The Author’s Perspective:
When the Mirror Stops Reflecting the Familiar
When a Photo Becomes a Mirror
I received a couple of still snapshots of myself from a video call the other day. They were candid. I was fully unaware until after the fact that they were being automatically captured (welcome to telehealth in 2026), and I certainly didn’t know the video chat software for the telehealth appointment was going to save these random stills both to my device and to the doctor’s system. Nevertheless, at the end of the call, as I closed the software, there they were on my desktop.
The photos weren’t good or bad in terms of what I saw on the surface. Under the surface, though, they simultaneously said to me “this is who you are now” and “who are you now?” I wasn’t expecting my mind and nervous system’s reaction. Compounded with the reason for the call in the first place, the weather I’m experiencing in my life at every level right now, and the general reality we’re all living in, it threw me for a real loop.
It’s not as though I’ve never seen a photo of myself. I’ve lived decades in this body. I’ve watched it change through literal growing up in childhood to puberty and then to adulthood, through becoming a full-fledged grown woman, through pregnancy and childbirth, through cancer and stress and caregiving, through surgical menopause that left me with zero organs of that system and a body completely unbalanced internally and externally. I’ve held on through years of circumstance and tragedy after tragedy laced by blessing upon blessing, all at once hollowing me out and reshaping everything, literally.
I’ve seen and experienced the evidence of time. I look in the mirror every morning and every night, as I get ready for the day and get ready to retire again. I notice myself, with little thought. But this evening, a day after the initial experience, I’m still sitting in a moment where I feel as though I’ve not met myself. Not this version. Not really.
I am looking at the physical representation of who I’ve become after all the caregiving, all the death, now a couple of years into feeling like an orphan here on earth, and I ask myself, “Who is this person? Who am I really, today?
What is my identity, with everything stripped away – my parents, my childhood home, my marital home, my career, my closest friends and teachers and confidants and gurus who helped me to grow and walked with me, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes pushing me on, sometimes carrying me because I couldn’t walk? And… without my child, even though he is still physically present, but lost in disease (which was the reason for the call that produced the photos in the first place – continuing to fight with the system and for him)?
I know, within. I am a child of God. I am a follower of Christ, not religion, not church, but Him. The Source. The Spirit. And filled with it. I know my heart, and my soul. I know ME.
But the picture? The shell? I don’t recognize her. And that is destabilizing in this particular season. Especially so.
I’ve gone into a deep introspection and all I can do is sit in silence with God. There are many tears, maybe more delayed grief than anything else, but He is silent too. And that is unnerving. Not scary. I understand what is happening. But it is uncomfortable.
Is this experience familiar to anyone else? Sure it is, and that is why I am sharing it here. Because maybe others wish they had the words – and at least I have that to offer….
The Death of the Familiar Self
What I’m describing is not vanity. It is not midlife crisis in the cultural sense. What I am experiencing is the psycho-spiritual collision that happens when the outer form no longer matches the inner knowing, or when the inner knowing itself has been so thoroughly remade by loss that the face in the glass feels like a stranger wearing your history.
Carl Jung spoke of the persona, the social mask we construct to navigate the world, and the deeper Self that lies beneath it. After years of caregiving for dying loved ones, after burying parents and becoming the last adult standing in certain lines of the family tree, after the nervous system has carried more than it was designed to hold, the persona begins to crack. The roles that once defined “me” (daughter, caregiver, the strong one, the one who could still function) have been lived through to their natural end. What remains is quieter, more stripped, more orphan in the earthly sense, even while remaining a child of God in the eternal sense.
This is the territory of individuation: the hard, often lonely work of becoming who you already are in God while the old scaffolding falls away. The tears are not only grief for the dead. They are grief for the versions of myself that died with them. Delayed, yes. But not disordered.
