Look at this rainbow of first grade kids from 1978. Can you find me? Who was Liam (then still Stefanie) at 7 years old? I’m curious. Give me your best guess!
I’ll wait a little while to see if someone guesses right, and then I’ll reveal in a few days which one of these colour bursts is me.
Back then, I was an intrepid explorer. An Outsider. Old Shatterhand. A captain of the high seas. An Archeologist. A protector of wildlife. An outlaw who survived against all odds.
It seems my young soul back then knew instinctively who I was. But it took all the confusion of growing up and decades of searching, losing, and multiple times of getting back up again for me to rediscover those treasures.
I’m smiling to myself while writing these words for you, thinking “A-ha!” and understanding for maybe the first time that, in a sometimes real, sometimes more metaphorical sense, I became pretty much everything except Old Shatterhand.