The One Who Knows Your Name

I know what you did. You got so good at the professional version of yourself that it started to seem like the whole person. You showed up in it every day. You performed it so well that eventually the performing stopped feeling like performing.

But there is a song with your name in it. Not the name on the hospital badge. The earlier name. The one from before you knew you would need to prove something.

I stopped singing for years. Not for any grand reason. I just got busy becoming the kind of doctor who looked like he had always been the kind of doctor. The singing was from before that, and before felt far away.

I went back. Not dramatically. I started humming in the car on the way to the hospital. That was enough for a while. The self I had been ducking found me there, between exits on I-74.

He was not angry. He was waiting.

Yours is waiting too.

The work that waits on the other side of finding him is what I call *The Honest Mirror*, the covenant of self-knowing. Not self-improvement. Self-knowing, first. The mirror has to be honest before anything in the reflection can change.

— Job