I have a colonoscopy later today, which is a sentence as ordinary as it is unpleasant. Millions of people schedule one, dread one, endure one, and then mostly move on. It is routine, preventative, and normal. My bloodwork is spotless. I have no particular reason to believe anything dramatic is waiting for me on the other side of it. And still, I am nervous.
Not panicked. Not spiraling. Just aware of the body. Aware of mortality in the way you become aware of a room when the lights flicker. Aware that even routine encounters with medicine can open a small door in the mind where the old animal questions live: What if something happens? What if they find something? What if this beautiful life, this impossibly good and strange and hard-won life, is more fragile than I like to admit?
I don’t think these thoughts are really about the procedure. The procedure is just the doorway. The nerves are not telling me that something is wrong. They are telling me that I love my life with an intensity I can barely explain.
I love my wife. I love our daughter. I love the strange little world we have built together. I love our rhythms, our jokes, our chaos, our home, our errands, our meals, our ridiculous conversations, our art, and our family gravity. I love waking up inside a life I once believed would never belong to me.
That is what caught me off guard this morning. Not fear, exactly. Love.
As I followed the nerves inward, I eventually found their source. Beneath the anxiety was attachment: a fierce, aching, almost embarrassing desire for more time. Decades more, if the universe is handing them out. More mornings. More birthdays. More art shows. More school events. More laughing in the kitchen. More being annoyed by tiny inconveniences that, from the right distance, are obviously evidence of grace.
And then my mind went somewhere I did not expect. It went back more than twenty-five years, to a version of me who did not want more time. A version of me near 400 pounds, clinically depressed, and completely convinced that joy was something other people were built to experience. I remember getting in my car and driving off with bad intentions. I remember the calls coming in again and again from my wife and family. I remember finally answering. I remember being talked into pulling into a hotel while they rushed to find me.
That memory does not feel like today. It almost feels like remembering another person. But of course, it was me.
And as I sit here now, nervous before a routine procedure precisely because I want so badly to keep living, I feel a tenderness toward that younger self that is hard to describe. I don’t want to scold him. I don’t want to shake him and tell him how wrong he was. I want to hug him. I want to sit beside him in that car and tell him he has no idea how good it gets.
He has no idea that one day he will be nervous before a colonoscopy because he loves his life so much. He has no idea that the same life he is trying to leave will someday become the thing he holds with both hands. He has no idea that love will not arrive as some clean rescue, but as a slow accumulation of reasons to stay: a wife who keeps evolving with him, a daughter who rearranges the universe, a family whose love is reflected back so fully that it feels almost absurd.
He definitely has no idea that one day, after getting a routine medical procedure over with, he will take his family to the opening of an art show he is in. That part makes me laugh. Not a bitter laugh. A holy ridiculous laugh.
Twenty-two-year-old me would not have believed any of this. He would not have believed in the family. He would not have believed in the health. He would not have believed in the peace. He certainly would not have believed that one day he would be making paintings and taking his wife and daughter to see one hanging in an art show. That sentence alone feels like science fiction sent backward through time. And yet here we are.
This is where the mirror turns. The younger self saw only collapse. Today’s self sees continuation. The younger self believed the story had narrowed to a single unbearable point. Today’s self is living inside a widening field of relationships, projects, laughter, responsibility, and love.
I do not say that as a clean triumph narrative. I distrust those. Life is not a motivational poster. Healing is not a straight line. The self does not evolve by shedding the past like it never mattered. The past matters. That version of me matters. He is not an embarrassment. He is not a discarded draft. He is one of the selves who carried me here, even when he did not know he was carrying anything. He made it to the hotel. He picked up the phone. He let himself be found.
Because he did, I get today. I get the nerves. I get the procedure. I get the spotless bloodwork. I get the family waiting on the other side. I get the art show. I get to be a person who wants to stay.
There is something sacred in that, though I do not mean sacred in the religious sense. I mean sacred as in charged with attention. Sacred as in suddenly visible. Sacred as in the ordinary world briefly revealing how impossible it is.
A colonoscopy is routine. But wanting to live is not routine when you remember a time you didn’t. Loving your life is not routine when some past version of you was certain joy had passed him by. Taking your family to an art opening is not routine when you once could not imagine a future with your name still in it.
So maybe that is the point of this reflection. Not fear. Not morbidity. Not dramatizing a routine medical appointment. Just gratitude. A strange, bodily, slightly inconvenient gratitude. The kind that shows up while you are fasting and drinking terrible prep liquid and thinking about mortality before breakfast. The kind that reminds you that anxiety is sometimes just love wearing a bad costume.
It also reaches backward. It gathers every former self into the room: the scared one, the lost one, the heavy one, the masked one, the one who almost left, and the one who stayed. All of them are here today. All of them get to walk into the rest of this day together.
Procedure first. Then family. Then art. Then, absurdly and beautifully, more life.