Versions of Me

One of my senior pictures, summer 2004

Have you ever gone back and looked at old pictures of yourself? I do, sometimes. We spend so much time looking out from behind our eyes that looking into them can feel like you're looking at someone else. 

Hanging out in a friend's kitchen, summer 2007

Sometimes, I look into the eyes of these old mes and remember how innocent and hopeful I was. Innocent of all the hard and challenging things that lay ahead of me, innocent of the disappointment of not facing those challenges head-on and overcoming them the way I would like to think I can. Hopeful that things would unfold the way I thought they would, hopeful that all those things I'd dreamed of were coming to me just the way I'd dreamed they would.

In the Young Adult fiction nook of our town library (my favorite place), fall 2007

The old me could have never have imagined the current me. In some ways we're very different people, and in others we're very much the same. I wonder if parts of her still linger, or if somehow the current version of ourselves gets "saved" over the older ones, like drafts of a Word document, and the only hints of those old versions of ourselves are the moments captured in photographs.

In the MTC, winter 2007