I wrote years ago about the danger of misdiagnosing this exact process. In Misdiagnosing Growth: The Danger of Labeling Spiritual Awakening as Depression, I shared how my first major dark night of the soul, nearly twenty years ago, was met with a quick clinical label and medication after one short visit. The withdrawal, the solitude, the internal dismantling that looked like depression to the medical eye was, in truth, the beginning of a spiritual emergence. Suppressing it did not heal it. It interrupted a sacred process and exacted a cost.
We must be careful here. Not every dark night is pathology. And not every pathology is a dark night. Discernment is required. But the culture’s first reflex is often to pathologize the very discomfort that signals transformation. The silence of God in these seasons is not abandonment. It is the quiet in which the old self is allowed to finish dying so that the new can begin to breathe.
Scripture Holding the Tension
John writes with startling clarity:
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! … Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:1–2)
What we will be has not yet been made known.
That is the precise location of this moment. I know whose I am. I know I am His. Yet the concrete, embodied expression of that belonging is still unfolding, still being refined through fire and loss and long obedience. The face in the photograph is not a failure of recognition. It is evidence that the “not yet” is real.
Paul says it another way:
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
The mirror is dim. The snapshot is partial. But I am fully known. Even in the silence. Especially in the silence.
Colossians 3:3 reminds me that my life is “hidden with Christ in God.” Hidden. Not erased. Not discarded. Hidden, protected, held, still becoming.
Philosophical Companions on the Road
Marcus Aurelius, writing in the quiet of his own journals while carrying the weight of empire and mortality, understood the self as something continually in flux:
“Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.” And again: “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”
He does not romanticize the discomfort. He simply refuses to treat change as catastrophe. The self I do not yet fully recognize is not a problem to be solved. It is the next form the process is taking. My task is not to force recognition, but to remain present to what is arising without clinging to what has already passed.
Alan Watts approaches the same mystery from another angle. He spent his life dismantling the Western taboo against knowing who we really are. The sense of a solid, separate “I” enclosed in a bag of skin, he argued, is a useful social fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” The discomfort of not recognizing the woman in the photograph may be less a failure of identity and more a momentary glimpse behind the mask. The ego wants continuity and familiarity. The deeper Self is not threatened by discontinuity. It is the continuity.
C.S. Lewis brings it home with characteristic precision. In Mere Christianity he writes that the real, new self “will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”
“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. … Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
I am not looking at the photograph to recover a former self. I am sitting in the silence, looking for Him. And the tears are part of the looking.
The Psycho-Spiritual Reality of This Season
There is a nervous-system truth here as well. Years of hypervigilance, anticipatory grief, and chronic stress leave imprints. When the crisis finally ends, or shifts into a quieter form of ongoing loss, the body does not immediately know how to stand down. The “who is this?” response can be the psyche’s way of registering that the old operating system is no longer required, yet the new one has not fully come online.
This is not mental illness. It is the aftermath of having been stretched beyond previous capacities and then released into a landscape that no longer matches the maps I once used. The silence of God in these moments often functions as a kind of spiritual sensory deprivation, removing the familiar consolations so that a deeper reliance can form. It is uncomfortable precisely because it is effective.
I have learned to treat these seasons with reverence rather than diagnosis. To ask for wisdom rather than quick relief. To allow the tears without demanding they resolve into a tidy narrative by the end of the day.
Sitting With It
So I sit.
I look at the stranger who is also me. I acknowledge the orphaned feeling without letting it become an identity. I remember that I am a child of God, fully known even when I do not yet fully know myself in this new configuration. I let Marcus remind me that change is the nature of things. I let Watts loosen the grip of the separate ego. I let Jung name the work of becoming. I let Lewis point me again toward Christ rather than toward self-retrieval.
And I let Scripture hold the tension between the “already” of belonging and the “not yet” of full revelation.
If you have stood in front of a mirror, or a photograph, or a sudden recognition in someone else’s eyes, and felt the quiet shock of unfamiliarity after seasons of profound loss or transformation, you are not alone. And you are not broken. You may simply be in the middle of becoming.
The silence is not empty. The tears are not wasted. The face you do not yet fully recognize is still held, still known, still being made new.
And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
— 1 Corinthians 13:13