I like to think of my past selves as exhibits in a museum, much like that episode of "How I Met Your Mother" where one character, Lily, sees the college version of her husband, Marshall, in an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in New York. (The episode is titled “Natural History” and is in Season 6 of the show, if you’d like to watch it.)

The way I see it, each exhibit features past versions of me, from my “Terrible Twos” to my “Chubby Years” to my “Awkward Teen Years” to my “Awkward College Year” and so on and so forth.

This image comes particularly handy when I think about my middle school and early high school self.

I was a strange mess of a person. Home life was rough for me and that reflected in a lot of what I did. For that reason, I was glad to think of that past version of me as, well, a thing of the past. I saw her as a different me in a museum, meant to remember and never meant to relive. I thought I would never be that strange, lost person ever again.

That is, until I found an artifact from that past version of me.

Sometime last week, I had an assignment that required me to find a quote that felt near and dear to my heart, a quote that defined me. Luckily, I like keep records of quotes that particularly speak to me and as I was scrolling through them, I found a quote from "A House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros that I recorded back in freshman year of high school:

"You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, Sally, was to love and love and to love and to love, and no one would call that crazy."

"A House on Mango Street," in my opinion, is a rather complex piece of work and I never truly understood the meaning behind most of the short stories, but my past self, that strange lost person sitting in the most turbulent portion of my personal museum, thought it fit to record.

I was honestly shocked. The “Freshman in High School” version of myself is the antithesis to everything I want to be and who I strive to be. That person four years ago is the person that I hope to never be ever again. Yet, that version of me recorded something that still speaks to me years later.

That version of me, no matter how messed up she was, still wanted to be free. She wanted to be in a world where she wouldn’t have to worry about being herself, where she didn’t have to be sad all the time. She wanted to dream and to love and to love and to love and to love, and she didn’t want to be called crazy because of that. And no matter how much I despise that past version of me, at our core we are still the same person. We are still searching restlessly for a place that accepts us, still trying to carve out our place on this Earth.

I realize now that we are not all that different from our past selves.

We are not exhibits in a museum, creatures apart from our current selves. Our pasts are more like a collection of fun house mirrors. Each past version of ourselves has a different mirror that tried to reflect the person we wanted to be, and now that we are different than who we were back then, we look distorted when we stand in front of each of those mirrors.

And yet, no matter how distorted each mirror made us look, each one was reflecting the same exact person. Who we wanted to be may be different in each mirror, but we are all somehow similar at our very core.

This is not to say that there is no way that we can change as people, or that we cannot be any different than just weirder versions of our past reflections. We are creatures capable of change and our collection of funhouse mirrors say exactly that. We are slowly going through new mirrors every day, trying to find one that will be the best reflection of who we truly are.

When I look into the fun house mirror that was my “Freshman in High School” version of myself, I see cracked glass and broken shards littering the floor, leaving my reflection with empty, black triangles. The mirror is grimy around the edges, and the lighting throws shadows over my features, but I still see myself, through all of the distortion and I see how the mirrors gradually become clearer, how my reflection looks more and more like who I want to be and, now that I’ve realized it, a little bit of who I was.

For some of us, our reflections aren’t quite where we want it to be. We just gotta keep searching. Maybe take a stroll through our fun house to see where they all lead to. Where it goes from there, only time can tell, but perhaps we can start with the person in the mirror.