The Becoming of Selves
Nur Anisah Abdullah
College of Education, Tamkang University; The Futures Studies Channel
Abstract
This reflective essay explores professional becoming through my return to Malaysia as a futures educator-practitioner after more than a decade. The experience brought inherited idealism, gendered expectations and cross-cultural ways of teaching into tension with changing educational conditions, including fragmented attention, generative AI and uneven readiness to participate. Drawing on narrative inquiry, I approach identity as a set of stories that can be examined and re-authored through neglected experiences and alternative selves. The Futures Triangle traces how the story of the dependable teacher was formed in the past, unsettled in the present and redirected by emerging possibilities. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), applied inwardly, reveals the systems, worldviews and metaphors sustaining dominant, disowned and emerging selves. The analysis reframes disappointment with learner disengagement as information about readiness, responsibility and the conditions for meaningful participation. It supports a shift towards executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer practice grounded in consequential questions, mutual commitment and action. The Chinese idiom rú yú dé shuǐ, like a fish that has found water, comes to express this changing relationship with identity and belonging. Becoming means learning to sense shifting currents, respond with discernment and continue choosing a direction.
Keywords: Futures Triangle; Causal Layered Analysis; futures studies; reflective practice, narrative inquiry in futures studies.
Introduction
In Chinese, the expression 如魚得水 (rú yú dé shuǐ), “like a fish that has found water,” evokes the ease of finding one’s element. I once understood it as a story of arrival: the fish finds the water in which it belongs and flourishes. Returning to Malaysia to facilitate foresight workshops for planning after more than a decade unsettled that understanding. The water had changed, and so had I. The return brought me into conversation with the educator who had left and raised questions about who I had been, who I was becoming and what it now meant to practise as a futures educator.
The experience made identity a temporal question. Inayatullah (1993) invites a shift from asking “Who am I?” to “When am I?”, locating the self within the histories it carries and the futures forming around it (p. 240). I returned with inherited identities and commitments, yet encountered conditions that brought different possibilities into view. The Futures Triangle allows me to trace how these past influences, present pressures and anticipated futures converge in my professional becoming (Inayatullah, 2013). This situated reflective essay remains grounded in my experience and makes no claim to represent educators or learners more broadly.
Narrative inquiry provides the frame for examining how these temporal forces become stories of identity. By creating distance between a person and a dominant story, it makes room for neglected experiences, alternative selves and preferred futures to emerge (Milojević, 2014). Through this lens, the dependable teacher becomes an influential professional story whose history, effects and exclusions can be examined without allowing it to define the whole self. The Futures Triangle traces how this story was formed and unsettled across time.
To explore what sustains the story, I follow Inayatullah’s (2010) inward application of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA). His examination of how the self is represented, which selves constitute its inner system, which worldview constructs it and which stories sustain it guides my analysis of dominant, disowned and emerging selves. Houston’s (2022) CLA of self during personal transition and Follows’s (2026) analysis of identity in digital life provide related examples of this inward inquiry. The essay moves from tracing the dependable teacher through past, present and anticipated future to examining the systems, assumptions and metaphors that give this identity moral authority. It then explores how alternative selves can be strengthened through new boundaries and forms of practice, before returning to rú yú dé shuǐ as a metaphor for sensing and moving within changing currents.
The Weight of the Past
Before leaving Malaysia in 2015, I facilitated workshops for the Ministry of Higher Education on charting the way forward. I also supported KPI and Balanced Scorecard reviews and planning workshops with academic departments, agencies and divisions at the International Islamic University Malaysia. I entered this work with deep idealism. I believed in Malaysians and in the potential of our ministries, public institutions and communities. I assumed that people who recognised the possibility of improvement would want to pursue it, and that better analysis would lead to understanding, commitment and action.
