Warriors Keep Learning

Stay curious about yourself — and start small.

It's back-to-school season. Notebooks and pencils, fresh starts, that particular smell of a new box of crayons. And somewhere along the way we got the idea that all of that — the learning, the growing, the being a student — was a phase. Something you age out of. You finish school, you become a Person With Opinions, and the learning quietly stops.

But here's something I believe all the way down: a warrior never stops training. Warriors don't arrive. They keep learning, keep sharpening, keep getting back up and going again — not because they're broken and need fixing, but because they're alive and still becoming. And the single most important subject to stay a student of isn't out there somewhere. It's you.

The question is how. Because "stay curious about yourself" can sound like a lot of navel-gazing, and that's not what I mean at all. You don't learn who you are by staring inward and waiting for insight. You learn it the way you learn anything — by trying things. Every new thing you attempt hands you a little more information about who you actually are.

Let me tell you what taught me that.

The deal my aunt made me

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When I was a kid, I was an aggressively picky eater. Not the cute kind — the kind ruled entirely by texture, where a food could taste perfectly fine and still be completely impossible because of how it felt in my mouth. It was a real struggle, and most adults just fought me about it.

My aunt didn't. She made me a deal instead.

Every time I tried three new foods, I had to call her and report back — which ones I liked, which ones I didn't. To this day I don't know whether she had an incredible memory or a running list tucked in a drawer somewhere. (I strongly suspect the list.) Because at the end of every one of those calls, she'd set a date to have me over for a meal — and the meal was built around the new things I'd told her I liked, sometimes made a whole different way than I'd first tried them.

So I tried things. I reported back. I got celebrated for it, and fed for it, and known for it. And somewhere in all those phone calls, without anyone ever using the word, I was learning. Not just about food — about myself. What I actually liked. That "I don't eat that" could quietly turn into "oh — I love that, actually." That trying the scary thing was safe, and every so often even delicious.

I learned. I grew. And it started with three small bites and a phone call.

It took me years to understand what she was actually doing. She wasn't teaching me to eat green beans. She was training me — gently, one phone call at a time — not to be afraid of what I didn't know yet. To walk toward the unfamiliar instead of away from it. To be brave enough to try, curious enough to wonder, adventurous enough to find out what I thought before I'd decided I was against it. And — though I wouldn't have had words for it for years — she was teaching me to question why I'd decided I didn't like something in the first place. How many of my "no"s were actually mine, and how many were just fear wearing the costume of a preference? She was quietly raising a kid who wouldn't spend her whole life flinching at the new. That's a warrior's education, and she slipped it to me disguised as dinner.

The concept doesn't change — just the setup

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It's different when you're an adult, obviously. Nobody's making you a deal. Nobody sets up the meal at the end and celebrates you for being brave enough to try. The stakes feel higher and the stage feels more public, and worst of all, by now you've mostly decided who you are — "I'm not a crafty person," "I'm not athletic," "I don't do things like that" — and those decisions quietly close doors you never notice are closed.

But the concept underneath is exactly the same as three new foods and a phone call. You try something new. You pay attention to what it stirs in you. You keep what lights you up and let go of what doesn't. And in the process, you meet a version of yourself you hadn't been introduced to yet.

That's the whole thing. Pick up the pottery class, the language app, the trail you've never hiked, the instrument, the recipe that intimidates you, the paint. Not because you'll be good at it — being good at it is not the point, and it never was for the picky kid on the phone either. The point is the trying, because the trying is how you keep learning who you're becoming.

Because here's what happens when we stop: we calcify. We mistake the person we were at twenty-five for a finished, permanent fact, and we spend the next forty years defending a self-definition we never even chose on purpose. That's not settledness. That's just a door quietly rusting shut. And you are so much more of a work in progress than that — thank God — right up until the very end.

Start small

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You do not need a grand reinvention. You don't need to become a whole new person; that was never the assignment. You just need three new foods and a phone call — the grown-up version.

So start small. Try one new thing this week — genuinely new, a little outside the lines of who you've decided you are. Then do the thing my aunt taught me to do: report back to yourself. Not "was I good at it," but did I like it? What did it stir? What did it tell me about me? Keep whatever lit you up. Try it again, maybe a different way. Let go of the rest, no guilt.

That's staying curious about yourself. That's the training that never ends — and the never-ending is the good news, not the bad. It means you're not stuck. It means there's more of you to meet. It means the door you thought had rusted shut was only ever leaning closed.

Warriors keep learning.

Go try three new things.

— Jen