To know thyself without mirrors

I was looking through my Instagram posts, an endless feed of different versions of myself floating by, when I realized that the lost person I was in those photos no longer exists.

I remember the free-falling feeling of the infinite scroll in the before times when I didn’t know myself at all. I remember the dread of seeing an old photo and finding envy creeping into my veins like ice water. I remember how utterly endless the void felt at the end of the tunnel. My posts in a way were a method of confirming my existence in the solitude of illness. They were meaning in days that felt meaningless. They created a false sense of community in the absence of real friendships. I watch as the drive I had to be an influencer slowly falls off the cliff. 200 likes, 140 likes, 60, 38. The stats creep toward their lows like a clock ticking down the time I felt I had left to be something more.

And the drive was endlessly for more. To be seen, to be beloved, to be fulfilled by a stranger’s comment for a few minutes and then to sink into the couch again as I gasped a ragged breath and went back to an illness-induced sleep. When your life is small, you think that you need infinity to make up for the confinement. But my life has gotten only slightly bigger, a membrane overtaking the adjacent opportunities of friendship and family and delight. My online self was a tool I used to imagine who I could be. Glamour replaced deep contentment in those dreams only because I had only ever tasted the former and didn’t understand the overwhelming hope of the latter.

Two years from those posts I am more well than I have been since I was a teenager. I have a combination of medications and yoga and exercise and financial security that allows the concentric circles of my home life and my citizenship in Austin and my family to spread out and overlap in rich, meaningful patterns. There are no more parties where I wear fake eyelashes. There are dinners over our kitchen table with a couple of bottles of wine and a card game that comes out of the box worn and used. There are birthday parties and nights spent in a rocking chair waiting for lightning bugs to make their way from the darkness.

I imagined in those days of well-lit selfies and constant planning and social media coordinating that when I was finally healthy there would be more festivals and more glamour. I thought to chase those things would be to become more of myself. In reality, when I was no longer bearing the weight of bedridden days, I wanted simplicity for simplicity’s sake. I did become more of myself — that self just isn’t as concerned with the ways in which we prove to the world that we are worthy and loveable and whole. I believe those things for myself now. I do not need the funhouse mirror of social media to echo back those affirmations in its discordant way.

The truth is the woman in those photographs is beautiful and filled with turmoil. She writes things out to the world in the desperate hope that they are true. Her world is small and in many ways less complicated. There are no systems to overthrow. Surface level platitudes are enough to get through a couple of hours at a time. But there is a deep emptiness at the bottom of every paragraph. There is a madness lingering behind the scenes because nothing can fix the brokenness of not knowing who you are or who you want to be.

An unexamined life is not worth living, and yet the endless feed can trick you into believing you’ve examined yourself because there is documentation. But documentation is often devoid of meaning. A picture does not require you to ask, “What do I want out of life — what do I value?” When the events and the parties go away and you are left in the silence of your home, you look yourself in the mirror and are forced to recognize the emptiness of a life that is all outlines and presentation. There is nothing attractive to the outside world about going on the journey to see yourself clearly. The path is not photogenic. It is quiet, it is lonely, and it is not easily conveyed in a paragraph. To choose to know yourself is to choose to give up the performance and to grant yourself permission to do something that will garner praise from no one.

If you’re looking deeply at the building blocks of self, you must resist the urge to explain the complicated feelings that arise every step of the way lest you give a designation to an emotion or a truth before you know its true name. To need to label every step of the process for external eyes is to rob yourself of the value of in-betweenness. Messiness, true messiness and not the kind that is popular in online vernacular, is impossible to communicate because it is so deeply personal. The valley inside of you is not one I can traverse. The valley I have been through is one I could never lead you back through again. To find the roots that tether us to this earth and keep us from floating away is to journey deeply into the unknown that is yours alone.

Perhaps more than anything else, I look back at those pictures and I see someone who is both heavy and rootless. I see a woman weighed down by the unfairness of a world that doesn’t love disabled people enough to provide for them and a woman whose sense of purpose is so hidden that any wind offering peace could blow her away. I see someone desperately searching for wisdom while wearing the costume of someone wise. I see someone who wanted to create herself from scratch instead of digging beneath the rubble to find the person she’d lost.

I have dug in the mire. I have hurt and mourned for the person I will never be. I have sat in stillness and in pain and have pushed up against my limitations. I have accepted that becoming more of myself and less of what I believe I should be will be a lifelong process of shedding other people’s expectations. I have traded in the shallow comfort of online praise for the vulnerable fulfillment of friendships forged by imperfections and shortcomings. I made room in my life for the people whom I love and accepted that meant changing the priorities for my time. I do not believe I have found the bottom of the wellspring yet, but I do know there are limits to the person I can be to everyone else.

Yet here I am, pouring out this explanation of why I’d gone away for so long and still trying to validate all I’ve learned by writing it down. The truth is that the deep knowledge trapped in my gut becomes real to me when it is outside of me. Maybe I will always be bouncing my ideas of who I am off of the walls outside of my mind so that I can be free of them for a little while. Maybe the quiet that I’ve found in these years is created by letting the ideas pour out and live in the free air.

I do not know if I will know myself when I scroll through the feed two years from now. I don’t know if there will be bounds of wisdom that make writing these words feel silly and out of touch. I think we can’t ever really know who we’ll become, only who we hope to be. I do know now that I choose the tools I carry on the road with me. I choose the priorities and the lessons I learn and the friendships I tend to and the paths I start down. I know that there will never be a healthy me formed if my choices are based on how they’ll look to everyone online. If nothing else, my shouts into the void have quieted because I know myself in the way I hoped the people following me would know me. There is peace in knowing that the striving can end. There is peace in knowing that the journey can be a reward in itself.