To All The Girls I've Been

This isn’t a tale about anything specific though certain events certainly caused and inspired these words.. I wanted to write about healing, about recovering, about hibernating even though I run like electricity. I was stagnant for so long , waiting for movement to return, only to be injured and left in a new forest. I know I am not alone in that type of journey.

After having my daughter, I couldn’t read or write. My brain, rewiring itself to focus on my child and too tired to recall sentences, turned to dust whenever I tried. The two things that saved me I couldn’t access. I panicked at first, as anyone would. What do I do without my tools for sanctuary? How can I learn to be a mother if I can’t access the parts of me that feel like me?

Then I realized I am no longer me.

Now I am two trees wound together into one trunk. Me before and me after, sprouting branches of me as a mother. The only me there is now. The me before no longer can exist. How can she went she now knows so much? When she has experienced all the things she has? I carry the scars of it all, good and bad, underneath my skin, where I feel them the most. They no longer live on the surface; they can’t. My new skin has grown there.

This is a hard concept to accept. I love me. I worked hard to become me. I think back, however, to all the mes that came before this one and I realize this is not the first time I’ve risen from ashes.

My tiny, lovesick high school me, longing for every boy like I’d never seen the sun again if they didn’t like me back.

My confident, bold college me, still desperate for love and finding it in my art, my talent.

My trailblazing, rocket ship twenties me. Quite possibly my favorite me. I was boundless, careless, magical, alive. Though I didn’t see it, I was living the dream my pining 14 year old self was yearning for. How lucky I was.

How lucky I AM.

Thirties me went through some shit. I had wonderful, core memory moments: epic travels, my wedding, my cats, beloved apartments, wonderful partnership and friendships. I also had the darkest depression storm of my life yet, burying me under wave after wave. And that was before 2020 (which we don’t have to discuss because we all know what we went through). My losses were great. Losses that have left craters in my body like the moon.

I worship the moon. Such a lovely, silver orb filled with holes as though she’s been through battle. Perhaps she has. The moon is old, it is rock, it moves oceans. If I am like the moon, I can survive all my phases and come out shining the brighter.

Now I am this me. The new me. The entering a new decade me. And I am healing in hibernation because what else is there to do with winter? I can’t stand it otherwise. So I started to look at it as the flora and fauna do: a time to rest. I can read and write again. I am diving head first into that, both for pleasure and for my novel.

I am nourishing my body with tons of water and slow movement. I never knew how much I valued movement until I couldn’t move. It has only been recently I can bend almost as I used to. Major surgery and fear do that do your bones and skin. My body is not the same and I have yet to reconcile that. Instead I move it in hopes I get closer to accepting it again. I love it; it has done incredible things. But I also keep waiting for my old body to return. And it probably won’t unless as a ghost. I know the answer is simple: I had a baby. Not only that but I was pregnant three times. My body is a literal battlefield.

I know it comes with time and tons of self love. I have it in me, I know I do. I’m not ready yet and that’s okay. I can be grateful and also disappointed I need to once again relearn my shape. I don’t want to learn how I feel now. Where I am soft, where it hurts to bend, where a thin, still purple and pink line, the permanent white finally shining through, stares back at me across my lower belly. I’m not in denial: I am not in acceptance. Someday soon I will be.

I want to feel beautiful again. I’m getting there but not fully, not yet. I am scrolling through pictures from less than three years ago and thinking how funny it is I thought I was unattractive then. Isn’t that the way? You go through a phase where you view yourself a certain way until you find new things to hate about yourself and wonder how the hell you ever thought the previous form was less than. I had a glow and now I am dim. My light needs some clapping, like Tinkerbell. I need to believe. I’m getting there. I know in few years I will look back on the me right now and curse myself for thinking she wasn’t the most gorgeous creature. But for now, she’s still a bit of a stranger. An acquaintance.

This is not to say I do not have people around me, raising me up and encouraging me to see myself as they do. I am fortunate that I do. But we all know it is different when you can’t feel it yourself. I need to see myself that way on my own. I need to believe even though they do. I need to clap to save myself.

I value the word I chose for the year: BLOOM. I consider myself a seed, buried in the frozen earth, waiting, pulsing with the start of life. In a month, my daughter will be a year. Even with a year of motherhood under my belt, I am no more versed in parenthood than I was when I just had cats. I was the same as a love crazed teen, a bold college actor, a fire blooded sprite set upon a city of opportunity. A thirty something who saw light and dark and heaven and hell and kept going. I had no idea what I was doing in any of those first moment, months, years. Do any of us?

As I heal, discovering my new self, I mourn the girls I was. I have them with me, of course. I wish I had loved them more when I was them. Appreciated each of them for their strengths and faults.

So to all the girls I’ve been, I love you. I’m sorry, I love you, I miss you and most importantly, thank you.

I wouldn’t be who I was without you. Thank you for standing by me even when I doubted you, was cruel to you, didn’t celebrate or believe in you. I learned so much from each of you.

I wonder what moon phase is next.