Who Am I When All the Labels Are Removed?
Take away my name.
Who am I?
Take away my age.
Who am I?
Take away woman, mother, grandmother, writer, seeker.
Who am I?
Take away the roles I have played.
The work I have done.
The places I have lived.
Who am I?
Take away the stories of what has happened to me.
What I survived.
What I lost.
What I found.
What I regret.
What I cherish.
Who am I?
Take away what others have called me.
Take away what I have called myself.
Take away the identities I have outgrown...
and even the ones I still hold dear.
Who am I?
And then...
silence.
Because perhaps I have spent a lifetime answering that question with nouns.
So what happens when there are no nouns left?
I am the heartbeat beneath the biography.
I am the breath that arrived before language named it.
I am the pulse that existed before its been measured.
I am the blade of grass bending beneath a foot...
and rising again when it passes.
I am the scent of rain arriving before the storm...
announcing something the eye cannot yet see.
I am reflection—
life revealing itself through what I notice.
I am mirror—
offering another a glimpse of themselves...
while discovering myself in what they reflect back to me.
I am the silence before the sentence.
The space between one thought and another.
I am curiosity leaning toward what’s not understood.
I am tenderness without needing a reason.
I am grief because something mattered.
I am laughter escaping before composure can catch it.
I am the hand reaching.
The hand receiving.
And the space between them...
where meeting becomes possible.
I am not Love because I have mastered loving.
I am Love in motion—
sometimes graceful,
sometimes clumsy,
sometimes frightened,
sometimes astonishingly brave...
but always moving.
I am earth beneath bare feet.
Warmth finding skin.
Wind moving through an open window.
Water remembering its way downhill.
I am flowers blooming.
I am sunrises and sunsets
I am the ordinary becoming intimate...
because I stayed long enough to notice it.
I am all of it.
And so much more.
Every word.
Every image.
Every experience.
Every version of myself that has lived long enough to answer when someone asks,
"Who are you?"
And...
I am none of it.
Because even these are labels.
More beautiful, perhaps.
More spacious.
But labels still.
The moment I say,
"This is who I am,"
life moves...
and introduces me to another expression of myself I have never met.
Perhaps that is why the question has become more interesting to me than the answer.
Who am I...
when I stand beneath a wide sky?
Who am I...
when someone places their tenderness in my hands?
Who am I...
when no one is watching?
Who am I...
when I stop trying to become?
Who am I...
before memory tells me who I have been?
Who am I...
when tomorrow introduces me to someone within myself I have yet to know?
Perhaps I was never meant to arrive at a answer.
Perhaps there is no last label waiting beneath all the others.
Perhaps...
I am the experiencing.
The heartbeat.
The breath.
The rain.
The grass.
The mirror.
The reflection.
The pulse.
Love in motion.
I am all of it.
And none of it.
I am this one particular life...
while somehow belonging to all of life.
So...
Who am I?
Perhaps, when every answer has fallen away...
there is only this:
I am.
