who you are when no one’s watching

Sep 10

Dear Reader,

There's a version of you that may have never been seen by anyone. It operates during the hours when nobody's around: the drive home, the shower, the walk to the car, the stretch after everyone's gone to bed. Add those up across a week and it comes to a meaningful portion of your life.

Think about what actually goes on in there. Some people talk to themselves, whole arguments, rehearsed or replayed. Some people cry in the car and are completely composed by the time they walk inside. Some people put on music that would surprise everyone who knows them. Most of it is fairly ordinary to us, and most of it has simply never come up in conversation with anyone.

Which puts us in an odd spot. We've spent weeks now looking at things other people can see, our pace, the way we come across, what we say about ourselves. All of that is real and worth knowing. But most of the people who've formed an impression of us were working from a partial view, since hardly any of them have been in the car.

What I find harder to shake is that we may be in a similar position ourselves. Those hours tend to be so ordinary that we barely register them, which can leave the least examined stretch of the day as the one where we're most ourselves and least on duty.

So this week, if you can, pay a little attention to what you're like in those gaps. Just enough to see it clearly, since there's a chance you never really have.

Yours in the journey,