Still Here

For this piece, I asked women to hold a photograph of their younger selves. Each chose an image that reflected a defining part of who she once was. The women themselves were chosen intentionally — for their histories, losses, work, migration, motherhood, faith, and joy.

In every portrait, the photograph is in sharp focus while the woman herself softens behind it. The decision is deliberate. The younger self is clear. The woman — layered by time, responsibility, love, grief, and memory — stands just beyond. I wanted to see what remains when everything else accumulates. What do we keep? What keeps us?

One who lost her brother young and learned to quiet her own grief, a silence she would later work to unlearn. One who devoted decades to strengthening public education — in classrooms, in law, and in policy — and still holds close the quiet memory of nurturing a newborn. One who left Kyrgyzstan at nineteen, carrying the strength of her upbringing and choosing to build her family and future across continents. One formed by summers on the Teton River — by fly lines, patience, and the quiet inheritance of her father’s craft. One whose childhood was marked by a mother imprisoned for political protest and who now teaches law, faith, and mercy. One who carries the legacy of her mother’s care after losing her too soon. One who raises nine children, shaped by the absence of a father who left during her childhood. One who sustains the sisterhood of her youth and now gathers her posterity into that same circle of belonging. One who built her life through steady labor, pride, and the work of her hands.

Life grows us outward. It adds titles, roles, and expectations. It asks us to carry families, professions, causes, and quiet grief. Yet beneath those layers lives a younger self — vulnerable, hopeful, uninhibited — who shaped everything that followed.

Time refines us. It does not erase us.

She is still here.