Yet these institutional settings were shaped by conditions I had underestimated. Participation could be required rather than chosen, while incentives, authority and the capacity to act were unevenly distributed. A workshop could generate energetic discussion without altering the structures that shaped what happened afterwards. Compliance and transformation could appear similar in the room while producing very different outcomes beyond it. The gap between institutional potential and readiness was already present, although I did not yet have language for it.
I carried into this work a dominant professional story: the dependable teacher. Dependability meant arriving prepared, mastering the subject, explaining carefully and noticing when students struggled. It meant following up, challenging weak effort and offering guidance beyond the delivery of content. These practices expressed care, but the story gradually tied the quality of my teaching to another person’s participation and progress.
This professional story drew authority from older narratives of gender and duty. I had been deeply socialised into patriarchal expectations, with futures prescribed along familiar lines: “good daughter,” “good wife,” responsible scholar and dependable teacher. These roles gave my life shape and meaning, but equated goodness with reliability, accommodation and service to others. They narrowed the selves I could imagine and made other desires and departures difficult to name.
Following Milojević (2014), I can externalise the dependable teacher as a story rather than accept it as the whole of who I am. Naming it creates space to examine how it was formed, what it made possible, what it demanded and which alternatives it excluded. Within this dominant story, the idealistic educator, dependable teacher and woman responsible for others reinforced one another. Crowded from view were disowned selves: the woman who sets limits, the educator who leaves responsibility with learners and the practitioner who chooses where and with whom to invest her care.
Externalising the dominant story does not make its history disposable. Inayatullah (1999) argues that plural selves can develop through travel, relationships and movement across cultures, but that such plurality requires depth. Transformation remains fragile when it avoids history and its pain. Alternative selves must therefore emerge through engagement with what has shaped me, recognising which commitments remain life-giving, which narratives have become restrictive and which histories require further reckoning.
The Push of the Present
My work now unfolds under conditions very different from those in which my teaching identity first formed. Information is abundant, immediate and increasingly personalised. Students encounter short-form media, AI-narrated content and search results already condensed for consumption. Large language models can explain concepts, propose solutions and produce polished assignments within seconds. Written work therefore offers a less reliable account of how a student reached an answer or what learning occurred. Sustained attention and the willingness to remain with a difficult question have also become harder to cultivate.
These conditions strain the dominant professional story of the dependable teacher. When explanations are available on demand, a teacher’s value can no longer rest primarily on transmitting knowledge. When polished assignments can be generated without sustained engagement, conventional assessment becomes a less certain window into understanding. I increasingly value encounters that are less easily automated: questions that disturb certainty, conversations that exercise judgement, connections between ideas and lived consequences, and spaces for dialogue, disagreement and discovery. Their value, however, still depends on a willingness to participate.
A college once told me that students did not want a “nagging” teacher: teach, then leave. The comment exposed a tension within my professional story. Practices I understood as care, including following up, challenging weak effort and insisting on attention, could be experienced as intrusion. The dependable teacher was expected to remain available while asking less of the relationship. When attendance or credential requirements bring learners into the room, substantial energy may be spent establishing that the work deserves attention before the work can begin. Opportunity and readiness coexist without necessarily meeting.
Narrative inquiry helps me locate this difficulty within the relationship among the dominant story, institutional conditions and participant readiness, rather than absorbing it as evidence of personal inadequacy (Milojević, 2014). The problem is no longer simply whether I have prepared, explained or cared enough. The present asks how care should be practised when responsibility for learning is unevenly shared, and what forms of teaching remain meaningful when participation cannot be assumed.
Geographical and cultural movement exerts a different pressure. I am Malaysian, but my sense of self has been shaped by living, studying, working and raising a family across several cultures. I spent seven years in the United Kingdom completing my master’s degree and PhD while my three children passed through formative years. I returned to Malaysia in 2009 to fulfil my scholarship bond and remained until 2015, before moving to Dubai and then Taipei. With another transition expected when I leave Taipei in August 2027, no single place can serve as a permanent professional or cultural home.
