Every year I write something for my birthday. It stands as a little marker in time—a cairn along the trail of life.

Here you are. You're going the right way.

Whatever that means.

This year, each time I began to write, it felt ever so slightly wrong. It felt like I was trying to be impressive, wise, humorous. It felt effortful. Every little stack of rocks I attempted kept tumbling. Each collection of words felt like a caricature—a self-portrait painted from the outside in, a mask.

Recently, I keep thinking about masks. Personas.

A teacher I’ve been following recently quoted Jung in his new book: “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual."

Who am I? Why am I here?

It seems a great deal of our time on earth is spent in pursuit of answers to those questions. Each birthday, I write a version of an answer. Something humble, grateful, transitional. Something raw. But this year, none of it felt right. It all felt like a story I was trying to hold—too tightly.

Increasingly, the universe keeps inviting me to let go of the question entirely. Answering the question keeps me stuck, identified, in pain. Every corner I turn suggests I look at the mask and it feels ever more true that even the version of myself I am sharing as “authentic” is, in itself, also a mask. A persona of vulnerability, passion, and struggle. A story about my story.

Sam Harris, in his daily meditations, often invites the listener to turn attention on itself. Who is meditating, right now? Who is the one asking who you are? What stands outside the question itself to ask the question?

Whenever I’m invited into that space, I see a swan. I’m wearing it like a suit. It pulls off of me, beak-first, rising smoothly into the sky. The silliest and most true way to describe it: like slipping the skin off a garbanzo bean— a swift pop revealing a layer not previously visible. The swan peels off, then dives through my chest and explodes out the back of me. What remains is the cosmos. I am no longer, but the stars are.

Long after this initially happened, I look up swan in my spirit animal book. It says: "In Sanskrit, the name for Swan is hamsa and the word for an enlightened being is paramahamsa (supreme Swan). Sages say that by swimming in the waters of the mind for a lifetime, Swan absorbs the wisdom of the lotus blossom—releasing identification with the ego and merging with the cosmos."

Yes. YES.

The swan is a cairn. You're going the right way. Except there is no right. No way. No you. There is only releasing all of that and returning to the stars.

A few weeks before I turn 41, I stop wearing mascara.

It feels almost too absurd a thing to note, but for me, it represents a significant transition—a letting go. On my 12th birthday, I asked to go to the Clinique counter for a makeover. They put products on my face that seemed to enhance what I had always thought was inadequate. For almost three decades, washing my face at night felt like scrubbing away something essential. The mask felt like the most authentic version of me, because it was closer to who I wanted to be.

I stopped wearing mascara because I felt an increasing urge to cry at random times—and the vanity of not wanting muddy streaks on my face had stopped me. After wearing this mask for the majority of my life, I gave it up. I felt sure people would recoil at my bare face, that I looked too tired, too old, too squinty.

No one seemed to care. Or they did but they didn’t name it and that released me from caring, too.

As I anticipated, I cried often and intensely. I closed myself in the closet under the stairs and sobbed out of exhaustion, frustration, fear, excitement—or often just sheer relief. I cried because I am the swan who is not a swan but a portal to infinity, because all the holding on was tiring and giving it up is both terrifying and liberating. I cried because I am wobbling through transition— for years it was getting to know myself, and now it is freeing myself from the constraints of any definition of self.

It is slow. The ego fights hard. After I released myself from the horror of exposing my bare skin, I found myself expecting the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction—that I’d experience a revolution and learn to love my natural face. That I’d celebrate my lines, my lack of definition, my splotches!

None of it happened. I didn’t wake up one day, affirming myself like an Instagram model, shouting my love for my God-given form in all its glory.

But one day in a hot yoga class, I caught my reflection in the mirror and felt—impartial. I felt love and disdain violently collide and how neutrality lay in the remains of that implosion. I saw my squinty eyes, my lopsided face, my frizzy hair, my belly— round from babies and cortisol. I saw my strong movements and the joy at the corner of my eyes and my center of gravity which is low and steady—a tree. I saw the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful; I saw the labels we hold dear, the constant judgments, the trap of identification, and all those heavy determinations somehow gathered together to make a net zero. It was an endless stack of rocks— an impossibly high cairn— that when weighed at the scales amounted to nothing. They were emptiness itself. None of it mattered.

I'm not beautiful and I'm not ugly. I'm not good and I'm not bad. I'm not even I.

Again and again and again and again, Mary Oliver’s words come to me, “You do not have to be good.” It is an anthem, vibrating through the universe, returning to me always.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to be good.

The idea that you ever might be, the striving, keeps me trapped.

Answering the questions posed by the human mind keeps me trapped.

Outside of that lies the stars.

And yet, here I am often, wrapped in my imperfect skin, just stacking rocks. Creating stories, getting trapped beneath them, letting them tumble. Another cairn. Another year. Another story.

You’re going the right way. There’s nowhere to go. We are all just stars.