When You Recognize Yourself

I have a friend who has lost 40 pounds in the last six months. She said—like many people do—when she was heavier and saw herself in photos, she didn’t recognize herself. And now that she is 40 pounds lighter, she looks in the mirror at her reflection and says, “Oh, there she is!”

There she is!

Such a beautiful thing to recognize one’s self.

Ever hear yourself talking and mid-sentence, you find yourself outside the one doing the talking, hearing this weird voice, and thinking, who is that voice?

Ever get so caught up in your life or circumstances that you forget the you who is the architect of it all?

I recently had a chemical peel on my face—don’t ask me why, except that when I went in for an ordinary facial my esthetician suggested it—she said, “Your skin will feel so good afterwards!”

I thought, it’s a pandemic, I’m locked in at home, why not?

It took my skin weeks to recover. It burned, itched, and peeled for 10 days. It did not go unnoticed on me on how foolish it is to put chemicals on the face and let it burn. Perhaps I was waiting to see who was under there—what me might emerge.

In the end, my sunspots—from stretching out on tin foil as a teenager and playing too much tennis outdoors—did lighten, my skin felt smoother, but essentially, I was the same, 51-year-old woman looking at myself in the mirror.

There she is.

But I was okay with it. Happy to have my face back, not to have to slather on moisturizers every second of the day to help my skin recover.

Once, when I was a senior in high school, the town paper ran a huge photo of me in a leotard in the middle of a gymnastics floor routine. I had this intense look on my face—a look that showed I had no idea a reporter was taking my photo. And while everyone around me thought it was cool, I was horrified. I felt so exposed. Who is that, I thought?
While I loved gymnastics, I don’t think I ever sinked fully into it. I never felt like me while doing it.

When are those times when you are most you? When do you think to yourself, “There he is!”

Maybe you’re most you when sitting with friends drinking a few beers around a fire pit. Or when you’re running. Maybe it's when you're giving a presentation to a large group at work. Or when you are writing/pursuing your favorite form of art. Maybe it’s playing ping pong with your kids.

As we go into 2021, I issue a challenge to all of us. Reflect on what would make you think, “There he is!” And then go do it.

Rumi put it beautifully, calling each of us there: “And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?”

It's there that you are.