OMG, Am I Still Me
The year was 1986, driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway in search of a good spot to see Halley’s Comet.
Many memories of my mother’s love felt more like obstacles at the time. Yet slowly, over the years, they’ve become gemstones—pieces of myself I’m rediscovering now through the eyes of who I was then.
To this day, I still don’t know if we ever truly saw the comet as clearly as I would later see Hale-Bopp in 1997. But somewhere across the distance between those two moments, their connection became the space between my mother and me, remaining present despite life’s, at times, turbulent movements. Around the time of Hale-Bopp, I had already served in the Navy and was living in San Diego.
Growing up between divorced parents, almost equally splitting my time between them, the turbulence of life began to feel strangely familiar—almost reflective of Earth’s own natural processes.
Lunar cycles, astronomy, geology, and the many science-based lessons I absorbed through both experience and college slowly gave me new optics through which to view life itself.
Gemstones are formed alongside toxins, pressure, heat, fractures, and immense geological violence. The deeper I’ve explored rocks and minerals, the harder it has become not to see pieces of ourselves within them. Some stones seem to capture more than light. Sometimes they seem to capture memory, resilience, even soul.
I remember sitting in a yoga class years ago, learning the idea that we are not merely our bodies, but the energy moving through them. That thought stayed with me.
If I were to lose my hand, would I still be me?
And if years of toxins, pressure, heat, and violence were slowly removed from a person… what remains underneath?
Labradorite has become one of my favorite stones. At first glance it can appear dark and unremarkable, yet with the slightest shift in angle entire spectrums reveal themselves. I’ve often wondered how much of life works the same way.
Even trees seem to reflect this lesson. Walking through a park or driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, we rarely stop to question why one tree grew taller, wider, more twisted, or bears different fruit than another. We simply allow them to exist as part of the same landscape.
Yet somehow, when it comes to people, those same distinctions often become labels, judgments, divisions, or assumptions.
The more I reflect on the many phases of my own life, the more I realize I’ve probably appeared as all of these things to different people at different times.
Which naturally leads me to wonder, how much do the perceptions of others truly define who we are?
If certain wounds no longer move through my psyche the way they once did, am I still the same person? Or perhaps closer to who I was before those layers settled in?
There’s something quietly profound in realizing that rocks, landscapes, erosion, pressure, and even planetary history exist completely outside of human prejudice systems. Nature does not seem overly concerned with labels. It simply continues becoming.
Perhaps we are too?
