Almost Me

There is an intimacy with ourselves that we struggle to reach, although we inhabit ourselves all our lives. We learn early how others see us and sometimes carry their gaze so deep within us that we begin to search for ourselves through their eyes. We become recognisable to those around us before we have understood ourselves. We know ourselves with an incomplete familiarity, continuing to exist through deferred desires, unspoken answers and possibilities to which life has given no form.

Some renunciations are so old that we mistake them for our own nature. When we begin to understand them, we look with tenderness upon those versions of ourselves that helped us remain close to others, sometimes at the cost of growing distant from ourselves. Yet we are not bound to remain the face we learned to wear in order to be loved. Each day, something within us can break free of its old contours, try another form, become. We are never, once and for all, who we have been.

We are also the living space between versions, and the freedom to meet ourselves again and say, with gentleness and courage, that this is me, and I will still be me, in the process of becoming.