Doppelgängers

(n.) Derived from the German language, literally meaning "Ghostly Double". 

One who nearly or completely resembles another- but with no biological relation. 
A while ago James and I started watching How I Met Your Mother after our friends Jesse and Kelly recommended it to us and we really like it.  It's a well thought out storyline, it's pertinent to married life, and it's just 21 minutes of 5 funny people to wind down with at the end of a long day. But I'm not trying to write about the show so much as one episode in particular that we recently watched, in which the gang finds their final "doppelganger" (each person on the show had the goal of finding their doppelganger at some point in the last 8 years), and Ted (the narrator) makes a very poignant point.  He notes that apart from finding a stranger in a restaurant that looks "exactly like _(insert friends name here)_" we all become our own doppelgangers over the course of our life, or even the course of a decade (or less).  We look exactly like us, and we look remarkably similar to how we looked five years ago, but almost nothing about us has remained the same.  I guess it's not something everyone experiences, but a lot of people do.  I think especially for people that go through big life-changing situations there is just so much that happens it's hard to stay the same.  I know for us, the "little Doskocils," we feel so different than we did even two or three years ago.  I was recently going through my phone, purging camera photos in order to make more memory space, and the couple that I saw in all the photos looked so foreign to me.  We looked so little, and so happy, and so carefree. That's not to say that we aren't happy anymore, but real life hit us like a ton of bricks since then and now things are just a little harder sometimes.  But there are also things we've lived and accomplished now that I could have never imagined for us back then, and I'm grateful for that wisdom.  I wish I could say we've found our stride, but in reality everything still keeps changing.  We love the flexibility and space we have to grow, and we love a lot of our recent developments, but there are still so many moments of uncertainty and times that I just want to quit being a grown-up altogether.  I think back to my goals I had in high school, or all the conversations with friends about where we wanted to be in five or ten years, and I can honestly say I'm only fulfilling maybe half the things I had planned for myself, but I guess that's God's grace that things don't always go according to our plans.  So I think it's safe to say I found my doppelganger, and maybe I'll find her again in another five or ten years, but I know I can't wait to hear her story and see what her life is like.