He was cleaning out a drawer when he found it. A photo from a trip he took at twenty-eight. He remembered the trip. He remembered being happy.
He looked at the photo for a long time.
He recognized his own face. The smile, the hair, the particular way he held his shoulders. All of that was familiar.
But there was something in his eyes in the photo that he couldn’t find when he looked in the mirror now. A kind of openness. An expectation that things were still being figured out.
He put the photo on the kitchen counter and kept walking past it all week.
We don’t notice when we lose parts of ourselves. The changes happen in such small increments, over so many years, that we never catch the moment any particular thing goes. We just look back one day and notice the distance between who we are and who we were, and we can’t trace the path between them. Something got traded along the way. We just don’t always know what, or when, or for what.
I have looked at old photos and felt that. The recognition that isn’t quite complete. The version of yourself that believed things you no longer believe. That wanted things you stopped wanting without choosing to stop.
He kept the photo on the counter all week. That feels like the right response. Not nostalgia exactly. Just staying with the question for a while.
What did we trade, and was it worth it?
Growing up requires giving things up. We know this. Certain dreams, certain ways of seeing the world, certain versions of open that close as we accumulate experience.
Some of that is necessary. Some of it is loss. The hard part is distinguishing between the two.
He’s forty-one. He’s not twenty-eight. He can’t go back to the openness in that photo. But maybe there’s a version of it available to him now that he hasn’t looked for yet. Something that knows more and is still willing to not know things.
Some things worth sitting with:
- Is there something you were at twenty-five or thirty that you miss and haven’t named?
- What did you trade for what you have now, and do you think it was fair?
- Is there a version of yourself you’ve given up that you don’t actually have to?
Something similar runs through He Achieved Everything on His List. Then He Couldn’t Make a New One., if you want to keep sitting with it.
Inspired by a real story shared anonymously online.