiet blessing I offer myself:
I am not finished.
I am not defined.
I am in motion, always.
I am a verb in the process of becoming.
Spirituality, Therapy, and the Good Life 