For many years, clients knew me as Jonni O’Connor.
Then life changed, as life does. I married the love of my later life and became Jonni Gray. And yet lately, I’ve felt something older and deeper returning to the surface.
What I’ve come to understand
At this stage of life, I understand identity differently. I no longer see names as replacements, but as layers of lived experience. I think of them as chapters, and even archaeology.
The name O’Connor carries the young woman who first stepped into this work. She was the seeker, the writer, the mother, the therapist who sat with tens of thousands of people in their deepest moments before she fully understood her own.
The name Gray carries the woman I became afterward. She’s been shaped by love, loss, endurance, marriage, grief, humour, survival, wisdom, cats & ducks, and an entirely different kind of becoming.
Both are true.
And I feel that ‘becoming’ doesn’t mean simplifying ourselves into one neat identity, but becoming spacious enough to hold every version with tenderness.
So this feels less like a reinvention and more like a homecoming
For the last few months, I’ve been changing my name to Jonni O’Connor Gray.
It’s been an organic process. I’m not going backward or erasing anything. I’m gathering all the pieces of myself into one name, and standing there honestly.
The energy this week
This week, we move from slow, grounded energy into something lighter and more curious. The season of building is giving way to the season of exploring. And what we’re exploring is the energy of duality, which I see as the ability to hold two things at once without needing to choose between them.
Think of it as twin energy. It’s spacious, not split. Expansive.
At the same time, there’s a homecoming quality feel, like a pull to what feels emotionally familiar. Maybe it’s the people and places that have known you longest. Or the parts of yourself you’ve set aside for a while, because life asked you to become someone else for a time.
That’s why this week, you might feel those older parts of yourself returning as guests you’re finally ready to welcome home.
The belief that won’t survive this week
“I have to choose one version of myself.”
You don’t. You can be the person you were AND the person you’ve become AND the person you’re becoming. You can carry the name you were given and the name you chose. You can hold your history and your future in the same breath.
That’s integration.
You’re gathering your selves together. Expanding. Becoming spacious enough to hold it all.
Why this matters
We live in a culture that loves a clean narrative. Before and after. Old self, new self. Who you were versus who you are.
But that’s not how becoming actually works.
Becoming is accumulation. Yes, it’s archaeology. It’s layer after layer of experience, loss, love, and learning, and then one day, standing in the middle of all of it and owning it all. This is me. All of it. Every chapter, and every name.
This week, I’m standing there as Jonni O’Connor Gray.
And if you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to gather your own pieces, and stop choosing between versions of yourself and start integrating them, this is your week too.
Jonni
P.S. If you’re in the middle of your own integration of not becoming someone new, but becoming more fully yourself, then my UNLIMITED might be the right container. I LOVE UNLIMITED. 7, 30, or 90 days of real-time support from someone who sees the whole picture — the psychology, the patterns, and the soul of the thing.
P.P.S. The dragonfly in the logo is not new. He’s been with me for a very long time. 😉
