"Sometimes, when I look at myself, what I see is a stranger.
Look in a mirror. Who is that person? What do they think? How do they feel about who runs the world, or how much a beer costs? Did they sit in traffic today? But I already know the answers because that stranger, that person in the mirror that doesn’t look like me, really is me.
I can’t deny it. It might take a few seconds or minutes but in the end I recognize myself and it leaves me feeling profoundly alien. My mental self image is that of a young man at seventeen, with wavy brown hair and a slightly lop-sided grin, wearing a size 'M' shirt and 30x32 jeans. I'm attractive, maybe even handsome. But not now. Now I see a stranger.
Every morning when I shave and brush my teeth or when I catch sight of myself reflected in a shop window I get a moment of frisson. Who I am outside doesn’t match who I am inside. Every inspection of my physicality feels like a betrayal of who I think of as myself.
How did I get here? When did it happen? How did I let it happen? Which decisions, tiny or enormous led me to this? I can feel them, every one, when I see myself through that filter of who I was before. That lie that my brain tells itself, the one that lets me think I’m still a teenager despite the bald head and creaking joints and cane, that filter has been there so long I’ve accepted it as the only truth.
I needed change. I wanted to see me. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to accept that I'm not that idealized version of me and that the flesh I wear now is human, and worthy of being seen. I wanted to be captured in the small movements that make up my presentation to the world so that I could at last present me to myself.
Here I am. See me."
