Recognize Yourself Again.
I was sitting at a red light at the corner of Main Street and Highland Avenue in my town last March when I glanced into my driver's side mirror and saw an older woman in the car behind me, and it took me a full eight seconds to understand that I was not looking at the car behind me. I was looking at myself. There was no car behind me. The woman in the mirror was me, in my own car, looking back at me from the angle that my side mirror caught when I tilted my head. I sat at that red light for the entire green cycle. The car behind me — there was a car behind me by then — honked. I did not move. He went around me. I sat there until the light turned red again, and then green again, and then I drove home in a way I do not remember driving. My name is Eileen. I'm 57. I live in a small town in central Pennsylvania called Lewisburg, in a stone house I have lived in since 1992 with my husband Tom who is a retired high school principal. We have three grown children and four grandchildren who range from 2 to 11. I work three mornings a week as the office manager at a small veterinary clinic on the outskirts of town. I sat in my driveway for forty minutes when I got home. Tom was inside. I did not want to go in. I did not want him to look at my face and try to interpret what I was feeling and ask me what was wrong, because I did not know yet how to put words around what was wrong. What was wrong was that I had not been able to identify my own face in my side mirror. The thing is — this is the part I want you to understand — it had not happened all at once. I had not gone to bed one night looking like myself and woken up looking like someone else. I had been looking like someone else for at least three years, in small increments, slow enough that I'd stopped seeing it. The wedding photo from my middle daughter's wedding in 2022. The Christmas card photo from 2023. The picture my granddaughter had drawn of me at preschool in 2024 — a stick figure with a bi
