Coming back to yourself

Trauma and grief can make you forget who you are. For 100 days, I woke up, I made coffee, I drove to the hospital an hour away, I spent the day advocating for my husband who was slipping away a little bit more every day, I probably remembered to eat, I kept everyone updated, and anywhere from eight to twelve hours later drove an hour home and tried to do things like laundry or get orders out or pay bills or feed the cats or shower or get some sleep. It was exhausting. Don’t get me wrong, I’d do it all over again. Tim deserved nothing less than everything I had to give. And I did have a few days off here and there when his family was here. But after, I did spend about a year feeling as if I’d been hit by a bus. In trying to just exist, just to put one foot in front of the other, I lost touch with who I was, what I wanted for myself, who I wanted to be. I forgot myself.

But I’d also been forgetting myself during our twenty year marriage. Not in an “oh my god he’s suffocating the me out of me” way but because marriage is about compromising. Not just compromising in a “I like to eat at 6 and he likes to eat at 8 so we’ll compromise by eating at 7” way but also in a “I’m an only child so I grew up leaving things around because they’d always be there because there was nobody to take them and he grew up with a handful of siblings and cousins so he never left anything out because someone could borrow it or move it or hide it as a joke” kind of way. Marriage is better when you’re both compromising and benefiting from the cohesion. But what about now? When I don’t have anyone to compromise with or for and it’s… just me? What time did I like to eat dinner when it was just me, before? What did I even like to eat? Did I sleep on one side of the bed, or in the middle? Am I a morning or a just-before-bed shower person? Who am I? Who was I? Did I want things? Did I have goals? Or at least ideas of what I’d like to do in the future?

As a side note, how ridiculous is it that you can forget who you are? If you took someone who’s never experienced trauma off the street and said “did you know there’s a way to absolutely forget that you had goals, what those goals might have been, that you can even forget if you had a favorite color or if you like camping?” They’d think you were insane. That’s some real Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind science fiction right there.

But that’s what happens when something like trauma bangs open the front door and steals you.

Trauma, grief, and time are like a trio of master thieves. They take your sense of humor, your ability to care if the dishes are done, your interest in that hobby you used to spend way too much money on, your ability to understand how time works, even your ability to concentrate enough to read an entire book. They take your sense of safety, your belief in a predictable universe, and your identity as someone who actually has their shit together. And whenever you try to get your body going in the right direction they snag your shoulder or your feet and turn you just a little bit sideways and steer you wrong. They keep you in the dark so you can’t find your way. Eventually, you lose the map you’ve drawn for yourself, about yourself, ever since you were little. You think, I used to be vibrant. I used to be somebody (“I coulda been a contender!”). Now I’m just a rock floating in the darkness of space without any direction or purpose.

The deep dark chasm that grief carves in your soul swallows everything. It doesn’t just take the person you loved or the safety you felt; it takes your internal compass. It takes the “you” that knew how to answer the question, “What do you want for dinner?” without spiraling into a philosophical crisis about what you even find tasty or how to cook for one person. It’s a black hole shoveling everything around it into it’s maw.

I used to be a person who had opinions about indie films and houseplants and why books should be shelved alphabetically by author. I had a vibe, if you call tattooed goth boho hippie animal lover a vibe. Then, the trauma arrived and suddenly, my vibe was “Vastly Unoccupied.” I became a hollowed-out version of myself, a biological shell held together by caffeine and the sheer, stubborn refusal to let the neighbors see me cry in my back yard (they’d need binoculars, but still).

You came to stay and live my way
Scatter my love like leaves in the wind
You always say you won’t go away
But I know what it always has been
It always has been

I feel like the last four years have been an archeological dig of trying to rediscover not just who I was before Tim died, but who I was before I even met Tim. Where was my life headed? What did I want? How did I want to live? How did I want to show up in this world? What did I want to be when I grew up?

We lose ourselves in times like this because “self” is a luxury. When you are navigating the jagged terrain of a shattered heart, your brain reallocates all its resources to “Structural Integrity.” There is no power left for the lighthouse of your personality. The lights go dark so the engine can keep turning. Kind of like how, near death, the body’s focus is on keeping the heart and brain alive, not the limbs. You’re pulling into yourself like a tortoise into the shell. But, it’s not that you’ve suddenly become a member of the Dull Person’s Club; you’re just in survival mode.

In this state of just surviving, there’s no room for personality. There’s no room for Whimsy McGee or Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Good-Time Charlie. There is only room for the absolute basics. Did I eat today? Did I feed the animals? Did I take my meds? If the answer is ‘yes’ to those, you win the gold medal! Even though the temporary cost of that victory is the “you” that liked reading 800 page books in a weekend or knitting complex cabled sweaters or going out to the movies.

I spent a good year, at least, looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger who looked vaguely like me, but older. I’d try to remember things the “Before Me” did. I’d put on the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab perfume. I’d put on the music that used to make me want to shake my moneymaker. And I’d stand there, dejected, feeling like a fraud. Surely it wasn’t me who did things like that? Wasn’t I born standing in the middle of this room staring at this wall? Haven’t I been doing just this one thing my entire existance?

It’s a specific kind of heartbreak to realize you’ve been evicted from your own soul, to feel like you’re missing yourself. It’s grief on top of grief, because you’re mourning the person you lost AND you’re also mourning the person you were before they left. You feel like you’re being haunted by your own Before life. You get those Google Photos notifications of “this day in history” and see the person you were four years ago – eight years ago, ten, twelve – and you want to reach through the phone and ask her for directions. How were you doing that? What did you think about when you weren’t thinking about the weight in your chest?

But here is the radical, uncomfortable truth: That person is gone. She didn’t survive the fire. And honestly? Trying to resurrect that person is part of why we feel so lost. The square peg of that person doesn’t fit into the round hole of this new person you’ve become after carrying all this grief and trauma. You might not know it but you’ve become bigger and stronger to carry that weight. The lighter, looser person you used to be isn’t the right fit any more. But you can find her, pick her up, and fit her into the small nooks and crannies and then build new architecture around her.

Good lord I just realized this blog post is going to be like 8000 words long. Nobody wants that! I don’t have time to write it all out beautifully in one go and you certainly don’t have the will to read that much in one sitting. So expect this to be Yet Another Multi-Episode Arc. Sorry/not sorry…?