The People We Used to Be

Recently, on my fifty-seventh birthday, I found myself looking through thousands of photographs on my phone. In one of them, I found myself staring at someone I knew well yet hardly recognized. It reminded me of Odysseus returning home after twenty years in Homer’s The Odyssey. He survived Cyclops, storms, wars, and monsters. But perhaps the greatest change was not the world around him. It was the man who returned.

None of us are the person we were ten, twenty, thirty, or even forty years ago, depending on your age as you read this. I know I am not.

Unlike Odysseus, I never angered the sea god Poseidon. But, like all of us, I have fought my own battles: the death of our first child after just eighteen days, OCD, hearing the word cancer and, thankfully, surviving it. I am not the same person I was even a year ago.

Age changes our appearance. Life changes who we are. The person staring back from an old photograph is familiar not because of the face, but because we remember the journey that transformed it. We do not become one person in life, we become many.

Even over the past year, I have written my first book, begun writing essays, prepared to launch a podcast, spoken publicly about my experiences, and faced another chronic health challenge. I am not quite the person I was twelve months ago.

Sometimes it's difficult to identify the moment we became someone new. For me, there were two: the diagnosis of OCD in my early twenties and the death of our first child, Matthew Jude. After those experiences, the world looked the same, but I didn't.

Your turning point may have been something else. A divorce. A diagnosis. Military service. Losing a parent. Becoming one. Sometimes a single day changes us. Sometimes life reshapes us so gradually that we don't notice until years later.

When did we become someone different?

Do we ever stop becoming someone new?

Which versions of ourselves were the most authentic?

Do we judge our younger selves for the errors we make, and can we forgive ourselves for them?

I do not know if there is an age when we finally become who we were meant to be. I suspect there isn't.

Perhaps life isn't about arriving at a finished version of ourselves at all.

Perhaps our goal was never to remain the person we once were.

Perhaps the goal was simply to keep becoming.