Each place has exposed assumptions I once took for granted and expanded the repertoire through which I interpret the world. Dator (2022) describes people as “human becomings,” continually created and re-created through experience and encounters with others. He asks, “Who do I want to be next?” (p. 9). The question opens identity to multiplicity and possibility. The Malaysian self who first left home has encountered different social worlds, each loosening some stories, strengthening others and bringing alternative selves into view.
Feminist inquiry also unsettles stories of neutral practice and selfless care. My work on Feminizing Futures (Abdullah, 2025) and Threads of Hope (Abdullah, 2026), together with conversations and lived experience, has made questions of power harder to overlook. Who is permitted to imagine? Whose experience shapes an agenda? Which forms of work and care are valued? Who carries the cost of a proposed future? These questions bring an emerging feminist practitioner more clearly into view, one attentive to how voice, authority, labour and consequence are distributed. Future-making occurs in homes, classrooms and everyday relationships as well as in institutions and strategic decisions.
The Pull of the Future
The future drawing me forward places foresight firmly in the realm of practice. Narrative inquiry frames this pull as a preferred story, strengthened through the values, intentions, relationships and actions that sustain it (Milojević, 2014). Within this preferred future, futures derives its value from disciplined attention to change, assumptions and alternatives, and from the decisions and relationships that follow.
The rooms in this future are organised around consequential questions, bringing together leaders navigating uncertainty, teams reconsidering strategy, practitioners developing facilitation capabilities and educators helping others think differently. This draws me towards executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer work, where futures methods can be closely connected to decisions and action. These settings cannot guarantee engagement, though they may offer clearer stakes, shared purpose and mutual responsibility.
Within this preferred story, an alternative practitioner self emerges: prepared, attentive and committed, while leaving participants responsible for their engagement and actions. She creates active, relational learning spaces where dialogue, disagreement and discovery reveal assumptions and expand what a group can perceive. Methods support the encounter; participants remain responsible for how they enter it and what they carry forward.
This preferred future also makes power visible. It asks whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, who has voice in the room, who feels able to disagree, whose labour sustains the process and which relationships might be reproduced through the futures being pursued. Eisler and Fry’s (2019) account of partnership informs this emerging practice through its emphasis on care, equitable relationships, mutual respect and human dignity. These values orient me towards work shaped by purpose, participation, mutual commitment and consequence.
My measures of progress change as this alternative story develops. I once recognised progress through mastering my subject, improving my methods, becoming dependable and helping students fulfil expectations. I now ask whether a process helped people notice something previously hidden, question an assumption holding a system in place or recognise an agency they had not exercised. Did it influence a decision or relationship, create space for a previously unheard voice or enable participants to carry the work forward after I left? Such questions thicken the preferred story by connecting its values to what the practice makes possible.
Reading Beneath the Currents
The Futures Triangle traces how past influences, present pressures and anticipated futures shape my professional becoming. Reading beneath these currents requires attention to the narratives that organise experience, position identity and make some futures appear more plausible, desirable or legitimate. The dependable teacher is one such narrative, connecting inherited expectations with present tensions and future professional choices.
Within Futures Studies, narrative inquiry examines how such stories shape the futures a person can imagine and inhabit. Milojević (2014) shows how dominant identity stories can narrow those futures, while neglected experiences and alternative selves open different pathways of becoming. The Futures Triangle gives this inquiry temporal movement, while inward CLA reveals the systems, worldviews and metaphors that sustain the dominant story (Inayatullah, 2010, 2013). Table 1 summarises the CLA of the Self.
Table 1: CLA of the Self
Litany
At the litany level, the transition can be narrated simply: I am becoming less willing to invest energy in teaching disengaged students and more drawn to executives, practitioners and trainers who bring consequential questions and a reason to act. Generative AI is disrupting familiar teaching and assessment practices, attention is fragmented and my patience for persuading reluctant learners has diminished. The apparent future is a change of audience and professional setting.
