I had dinner with all 55 of myself last night. It was a long table and we sat together, arranged without intention, as if someone had shaken a box of all my pieces and let them fall. A scatter of life emptied from its container.

It was a hasty, last-minute thing. I’m surprised it worked for everyone. All of us gathered, all of us carrying our small urgencies, none of us sure why we’d been called together at all. It was the youngest who broke the silence first.

2 was crabby, her brow knotted, her chubby fists pressed against her cheeks. “I want to go home,” she pouted. Every minute away from our mother felt like a punishment she didn’t understand. Her restlessness moved through the table like a draft, a reminder of the first tether we ever knew, and how early we learned the ache of being separate.

6 pushed her peas across her plate, worried about what it meant she would lose later — dessert or approval.

9 mostly stayed apart from us, choosing a chair in the corner, where she entertained herself, like a good girl. A good, invisible girl.

14 was cutting her bangs, the hair falling into her lap like the bristles from a paintbrush. The air around her held the faint scent of drug store hairspray and wanting to be someone else. She wondered aloud to 23 whether this wilderness she sometimes feels in herself would hurt her or be the thing that saved her.

16 leaned forward, elbows on the table, her mind already at home writing her boyfriend a letter she’ll slip to him when they pass in the hall tomorrow between gym and biology.

19 rolled up in a ’79 Camaro, the engine still ticking with heat as she stepped inside. She dropped into her chair with a loose, sun-soaked confidence, her keys clattering onto the table.

22 turned to 39, studying her with a tender curiosity, before casually inquiring if she knew what the life she was building would eventually add up to. 39 paused and said she could only say that it was really important that she didn’t get trapped by the small stories – the little ideas she has right now about what her future will be in the world. I thought that was profound advice.

25 looked both tired and luminous, as though love and depletion had taken turns chiselling her face. Our new baby girl slept in the cradle of her arm, her long lashes resting like brushstrokes against her cheeks – a tiny, breathing reminder of how much 25 is still learning. And of the bewildering, overwhelming truth of it all: that she could never have imagined how fiercely and completely she could love someone.

She spent half the night reaching for the hand of 26, who’d come straight to dinner from ugly-crying in the shower about the brother she’d just lost.

29 sat nearby with our son balanced against her hip, his blond curls creating a messy halo. He twisted and stretched toward everything not meant for him – her earrings, the saltshaker, the edge of the table. We all loved watching him. In her free hand she held a tattered paperback of The Power of Positive Thinking, eyes moving over the same paragraph again and again. Hard to concentrate with all the noise.

34 slipped in late after dropping our boy off at hockey practice, easing in between 21 and 46. She stayed quiet, observing us all with a kind of measured calculation, dying to ask whether any of us were expanding, accelerating, becoming something we hadn’t prepared for too.

38 barely looked at anyone; her gaze pinned to the table as if the light in the room itself might strip her bare. Shame lives in her skin, she finally whispered to 40, who nodded in understanding. We never did get the full story. Something about a closet and how you don’t bury secrets –  they bury you.

41 stood in the hallway a long time, taking everything in as though she was memorizing the room before stepping out of it forever. She explained that she was in the last moments of herself as that version and she was gathering the courage to give up everything and start again.

43 sat holding a cardboard box of ruins on her lap. She told 18 that she needed to spend some time getting to know them – each shard, each unfinished story – before she put herself back together, so that whatever she built next could be lit from within. “It’s hard to look at this stuff, but you have to,” she said, pulling 18 closer. “There are times when it’ll make you feel that you just want to disappear. But you only want to be found.”

45 was unmistakably happy. When 27 asked her about it, she said she was loving herself back together. Writing had been part of the mending, she said. Putting words on a page, stitching light into the places that had once felt beyond repair. 51 leaned across the table then: “Have you heard our new podcast,” she asked. “We’re telling our story.” 53 chimed in: “Hearing it in my own voice feels like meeting myself with kindness about it for the first time.” 

That brought tears to my eyes.

48 was different from 45 in that she was both happy and sad at once. She sat inside the glow of the evening – the reverie, the stories, the celebration of it – but told 33 that she was feeling the pull of her mother’s recent death like a tide beneath her feet. When 11 looked at her with wide, uncertain eyes, she leaned in and put her arm around her. “It’s okay,” she said. “One day, you’ll know that your joy and your struggle can coexist. You don’t have to choose between them.”

No one was surprised when 52 leaned forward to announce she had to duck out early to catch a flight to Paris with our wife for the long weekend. Then, still breathless with excitement, she told us about the new course they were taking together called: Unlearning – and how it was teaching them to peel back the layers of inherited belief until they could feel the raw grain of their own souls again. “It’s not cheap, girls. But I’d highly recommend it.”

54 opened up about how making art has helped her discover that her life is a canvas and she had always been her own muse – recreating herself as many times as needed. That, in truth, we’re all artists all our lives, adding more layers and color to our spirit’s canvas until we love what we see. I really loved this for her.

With that, 55 tapped her wine glass with her spoon, and lifted it in the air, the soft chime gathering us toward her. “Thank you all for coming tonight,” she said. “It’s crazy to see you all in one place. And honestly, who knows if we’ll ever manage to gather like this again, so let’s raise a glass, shall we?”

She looked around the table, taking us all in. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything you’ve carried. For everything you’ve questioned. For everything you’ve broken open or held together. For every person you’ve ever loved, for the risks you took, for not hiding from your own life. Thank you for saying yes more than you said no. And, for every beautiful and brutal thing you’ve lived through. All of it – every scrap of it – made me who I am.”

She lifted her glass a little higher. “I don’t know a lot of things for sure, but I know this: one day, when it’s all over, we’ll all look back together and know that this life – with all of its light and shadow, its tragedies and triumphs – was our truest work. And that, if nothing else, we lived it as we truly are – fully known and fully loved. Tell me, what gift could be greater than that.”

The room erupted – applause, laughter, the clatter of glasses – as she eased back into her seat, letting the noise wash over her. She looked at them and thought about how strange it is to live inside yourself every day and barely notice your own slow, steady evolution – how only in hindsight can you see the distance travelled, the skins you’ve shed along the way.

55 got up to leave not long after – “sorry, I have to work tomorrow.” We watched her slip on her coat and move toward the door. She turned to wave, the luminous threshold of her future open behind her.

No matter how we’ve tried, none of us could ever fully imagine what waited there – only that it would come the way all true things had for each of us: slowly and then all at once. But we understood it now: how the future would be just another leg in the beautiful and complicated relay race of becoming…each new version of us carrying the baton as far as she can, before passing it to the next.

I almost talked myself out of going to dinner last night, but I’m glad I showed up.