Where Does Goddess Becky End and Becky Begin? Identity and Personal Evolution.
I’ve spent more than twenty-five years being Goddess Becky.
Recently, I’ve found myself wondering where she ends and I begin.
I thought the answer would be obvious.
It isn’t.
People have asked me variations of the same question for years.
“What’s the real Becky like?”
I understand why.
People encounter an image.
The Dominatrix.
The confident woman.
The sexuality.
The authority.
The clothes, language, fantasy and carefully controlled public world surrounding her.
They see Goddess Becky.
And naturally they assume Becky must exist somewhere behind her.
She does.
But the interesting thing I’ve begun to realise is that Goddess Becky isn’t standing in front of Becky concealing her.
She’s part of her.
She began as a mask
I don’t think Goddess Becky began fully formed.
She evolved.
And if I’m completely truthful, I think the earliest version of her sometimes acted as a shield.
She could hide insecurities.
She could protect vulnerability.
She could step forward when I needed to feel stronger than I actually felt.
There was safety in her.
She controlled the situation.
Her territory.
Her rules.
She decided who came close.
She could observe before exposing anything herself.
Perhaps initially some of that confidence was performed.
But something strange happens when you repeatedly practise a behaviour.
Eventually you don’t have to pretend anymore.
The persona grew up too
It’s tempting to imagine that we create a public identity and then keep performing the same character indefinitely.
That hasn’t been my experience.
Goddess Becky changed because I changed.
The younger version was considerably more reactive.
More fiery.
Perhaps she had something to prove.
She needed people to know she was powerful.
Present-day Goddess Becky doesn’t.
She’s considerably calmer.
She’s softened into her femininity without becoming less formidable.
The fire is still there.
It simply doesn’t need to burn constantly to prove it exists.
That’s probably one of the biggest things age and experience have taught me about power.
Strong boundaries don’t need a dramatic announcement.
Confidence doesn’t require constant demonstration.
And knowing your value is very different from needing everybody else to recognise it.
So which parts are real?
This is where the distinction becomes difficult.
The dominance is real.
The independence is real.
The fascination with psychology is real.
The sexuality is real.
The ability to lead is real.
The curiosity about people’s hidden worlds is very real.
The high standards are certainly real.
The performance comes from amplification.
Certain characteristics are turned up because Goddess Becky exists partly within fantasy and entertainment.
But if you amplify something that genuinely exists inside you, when does amplification become pretending?
I’m not sure it does.
Perhaps it’s simply choosing which part of yourself gets the microphone.
Did I create her, or did she create me?
This is the question I find considerably more interesting.
Because Goddess Becky gave me permission.
Permission to explore power.
Female sexuality.
Control.
Psychology.
Human behaviour.
Fantasy.
Vulnerability.
Desire.
The parts of people they rarely show anybody else.
And through understanding other people, I began understanding myself.
Twenty-five years of conversations with people revealing things they had never told another human being inevitably changes the way you see people.
It certainly changed me.
I became less judgemental.
More curious.
Better at recognising behaviour.
Better at boundaries.
More comfortable with myself.
More selective about who gets access to me.
So perhaps I created Goddess Becky from qualities already inside me.
And then Goddess Becky strengthened those qualities through years of use before handing them back.
But was she armour too?
This is a more uncomfortable question.
There is safety in being the person in control.
If somebody desires you, you don’t necessarily have to expose your own desire.
If people approach you, you don’t have to risk approaching them.
If you’re analysing somebody else’s vulnerability, you can remain safely outside your own.
And if somebody rejects a persona, perhaps there’s a small psychological distance between their rejection and the person underneath.
I’m not suggesting I consciously invented Goddess Becky as some elaborate psychological defence mechanism.
Life is rarely that neat.
But I am curious about the possibility that she has sometimes been both an expression of me and protection for me.
Perhaps some of our strongest identities work exactly like that.
They allow something authentic to emerge while simultaneously protecting something else.
Softness was never the opposite of strength
There’s another misconception I’ve become increasingly interested in.
Strong women aren’t devoid of softness.
Independence doesn’t mean we never want support.
Authority doesn’t eliminate tenderness.
Being capable of taking care of yourself doesn’t mean you don’t value partnership.
And knowing what you want doesn’t place a woman in some permanently “masculine” state.
I’m still perfectly capable of being nurturing, emotional, playful and occasionally spectacularly useless at parallel parking.
Multidimensionality shouldn’t be surprising.
Yet people frequently struggle when apparently contradictory traits exist in the same person.
Strong and vulnerable.
Independent and capable of needing someone.
Sexual and emotionally selective.
Dominant and gentle.
Ambitious and nurturing.
Perhaps the contradiction only exists because we’ve been taught those characteristics shouldn’t occupy the same woman.
I disagree.
The contrast is what makes people interesting.
What happens when the performance ends?
This is the question becoming increasingly relevant to me now.
My career is changing.
For a while I’ve called what I’m doing “retirement.”
I’ve realised that’s the wrong word.
I’m evolving.
So what happens to Goddess Becky when I no longer need to perform her professionally?
I don’t think she disappears.
How could she?
Too much of her is already me.
I want her discernment.
Her confidence.
Her authority.
Her understanding of people.
Her refusal to shrink herself to make other people comfortable.
Her boundaries.
Her independence.
But perhaps I no longer need all the armour.
Perhaps the next evolution isn’t another persona.
Perhaps it’s integration.
The younger woman’s willingness to leap.
The model’s playfulness.
The entrepreneur’s ambition.
The Goddess’s power.
The writer’s curiosity.
The private woman’s softness.
All occupying the same person without requiring one to defeat another.
So who is Goddess Becky?
She’s me.
But she’s not all of me.
She’s an expression of certain characteristics, an amplification of others, a woman who once helped me access qualities I hadn’t completely learned to own and an identity that subsequently taught me an enormous amount about myself.
I don’t need to kill her off to evolve beyond the career associated with her.
And perhaps that’s something worth remembering whenever we outgrow an identity.
We don’t have to despise the person we were in order to become somebody else.
We can thank them.
Understand why they existed.
Recognise what they protected.
Keep what they taught us.
Forgive what they didn’t yet know.
And decide what no longer needs to come along.
Perhaps becoming yourself isn’t about stripping away every character you’ve ever been until you finally uncover the “real” person underneath.
Perhaps it’s reaching a point where you understand them all well enough to say:
You were all me.
But none of you were ever all of me.
Stay curious.
Goddess Becky xo
Still curious?
Some questions don’t end when the article does.
My letters are where I continue exploring identity, psychology, power, relationships and the strange contradictions that make us who we are.
If you enjoy looking beyond the obvious and questioning what you think you know, join me there.
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