To all the versions of me I've loathed before

on the many selves we carry within us

This week’s newsletter is from the archives, a piece I wrote several years ago when few people but my parents read my posts. I still really love some of these old pieces, so I’ve decided to reshare the occasional old post for readers who are new to this newsletter. To all those who have read this one before: thank you so very much for sticking with me all these years. -MM

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Most Wednesdays when my kids are with my parents for the day, I spend my first kid-free hour working out, a little slice of self care before I run my errands, do my domestic chores, and write this newsletter.

We meet up to exchange the kids at our local YMCA, which is where I usually do my workouts. But today it was too nice out to slog through an indoor treadmill run; I opted to run in the adjacent park instead. I’ve always loved that particular park—it’s the one I grew up going to—and today it was outfitted in its Sunday best, the impressive array of trees and flowers out in full bloom. The people were out in full bloom, too. As I ran, I found myself weaving through little clusters of power walkers and stroller pushers, people stopping every six feet so their dogs could sniff a different patch of grass.

The park is big if you’re sitting on one side and looking across at the other, but not so big if you’re jogging laps around it. The longer I ran, the more times I passed the same people, and the more new faces joined the fray. It began to feel like the Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom, like I was speeding rapidly through time, viewing different iterations of myself in both the past and future.

First there were the young mothers, probably only ten years my junior but seeming impossibly young with their dewy skin and oversized iced coffees, their months-old babies strapped into side by side strollers. I caught a snippet of their conversation (“She’s sitting up in the highchair now!”) and I remembered being them, a young mother full of fear and hope and so very many questions.

As I locked eyes with one of the women, I felt as if I was walking past a version of myself from ten years ago, when all that waited for me in the near future—the first steps and adorably mispronounced words and compounding love—was still unknowable, had yet to arrive. I wanted to tell them how much better and more rewarding it gets, how much more love you can fit in your heart than they’d ever realize right now.

By the flower gardens, a mom with a squirmy toddler on her hip placed her daughter down on shaky legs to chase after a butterfly. I was her not so long ago too, exhausted from chasing two toddlers running in opposite directions. The version of myself in those years was spread thin and brimming with love, trying so hard to get it all right that it nearly crushed her. I remembered the bottles of wine that filled the recycling bin, the search for a village of other moms, the long days of block building and swing pushing, with one eye on the clock for my husband’s return.

Around the next corner, I passed a twenty-something year old woman with long, confident strides, power walking and talking on speakerphone. I remembered being her too, charging through the streets of Boston at twenty-one, dragging my shopping cart a mile and a half through a tunnel of bitter wind to the grocery store, where I stuffed my cart with things that could never fill the yawning hole within me. This woman was, of course, a stranger, but I wanted to hug that past iteration of me, to tell her that in a year’s time she would get help for her eating disorder, that this one brave decision would change the entire trajectory of her life.

By the park steps, I passed a young couple strolling slowly, holding hands and laughing at their own private jokes. I remembered being her, the girlfriend and then the wife, the future laid out before my husband and I in every direction, like a flat country road extending out toward the horizon. That version of me was so sure their union would make her whole, would halt her searching and fill that bottomless void within her. She wouldn’t know for many years that, as wonderful and life-giving as her marriage would turn out to be, she was already whole and complete, all by herself.

I passed the giant redwood tree, still standing, whose canopy of leaves sheltered me as I wrote my stories on the warm sunny days when my creative writing teacher unleashed us to the park from the library overlooking it. I remembered being that girl, the one who would check fifteen books out of the library at once, a real-life Matilda carting home a wagon full of her spoils, trying to make sense of the world through the written word.

I passed the hill where I once ate a picnic lunch in the sunshine with a friend of mine, now two years dead from cancer. I strode by the fountain into which my kids threw countless chubby fistfuls of coins over the years, the pond where they loved to watch the turtles sunning themselves on the drain cover. I took a detour out of the park and ran along the downtown sidewalks, passing storefronts and restaurants, ghosts of my past streaming by. The jewelry store where my aunts bought me shiny pearls to add to my necklace; the dress store where I bought my wedding gown; the restaurant, now shuttered, where we convened after the funeral of the first boy I ever loved, dead at thirty-four. All those lives, those old versions of me, whizzing by in my periphery.

For so many years, I was ashamed of these women I used to be—the versions of me that were scared and depressed, lonely and addicted, that felt like both a naive child and a world-weary octogenarian. I thought that by changing my behavior, forming new opinions, and erasing old habits, I could shed those versions of myself entirely, become a whole new person. It’s part of what drew me to religion in my late twenties—the language of being washed clean, born again, made new.

Recently, I read poet Maggie Smith’s memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. While I didn’t love the book, one message in particular stuck with me: the idea that the past versions of ourselves are like nesting dolls, all contained within our current self. When I think of it this way, I feel a maternal instinct come over me, like I have a responsibility to nurture these old selves, to provide a good home for them. I have this visual of splitting myself open like some ripe fruit, and finding all these versions of myself waiting inside, a hard-won prize. In this vision, it’s all there: the heartbreaks and bad haircuts, the crushing loneliness and unfortunate outfit choices, all mixed in with the tiny, endless joys of being alive.

In this more expansive view of my past selves, I find that is only because of those versions of me—the curious little girl trying to make sense of the world through writing, the lonely twenty year old, the overwhelmed young mother—that I am who I am today. She made countless sacrifices so I could have the life I have now. I am learning not to be ashamed of her, but rather to be proud of what she has overcome.

Before I left the park, I saw a high school classmate’s mother pushing a little girl in a stroller, presumably her granddaughter. The woman’s eyes were cheerful, her posture relaxed and self-assured. I reflected on how many versions of me I will have nested inside me by the time I reach her age, how this current version of me, the one running these very sidewalks, will be tucked in there with all the others. What a privilege it will be to bear witness to all those selves, I thought, even the ones I haven’t yet met.

I smiled at her, my future self, and kept on running.

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