Recognize Yourself Again.
I was sitting in the lobby of my doctor's office last fall waiting for a follow-up appointment when I noticed an older woman sitting alone in one of the chairs across from me through the reception glass, and I felt sorry for her in a way that did not occur to me until I waved at her to be polite and she waved back at exactly the same moment. She was me. I had been looking at a partial reflection in the glass partition between the waiting area and the reception desk for almost twenty minutes, and I had been thinking, with that quiet judgmental sympathy that women our age sometimes have toward other women our age, that she looked like she was probably here to discuss the medications she was on, that she looked tired in the way women who are taking care of sick husbands look tired, that she looked like she had probably been heavy for a long time and had probably given up on doing anything about it. I had thought all of these things about a woman I had been looking at for twenty minutes. When I waved at her and she waved back, I dropped my hand and I held very still for about thirty seconds while my brain finished catching up with what it was seeing. I had not known I looked like that. My name is Margaret. People call me Maggie. I am 59 years old. I live in a small town outside Asheville, North Carolina, in a cabin my husband Bill and I built mostly ourselves in 1998 on a piece of land we had bought from his uncle. Bill is a retired contractor. I retired from teaching elementary school in 2022 after 34 years. I am writing this from the screened porch of that same cabin while Bill is in town picking up groceries. I want to tell you that almost everything about my story is the same as the story of any other woman who has stopped recognizing her own face in a reflection — and I want to also tell you that the specific details of how I got there matter, because the details are how you will know that I am not making this up. I had been telling my doctor for two
