I like to think we are all born pure and open, a clean slate yearning for love, safety, and connection. We can be anything, but we can’t control the world around us, we are at the mercy of others.

It is life and other people that often change and damage us.

I have no idea what we feel and think when we are born, but I keep reading that we are shaped, supported, encouraged, or neglected as we grow older. That shapes who we become.

I have undergone a lot of change lately.

I dress differently, eat differently, learn differently, anger differently, listen differently, love differently,  meditate differently, write differently, photograph differently,  and sleep differently.

I have been losing weight for some months now, so I am beginning to look differently. That is strange.

Maria and I talked today in the car about change and how each of us has changed since we married ten years ago. I told her I loved onions and vegetables, and she shook her head and said, “you are becoming a different person.”

I laughed and said no, I don’t think so.

I am beginning to be the person I was and was meant to be. She got it and nodded her head.

I said we were both alike; I thought the story of our marriage was really about two people helping each other,  not to become a different person but the one we are at the core and have wanted to be.

Maria is very much the same person I married, and I am the same person she married. People can change, but that is often on the outside. Change on the inside is very different.

“I don’t believe we can ever change who we are,” I said. ” I don’t believe I have changed; I have become the real me I was once and hoped to be. I can never be someone else and don’t want to be.”

We both laughed and nodded our heads.

I have, I said, escaped from the other me.

“You can’t fake who you are,” I said, “not from someone who knows and loves you.”

Maria smiled. “When we meet,” she said, “I felt you were the first person in my life to see the real me.

And, I added, “you were the first person in my life to see the real me, not the one I had somehow become.”

Neither one of us is much into working over the past or blaming others for our problems. We all do the best we can for as long as we can. I believe that very strongly.

“We have helped the other be ourselves,” Maria said, agreeing, “not someone else.”

We both want so badly for the other not to be someone different, but the person we know to be there and have always seen in the other.

Perhaps this is why identity is so important to me and why I react so strongly and sometimes angrily to the endless number of people who insist on telling me who to be, what to say, and how to live.

There is no end to them; social media cranks them out like locusts in Nebraska. I can either accept this or jump in the ocean.

Most of them mean well, I’m sure, yet being told who I am both by people I trusted and by strangers is something that makes me both suspicious and angry. That’s where my life fell off track in the first place.

I was finally able to tell myself what to do and how to be, and that’s how I got my real life back.

That doesn’t mean I’m a saint or a wonderful human or better than anyone else. I haven’t changed at the core, and I doubt I ever will. I am me.

I am just becoming who I was and want to be. That is the miracle of my life.

This is at the core of Maria’s closeness with me and our love for one another. We always know what the other is talking about, even when it’s difficult for others to understand.

We see right into the soul of each other, which is, perhaps, what love is.

I keep trying and hoping to explain this, and perhaps I’m getting there. Either way, this conversation is part of my recovery and search for a life of love and meaning. I’m getting there.

I can see it, smell it, and sometimes even touch it.

Maria understands this completely because she also had her life taken away from her and has worked hard to restore it and get it back. She can smell it also.

At the core of all of this is this: My life is changing all the time, but I am not changing at all.

As we drove back home from the supermarket and a visit with friends, I asked Maria if she thought I had changed.

“Well,” she said, “you are dressing better, and I never thought you would love broccoli and onions, but I see more tolerance and calm in you. That is different than before. Otherwise, you are the person I saw when we first met, and you are the person I see and love now.”

How nice, I thought, someone loves the person I was, the one inside of me.