I saw Die, My Love this week, a film about a woman whose life shifts after becoming a mother. She has moved somewhere new, with the intention of writing, of continuing the version of herself she had always imagined she was. And then the baby arrives, and her sense of self begins to unravel.
The film moves between what is real and what is internal. It doesn’t offer neat explanations or diagnoses. Instead, it shows how identity can fracture when life changes faster than we can adapt to it. The woman believed she could be both things at once, the one who creates, and the one who cares. But the person she thought she was, the one who was going to write the book, slips out of reach. Something else takes its place. The house, the landscape, the relationships around her all seem to press in. What we see is not simply “illness,” but a deeper question.
Who am I now, if I am not who I believed myself to be?
This stayed with me.
Because so many of us have known that moment, in different forms.
When a role changes.
When a chapter ends.
When what we were once so sure of begins to feel unfamiliar.
It might not be motherhood. It might be retirement. Loss. A move. A relationship ending. The body changing. The world shifting around us.
The film isn’t comfortable, and it isn’t resolved. But it captures something true about those thresholds in life where the previous identity no longer holds, and the new one hasn’t yet formed. Those in-between places where we are not who we were, and not yet who we will become.
What I took away was this:
There are times when the task is not to strive or to hold on, but to recognise the self that is leaving. And to be gentle with the one that is emerging.
No answers.
Just the noticing.