This surface narrative is recognisable, but incomplete. It risks presenting students as the problem, technological change as the cause and executive education or consulting as the solution. It can also make my changing tolerance appear to be an individual failure or preference. Questioning this account opens a more consequential futures inquiry: what conditions shape willingness to participate, how has responsibility for learning been distributed, and why has my professional identity become attached to carrying that responsibility?
Systemic
At the systemic level, the transition is shaped by interacting institutional arrangements. Higher education brings credential requirements, assessment regimes and uneven learner choice into the classroom. Generative AI changes access to knowledge and weakens the evidentiary value of familiar assignments. Institutional structures can require attendance without generating ownership, just as planning processes can require participation without redistributing the authority or incentives needed for change. Teachers and facilitators are often expected to create engagement while having limited influence over the conditions that support it.
The system is also biographical and relational. My practice has developed across Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Dubai and Taipei, alongside scholarship obligations, migration and the work of raising children across cultures. Gendered expectations of care have travelled through these environments and interacted with institutional expectations of the “good” teacher. What appears at the litany level as individual frustration is therefore connected to wider arrangements of authority, participation, care and accountability.
This deeper account changes the futures question. Greater preparation or persuasion cannot resolve every gap between opportunity and willingness. A teacher or facilitator can create conditions for inquiry, but cannot supply curiosity, courage or commitment on another person’s behalf. Moving towards executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer practice offers no guarantee of readiness. It represents an attempt to create professional relationships in which stakes, agency and responsibility can be made more explicit and more genuinely shared.
Worldview
At the worldview level sits a moral proposition: a good educator is dependable, and dependability means remaining responsible until learners engage, understand and succeed. This proposition has supported careful preparation, presence and care. It has also encouraged me to interpret disengagement as evidence that I should explain more clearly, intervene more persistently or assume more responsibility for the relationship.
In narrative terms, the dependable teacher is a dominant professional story rather than a complete or fixed self. It determines which actions count as evidence of goodness and which possible selves appear less legitimate. The story draws authority from the inherited figures of the good daughter and good wife. Across these roles, goodness is demonstrated through accommodation, reliability and service. The woman who establishes limits, chooses where to invest her effort or leaves responsibility with others can consequently appear less caring.
Inayatullah’s (2010) inward application of CLA asks which self has become dominant and which identities and futures have been pushed away. This inquiry reveals disowned selves and disowned futures (Stone & Stone, 1989, as cited in Inayatullah, 2010, p. 105): the woman who establishes boundaries without interpreting them as a withdrawal of care; the practitioner who chooses where her effort is placed; the facilitator who expects participants to carry responsibility; and the consultant who works alongside institutions without assuming that their transformation is hers to deliver. Executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer practice were never unimaginable futures, but they remained difficult to inhabit while the dependable teacher held the greatest moral authority.
Milojević’s (2014) account of alternative selves connects this inner constellation to futures thinking. Alternative selves gain substance through values, capacities and experiences obscured by the dominant story. Moments when I have cared without carrying the entire relationship, maintained a boundary while remaining present or supported agency without assuming responsibility for another person’s movement make these possibilities visible. Narrative inquiry describes such exceptions as unique outcomes because they reveal that the dominant story has never been the only possible account and provide foundations for alternative ways of becoming (Milojević, 2014).
A plural understanding of identity places the teacher, facilitator, consultant, scholar, daughter, wife, mother and cross-cultural practitioner within an evolving constellation of situated selves. A more democratic relationship among them allows care and dependability to coexist with boundaries, choice, authority and mutual responsibility. Inayatullah (1999) cautions that selves shaped through travel, relationships and cross-cultural movement require historical depth. Alternative futures become more durable when they remain in conversation with the histories that gave the dominant story its authority.
