Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Dove

Dove’s line treats childhood less like a warm-up act and more like an ignition. “Come alive for the first time” is a deliberately theatrical phrase: it suggests that before a certain flash of recognition, we’re moving through the world on borrowed scripts. The sentence doesn’t romanticize innocence; it pins identity to a moment of sudden voltage, when sensation, language, or desire finally locks into place and you feel the click of selfhood.

The subtext is that “becoming” isn’t continuous. It’s episodic, even curated. Dove doesn’t say we discover ourselves; we “go back” and select scenes from the archive, replaying them until they harden into origin stories. That’s both tender and slightly unsparing. Memory here is not a neutral record but an editor: it trims the sprawling mess of childhood into a single, usable “This is when I became myself,” a phrase that sounds like confession and branding at once.

Context matters because Dove has spent a career writing about how the private self is formed under public pressures - race, history, family lore, the expectations that hover around a Black girl’s body and voice in America. In that light, “became myself” carries stakes beyond personal nostalgia. It implies a triumph of interior life: a moment when the “I” is not merely assigned by others but claimed. The quote works because it understands identity as both accident and craft - a spark we can’t force, and a story we keep choosing to tell.