This blog is for both February 11 &12 because it took a long car ride yesterday, a nice evening with my husband, and the dawn of a new day today to bring my experience to clarity.
“I lost myself” and “I’ve got to go find myself” are two phrases I’ve never quite understood. (Strange, for someone who grew up in the sixties when “finding oneself” was all the rage.) You walk around living, breathing, thinking, talking, working, etc.everyday. You see your face in the mirror every night. How the hell could you misplace yourself? I’d shake my head every time I’d hear about so and so going off to “find themselves”. But alas, once again, don’t judge that which you have never experienced.
Losing oneself happens so gradually, over time, that you don’t feel the micro-changes taking hold of you, changing who you are, how you act, how you speak, how you interact with friends and family, and, most importantly, how you think and view your life. Then one day, you begin to look around at your world crumbling in hands. You start asking yourself, “How did this happen?” as if you weren’t present for the whole thing and someone else did it for and/or to you. How do you get to this point of realization that your “self” got “lost”?
For me, it happened last Sunday. I made a joke about something and my husband and daughter laughed at it. It startled me. It felt like it had been a very long time since I joked about anything. At the same time, I was reading the book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. In it, I saw myself in one of the characters. It was an awful weak, depressed, possessive, woman – you wouldn’t know it on the outside, but listening to her thoughts and those of her son, I felt like I was looking into a mirror.
Driving yesterday, I asked myself some hard questions as a result of these musings. I tried to remember when was the last time I felt like the “self” I was slowly remembering. It was last spring on my LA vacation. When I got back from LA, my mom had her accident, which eventually led to her unexpected passing. In the midst of a whole summer dealing with this, and a long fall dealing with the aftermath of my latent feelings, I gradually “lost” the wife, mother, and friend I was when I went to LA, and became this individual I met in the novel.
Upon going to bed last night with these realizations, I woke up to a new day this morning. Suddenly I feel free. I don’t feel shackled by the feeling of “I must take care of everyone and everything or I will lose more”. Extreme loss does things to a person that you don’t realize until much time passes and you have something to compare it to. I think depression quietly creeps up on a person in much the same way. Beware.
I have learned much on my journey of “losing and finding myself”. In 2011 I know I will be a much better parent, wife, and friend. It’s going to be a year of renewing and rebuilding the parts of me I remember. The things I will keep from the journey will be the tools I have acquired to deal with extreme loss. Loss is a part of life and I would be remiss in thinking it’s never going to happen again, and I now feel equipped with the strength to face it again, but keep myself intact. It really is all about the journey.
And so, as another day goes by, that “other woman” is gone and I am back, and …I have written.
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