I couldn't/can't even see me, let alone reach that person. I can look back and see who I was in terms of the roles and things and people I hooked my identity on, there's really nothing left of her to salvage.
Ah yes, I couldn’t see her either. For years and years. It’s a hard thing to describe and live with, isn’t it?
I don’t want to invalidate you by saying you might not be right. In fact I assume you are right, right now.
The only thing I will say is that you might not be
completely right forever.....to suggest that is a possibility even if it feels as if it is not?
Bc I was rather surprised when my Me popped up only a few months ago here. And there is nothing unique about me tbh. I think I had probably stopped hunting for her
So it rather threw me when I could see her.
i’d had the odd glimmer in the past, moments, like snatches of an old familiar tune, but then it would drift away again. Do you get those? And of course it is true that most of the hooks are long gone, just as you say. But there may be a Nas there anyway, the Nas before the hooks, pure Nas lol. In a way it would be strange if there wasn’t something, right? Even if it feels like a tiny something too small to salvage. My coach used the word Reclaim and I jibbed against that....it doesn’t feel like a reclaiming, like you that feels not possible. Perhaps not worth doing. It feels more like, idk, a reacquaintance? A rebuilding from parts to make something else? Idk.
For 7 months I was killing it and then it all completely blew up. Now I know to set much, much smaller goals. It's hard to look at an ordinary thing that seems to tiny and call it a "goal" and celebrate meeting it. It's hard not to be impatient. It's hard to look back and see that I've lost years of my life to just surviving when I was supposed to be moving forward, starting over, not just getting older and older and moving an inch at a time instead of the miles I should have, could have, would have.......That's the mourning I sometimes find myself doing, mourning the Nas who was supposed to come out on top.
Ah yes again.
I found my frustration led me to a sort of despair tbh. Maybe I gave up trying bc it seemed undoable and it hurt to keep trying. I was very attached to those ‘supposed to be’s but I failed over and over again. Felt like a pig trying to fly
. Or perhaps more accurately a pig who remembered being an eagle. I liked being an eagle....or my memory of how it felt anyway....I did not like being a pig with flying goals. Not one jot.
Yes, I could celebrate overcoming every single obstacle, but I'm too busy looking ahead at the next obstacle and trying to head off more of them. And if I'm honest, being really salty that they exist. It's a bit like living in a game of Frogger (if anyone remembers that Atari classic). I can cross the street, but unlike when I used to be able to just look both ways and then simply walk across, I have to time every single step perfectly to avoid oncoming trouble/danger/impediments, otherwise I'll end up splattered on the pavement.
And another yes.
I don’t remember the game but I absolutely know the feeling. It’s exhausting isn’t it? And a bit baffling while everyone else seems to skip over the street. And - at least this was my experience - I ended up getting splattered anyway more often than not.
And yes, I felt indescribably stupid and small somehow that I had become a person who only had these infinitesimally tiny nuggets to go ‘yay Me’ about. Parking in an unfamiliar car park. Emptying a box, not vomiting on a train. Getting out of bed somedays, breathing tbh.Still the reality, my reality, was that the nuggets were mountains, each and every one of them. You get that, I know, but ‘normal’ folks don’t. I would not have got it before either.
So what can one do?
I think - very slowly - I had to let go of the belief that I could salvage the old Me. Bc I was so self evidently failing lol. Perhaps that is the inherent purpose of Mourning, idk? But I didn’t want to bc that felt like a failure too. And one that would maroon me in this s$itty place of No Me. Which also felt like a failure. S$itty rock and s$itty hard place. I think I had to - even more slowly lol - find some way of approaching it that felt more real and more realistic, some way of almost embracing the s$ittiness of it enough to tidy up some pieces of s$it so I could see a few little bits of shiny. Not saying I did this very consciously and i’m sure others have found more efficient glam ways....mine was more a small bucket and a tiny tiny brush kind of way lol.
Bc it was also true that, even with the many ups and downs (and they are still here), that I did not stay in exactly the same spot that I had been in before. That I did have the odd cross the street moment even if I fell flat on my face the next day whereas at one time I couldn’t cross the street at all. Tbh in recovery from PTSD I had no choice but to go small bc that was all I had in me.....they were all still mountains to me even if they were paving cracks to others.
Hence my idea of a drystone wall, I suppose....a very tiny drystone wall made at a snails pace from pebbles rather than rocks lol. Bc the reality was/is that this small wall was all I could do but....and it was an important but for me...it was also where I saw and felt an equally tiny sense of momentum. (I was going to say progress but that felt like too grand and big a word for what it was/is). It was more like starting to fill a very big jar with very small pebbles...and then a moment when you are surprised to see an inch depth of pebbles....the pebbles proved that I was not in exactly the identical place I had been last year or month. And in the blindingly obvious truth that there was no ah-ha with a mighty bound kind of thing, that was not nothing.
But I always felt and often feel still a bit silly going ‘yay you’ over a pebble
I think I have just learned to respect the effort more than the result, the pebble over the wall perhaps.
I don’t know where I am going with this, Nas. Or even if it makes any sense at all, this wittering and ambling round metaphorical pebbles and walls
Other than to say yup, I hear you and yup, I know that feeling and yup, it’s weird and hard and yup, it’s a real thing and i’m sorry that you are feeling it too.
And perhaps there is a tiny tiny possibility, just a conceptual possibility maybe, that it is not the whole story forever. But I lay that down with a bow and backing away slowly bc I know that it felt like the whole story to me for years and years and it sometimes made me feel worse if others thought they saw something of Me that I couldn’t when they had no idea really of what it felt like to wake up in my skin.
Gracie and me send you a hug (mine) and a chirrup (hers).
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