The Woman in the Mirror @Liz Flaherty

Do you ever feel as if you lost yourself somewhere along the way? If you've had a bad time or an extraordinarily good one, do you ever look in the mirror and wonder exactly who's looking back at you? Because you've changed, and you're not sure what to do with the person who's there.

I'm feeling thoughty here--can you tell? I'm always, always whining about how much I hate change, yet when I look back--over bad times and extraordinarily good ones, it's an ongoing cycle, isn't it? It's what keeps life new and interesting. And, yeah, sometimes awful.

But if it weren't for change, and my kicking-and-screaming caving to it, I would:

• Never have changed jobs and I'd have been stuck with working one I hated.
• Never have married the man I did because he wasn't the first person I loved.
• I'd never have had a third child.
• I'd have given up the first time a publisher said Nope.
• Or maybe the second.
• For sure by the twenty-third.
• I'd have kept my hair short.
• And let it go gray.
• I'd still be writing longhand on lined paper and thinking I wasn't good enough.
• For anything,

So, no, I don't always know the woman in the mirror, or, for that matter, the man I'm married to. I don't always like either of us. There are days when I do feel like I've lost the person I was. Because I have. Because every re-invention in every time of life is change, it's often hard, and it's always necessary. I think maybe I like it.