Are you experiencing the Chameleon Effect?
Because we're all shape-shifters and it's making me dizzy.
Recently, I blew out 36 candles on a fantastic lemon meringue pie. I hugged my growing sons. Wrote a poem. Eyed the piles of laundry with an audible sigh.
And asked myself — who am I?
In my late teens I “was” my academic record.
In my 20s I “was" my work.
In my early 30s I “was” full-time motherhood.
But now I’m sitting at the edge of this most recent season noticing how, once again, my defined place begins to shift, shimmer, and become more opaque.
My sons will soon move out of the early childhood years and the ME I have immersed myself in being will need to adapt again.
I begin this old-new dance with work, a performance reserved only for the quiet of moonlight, and feel my foot tapping a rhythm I thought to be lost.
And I ask myself — who am I?
Sometimes writer. Sometimes trainer. Always mother. Living multitudes of fractions in any given moment.
Last night we flicked on Netflix and I noticed, with a slightly wry panic, that women of my generation are no longer cast as leading ladies in mainstream RomComs.
Despite being more comfortable in my skin than ever before, I couldn’t help but feel the zephyr of some door closing on a part of my life that I wasn’t expecting to farewell — namely, missing my chance to be an onscreen love interest or femme fatale.
(Men my age continue to land the role of central heart throb, but that’s a conversation for another time.)
Who am I, now?
Maiden. Mother. Crone.
Honestly, it can be a bit of a mind trip.
And I wonder if you’ve gone through something similar? I feel like most women must.
It’s not so much a crisis of identity as a wrestling with the social narratives around womanhood, motherhood, and dispersion of self that leaves us wondering if we ever truly get the chance to reveal who we are.
I NEVER bought into the idea that a woman’s role is her whole.
Yet here I am, describing my value through education, career, and matrescence.
And spare change toying with the idea that we all have a heyday — and what if mine’s past?
Because aren’t we told that motherhood is the pinnacle? Aren’t we marketed the fetishisation of youth? Aren’t we all given a demarcated line that, once crossed, can’t be peddled back over?
As an introvert and over thinker, I often wonder if other women have similar experiences and assess their evolution in a similar way to me. Some recent big feelings have seen me finally ask my friends if I’m being weird…
Overly dramatic?
Overly feminist?
Reassuringly, the answers came back with a resounding “no!” We’re all lost at sea, trying to figure out how to be who WE need, whilst being needed by everyone else.
And it got my mind bubbling with imagery to describe this feeling.
To understand why we (may) reach a time when we’ve lost touch with who we are, separate from the confines of our labels.
Where I landed was — The Chameleon Effect.
The idea that a woman’s identity is ever shape-shifting to suit the role required of her in each season of life.
Unlike men, who historically tend to pursue personal development in an upward linear fashion, a woman’s timeline is cyclical and tangled with a history of Shoulds and Expectations. We have more intense, shorter seasons that change more rapidly depending on our external environment.
Self, lover leader, carer.
Self, lover, leader, carer.
Again and again and again.
Our seasons continue to change with the pace and fury of a north-eastern winter storm.
We shape-shift like chameleons to meet these many and varied roles. We become metamorphic, in constant transition, learning to separate desire and practice, thoughts and words, inner world and outer representation.
But with each cycle, the self moves further away.
It becomes more fragmented.
Less sure.
With each transition we leave a piece of heart behind, beating for the continuation of yet another version of ourselves that began only to end.
And one day, we can wake up with the thought — “Who Am I?”

From time immemorial, women have been taught to gauge their human value based on how they look and the familial role they will meet as mothers, wives and daughters who exist to care.
More recently, social constructs have added to that request. In addition to staying younger, thinner and more fertile, we must become more productive, more independent, more powerful…
Be a bearer. Be a boss. Be a babe. Be a brand.
It’s life in female limbo and it’s exhausting.
(Unfortunately, not much else in society changed to make this shift possible. Read: childcare, patriarchy, the health care system…)
I sometimes imagine myself as an octopus with eight tentacles stretched in opposite directions at any given time.
Away from centre.
Away from self.
So is it any wonder that we might feel a little detached from who we are? That anxiety is on the rise?
In preparation for this article, I read several studies on the increase of anxiety disorders in Western populations, all of which stated that women are more likely to experience the condition than men.
I’m not surprised.
But here’s the common outtake — women’s anxiety is related to hormonal fluctuations, lower adaptability to stress and, no joke, lesser problem-solving strategies.
I kid you not.
Interestingly, many of these studies were written by women who didn’t seem to find it relevant to mention the crushing load that is placed on our gender from a very early age.
Olivia Remes, from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, writes (and I summarise):
When faced with stressful situations, women and men tend to use different coping strategies…Women faced with life stressors are more likely to ruminate about them, which can increase their anxiety, while men engage more in active, problem-focused coping.
I got a hot flash just reading it!
While neuroplasticity is fascinating to me, the plethora of peer-reviewed studies that neatly summarise a woman’s biochemistry as the cause of her mental health struggles is not overly helpful to any of us.
And can feel like yet another unbearable weight to carry.
It also removes the impetus for self-advocacy because we can neatly chalk our “problems” up to biology.
(There must be a pill for that.)
Yet, I digress…
Speaking of a collective sense of muting, we need to consider how this Chameleon Effect brings with it an inevitable self-censoring.
In firmly binding WHO we are with WHAT we do, we start to make life choices that seem appropriate for whatever protective label we’ve most recently adopted.
More often than not, these choices lean conservative and restrictive…Because we’re carers. Who wear “mum” jeans. And eat salads.
I’ve done this for a long time and it’s both limiting and irritating.
So it’s time to return to our multitudes and remember that being whole in yourself and meeting your roles aren’t mutually exclusive…
If anything, the latter will only benefit from how seriously you take the former.
But how do we do this?
Well, it’s a journey of self-knowing…identifying what matters to you and living by a system of core values…holding boundaries and speaking up for what you need…
On a less esoteric level, it’s buying a bright green sofa, if you want a bright green sofa. Or wearing a Social Distortion t-shirt at school pickup. It’s getting a tattoo at 65 if you’ve spent 50 years thinking about a tattoo.
It’s NOT buying into the system that keeps us stuck in time-and-place representation. It’s walking Homer’s Odyssey and curiously forging ahead with our next chapter where we can be Self. And. [Insert multitudes here.]
In an interview with Jonathan Fields, the poet Maggie Smith mused:
“You can be in the world in a way that is truly nourishing and you don’t need to leave parts of yourself off to the side.”
What a great reminder.
Women evolve so splendidly and yet we hesitate to show it. We somehow manage to give it all away without revealing the truth of our beings. We keep shifting in our chameleon shades until we no longer recognise the beauty of our true colours.
Eclosion is the process of a Monarch butterfly finally emerging from its chrysalis.
Eclosion.
To eclose.
Let’s stick that on a post-it on the bathroom mirror. Write it on our wrists. Use it as a mantra as we inhabit the “self” that we’re all meant to be.
Our time starts now. Let’s take the next step.
Yours,
Jenn xx