Knock Knock

I've been noticing how many different versions of me seem to be wandering around lately. There's the version my oldest friends know, the one my family knows, the one people from my corporate life remember, the one who built Blueprint4Joy, the one who got married and the one who packed everything into storage and rather enthusiastically announced she was becoming a nomad.

And apparently there's also a woman attempting to date. We should probably discuss her another day.

I've been thinking about how the people in our lives each know a slightly different version of us. Your childhood friends remember things about you that people you met at work will never know. Your family knows a version no one else quite gets to see. Someone you loved may know who you were during one particular chapter, while someone who comes into your life later gets to meet you without any of that history at all.

None of them necessarily knows the whole you. I'm not sure we do either.

It's funny how people can knock on the door of our lives and bring pieces of us with them. Someone new can introduce us to a version of ourselves we've never met. Someone from years ago can show up and suddenly there you are, laughing in a way you haven't laughed in months.

You remember things about yourself you hadn't exactly forgotten, but maybe hadn't been using either. An old friend came to visit this month and that's exactly what happened. He knew me long before this particular version of my life existed.

He didn't fix anything. He reminded me of someone.

Me.

And it made me wonder how often we mistake the version of ourselves we're experiencing right now for who we are, especially when life is changing. A hard season can become so consuming that we start to think the person navigating it is the whole person. We're the woman getting divorced, the person who lost the job, the daughter caring for a parent, the new mom, the empty nester or the person who moved somewhere new and doesn't know anyone yet.

But those are circumstances and chapters. They're not the entirety of who we are.

This month I've been driving a lot, staying in different places and settling into this nomad experiment I rather enthusiastically signed myself up for. I've celebrated a friend's birthday, held a brand-new baby, laughed with people who have known me forever and met people who know almost nothing about me.

I've even tried dating.

Again, another day.

Through all of it, I've noticed that I don't feel like the same person every day. Some days I feel adventurous and curious about what comes next. Some days I feel completely like myself. Some days I bump into a version of myself I haven't seen in a while and think, There you are.

And some days still taste like yesterday.

I used to think moving forward meant those days would eventually disappear, that at some point the new life would become real enough that the old one wouldn't reach into it anymore. I'm not so sure that's how it works.

Maybe moving forward isn't becoming a completely new version of ourselves. Maybe it's gathering up the versions that still belong to us. The woman who loves adventure. The sister. The friend. The aunt. The woman who laughs too loudly, talks to strangers and apparently thinks having all of her belongings in storage is a perfectly reasonable life plan.

They're all still here.

And maybe that's useful to remember when we don't particularly like the version of ourselves who showed up today. A sad day doesn't make us a sad person. A confused day doesn't mean we've lost our clarity. Missing something doesn't mean we want it back and feeling like yesterday doesn't mean we're headed there.

We're allowed to contain more than one thing at a time. We can be moving forward and miss what was. We can be excited about what's coming and have a day when we want something familiar. We can discover completely new parts of ourselves while being unexpectedly reunited with old ones.

Maybe the people who know us along the way are part of how we remember that. They hold little pieces of our history and sometimes reflect them back when we need them. They remind us how we used to laugh, what we cared about, what we were brave enough to try and who we were before whatever currently feels enormous became enormous.

And the people we're just meeting can do something equally interesting. Without all that history, they aren't expecting us to be who we've always been. Sometimes that gives us room to discover something about ourselves too.

Maybe that's one of the gifts of connection. We get to see ourselves through different eyes.

Sometimes someone new introduces us to a version of ourselves we haven't met yet. Sometimes someone we've known forever reminds us of a version we've forgotten. And sometimes, without even realizing they're doing it, someone simply holds up a mirror that says:

There you are.

Maybe we don't have to decide which version is the real one.

Maybe we're all of them.

If You’re Curious…

• Who in your life brings out a version of you that you really like?

• Is there a part of yourself you've been missing lately? Who or what helps you reconnect with it?

• What if a day that tastes like yesterday doesn't mean you're moving backward?