Is that still me?
on where our former selves go...
What happens to our old selves as we grow and transform?
Are the former versions buried under new layers?
Are they released or peeled away as we find our true essence?
Last month, a friend of mine started a new job and was showing me all of her cute new work attire.
I took one look down at my rumpled striped shirt and my repeat black leggings (holes and all) and laughed.
But, wait! I have some old outfit pics I can send you, I exclaimed in response, and found the album I kept on my phone, back from when I would snap elevator mirror “selfies” of my ensembles to remember good combinations and which boots worked with what skirts.
I sent her off five or six shots, some of me in suits and others a bit more casual but still “put together.”
“Oooh. Corporate Kim!” she responded.
Two days after this text exchange, I stood in front of my closet, debating what to wear for that day’s writer’s retreat. I was hosting.
Without really thinking about it, my hand found its way to the far reaches of my closet and pulled out a jacket I hadn’t thought about in years.
Well, until I’d seen it two days earlier in one of the pics I’d sent off to that friend.
It wouldn’t even be outlandish to say it might have last been worn the day of the photo back in 2016. (While I’ve cleaned out my closet many times over in the last decade in a desire for minimalism, this is a piece that’s always remained.)
It’s a motorcycle jacket design and shape, but cloth. Unlike most of the things I wear these days it’s not black or grey or blackish grey or greyish black.
Without thinking further, I pulled the jacket from its hanger, and threw it on. I grabbed my keffiyeh and went to take a photo in the mirror.
Here I was, getting ready to go to work again. Here I was, in this same jacket.
But this time it was on a Saturday.
This time, my work was going to meet my people.
This time, I was showing up in all my authenticity and truth.
This time, my work was writing, convening, connecting, and community.
This time, my work felt like me walking in my purpose.
I don’t know what was going through my head on that day eight years ago when I was wearing that jacket in the first picture.
Sadly, I was going through a years-long writing lull at the time and don’t have journals or much captured from back then to orient myself to that point in time outside of some hazy memories.
I could have been perfectly happy and content that day.
This isn’t about revisionist’s history. Nor is this about becoming a new person per say. (The rollercoaster doesn’t stop. In some ways, maybe we are who we are who we are.)
But, perhaps what this is about is about how we can change our context.
Sometimes that’s big huge notable shifts like leaving your job to go start a writing business.
Sometimes it’s smaller, almost imperceptible shifts—the slightest step in one direction that may lead to another or another or another or not.
I’m not sure if the layers of that old Kim are beneath the current veneer or if I shed those layers to make room to welcome the new/real (?) me.
Or, has everything simply alchemized together as I evolve and grow and further become? I’m still working that all out, though ultimately I don’t know if pulling it apart to understand it really even matters.
What I have found, though, is one notable difference between me today and the me in that picture.
Today, I’m running this pen across the page. Today, I’m capturing.
Eight years from now, if I stumble across the new photo from the writer’s retreat a few weeks ago, I won’t wonder how I felt or what I was thinking.
I’ll be able to know.
And that’s because now I do (consistently, with love & frustration & pain & joy) what I know I’ve always been meant to do.
Now, I (in the words of Anais Nin) “taste life twice.”
Now, I write.
