All f*cks to give forgotten

on letting the old me fully die

For awhile now I’ve wanted to be a person who doesn’t have “divorced” come to mind for the first few words I use to describe myself. Often I feel embarrassed of how much time I have spent writing down another rumination on what role divorce has played in my life. I’ve felt self-conscious wondering when I’ll gravitate toward identifying with anything else. 

Recently I was reading Writing Down the Bones, a book I’ve had on my shelf for years and never leafed through. As soon as I began it, I was immediately inspired. Everything Natalie said illuminated that I want to write (or speak), but have a deep block lodged inside of me that I’m only just perceiving on a conscious level; one that has been stopping up my creative flow for a few years. A strong editorial voice that is constantly squawking in my ear about how I have nothing good to say. All of my ideas are played out, I’m actually insane and I should really just give up and shut up. Backspace. Backspace. Backspace to a blank document, loser.

The last few years have been a reckoning for me that seems to just keep going. Of course there is the obvious chaos of life as I knew it getting set on fire, but there is the deeper, more foundational form of change that takes years to fully metabolize. When you lose so many things at once, you also lose your sense of self entirely which is a disorienting and terrifying thing, particularly as you try to carry on doing things like raising children, keeping a house, paying the bills, and so on.

When everyone in my life was informed of my divorce, it’s like who I was seen as on the most basic level changed overnight to a lot of important people in my world. I was now a betrayer. I was now someone who “broke up a family” (I resent this storyline, for the obvious record.) I was, to them, probably unstable. And as someone who had spent my life carefully keeping my image, who cared a great deal about others, and who had carefully and with great pain considered all decisions before acting, this new footing I had with everyone was… upsetting. I started working overtime to prove to them I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t bad, I wasn’t lost.

You make it through the worst of something like that on sheer will to survive, on adrenaline, on cortisol levels through the roof. You don’t really have a choice. You just get up. You just make the kids breakfast. You just make your face muscles smile and talk. You just make your limbs go. You just do it. You just have a panic attack and then wipe your face because your kids came in asking for a snack. You just convince yourself it’s no big deal at all to not recognize your life, your self, your place in the world. And then you go get the snacks.

And I’m here now, quite a bit down the road from there, doing much better but still trying to make sense of this lump I feel in my system, blocking what I can only describe as a flow I feel strongly wants to move through me unencumbered. A flow that has something to say. Blooming to do. A flow that carries something totally different than what I’ve been working with all my life. A light. A hope. An urge.

I have been working on this block for months. I have been journaling. I have been somatic work-ing the shit out of it. I have been shaking, dancing, humming, EFT-ing, rolling my hips, sweating it out on runs where I take my heart rate through the roof. And I am realizing something finally, as I feel around all sides of it: all this time I thought the block was fear, fear of failing. I thought it was a clogged mass of the fearful questions I had been asking myself years ago: What if I am wrong about this? Wrong about me? What if I rearrange the pieces and I fail, and everyone will be right about me? 

I thought the work I was doing was convincing that old version of myself to get back on the stage and coaching her to perform again. This week, it occurred to me that maybe the block isn’t about a fear of failing. It isn’t about convincing the old skeleton I’m lugging around to dance again. Maybe, this is actually about a fear of who the hell I am without the old stories. Maybe this is actually about the fear of success.

It’s like I’ve been draping this old version of me onto myself, moving her lifeless form around with mine, trying to prove to a small crowd in my head, “Look, do you see how I’m still me, and I really am good?” I’ve been doing the moves of a new routine trying to reanimate this raggedy survivor on top of me to prove (to a half-imagined audience in my head that doesn’t even really care) that I’m still good, and they can accept me now.

But to get to where I want to go, I have to get out from under her. I have to graduate myself from survivor, and give that exhausted girl a seat of honor somewhere, preferably a warm bed (a coffin? Too dark?) where she can finally rest. I think the fear has been that I don’t know who I really am if I let her go. But all she knows how to do is perform and cross her fingers for good reviews. Where I’m headed, there’s no performing. There are no reviews. There’s just being, knowing. All fucks to give forgotten.

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