I Think, Therefore I Am. But Who Is the “I”?

What has changed about you during your life?

Your body, appearance, roles, beliefs, memory, health, relationships—anything that feels relevant.

René Descartes wrote, “I think, therefore I am.”

The words sound simple, almost obvious. Yet they expose a much stranger question: who—or what—is the “I” doing the thinking?

There is a wall in my home filled with photographs of me. Baby Crystal. A young child. A teenager. A young woman. A graduate.

Perhaps it looks a little egotistical—very Leo of me—but I did not put them there simply to admire myself. I wanted to feel connected to all the versions of me that have existed. During therapy, I especially wanted to feel connected to Baby Crystal.

When I look at those photographs, I do not look the same at all.

I am now a mature woman. I have grey hairs and lines on my face. My body has changed many times. During my adult life, I have been thinner and much larger. I have worn almost every hairstyle imaginable: green hair, dreadlocks, braids and a shaved head.

Yet throughout every change, I still felt like me.

My roles have changed too. I have been different people at different stages of my career. At twenty-four, I became Lakshmi’s mother. I have been a daughter, a friend, a cousin, a partner and a professional.

Each role revealed something different, but none of them contained the whole of me.

My beliefs have changed tremendously. Ideas that once seemed certain became more complicated as I lived, loved, studied and met people who did not fit neatly inside them.

Even my memory has changed.

After three strokes, I live with aphasia. Some memories have disappeared, and parts of my brain will never work in quite the same way again. My health is not what it once was. When I was younger, I was athletic and full of energy. I could party all night, work all day and somehow do it again.

That woman was me.

The woman I am now is also me.

So I cannot be only my body, because my body has changed. I cannot be only my appearance, beliefs, roles, health or memories, because they have changed too.

And still, there is something that remains.

There is a me.

There is Crystal Todd.

I cannot fully explain what that self is, or why I am experiencing life as this particular person. Who truly knows the why of it?

But beneath every version of myself I have ever been, there is something that recognises this life as mine. Something that knows:

I am here.

I am alive.

I am me.

And this is what I want to say to every woman reading this:

You are you.

Before you are somebody’s mother, daughter, wife, partner, carer, employee or friend—you are you.

Beneath what has happened to you, what has been expected of you and what you learned to become in order to survive, there is still a self who belongs to herself.

Time is precious. We do not have endless years to spend absent from our own lives.

For me to apply love to my life, I have to remember me. That remembering must become the place from which I love myself and make decisions about the life I am creating.

Perhaps love does not always begin with becoming somebody new.

Perhaps it begins with remembering that you are already here.

A question to sit with:

Beneath every role, every memory and every version of yourself, what is the part that still says, “This life is mine”?