I’ve been having issues with Comcast. Today I started receiving my Mac Mail again but I lost my signature line. Without the lines and the book covers appearing below my signature I reacted as if I’d lost my identity.

Not real. Not accurate. Not true. But feelings can eat a person up—especially when they are untrue and yet you also believe them.

Of course I’m still a writer. Also a wife (#3), a step-mom, a step-grandma, a sister, an aunt, a former teacher, a pastor’s wife, a thinker, a dreamer, and an imaginer. You get the idea, right? I play many roles.

Lately I’ve been thinking about adding one more descriptor: retired. Will I still exist if I retire? Will my opinions matter? They would if I had been President. George H.W. Bush will exist as long as his family, the Navy, his country, and the history books remember him. There won’t be anything that dramatic for me, but I don’t want to fade away in some assisted living facility.

I am struggling. As far as I know, humans exist and live until they are no longer remembered.

I’m not the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me. Others don’t make me anything unless I let them. Others can label me, but they can’t change me. I made choices that gave me the labels above.

I exist with or without a signature line on my e-mail showing what they have done on earth.