My Phone Doesn’t Know Me

My phone and I are going through a break up; it claims it doesn’t recognize me anymore.

It all started on August 29th, the day Bell’s Palsy hit my face. Suddenly, my face was terribly lopsided, like one of those melted watch faces in the famous Salvador Dali painting, drooping over a table edge and a tree branch, like a chocolate bar left to warm in the sun.

At exactly the moment that half my face became paralyzed, my phone lost its ability to recognize me. In other words, Face Id, the AI algorithm that had memorized my face, via the dozens of mathematical data points that it uses to determine that I am me, suddenly decided that I didn’t look like me anymore. Now I was forced to enter my 6 digit passcode every time I needed access to my device.

The nice thing with AI and neural networks is that the more times I entered my passcode, the more the phone seemed to learn that this new, misshapen face actually was the same David Kosak from before my palsy. Until it forgot again.

I was getting laser treatment, which apparently shortens the severity and duration of palsy, and my dental technician requested that I shave my beard so that the low-power laser wouldn’t be absorbed by my beard hair. Despite Apple’s claims about its FaceID technology recognizing a person with or without a beard, my phone really didn’t know what to do when I was both clean-shaven and had a drooping face. It took another four days for it to relent, yet even now, it occasionally doesn’t quite trust that this new David is the same as the old David.

Now that my beard is coming back in, the damned device has thrown up its silicon arms in complete frustration.

I don’t blame it—these same questions have crossed my heart and mind numerous times in the intervening days, questions about identity, whether and when and how do we actually change, and if our attachment to what neurologists call the default self is merely an illusion.

We clutch tight to our identities as though they can save us from the shifting sands of life itself. Yet looking into the mirror of my Palsy, my face, the most intimate address of identity refused to return my gaze. Instead someone else, a rude impostor, stared back at me, close enough to me to be even more disturbing. Yet unrecognizable by me, or my phone.

I had disappeared. Or had I?

Let’s return to that Salvador Dali painting with the drooping watch faces; it is entitled The Persistence of Memory. This famous surrealist painting struggles with the same questions we each ask, at least at some point in our life. What is real, and what is imaginary, a mirror in the painting demands? How can we distinguish between our dream stories and our unadorned, innermost self?

Salvador Dali seems to be saying that because time melts away like sun-baked chocolate, it matters less than memory. Yet is our memory—all that remains of our past lives—any more stable than time itself? The memory of what my face used to be was on shaky ground.

These are the sort of questions we might ask at a midnight bull session with old friends over a glass, after the death of a loved one, or perhaps on the floor of a philosophy department. Yet looking into the mirror at my Bell’s Palsy, and listening to my voice, distorted and slurred by reduced motor control, these were some of the least abstract and most disorienting of questions. I didn’t recognize myself anymore than my phone did.

Bell’s Palsy is a stark manner with which to come to this realization, yet we have all had moments when we suddenly notice some behavior we have engaged in that embarrasses the positive self-image we have of ourselves—that very strong desire we all possess to imagine that we are good people. We experience shame in those moments, when our carefully cultivated personas tumble off us, like a masquerade mask at the end of the ball. Not only do we not recognize the reality of who we are, which includes moments of failure, but we distance ourselves from them. Or try to. Our first instinct is to clutch at the falling mask, prop it back on our faces, even if it hangs off-kilter. Better to be sideways than lost. We want to get back to who we thought we were. We want our stories back.

Bell’s Palsy is a temporary thief of our precious default identity. When I saw a young child playing on my block, I was literally unable to smile and share in her joy. Take that in—I was unable to smile. My ability to smile was stolen from me. I’m someone who naturally smiles at little children, I like to act goofy with them. But my face was frozen, unyielding to my commands. That piece of my self-identity? Gone for the interval. Only time will tell if I will ever be able to smile again. In the meantime, all I can do is grieve its loss.

Yet ultimately, my Bell’s Palsy was a liberating reminder that I am not my default self.

The central tension of life is this: the urge, desire, even need we feel to transform ourselves and the equally pressing urge, desire, or need to accept ourselves exactly as we are.

When you open to the possibility of honoring yourself exactly as you are at every moment, that attitudinal stance necessarily includes honoring your transformation, because you are not a static entity. Truly accepting yourself as you are clearly encompasses accepting change. But what kind of change? With self-acceptance, you no longer seek to force change upon yourself out of a sense of not being good enough; rather, the change and growth of which we speak is simply what naturally wants to happen.

The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.

My face practiced a little death. Half my face froze, dead. The other half, still alive and able to witness its mirror self in suspension. Change was forced upon me—unwanted change—and I had to, if you’ll pardon, face it.

But I did. It was a choice. I could have ignored this change; instead, I took it in, studied it and reflected. This is the process of change. It begins with acceptance.

We all have moments in our lives where we get a glimpse of who we might become if we do not change, and who we might become if we dare to change.

Often, the thing that stops us from trying to change is fear—fear that we won’t be accepted if we do. This is the terror that tormented my mind when my AI-driven phone refused to accept me, refused to recognize me, after the change that was forced upon me. Yes, I was frustrated, but more than that, I was afraid. If my own phone won’t recognize me, who will?

Was I lost to those I loved and the world I know?

What I learned is this: change is inevitable. Trusting is a choice.