Unrecognizable
My grandpa is in Hawaii right now. He was telling me about meeting up with old friends he hadn't seen in about ten years. He was waiting outside his hotel for them to pick him up and saw a few people standing nearby. None of them looked familiar. There was a woman, but she couldn't be his friend. She was far too different from the person he remembered.
Then she pulled out her phone. She dialed a number. His phone rang. It was her. He just didn't recognize the way time had changed her.
We laughed about it. But it stayed with me.
Vanity says I want to remain recognizable. I'll take every "you look just like you did" and "you haven't changed" comment.
But when I think about the alternative—remaining exactly the same person I was five or ten years ago—that's what actually scares me.
I want to be unrecognizable. Not physically. But in the ways that matter. In how I show up, how I listen, how I handle the hard conversations, how I move through a day. I want the person I was at thirty or forty to look at me now and not quite recognize who I've become.
The growth doesn't usually come from one big moment. It's small. The discipline of writing each week. A conversation that shifts how I see something. A year where a theme keeps surfacing and I finally pay attention.
If the woman I was ten years ago passed me today, I hope she'd have to look twice. I hope she'd have to pull out her phone and dial, just to be sure.
It's me. And, in the ways that matter, I hope it isn't.