A whole lot can change in nine years. And deep down, very little has changed. And yet, deep down, a light has been shone on what feels like everything and all that seems true.

Nine years ago, on August 25, 2017, I had a lunch that changed the course of my life. I asked one question about gender: “Who the heck is Caitlyn Jenner?” One question, yet it was the deepest question I had been sitting with for more than fifty years.

We were about two-thirds of the way through lunch when my colleague looked at me and said it plainly. Gender is who you go to sleep as, our core essence. Sexual orientation is who you go to sleep with, attraction. In that instant, I felt clarity and shock at the exact same time. You could have pushed me over with a feather.

My journey to self began in that moment. In that second of clarity.

I did not go into that lunch knowing what I wanted to do, or with some vision of another life I was trying to create. What I had was a feeling that had been intensifying within me for a very long time. A quiet longing to know myself, to understand myself, to express myself, and to somehow make sense of parts of me that I had felt since childhood and could never explain.

Today, I think about the word entelechy, an ancient Greek word. The idea that there is something within a living being that somehow knows what it is and what it is becoming before the conscious mind can name it. Something deep within us calling and quietly moving us toward fuller expression.

There were parts of myself I had judged and denied because I did not understand them, or because parents or teachers had scolded me for them. There were feelings I had learned to push away. There were parts of me that did not seem to fit easily within the life I had built or the person I had learned to be in the world. Yet beneath all of that, something remained. Something persistent. Something that would not go away. Entelechy.

That lunch became a threshold. A doorway.

Walking through that doorway opened a path to understand my gender, reconcile my gender, and ultimately affirm my gender. That was an extraordinary journey in itself. Yet the nine years since have helped me understand that August 25 was never only about gender. It opened a much larger path into myself.

I began to understand my mind differently and what I now think of as neuro-uniqueness. The intensity of my curiosity, the way I connect ideas and experiences, the way I make sense of things. The way I can feel a pattern or possibility before I can fully explain it. My need for quiet and reflection, and my love of learning, wandering, creating and discovering.

I began to see these things with more curiosity and more love, rather than constantly measuring them against some idea of how I was supposed to think or be, an idea that was taught and impressed upon me by those around me, by rules, by society.

The doorway also took me deeper into my family and lineage. Into the lives of my parents and ancestors, and into the hurt that travelled through our family through war, displacement, loss and survival. I began to understand that so much of what forms us physically and genetically begins long before we are born. Patterns travel through families. Fear travels. Silence travels. Ways of protecting ourselves travel. And so do resilience, courage and hope.

Understanding this history helped me understand myself differently. It also gave me more compassion for the people who came before me. They too were human beings trying to find their way through lives shaped by experiences and conditioning I can only partly imagine.

There was a great deal of grief in those first years of my journey.

About a year after that lunch, I experienced depression, and there were times when I was ready for life to be over. An angel saw my pain, named it and shared the truth of the intergenerational pain I would create. In that moment, I found hope in choosing to live for my children. They gave me a reason to continue.

There were other moments, too, in those early years when I collapsed under the grief. There was so much that I had held for so long and so much that I was finally allowing myself to feel. Somewhere within that grief, I surrendered. I released, curiously explored and healed.

I began to stop fighting myself. I began to stop judging parts of myself that I had denied or tried to explain away. I began to accept and embrace more of who I was.

And through that journey, I discovered something extraordinarily beautiful about human beings.

The doorway led to a hallway that showed me a deeply compassionate, caring and loving side of humanity. I experienced the love that becomes available within each of us when life, or sometimes we ourselves, create enough space to grieve, to heal, to grow and to find that love within us.

I experienced people meeting me with kindness, curiosity and compassion. And as I received those things, I began to discover more of them within myself.

It changed the way I understood leadership too.

I had spent decades leading people and organisations. I knew the systems, structures and processes of leadership. I knew what we were taught leadership should look like. Yet my own journey began to show me something different.

When we have travelled deeply within ourselves, when we have faced our own fear and grief, when we have learned to be more compassionate with ourselves, something can change in the way we meet other people. We can become kinder and more curious. We can hold more empathy. We can become more courageous because we have already walked through things within ourselves that frightened us. We can become more able to sit beside another human being without immediately judging them or trying to fix them.

The journey within humbled me. And through that humility, I found a greater capacity to hold space for others.

Over time, I began to see how kindness, curiosity, compassion, courage, purpose and a desire for a more harmonious world could become an evolved form of leadership. The power- and fear-based forms of leadership we so often learn through schools, systems and processes began to give way to something more human, the kind of leadership that can emerge naturally when we have journeyed deeply enough within ourselves to become fully ourselves.

A whole lot has changed in my life since that lunch. I experienced divorce. My children grew up and were launched into lives of their own. I moved on from roles and jobs where I had been successful and into new directions that gave more room for my curiosity, my love, my sense-making and the things that have always mattered deeply to me.

Today, I steward a home and land in the kind of place I was drawn to as a child. I walk through the gardens and lavender. I watch the bees. I make things with my hands. I learn. I wonder. I follow my curiosity. I meet beautiful people, beautiful souls.

And I experience the beauty of a human lifetime in a way I could have never understood before.

The beauty of nature. The beauty of curiosity, wonder and learning. The beauty of loving and being loved. The beauty of friendship and connection. The beauty of sitting quietly beside the water. The beauty of making something with our hands. The beauty of discovering something we did not know yesterday. The beauty of being here long enough to experience what life continues to reveal.

There was a time when I found enough hope to live for my children. Today, I have found enough love within me to live for myself and the beauty of this lifetime.

I want to be here for this life. I want to experience it. I want to love. I want to keep learning. I want to remain curious. I want to keep becoming.

Today, I feel peace. I feel joy. I feel love. I feel faith.

And the more I live from my essence, the more I notice that some things no longer carry the same weight. People, places and things that once seemed so important can fall away, while other people, places and experiences seem to draw closer because something in them resonates more deeply with who I am.

Perhaps the more we live from our essence, the more we recognise what feels true.

When I look back across these nine years, the outward change is enormous. Yet when I look deeper, I recognise so much of what has always been there. The curious child is still here. The part of me that wanted to wander, imagine, create and understand is still here. The part that sensed things deeply before having words for them is still here. The longing to know myself, to love and be loved, and to understand this strange and beautiful human experience is still here.

Deep down, very little has changed.

And yet, deep down, a light has been shone on what feels like everything.

Perhaps entelechy is not about becoming someone new at all. Perhaps it is about allowing what has always been within us to become visible, to be understood, to be loved, and finally to have a life.

I find myself wondering what doorway might be quietly waiting for you.

Nine years ago, I asked one question.

I had no idea I was opening a doorway into my whole life.