The emerging worldview redistributes responsibility: I am responsible for the integrity of the invitation, the quality of my preparation and the conditions I can influence. Learners and participants remain responsible for how they enter the inquiry, what they contribute and what they carry forward. This preferred account protects learner agency while allowing educator care to remain generous and bounded.
Myth and Metaphor
At the deepest layer are the stories through which the dominant worldview becomes emotionally and morally persuasive. One is the “idealistic fool,” the educator who sees potential in people and institutions and assumes that making possibility visible will call it into being. Another is the dependable teacher who carries others towards learning. Both contain generosity, hope and belief in education. They become restrictive when they make the educator responsible for converting another person’s potential into commitment and action.
The idiom rú yú dé shuǐ once sustained a related narrative. The fish finds the water to which it belongs and flourishes within the right element. Belonging appears as arrival, while the self appears already formed and waiting for the environment that will reveal it. Repeated movement across cultures and professional settings has made this story insufficient. The water is a changing environment whose currents alter, depths shift and conditions cannot be taken for granted. The fish also changes through sensing, responding and moving within it.
Re-authoring the metaphor opens a preferred future: finding water, reading currents. Finding water acknowledges that environments and relationships nourish or constrain what can become possible. Reading currents adds discernment, agency and responsiveness. It means noticing the forces at work, recognising what can be influenced and choosing a direction without expecting the water to become still. Within this narrative, the educator creates conditions for attention, asks consequential questions and accompanies those willing to move. She remains committed to care without carrying everyone across, recognising that each participant must also swim.
The Becoming of Selves in Changing Waters
An alternative story gains force when it becomes detailed enough to guide action (Milojević, 2014). The emerging self in this essay retains care, preparation and idealism while practising discernment, establishing boundaries and leaving responsibility with others. Executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer work offer settings in which this story can be enacted, tested and revised.
I now understand disappointment differently. I once treated disengagement as evidence that the method, the participants or I had failed, then responded by preparing more, explaining more and working harder. I now see disappointment as information about the relationship between the work and its conditions. I can recognise another person’s potential without assuming responsibility for activating it. Attention, curiosity and commitment must remain with the learner.
Care, preparation and presence remain central to my practice. Dependability now means creating conditions for agency, judgement and dialogue while respecting the responsibilities others must carry. I want to accompany people who are willing to engage with consequential questions and act on what they discover.
My feminist becoming sharpens this shift by locating the ideals of the good daughter, good wife and endlessly dependable woman within wider systems of gendered duty and authority. My hesitation to call myself a feminist marks the distance between inhabiting these expectations and examining them consciously. This perspective reshapes the questions I bring to futures practice: whose future is preferred, whose voices and knowledge count, whose labour sustains change and which forms of power might be reproduced?
The idealistic fool remains part of me. Her faith in people, institutions and the possibility of change still gives the work meaning. I am learning to give that hope boundaries by attending to agency, incentives, power and readiness, and by choosing where my contribution may take root. Executive education, consulting and train-the-trainer practice offer settings where consequential questions, mutual commitment and action can be more closely connected.
Returning to Malaysia brought the person who left into conversation with the practitioner I am becoming. The cultures and places I have inhabited continue to shape how I teach, interpret and relate. When I leave Taipei in August 2027, I will cross another threshold carrying these histories, relationships and desired futures, without knowing which self the next place will call forth.
Rú yú dé shuǐ now holds a different meaning for me. The fish does not simply find its water and flourish unchanged. The water moves, its currents alter and its depths shift. The fish must continue sensing, responding and choosing its direction. Belonging may lie in that capacity to remain present and alive within change, without waiting for the water to become still.
I am still morphing. Still learning. Still becoming.
Only a while the mountain sleeps.
All sleeping women now will awake and move.
—Yosano Akiko, quoted in Bart (1974, p. 43)
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AI Use Disclosure
Large language models (LLMs) were used to support the writing and editing process. All concepts, ideas, interpretations and arguments are the author’s own.